‘Scaling up’ educational change: some musings on misrecognition and doxic challenges

Educational policy-makers around the world are strongly committed to the notion of ‘scaling up’. This can mean anything from encouraging more teachers to take up a pedagogical innovation, all the way through to system-wide efforts to implement ‘what works’ across all schools. In this paper, I use Bourdieu’s notions of misrecognition to consider the current orthodoxies of scaling up. I argue that the focus on ‘process’ and ‘implementation problems’: (1) both obscures and legitimates the ways in which the field logics of practice actually work and, (2) produces/reproduces the inequitable distribution of educational benefits (capitals and life opportunities). I suggest that the notion of misrecognition might provide a useful lens through which to examine reform initiatives and explanations of their success/failure.

My aim is to test the explanatory power of Bourdieu's notion of misrecognition in the light of contemporary orthodoxies of educational reform. I introduce Bourdieu's field theory and bring it to an analysis of 'scaling up'. I examine the usual reasons given for the failure of rescaling up reforms, before providing two indicative examples of change leadershipthe kind that are typically used to show what ought to be system-wide practiceto sketch what happens as they spread. I also consider what making changes in the field might actually entail. I begin by examining the major tenets of scaling up.

Scaling up
The concept of scaling up is a relatively straightforward one. It simply means spreading a particular practice or idea so that it becomes much more common. The concept does not encompass what is to be spread, why and not always to what extent. The notion of scaling up is an 'open signifier' (Saussure, 1959), able to be populated with all manner of whats, whys and how muchs. The focus in scaling up is most often on process, on the how.
The idea of scaling up has currency in development literatures and practice where it refers to highly diverse interventions, ranging from health promotion and disease prevention to more 'sustainable' agricultural practices to Western educational approaches such as inclusive education (e.g. Knippenberg et al., 2005;Koenig, Leandre, & Farmer, 2004;Lin, 2012). There has been a great deal of debate about the how of scaling up in the development fieldthis extends from critiques of the 'trickle down' approach to taxonomies of scaling up and debates about the locus of activities, tools and technologies (e.g. Downing, Lamont, & Newby, 2010;Mansuri & Rao, 2004;Schultz & Strauss, 2008;Uvin & Miller, 1996).
As noted, scaling up is also an idea popular in education. It is, for example, taken up in relation to changes in assessment practice (Leahy & Wiliam, 2011), the use of information and communication technologies (Blumenfield, Fishman, Krajcik, & Marx, 2000), social and emotional education (Elias, Zins, Graczyk, & Weissberg, 2003) and early literacy interventions (Landry, Swank, Smith, Assei, & Gunnewig, 2006). It is not my intention to provide a comprehensive review of all of these interventions and innovations. Rather, my interest in this paper is in the scaling up taken up in the overlapping school effectiveness/school improvement (SESI) and school reform/education change areas. I am particularly interested in how failure of large-scale educational reform is understood; I will therefore here briefly canvass the key common understandings about scaling up, its successes and failures.
The SESI/reform/change field generally advocates a scaling up heuristicset of components for any kind of activity (see Table 1). The heuristic has a strong how Table 1. My interpretationscaling up heuristic (see, for example, the materials on the National Centre for Scaling Up Effective Schools. Vanderbilt University, www.scalingupcenter.org). Accessed 24 April 2013.
The innovation phase might entail either or both of research or school-based piloting. The research might range from action research to design research to randomised controlled trials. The capacity building phase focuses on systemic professional development, leadership enhancement, additional resourcing, the development of standards and measures and the provision of some incentives. The implementation stage sees some reduction in resourcing, publication of best practices, local professional development, monitoring against the standards with disincentives for failure. Sustainability relies on the transfer of responsibility and further reduced resourcing to the devolved unit, usually the school, with ongoing monitoring and a reward and punishment regime often instituted as a means of dealing with the apparently tardy.
focus, with the what and why being available for local interpretation. Increasingly however, the what equates to better performance on standardised measures and the why as international competitiveness/performance. There are of course significant variations to this heuristic with different consultants/scholars offering differing emphases and different arguments as to the relative merits of each of the elements. The Rand Corporation stresses the importance of building capacity to implement and sustain the reforms, adjusting for local culture and policy, ensuring quality control, providing the necessary infrastructure and fostering a sense of ownership. They stress that the scaling up process is iterative and complex, and requires cooperation among many actors who must ensure that the results align with goals (Glennan, Bodilly, Galegher, & Kerr, 2004). Levin (2008) emphasises the importance of a focus on a few key student outcomes, capacity building, taking a positive approach and building political and public support. Others highlight the role of local leadersusing data to monitor and guide their activities (Boudett & Steele, 2007), following the characteristics of successful/effective leaders and schools (Fullan, 2011;Stoll & Fink, 1996), strategically coordinating local leaders' efforts (Leithwood et al., 2006), and allowing school leaders to take up more systemic roles (Hopkins & Higham, 2007).
There are also national policy differences and different approaches within countries depending on the initiative. Sometimes the first scaling up phase might be omitted altogetheras in the English free schools policyand in many cases, innovations never make it to the stage where they might become sustainable. Anxious policy-makers also create situations where scaling up is impossible because of the sheer volume and rapidity of innovations they initiate (Levin, 1998).
However, despite local inflections used by policy-makers, the dominant notion of scaling up as it is generally used has little truck with context. When Sahlberg (2012) refers to GERMthe Global Education Reform Movementor Thomson, Gunter and Blackmore (2013) to the TLPthe Transnational Leadership Packagethey are referring to practices which are assumed to be both transferable across national boundaries, and scaleable at any sizeone school, a school district or a national education system. This lack of attention to particularity is just one of the aspects of scaling up which is problematic and which I will suggest can be understood differently using a Bourdieusian lens.
Bourdieu's conceptual toolkit Bourdieu saw society as made up of fields (Bourdieu & Bourdieu, 1977;Wacquant, 1992Wacquant, , 1990, interlocking and overlapping spaces. Each social field has a territory, and players who are invested in it. Each field also has specific capitals at stake. What happens in fields can be understood as a 'game' in which winning is decided on the basis of who gets the most, in both volume and type of, capitals. Capitals are convertible, so, for example, cultural capital can often be exchanged for social and/or economic capital and vice versa. While the game in the economic field is maximising profit, in the education field it is the rationed distribution of specific prizessymbolic, cultural and social capitals rather than capitals which are directly economic. There are similarities and differences between fields; Bourdieu talked of each field being relatively autonomous but there being important homologies (commonalities) across them. Thus, the ways in which profits are accumulated differentially by different 'players' (companies, owners and shareholders) is analogous, but not identical, to the ways in which elites and elite institutions in the education field accumulate credentials, status and positions of influence.
Bourdieu suggested that the overall field of power is geared to support the re/production of national/global economic and social regimes. Every other field has a part to play to make this happen. The field of education must produce the people qualified to work at all levels in all other fields, as well as to re/produce the kinds of knowledge, skills and dispositions already possessed and valued by the social elites and managerial elites in each of the fields. The game in the education field is fundamentally 'sorting and selecting' people by, for example, privileging particular knowledges, ways of speaking and acting, educational pathways and particular certifications. These come to seem only right and proper, 'natural'.
However, the education field not only produces knowledge about itself but also about other fields. It is thus simultaneously both a field of reproduction and of knowledge production and diffusion. Bourdieu discriminates between fields in which practices of reproduction are dominant and those devoted to production and diffusion. The purpose of a field of production and diffusion is one devoted to knowledge work, generating and conserving 'consecrated' capitals and agents who specialise in the work of cultivating and legitimating the symbolic goods required in fields of reproduction (Bourdieu, 1993, ch. 3). In the education field, knowledge production and diffusion generally occurs within the higher education subfield while reproduction occurs throughout. This understanding is important to my argument about scaling up. 'Scaling up' is 'knowledge' generated within a subfield of education, often in partnership with government (a subfield of the political field) and diffusedand usedthroughout the educational and other fields (health, welfare, political, housing and so on).
A field is populated by positionspositions are occupied both by institutions (schools, colleges, universities, nurseries and community education centres) and by people (or agents, as Bourdieu called them). Positions are not evenly distributed in a field and fields are not equitable spacesthey are not, as the common saying has it, level playing fields. They consist of status and power hierarchies which are derived from both horizontal and vertical positional arrangements. It is these status and power hierarchies which are re/produced within fields.
Bourdieu argued that the actions taken by players in any field operate according to predetermined rulesthey are governed by their own logic of practice (Bourdieu, 1990)each field has its play, its own logics and its own specific practices. The game is rationalised by field-specific doxa and is played for field-specific social, cultural and symbolic capitalsin schooling, qualifications and particular forms of knowledge and networks. Field players generally take the doxa as a 'truth': in order to be successful they play by the rules. Playing the game both requires and produces particular dispositions which become configured as 'habitus'taken-for-granted ways of acting, being, thinking and doing.
A final important point about fields is that they are chiasmaticthat is, they are not stable, but riven with tensions, debates, oppositions and alternative doxa. In the economic field, for example, there is the classic opposition between employers and trade unions, locked in a struggle over the distribution of profits. In education, there are also trade unions, but other oppositions too, about the capitals at stake and the rules of the game. One of the sites of struggle in a field may be that of doxa and representations, about what the rules of the game should and could be. It is important for the argument I make here to state that it is possible for players to be positioned to carry out the prevailing logic of the field, and to do so, but at the same time also take up a doxic position and adopt a partial practice which runs counter to that which prevails in the field (Thomson & Hall, 2011). Thus we have, for example, school leaders who must conform to the field enough to stay in post, but who also seek to change it and to resist inequitable imposts (Thomson, 2008). In the case discussed here, it may be producers of knowledge within the subfield of higher education who are able to counter scaling up narratives and practices.

Bourdieu and misrecognition
The term misrecognition is common within the social sciences. It is used, for example, by theorists of race and postcoloniality who argue that racism and racist violence and counter actions are misrecognised as criminality within colonial contexts (e.g. Fanon, 1961). The term is also usedand debatedby identity theorists and feminists who suggest that the process of 'othering' (misrecognition) is countered when people are recognised for who they aretheir differences and differing identities (manifest in diverse ontologies, epistemologies and axiologies) seen, heard and understood (Fraser & Fraser, 1997;Honneth, 2003).
Bourdieu's use of the term misrecognition differs from these. He does not mean simply mistaking one thing for another, although that is involved. Nor does he mean 'false consciousness', a delusion about material reality, although he does suggest that misrecognition involves not 'seeing' materialities for what they are and what they do. Bourdieu suggests that misrecognition occurs when agents are not entirely unaware of the truth of their practices, but act as if they must conceal it from themselves. Agents accept doxa and thus 'misrecognise' the material reality and effects of the game which, in the case of education, is not about reward for meritorious performance but rather, the production and reproduction of inequalities.
One way to explain Bourdieusian misrecognition is through an example -I will use the store loyalty card. 1 When we finally get enough points to 'buy' something, we feel pleasure; in that moment we appear to have something for nothing, even as we understand that we have already paid for the gift. On another level, we know that loyalty cards are not only a way for stores to encourage us to continue to purchase goods from them, but they are also now a way of accumulating information about our individual and demographic buying habits. Loyalty cards allow stores to push marketing at us via email, and to tailor the stocks in particular shops on the basis of aggregated demographic data. They are a means of maximising profit. A misrecognition occurs when we foreground our feelings of pleasure about the loyalty card and play along with the game of points accumulation, ignoring its privacy-invading, profit-making function.
In his work on education, Bourdieu notes that education operates via field-specific misrecognitions; as noted, these re/produce privilege. One of these is the combined idea of merit and ability. The attribution of ability and merita doxa or taken-for-granted truth in the field of educationobscures material reality, viz.: that children enter the educational field with differing capitals; that families have a crucial role in handing on capitals; and that schools perpetuate the hierarchies of capitals through pedagogical practices dependent on specific language and disciplinary capitals and processes such as examinations. These combine to produce and reproduce dominant ways of knowing, acting and being. As educational 'game' players, children start from different positions (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977, 1979. The patterns of differential achievement that are pervasive in the field are personalised and individualised and attributed to the deficiencies of social structures such as families, schools and neighbourhoodsthis is the misrecognition. Misrecognition of the social determinants of the educational careerand therefore of the social trajectory it helps to determinegives the educational certificate the value of a natural right and makes the educational system one of the fundamental agencies of the social order. (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 387) Both dominant and dominated players in the field accept the misrecognition as a 'truth'.
The consequences of misrecognition are, Bourdieu says, always multiple. Misrecognition simultaneously allocates blame and disfavour, perpetuates its doxic basis, and legitimates practices which continue to differentially distribute capitals to those who are already advantaged in the field. Thus, those children who are not possessed of 'ability' or 'merit' are not simply demonised and seen as lacking but are systematically subject to practices of dominationfor example, they are streamed and set, offered differentiated curriculum and set tasks and examinations at which they are expected to do poorly, and they do. Their failure, and the success of a few, acts to legitimate the belief that their failure was caused by lack of ability or application, as well as to re/produce hierarchies which already exist within the field.
Bourdieusian notions of misrecognition are arguably less well used within educational research than other aspects of his conceptual tool kitfield, capitals and habitus. There are however some examples in the literature. For example, English (2012) examined leadership standards in the UK and England. He argued that seeing them as a means of system-wide improvement misrecognised their actual purpose, viz. to advance the field position of particular national agencies while simultaneously consolidating particular kinds of leadership practices, habitus and doxa. Grenfell and James (2004) focused on educational research, arguing that attacks on particular kinds of educational researchan 'avant-garde' in the fieldconstitute attempts to shore up what counts as legitimate knowledge. However, seeing this as simply about research methods misrecognised what was at stakeways of knowing about re/production and educational inequalities. They suggest radical reflexive research methodologies might counter these dominant and dominating field activities. This argument intersects with the case I make here.
I now bring Bourdieu to the notion of scaling up. I present two quite different examples, one which illustrates misrecognition, and the other which avoids misrecognition and thus leaves a space for further analysis and contestation. In each case I am focused on the knowledge (educational capital) that is at issue.

Misrecognition and scaling up
Scaling up advocates often couch their process advice as making 'radical change' Radical change is understood as the implementation of a whole-scale reform across a unit which can be measured. A unit can be a school (scaling up from one classroom), a district (scaling up from beacon schools) or a system. Educational scaling up advocates almost always include in their formula: leaders who have and spread 'vision', schools with some degree of autonomy but high accountability via audit and testing, and some degree of systemic support and sanction (see Table 2).
Contemporary scaling up advocates often now argue that change is not a blueprint, it must be sensitive to local context, and must allow for individual variationspersonalisation for students, developing particular niche offerings for schools. It must be owned by participants, must have some form of shared decision-making and a great deal of collaboration. Teachers must be allowed to exercise professional judgment, schools must have the power to decide what their communities need (Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012;Hargreaves & Sahlberg, 2012;Hess, Mehta, & Schwartz, 2012). Table 2 shows one advocate arguing that scaling up must learn urgency and dynamism from social movements. It is helpful to note here how scaling up advocates designate responsibility for contextual adjustment of substantive reform content to implementers not to the change model per seit is generic and transferable across all settings.
Scaling up advocates suggest that successful reform lies in successful process. They therefore suggest that failure of reform is a process failure, attributable to those charged with carrying out the process or the process itself. Meta-studies of scaling up and its problems almost inevitably focus on how questions (e.g. Chapman, 2005;Hubbard, Mehan, & Stein, 2006;Pounder, 1998). Educational reform failure is attributed to one or combinations of: (1) the reform being badly designed, (2) schools and teachers being inadequate for the task, (3) the reform being too simplistic and thus failing to address the complexity of problems, (4) aspects of the environment or context being too difficult and (5) support for the introduction of the innovation, but not its implementation and/or its sustainability (Schneider & McDonald, 2007). Reform advocates and designers are therefore charged to remedy the process deficiency: supply what is missing in the environment, gives sustained support, include potent incentives, and offer powerful and continuing guidance. The implication is that reforms will succeed only if better process techniques can be found to address implementation and sustainability problems. Tyack and Cuban (1995) however take a different view of reform failure, namely that there is something about the nature of schooling itself which prevents dramatic change and which instead fosters quite gradual evolution. They offer the notion of a 'grammar', a kind of structural/cultural architecture, which is not amenable to rapid shifts. Despite changes in educational governance and policy regimes, they argue, the grammar holds but slow changes do occur (Cuban, 1995). Their analysis does suggest something more systemic about the ways in which reforms fail.
Bourdieu provides one explanation for this systematic failure. His conceptual toolkit allows cases of 'scaling up' to be examined in alternative ways. Rather than ask whether these are successes or failures, relevant Bourdieusian questions become: The rules of scaling up 1. Leaders must earn authority 2. Teachers must have control and autonomy to innovate 3. Schools need technical support 4. Individuals and collectives must define and clarify goals/principles 5. Schools must achieve and sustain quality 6. Change must have the characteristics of a social movement (urgency, sense of possibility) 7. There must be a few clear goals 8. There must be agreement about non-negotiables 9. Policies must allocate resources appropriately 10. Resistance must be dealt with • What capitals are at stake in this reform?
• What is 'the game' being played?
• What and where is the doxa that is integral to this reform? • Who benefits from this reform and how?
• Does the reform change the overall patterns of hierarchy in the field? • Does the knowledge generated about the reform speak to contestations in the field? I now take these questions to two examples of scaling up to indicate what a Bourdieusian approach might achieve.
Example one: scaling up success The first example is taken from unpublished research conducted by the author and colleagues (Thomson, Day, Beales, & Curtis, 2010). The research was commissioned by the English National College for School Leadership, as it was then known, and it was intended to provide case studies of successful school leadership which could be used for teaching purposes in the then mandated qualification necessary for headship. 2 The research was intended to support the 'scaling up' of particular leadership practices.
We were asked to provide 12 case studies; the National College nominated 10 of these and we chose the final two. The case studies were 'snapshots' ; data were generated over three to six days in each location and consisted of documents, and interviews with the head, Chair of governors, other leaders, teachers and students. Case studies were sent to each head for checking before being presented to the funder. In the case reported here, the names of the site and the head have been anonymised. This case study is one I conducted myself over three days and through two extended follow up telephone conversations with the head teacher.
In order to understand the particularity of the case, it is important to flag up some characteristics of the schooling field in England. Like all jurisdictions, education in England has been subject to global pressures (Lingard & Rawolle, 2013). In order to retain power and credibility at home, the UK government has assumed responsibility for raising educational standards, as measured on national and international tests. English policy-makers have opted for a particularly extreme version of marketisation, privatisation and contractualism, the imposition of new audit regimes and new modes of governance (Ball, 2012). The doxa is one of 'raising the bar and closing the gap' (see  for a critique of 'gap talk') as well as increasing the numbers of students staying in education for ever longer periods in order to avoid the collapse in the youth labour market. Accompanying this educational 'massification' are continued demands for differentiation in order to manage access to higher education; this has involved an ongoing struggle over graduating school credentials and university access (Thomson, 2010). This English policy settlement, begin in the 1980s, has entailed both the imposition of new practices 'at scale', and the selective 'scaling up' of particular practices.
A key to this agenda is 'leadership' (Gunter, 2011), the focus of our commissioned case studies. The field position of leader has become more important as schools have been increasingly regulated through governance mechanisms rather than through direct control. This case study was undertaken at the point when new forms of schoolingacademies, and their later incarnation, free schoolswere just being introduced and further demands were being made on leaders.

Barton special needs federation
Barton school and its head teacher were nominated by the National College for our study on the grounds that the head had significantly changed the attainment of students for the better. As the school was designated 'special education' this was to be an example of school leadership which 'closed the gap' and promoted equity. The aim was to show the doxa of good leadership producing improved student outcomes.
Barton was originally a special needs facility for secondary boys. When its current head Bill was appointed 10 years ago, inspectors judged it a failure; there were abysmal student outcomes, high staff absenteeism and serious racism and sexism among both staff and students. Bill asked the local authority to intervene; the school was temporarily closed, and then reopened with some old and some new staff. Over a three year period, the school developed routines and elements of the national curriculum and a range of vocational options. In the fourth year the school was re-inspected and Ofsted judged it 'good'. Bill told me: They said we were a very good school, and they described the leadership of the Head as outstanding. That was the key thing because then the ball was rolling our way. You suddenly got a level of autonomy to do whatever you wanted within obviously the guidance … suddenly you were moved into a whole new level of leadership. People were phoning asking you advice, invitations from this community, that community. As it was for you, personally, so it was for the school.
Bill was then asked by the local authority to offer support to the local Pupil Referral Unit (a PRU is an alternative provision for excluded students) which was also deemed in crisis. This he did, and he then negotiated to take it over, as well as develop complementary services. In Bill's words: … it's about opportunities isn't it? It's seeing opportunities and grasping them when they're there. Not, you know, not necessarily waiting, sometimes go out looking for them, but sometimes they just present themselves to you and you've got to be prepared to pounce and take them. The Local Authority said to me, 'Do you think you could support our PRU?' and I thought 'Yes I could support that' but I knew that I didn't want to just support it. I wanted it to become a part of something bigger. But I thought the way in was to accept half of it at the moment and then we can go on.
Over time the school expanded to three sites and now offers a comprehensive primary and secondary short and long-term special education provision, with separate support for school refusers and seriously ill children. Barton also provides support for local primary and secondary schools in managing 'difficult' students, a work placement service and a wide range of curriculum. The service operates as a federation, with a single governing body and a local head on each site, with Bill as the Executive Head.
I'm sorry to put this as a market but if you think of it as a market it makes you sharper about how you deal with it. It doesn't make you inhuman, it doesn't make you a non-teacher. So I saw that there is definitely a need out there for behaviour kids and I wanted to meet that need through providing a solution, hence the Federation's resources.
On the back of this change, Bill has subsequently been invited to become a member of prestigious national bodies and is frequently out of the school advising other heads about how they can do what he did. Bill is now talking up scaling up what he did and continues to do.

A Bourdieusian commentary on Barton and Bill
It is not hard to see who benefited from this incident of individual school reform. Barton's students acquired more cultural capital from their school experience which they were able to 'cash in' in the training field and in employment. They were advantaged by their school's changes when compared to other special students attending less 'successful' schools. But the change at Barton also brought distinction to both Bill and the school. However the school federation remained, albeit with much higher status, in its special education subfield. Bill, on the other hand, became part of an elite body of exemplary school leaders working across the entire English schooling field. The difference in distinctionthe school and students within special education and Bill across the field, are an indication of which practices are those to be 'scaled up'.
Two kinds of capitals, those afforded to students and those used by its head teacher, were required to achieve distinction. Students needed to acquire 'vocational skills' and 'value added' test scores, including those that counted most, the General Certificate of School Education (GCSE) (all English schools must meet target results in this certificate which marks the end of compulsory schooling (Gillborn & Youdell, 2000)). We can theorise further that extending the kinds of vocational curriculum enjoyed by Barton students to all special schools would simply mean that new discriminators would need to be developed in order to allocate the very limited numbers of jobs and training positions open to special education graduates (Riddell, Edward, Weedon, & Ahlgren, 2010). And even if there were less differentiation among special schools, Barton's practices would not change the overall field, because a key differentiating practice in the schooling field is via the vocational-academic divide. As long as vocational education is subject to the doxa of meritocracy, and legitimated by the histories of head/hands binary thinking, any students with vocational credentials will have symbolic and cultural capital considered inferior to that of 'the academic'.
But Bill was required to use managerial capitals in order to shift the school from failing to successful, as his comments on being given a good inspection result showed. These capitals were largely directed to 'capacity building' of staff and the introduction of a curriculum amenable to the production of data which would signify improvement. Exercising these managerial capitals kept Bill and the school from losing position, from less distinction within the subfield and the schooling field overall. But it was his use of entrepreneurial capitals which allowed him to advance his position in both fields: these are clearly shown in his comments (above) about visiting other schools, taking advantage of opportunities that presented themselves, and seeing a market need he could fill.
Bill's leadership practice was seen by the National College as generic and transferable able to be scaled up across all sub fields/types of schools. The doxa suggested that if all leaders followed Bill's example then systemic gaps in achievement would be reduced, particularly for special education students. However, this does not follow. At scale there was nothing in the logic of Bill's practices to change the overall hierarchical functioning of the schooling field, and a lot in his leadership practice that served to produce and reproduce it.
So what did scaling up Barton and Bill's leadership accomplish? Bill's game strategies were strongly aligned with the logic of the fieldhe used external field support to legitimise changes and to provide the warrant for his imposition of new internal practices; he confirmed to policy expectations about curriculum and pedagogy. But it was his anticipation of where the game was going that made him a field exemplar: he took full advantage of his autonomy to expand; he mobilised softer forms of leadershipcoaching, distributing leadership opportunities, and dedicating time and resources to 'capacity building'; at the same time, aspects of his practice were highly masculinistdecisiveness, entrepreneurialism and risk taking, for example, are highly gendered practices (Blackmore, 1999;Blackmore & Sachs, 2007). Bill was 'scaleable' because he conformed to the doxa and because his leadership practice was where the game was headed. 'Scaling up' his leadership up would help bring into being further school autonomies and increased competition across the field. Seeing Bill's success as having potential to 'close the gap' at scale is in fact a misrecognition of the way that his practice not only conformed to field logics but also actually helped to legitimate and perpetuate the inequitable hierarchies that constitute 'the gap'.
As researchers, we were positionally complicit in the doxic knowledge production elements of this overall project (cf. English, 2012).

Example two: a scaling up failure
My second example is of a different order. I have argued in this paper that scaling up failure is generally attributed to deficiencies in teachers, schools and reform design. This is, I suggested, a doxic as well as toxic explanation, a misrecognition of field reproductive practices. Change and SESI policy advocates and entrepreneurs take it as a truth. I have suggested that this misrecognition comes in part emenating from the higher education subfield that is dedicated to knowledge production and diffusion. I now examine an explanation of scaling up failure which does not misrecognise. I will suggest that it leaves open a space for contestation. This example comes from Australia. The field of school education in Australia is different to that of England in that it has more layersstates and districts mediate what national policy-makers stipulate. While there are moves to governance structuresa national curriculum, national testing and league tablingthe field might appear more benign than in England. It is, however, divided deeply by ongoing struggles over funding for elite schools versus those serving disadvantaged communities. Data suggests that it is a highly stratified national system, which continues to reproduce significant inequalities based on class, gender and race (OECD, 2013).
The group which fares worst in terms of educational outcome data is Indigenous students. The Council of Australian Governments (COAG) has an ambitious plan of action (MCEEDYA, 2010) which aims to halve the gap in achievement between Indigenous and other Australian students by 2018. Effort is to be directed to assisting Indigenous students to play the schooling game more effectively. A range of strategies are planned and underway, including early childhood intervention, provision of homework centres, additional English language programmes and establishment of 900 focus schools with high Indigenous enrolments.
The Stronger Smarter Learning Communities (SSLC) programme (2009-2013) fits with, although is not part of, the Indigenous Education National Action Plan. The SSLC funded hubs of Australian schools to develop Indigenous leadership, positive identity among students, high expectations and improved student learning outcomes. The programme was an attempt to scale up the practices and philosophy developed by Chris Sarra at Cherbourg State School in south east Queensland (Sarra, 2012a(Sarra, , 2012b. As such it has strong similarities to the Indigenous Action Plan's approach to its 900 focus schools. A recent academic evaluation of the SSLC (Luke et al., 2013) suggested that the programme had some successit had successfully changed staffing practices in the participating schools, introduced an Indigenous curriculum element and promoted increasing awareness of the need to do better for Indigenous students. However, it had hit a number of problems. The evaluators noted: a lack of institutional analysis of how to reform deficit thinking; a community view that little had changed; that attendance and achievement had not improved; the basic curriculum models of basic skills instruction and vocational education remained unchanged; and there was an overall lack of leader and teacher knowledge of and engagement with Indigenous communities, knowledges, cultures, languages and histories (see Table 3).
For my argument about misrecognition, it is important to note the ways in which this SSLC evaluation differs from those offered by process advocates from the school effectiveness and improvement/school reform and change area. Failure in the SSLC was not seen simply as a problem of process, and the sole responsibility of teachers, schools and programme design. The report expresses concerns which directly relate to the logic of the education fieldthe privileging of particular forms of knowledges and languages, the sorting and selecting effected through vocational and basic skills curricula, the doxa of ability and merit which underpins deficit thinking. While not expressed directly in Bourdieusian terms, the evaluation follows a Bourdieusian line of argument. It offers an account of the difficulties of scaling up a change which runs somewhat counter to the doxa, the logic of practice and the capitals at stake in the field.
There is also in the SSLC report a suggestion that schools need to relate differently to Indigenous communities. This might mean much more than better parent-teacher relationships; it might also cover engagement with the ongoing struggles of Indigenous peoples for land, rights and equitable services. One of the causes of failure to 'scale up' this particular programme perhaps resides in the doxic difficulties of 'getting political'. The late Jean Anyon (2005) argued that recent shifts in the education field have always been as a result of the political activities of larger social movements acting in coordinated way across fields. She contended that we cannot understand struggles around education for African Americans without understanding the long history of slavery and the civil rights movement. Similarly, the education of girls is inextricably connected with the history of suffrage and various waves of the women's movements. Anyon's argument suggests that in order for change for Indigenous students to be more successfulto progress beyond distinction for a minatory of individuals and institutionsschools must make stronger alliances across fields with counter-political groupings. This is a possible inference from the report's benign wording about school-community relationships.
The SSLC report is, I suggest, an example of how it is possible for the higher education subfield to discuss reformand reform failurewithout misrecognition. The report's authors show the capitals at stake in the field -Indigenous knowledgesand key reproductive practices such as sorting and selecting via vocational education and life skills (these also featured in Barton's success) and the unequal distribution of resourcesinsufficient time available for teachers to acquire new social and cultural capitals. Drawing attention to these capitals and practices makes them available for contestation.
Showing that there are no systematic patterns of curriculum which consolidate Indigenous capitals leaves the way open for a reading which says that this lack of systemacity is integral to the production and reproduction of dominant interests. It also allows a reading which recognises, not misrecognises, that while acting counter to white interests might be acceptable in one or even a few schools, and even potentially bring distinction to those that succeeded in this venture, at a more systemic level this is difficult, since it challenges dominant field interests by changing the game and the capitals at stake.
A Bourdieusian re-reading of the SSLC report begins with the notion that fields are unstable, and that action across fields, particularly in times of crisis, can produce change in the overall balance of power and interests. As Wacquant (2004, p. 11) explains, Bourdieu saw change in democratic societies as an historical process of negation of social negation, a never-ending effort to make social relations less arbitrary, institutions less unjust, distributions of resources and options less imbalanced, recognition less scarce.
The history of education does suggest that even as the mass level of education has risen, social and economic hierarchies remain, but there have been changes in practices and positions. Arguably, in both England and Australia, field borders have become more porous and the fields themselves less autonomous (Thomson, 2005). There also have been changes which have resulted at least in part from internal field contests where the volume and types of capitals which are dominant have shifted. For example, gender has ceased to have such a potent negative effect on middle class girls' education while it remains a potent negative when they try to cash in their symbolic educational capital in the labour market.
Bourdieu notes that contestation over capitals often occurs in the cultural rather than the economic sphere. Thus, because fields are chiasmatic, that is, it is riven with temporally-spatially specific oppositional ideas and practices, ideas and practices which challenge field prevalent doxa and logics co-exist. These act as reservoirs of potential new practices able to be scaled up should the situation change in other more dominant fields or across fields. The analysis in the SSLC report may indeed act as just such a reservoir of potential new practice.
A Bourdieusian re-reading of the SSLC evaluation also suggests that at least some of the failure to scale up the programme was located in the challenge it offered to the ongoing reproduction of white privilege and European knowledges. This is not stated as such in the report. Rather, the report analyses, not theorises. The authors present a sophisticated set of pointers and refuse the doxa of misrecognition via the conventional scaling up attribution of process blame. This, I suggest, provides a space for agents in the field to not only provide their own reflexive reading of the text, but also to use this to inform countering strategies focused on field practices such as the privileging of particular capitals, the perpetuation of the vocational-academic divide across the entire schooling field, and the schism between Indigenous communities and organisations and their schools. Of course, this text may also be subject to a reading which misrecognises.
In conclusion, I consider further the idea of misrecognition and its use within the knowledge production and dissemination subfield.

Talking about misrecognition
Using a Bourdieusian lens, I have argued that the notion of scaling up as it is most commonly promulgatedincluding by academics in the higher education subfieldis a misrecognition of the logic of practices in the education field. The focus on process allows failure to be attributed to particular individuals and institutions rather than being seen as a legitimation and furthering of field differentiating practices. I have also suggested that those involved in the knowledge and production subfield are positioned to re/produce the doxa of scaling up and can be complicit in misrecognitionor they can act otherwise. This suggestion is in accord with the 'radical research' suggested by Grenfell and James, referred to earlier in the paper, and with Bourdieu's arguments about the conduct of sociology and sociologists.
In a Bourdieusian spirit, I now want to briefly examine some critiques of the notion of misrecognition. The concept is not universally admired. Ranciere (2004) argues, for example, that misrecognition is simply and unhelpfully circuitousthe system is reproduced because it is misrecognised and naturalised via doxa, and in reproducing itself, the system re/produces the effect of misrecognition. This leaves, Ranciere argues, the 'philosopher' as the only person able to see the system for what it is, and the only person able to denounce it for its cruelty. There is something of this in the argument I have made here, although I have been careful to suggest that it is not only the higher education subfield which is able to generate counter understandings. Gorski (2013) argues that the Bourdieusian propositionthat naturalisation and misrecognition are fundamental to the reproduction of cultural capitalis not amenable to empirical investigation but operates best at an abstract level. What is required for empirical specificities, he suggests, is something rather more traditionally Marxist, an investigation of symbolic exchanges, process and values. While I have not done this, it does seem that the examples I have re-read for this paper did generate some of this kind of data. Burawoy (2012) offers another view which picks up on both of these critiques. Burawoy compares Bourdieu's notion of misrecognition with Gramsci's notion of hegemony. He suggests that Gramsci overlooked 'the mystification that characterises advanced capitalism'. However, Bourdieu saw misrecognition as deep and universalthe result of the incorporated and embodied habitus, a process of internalization that was unconscious rather than a spontaneous effect of specifically capitalist relations. (p. 189) Burawoy contends that this understanding positioned Bourdieu as overly pessimistic about change, compared to Gramsci's over optimism about the possibilities of 'seeing' material relations of domination. Burawoy argues that while Bourdieu's notion of change rests on the discrepancy between position and dispositions, this does not adequately explain a number of recent events including the fall of state socialism. 3 This however was not the task undertaken here, which was to consider change that is less seismic and integral to the stubborn static correlation between privilege and education. While Bourdieu's conception of misrecognition may well have limits and pitfalls, I suggest that, as part of a conceptual toolkit, it does have something to offer. While it may not show a way to transform the field, it can certainly, for those of us engaged in knowledge production and dissemination, open up critical readings of current practices, including our own. Because of the way in which dominant agents in the education field use knowledge as part of the game, and are invested in doxa which hide the material realities of domination, it is surely helpful to adopt a reflexive position which asks how our work might constitute a misrecognition, might perpetuate doxa, or might be easily taken up to further these ends. This seems essential to the work of reflexive academic practice, as well as offering knowledge resources that might support those engaged in more active contestation in the field. Notes 1. This example courtesy of David James. 2. These materials have, as far as we know, been published and are in use, but we have never been sent a copy. 3. Burawoy argues that the fall of the Soviet Union was caused by a crisis in the ruling elites to manage their ideologies and material realities and this brought the possibility of radical change. There was no misrecognition or naturalisation at issue but rather a field-generated collapse.

Notes on contributor
Pat Thomson PSM PhD is Professor of Education, School of Education, The University of Nottingham. She is Director of the Centre of Advanced Studies (faculties of Arts and Social Sciences). Her research is concerned primarily with arts, creativity and school and community change, with additional work in doctoral education and academic writing. She blogs at www. patthomson.wordpress.com and tweets as @ThomsonPat. Her most recent book is Writing for peer reviewed journals: Strategies for getting published (with Barbara Kamler, 2013, Routledge).