Reviews for Teachers' Work in a Globalising Economy

The average rating for Teachers' Work in a Globalising Economy based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2007-07-06 00:00:00 Susan Parker Let me start by saying that I'm not a culturalist. I tend towards conflict theories, structure and organizations. Mullen is all about Bourdieu, which is fine but knowing this difference in how I read it and how she likely wrote it might be salient if you're an egghead. If not, pay not attention. There is nothing earth shattering here but that does not mean this isn't a book worth reading. On the contrary, Mullen's greatest contribution may be in summarizing how little inequality and higher education has changed since the previous two major waves of sociology of highered research. Jenck's 1972 policy recommendations still make sense (progressive taxation, poverty solutions, etc.) because little about inequality in the U.S. has changed, except that it is more acute than it was when Jenck's was writing. Mullen sets out to explore what statistics about college enrollment cannot reveal: how do students at vastly different colleges make their college decisions? Mullen makes a valiant effort to do what I try to do in my own work: value individual agency while detailing structural constraints on that agency. She has an impressive data set. She got student lists from Yale and nearby Southern Connecticut State University (Southern). From these she randomly selected 50 students, stratified for gender, from both sites. She then interviewed them about their educational biographies, family background and college experiences and aspirations. What she finds is that the 5 mile distance between the two schools is light years in social distance. Yalies don't know Southern exists and Southerners don't care that Yale exists. The students at Yale think they started applying to Yale in their junior year of high school. In fact, they started going to Yale, or a similarly elite school, from the moment they were born into a social and economic environment that made preparation for elite colleges a practical possibility. Similarly, the Southerners' college choices were limited for them by the same social forces, even if the students construe those limitations as personal choices. Again, none of this is remarkably new but the qualitative approach lends much to the trend in soc of highered to go for big data and qualitative analysis. The rapid change in higher education could stand for some new qualitative studies to contextualize the structural effects we measure in national data sets. The book doesn't address my area -- for-profits -- and, in fact, obscures their position by holding fast to the somewhat outdated notion that higher education is still structured by prestige that correlates to price (i.e. the most expensive schools are the most prestigious). But the money, to me, is in the summary of soc of higher ed research in the first chapter and the policy recommendations in the conclusion. In the latter, Mullen finally deviates from her Bourdieuian theoretical approach (habitus, culture, concerted social identification with place) to talk about status competition, not that she uses the term. But when she recognizes that greater access to college only increases stratification and inequality despite public rhetoric that champtions more college as a poverty solution, she's summing up status competition.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-12-27 00:00:00 Samantha Sun Let me start by saying I am a professional who works in Higher Education and I genuinely enjoy reading about Higher Ed for fun. However, this book was absolutely brutal to get through. There was no new or unexpected research in this work. The entirety could simply be summed up like this: as a whole, Yale students generally come from higher SES and more privileged backgrounds than other non-Ivy college students. Another gripe I had were the quotes from the students at both Yale and Southern. Did Mullen purposefully only include the most mindless, grammatically incorrect quotes from these students?! All of the "like" and "ya know" talk really distracted the reader. These students are Ivy League! There must be better quotes to feature in all of her interview recordings than the quotes she chose!