Scott Davies is Professor of Sociology at McMaster University in Canada. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University. His interests are in sociology of education, stratification and organizations.

Janice Aurini is Post Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology, Harvard University. Her interests are in sociology of culture, education, and organizations. In 2007 she will be Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Waterloo in Canada.

Exploring the Moral Boundaries of School Choice:
A Mixed-Method Approach

Sociologists have long examined how middle class parents create educational advantages for their children by imparting high expectations, intervening in school, and enhancing their cultural capital. This paper extends this literature by examining school choice-seeking behavior as a unique form of “concerted cultivation” that involves a more adversarial relation to public educators. We use mixed methods to examine two issues. First, we analyze a survey of 2000 Canadian parents to explore how social class correlates to a series of choice-related attitudes and actions, and find that wealthier and more educated families engage in more contentious choice-seeking behaviors. Second, we examine interview and focus group material to uncover parental rationales for school choice, and find that proponents rationalize their acts by re-drawing moral boundaries from older concerns with elitism and “privatism” to new images of “engaged parents” and “responsive institutions.” We interpret these findings in light of theories of class reproduction.
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Organizational Cultures of Bullying

After a long period of dormancy, cultural or idea-centered explanations are receiving increasing consideration as a way of explaining policy outcomes. However, these explanations continue to emphasize continuity over change, providing little leverage for understanding how the agenda shifts or institutional change happens. This article seeks to build upon the emerging work at the intersection of cultural and political sociology to develop a three-stage model of policy change. The model also seeks to achieve détente between rational choice and cultural views of the role of ideas in the policy process, arguing that ideas can serve a strategic, constitutive, or regulative role in policy debate. I develop this model through consideration of an important substantive case: the shift in American educational policy towards standards, testing, and accountability over the past 25 years, and the concomitant institutional shift of educational policy from its longstanding historical place as a local and state function to one that has become central to federal policy-making. I contrast the three-stage idea-centered model to institutional, rational choice, and interest group approaches, and find that an ideational perspective best accounts for the changes. In conclusion, I briefly consider the utility of the model for explaining changes in other substantive policy areas.

Moral-Values Politics in the United States:
From Status Group Conflict to Institutionalized Party-Movement Electoral System

Is Anyone Listening?
Academic Freedom, Intellectual Diversity, and Conservative Critiques of the American Professoriate