The power of taste: Bourdieusian perspectives on the negotiation of policy, practice, and pedagogy

This study examines the dynamic relationship between quality improvement (QI) policies and teaching practices within English Further Education (FE) settings. Drawing on sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's work, we examine the ways supposedly objective scrutiny validates a problematic discourse of taste in a context where notions of “quality”, “improvement”, and “policy” must be negotiated by the practitioners who enact them. First, the concepts of “distinction”, “docta ignorantia” and their relationship to power and especially taste are discussed. We then analyse interview data which explores the negotiated enactment of QI policy to examine how teaching practices are categorised, often neglecting the complex contextual constraints in which they operate. This ‘distinction’ between forms of practice, we argue, creates tensions between externally defined standards and teachers’ professional judgments, with implications for how they engage with diverse student needs. These quality distinctions, we suggest, do not merely instil conformity to prescribed QI standards, but engender a form of ‘symbolic violence’, acting not just on FE practice per se but on practitioners’ own distinctions. This alignment is both insidious and invidious, when pedagogical "taste" is framed by externally imposed benchmarks which misrecognise local pedagogical approaches and environments.