| Chapter 2: | Background |
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Whitty, himself a strong advocate of this new sociology of education, in his 1997 lecture, although agreeing with Kettler et al. (1982) and Delanty (2001) that Mannheim’s legacy offered a valuable model of sociological thinking, admitted that Mannheim had been unfashionable among sociologists of the new sociology of education since the 1970s. This was partly because, in Whitty’s words, “he resisted the notion that all ideas could be understood in terms of relations of class” (1997, p. 7), which was the central focus of the new sociology of education.
The work considered most representative in this development of the new sociology of education is Young’s (1971) edited collection of articles, Knowledge and Control. It claims to employ a vigorous theoretical base for its subject by using critical social theory in opposition to established education sociology, and, as a whole, it was developed against a background of the social and political contexts of the United States and Europe at the end of the 1960s (Kolbe et al., 1997). For Wexler (1987), the whole development of the new sociology of education was based on the integration of the sociology of knowledge. Some traditionalists, such as Bernbaum (1977), further argued that the sociology of knowledge has always been part of the sociology of education and believed that there was nothing new about Young’s new sociology of education (it is an example of the fractionation process, to use Abbott’s term, as discussed earlier). Nevertheless, Young’s work has generated such influential force that it has almost become the definitive discourse for the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of education. This is in contrast to Mannheim’s theories, which are not widely referred to by the community of sociologists of education.
As Mannheim once pointed out, scientific cultures change in differing times due to shifts in value emphasis, and this results in differing supremacies of thought—a phenomenon that, ironically, applied to Mannheim and his sociology of knowledge. It is this kind of phenomenon relating to shifting values in shaping the sphere of a field of knowledge that I have observed through my experience in the teaching of Chinese studies, which allows me to build on the assumption that there are shifts in value emphasis in scientific cultures in different times and places. Based on these assumptions, the aim of this investigation is to seek what marks the tensions of shifting value emphasis in the constructing of Chinese studies.