50.3 - Convention Theory & Education

Special Issue – Christian Imdorf, Arne Böker, Romuald Normand, Christian Schneijderberg & Rebecca Ye (Eds.): Convention Theory in Research on Schools, Vocational Training, and Higher Education.

This HSR Special Issue explores convention theory’s potential for educational research across schools, vocational training, and higher education. The editorial highlights the theoretical potential of convention theory and its core concepts such as orders of worth, investments in forms, and regimes of engagement and outlines methodological strategies for both deductive and inductive social research. The ten original contributions of the issue cover various educational contexts and segments from school to vocational training and higher education, as well as different methodological approaches, offering key insights into the current state of education research guided by convention theory. These contributions illuminate methodological possibilities and avenues for theoretical innovation within the field. 

Convention theory has already proven insightful in research on education, moving beyond traditional sociologies of education dominated by approaches influenced by the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Raymond Boudon. It offers an alternative by avoiding overly structuralist or individualistic perspectives, emphasizing education as a situational and open-ended process linked to social, political, material, and cognitive conditions. Convention theory enables the assessment of how educational settings respond to multiple crises, how policy and politics frame educational structures and processes, and how educational actors can prepare students for societal changes. Taken together, the understanding of educational processes is enriched by convention theory’s focus on the situational and diverse logics of social action and educational inequalities.