Book Review 

Maton, K. Knowledge and knowers. Towards a realist

sociology of education. London: Routledge.

ISBN 978-0415-47999-8

Sherran Clarence

The late and well-known British sociologist of education, Basil Bernstein,
claimed that in educational research (although this could apply to many more
fields) we need less of an allegiance to a theory and more of an allegiance to
the problems we need to solve (Maton, 2013). There are indeed many
problems in education around the world today that need to be solved and
many questions that need to be answered. But in order to tackle these
problems and begin to answer our many questions, we need theoretical and
analytical frameworks and conceptual tools that we can put to work to look
not just at the problems themselves, but at what is beneath or behind them so
that we can better understand the nature of the struggles within education, as
well as how to bring about sustainable and necessary changes. Legitimation
Code Theory, or LCT, the subject and focus of Karl Maton’s book,
Knowledge and Knowers, is such a framework.

In Knowledge and Knowers, and in his work leading up to this book, Karl
Maton introduces us to a way of thinking and working that represents a focus
on solving problems with a strong explanatory and conceptual framework that
allows researchers to go beyond and beneath what can be seen and understood
through a constructivist or instrumentalist lens. His broader aims, in a body of
research that reaches beyond this book, are to address a significant gap in
educational research left by a lack of strong, generative theoretical and
conceptual frameworks and tools, and an inability of much educational
research to build on past research findings more cumulatively (something
noted by the National Research Foundation in South Africa in a recent
report). This lack of cumulative building of knowledge about education and
about the nature of educational knowledge and knowing itself is something
with which LCT is particularly concerned.

Legitimation Code Theory, or LCT as it is known, is the conceptual and
explanatory framework that is the focus of this book. This is a theory, as
Maton argues, in Bourdieu’s sense, where the latter argued that ‘Theories are



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research programmes which call not for “theoretical discussion” but for
practical implementation’ (Bourdieu, Chamboredon and Passeron, 1991,
p.255). This is an important point to understand when reading this book and
other papers and books that use LCT as ‘theory’ or as a basis for analysis of
data. The book draws on data from different studies to illustrate and clarify
more abstract theoretical arguments, showing consistently that this is indeed a
‘research programme’ that poses at least as many questions as it answers and
that does indeed call for ‘practical implementation’. LCT, even though a work
in progress, is more than a call to arms, though. It provides researchers with a
range of tools, some more well developed and tested out than others, that can
be used both within educational research and without to delve into problem
situations and attempt to find answers and a way forward in research and
practice.

LCT is a realist framework, and draws on insights from critical realism,
critical rationalism and social realism. One of the most important insights,
drawn from critical realism, is Bhaskar’s layered ontology, arguing for the
need to look beyond and beneath empirical reality to understand and see the
generative mechanism and tendencies (Bhaskar, 1989) or, in LCT terms, the
organising principles that generate or give rise to that reality. Another is
critical realism’s three commitments: to ontological realism; to
epistemological relativism; and to judgemental rationality (Archer, Bhaskar,
Collier, Laurie and Norrie, 1998). Ontological realism holds that we need to
recognise that knowledge is ‘about something other than itself’ (Maton and
Moore, 2010, p.4); there is a reality that does exist beyond that which we can
behold, and while we can believe in anything we want to, we cannot know
anything in the same way. Epistemological relativism says that this
knowledge that exists independently of us is not universal or unchanging or
True. Rather, it is socially produced over time in socio-historical contexts and
is thus fallible and mediated by and through those contexts (Archer et al.,
1998; Maton and Moore, 2010). Our knowing is further mediated by these
socio-historical contexts. Finally, judgemental rationality holds that there are
‘intersubjective bases for determining the relative merits of competing
knowledge claims, because some knowledges are more powerful and
productive than others’ (Maton and Moore, 2010, p.4). Thus, knowledge is
not the same as knowing and can indeed be seen in its own right as an object
of study. It emerges from but is not able to be reduced to or conflated with the
condition or contexts or minds from which it emerges (Maton and Moore,
2010). This is very important to understand as a foundation for LCT, because



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it is the framework’s realist underpinnings that enable it to be focused on both
knowledge and knowing without excluding or being blind to either.

LCT subsumes and extends parts of the work of two well-known sociologists,
Basil Bernstein and Pierre Bourdieu. From Bernstein, LCT takes code theory
– Bernstein’s educational knowledge codes and their orientation to examining
what gives rise to practices rather than just what practices themselves are – as
well as the pedagogic device and knowledge structures. From Bourdieu, LCT
draws on field theory, and central concepts of habitus, capital, field and
practice. Neither Bernstein’s work nor Bourdieu’s can provide a whole
picture in terms of understanding the field of education, and there are gaps
left by both of these theorists that need to be filled if we are to solve the
problems facing the field in terms of intellectual and educational development
as well as pedagogy and student success. But rather than creating a break with
these foundations and carving out a new path, LCT draws code and field
theory into the framework and builds cumulatively on these foundations,
using the prior tools and in so doing developing them in new and very
productive directions. This is a significant development for the sociology of
education, because it creates the capacity for a different kind of research
programme – one that builds cumulatively on its foundations, showing how
the prior thinking and research can be re-analysed, re-interpreted, developed
and also critiqued within a framework that seeks to bring these insights
together into a larger whole that has greater explanatory power as well as
more conceptual economy. 

Maton begins the book by laying down the aims of the book as well as
discussing the broader concerns with which LCT is concerned and the
framework’s realist underpinnings. The main point of the book, and about
LCT itself, and one Maton demonstrates consistently throughout, is that this
book is about ‘building knowledge about knowledge-building’ (p.3) and that
rather than a ‘new’ sociological approach, LCT is building on and extending
prior approaches and in so doing is evolving into a ‘sophisticated toolkit’
(p.3) for research and also for practice. A more practical point of the book is
the laying out or unfolding of the framework, or at least the two dimensions
of it that are able to be discussed in detail in this limited space: Specialisation
and Semantics. As Maton explains in the first chapter, there are five
dimensions of LCT currently, but not all of these are as developed as the first
two dimensions, and much work, research, and development lies ahead.



170        Journal of Education, No. 60, 2015

What is very clear throughout the book is the process that Maton has
undertaken to do what he claims LCT is designed to do: to cumulatively build
on prior tools and foundations and to extend research, primarily into
education, in new, exciting and more generative and productive ways. Thus,
each chapter builds on the one before, and although there is some repetition,
this works to keep the reader in step with the text. It also makes the text more
accessible, as some of the concepts are fairly complex, and require careful
reading. Chapter two begins the unfolding of Specialisation. In this chapter
the Legitimation Device is explained, about which there is much more to say
than I could do justice to here. In essence, all academic disciplines comprise
fields, in which there are a range of actors and resources. Actors within these
fields are either in accord, if they are working together towards the same goals
and have the same underlying orientations or principles or, if they do not they
may well struggle over these resources, and over the rights to make their
orientations and principles the ‘ruler’ for the field. Thus, all academic
disciplines (and this applies to fields outside of the academy too) are sites of
struggles over what counts as legitimate and what does not, and who gets to
decide that and when they get to do so. In order to understand the nature of
these struggles and the changes and shifts within field over time, we need to
be able to see the underlying orientations or principles of the actors and their
practices. Otherwise we are likely to be working with assumptions about why
things happen as they do rather than reasoning based on knowledge and
understanding. The dimensions of the Legitimation Device – the symbolic
ruler of consciousness that allows those who control it to set the bar as it were
in terms of what knowledge, practices, habituses and resources are valued and
why and how – provide these tools. This chapter goes on to explain the first
part of the ‘toolkit’, epistemic and social relations and how these can be
brought together to create legitimation or specialisation codes. Simply put,
they allow us to see what it is that counts in particular fields in terms of
success and claiming legitimacy or recognition.

Epistemic and social relations are concepts and also analytical tools that are
returned to in subsequent chapters, and simply explained they allow
researchers to look both at the relationships between knowledge and its
objects (what is known) and knowledge and its subjects (who is doing the
knowing) so overcoming both a blindness to knowledge and knowers. This is
important to understand when moving on to chapters three and four, where
the following two parts of Specialisation are unravelled and discussed,
namely the epistemic-pedagogic device and knowledge-knower structures. All
of these parts of Specialisation build quite deliberately on Bernstein’s code



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theory, with specific reference to his collection and integrated codes and
classification and framing, as well as his work on the Pedagogic Device as a
way of seeing education as comprised of three distinct yet interrelated fields.
Knowledge-knower structures build quite specifically on Bernstein’s later
work on knowledge structures.
 
Chapter five discusses gazes, using an idea of Bernstein’s that was not fully
explored in his work, but which has potential in terms of understanding the
growth and development of fields that exhibit horizontal knowledge
structures. In the chapter Maton develops a notion of four different gazes that
denote different strengths of the relation of knowledge to its subjects or
knowers, and in doing so shows how fields that can often seem segmented,
and to be exhibiting weaker ‘verticality’ (Muller, 2007) or ability to develop
cumulatively over time can actually have the potential to develop
cumulatively through the specialisation of knowers rather than of knowledge.
There are questions raised by this chapter that have yet to be answered. One
such question is whether social gazes, which knowers possess by virtue of
being part of specific social groups, really do lead to the fragmentation of
intellectual fields or educational knowledge fields in the ways they have in
Cultural Studies (the case used in the book). The differences between social
and cultivated gazes, the latter possessed by those who have immersed
themselves in a field for a lengthy period of time and thus learned the
particular methods and knowledge of a specific discipline, need to be further
explored in empirical studies. Maton acknowledges very clearly that the
framework is evolving, and while he shows explicitly and with reference to
data and analysis thereof both how Specialisation subsumes and extends
particular parts of Bernstein’s work, thus building the LCT framework
cumulatively, there remains much work to be done. This is a strength, because
LCT is a framework that poses questions as well as answering them, thus
driving the research programme on.
 
A second dimension, Semantics, comprising the two key concepts of semantic
gravity and semantic density, is built on Bernstein’s early work on elaborated
and restricted codes, and as a further dimension of the Legitimation Device it
does not represent a break with Specialisation but rather ‘codes’ different
elements of practice. In chapters six and seven Maton lays out first semantic
gravity and then semantic gravity, connecting them to preceding chapters
where relevant and moving towards perhaps the most exciting part of the
framework for analysing whole fields as well as parts of them: constellations.
Using accessible metaphors, and well-known examples of student-centred and



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teacher-centred learning, Maton shows how both Specialisation and
Semantics can be brought together to analyse the differences between certain
stances taken within fields, and the reasons why some of these may be
well-supported and others not, even though those stances not well supported
may be sound.
 
In chapter nine, Maton moves into newer territory, referring back to epistemic
and social relations to develop what he calls his ‘4-K’ model encompassing
knowledge, knowers, known and knowing. He also further develops the gazes
discussed in chapter five expanding this concept to include insights and
lenses. This chapter shows how fine-grained and sophisticated LCT can be,
and highlights for researchers the potential for developing other parts of the
framework in similar directions as needed, creating finer typologies for more
nuanced, less fuzzy and more focused analysis and research. However, as
Maton continually argues, you only need as much theory as the problem
requires, and you only need to choose the parts of the toolkit that will help
you look at your particular research questions as clearly as possible. Thus,
while the book is truly a grand journey through what has currently been
developed of LCT and published, researchers need not feel overwhelmed by
the depth and breadth of the framework, because one will never use all of it in
one project.

The final chapter points quite clearly to the ways in which the framework is
still building on the work of Bourdieu and Bernstein, primarily. It discusses
new directions in which LCT is beginning to move as a field – and makes
quite clear that LCT is a field with a growing number of newer and more
established voices who are beginning to think in different ways about
educational research and practice and also about fields outside of the realm of
education. It also points to other complementary frameworks that have been
brought together with LCT that are leading to productive new forms of
research, for example Systemic Functional Linguistics. Maton’s own words
perhaps sum up best what LCT is and can be when he says ‘An adequate
working theoretical tradition is not only epistemologically powerful but also
socially inclusive. By making visible the workings of the gaze, we have a
chance to make that gaze more widely available. We can climb on the
shoulders of. . .giants. Not only can we then see further, more of us can do so’
(p.147). This book, and the conceptual tools and framework it lays out and
discusses, is most certainly an attempt to make visible the workings of this
particular sociological gaze, and is aimed at making it possible for more
scholars to immerse themselves in the tools they find most relevant and



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productive to their work in order to use this gaze to research substantive
problems that need solving. It is a must-read for students of the sociology of
education, and for scholars who find that their current approaches may not be
providing the answers they need. LCT is not the only answer, but it is a very
good place to start working from.

References

 

Archer, M., Bhaskar, R., Collier, A., Laurie, T. and Norrie A. 1998. Critical
realism: essential readings. London: Routledge.

Bourdieu, P., Chamboredon, J-C. and Passeron, J-C. 1991. The craft of
sociology: epistemological preliminaries. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Council on Higher Education (CHE). 2013. A proposal for undergraduate
curriculum reform in South Africa: The case for a flexible curriculum
structure. Report of the Task Team on Undergraduate Curriculum Structure.
Online at:
http://www.che.ac.za/media_and_publications/research/proposal-undergradua
te-curriculum-reform-south-africa-case-flexible

Maton, K. and Moore, R. 2010. Introduction. In Maton, K. and Moore, R.
(Eds), Social realism, knowledge and the sociology of education. Coalitions
of the mind. London and New York: Continuum, pp.1–13.

Muller, J. 2007. On splitting hairs: verticality of knowledge and the school
curriculum. In Christie, F. and Martin, J. (Eds), Language, knowledge and
pedagogy. London: Continuum, pp.65–86.

Ryle, G. 1945. Knowing how and knowing that: the presidential address.
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. 46. The Aristotelian Society:
Blackwell Publishing.

Wheelahan, L. 2010. Why knowledge matters in curriculum. A social realist
argument. Oxfordshire: Routledge.



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Sherran Clarence
University of the Western Cape

sherranclarence@gmail.com

mailto:sherranclarence@gmail.com