Description
This account of social life in three high schools combines a theoretical analysis and methodological awareness with a detailed study of social life in high schools. The emphasis is on how social relations differentially organize the meanning of the “self” for youths in different socioeconomic environments. The social psychology of school is a class social psychology and what is described are the cultural and social processes for which a class “self” is enacted in different high schools. Differences among the high schools are analyzed in a way that combines postmodern theory and specific social institutional processes. The book offers both a social institutional analysis and a social psychology which goes beyond general theoretical interest in postmodernism to provide a social analytic composition of the class self and the institutional processes, including the absences, which produce this socially differentiated self. It is aimed at undergraduates, postgraduates and lecturers of education and sociology, social and education psychologists.
