The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse: volume IV, class, codes and control.

This fourth volume on 'class, codes and control', published 15 years after the third, is not a culmination but a continuing search for understanding. As always with Bernstein, previous analyses are restated, revised, refined, and integrated, with main strands in the enquiry being followed into ever deeper ground. The over-arching structuralism so clearly identified by Paul Atkinson (1985) is evident both in the content of the analysis and its deliberately formal exposition. The level of abstraction is certainly very high, so that the occasional empirical illustrations serve almost as light relief. Classification and framing, for example, are defined as