 helps us to explain and to deal with that level of analysis issue. A third area that causes some difficulty, or could cause some difficulty, is the fact that practices are very different from site to site, so that when academics are doing research, they'll behave differently from when they're doing learning and teaching. Here I'm going to draw on Bernstein. He talks about what he calls the pedagogical device and notes that discipline as research is different from discipline as curriculum. It's articulated differently in teaching discipline as curriculum than it is when it's research practices that are going on. So again, identifying the thing, essentialism with its core characteristics becomes rather difficult because the site of practice matters, granularity matters and the site of practice matters. So once again, Wittgenstein's argument about familial resemblances I think helps us to deal with those differences and yet sameness issue. Finally, another problematising issue is time. Disciplines do change over time, some faster than others, some very fast indeed, but again we can still recognise them as being the same discipline. So granularity, time and the site of practice all mean that a discipline is articulated differently, different times, different places and in different sites. And as I've already said, in terms of generative power, that too varies according to the particular situation. So what I'm saying really about disciplines is that they have multiple and variable characteristics depending upon the sets of relations, the level of analysis and the time that we're looking at. But they do draw on a set of family characteristics so that we can recognise them. And Seher again, Andrew Seher has noted the importance of moving away from hard categorical boundaries and taking the kind of approach that I'm suggesting in detail here. He says that trying to establish hard categorical boundaries for example around tribal territories conceals, this is a quote, conceals fuzzy complex shifting transitions with the distinctions often being the subject of social struggle in particular, familiar bipolar distinctions suppress difference and hybridity. And really that's what I'm talking about here, difference and hybridity. To try to look for disciplinary territorial borders and to fix them, to map them for all time and all circumstances is wrong. Disciplines are the site of struggle and change. They vary, they're very impracticed and they vary as to how you look at them as well. So how is it that we come to recognise disciplines? How is it that we establish in our minds these familial resemblances? How do we come to know that sociology is sociology and not, for example, history? This brings up the issue of a very important issue of when is a thing not a thing and a verge, for example, in thinking about social practices has used the example of the polevolta using a new technology, a new kind of pole and people saying, are they really doing polevolting? Or Oscar Fistorius, the so-called blade runner very relevant in the South African context of course was he really running the 400 meters when he had those blades to help him? Or a child in school doing arithmetic with a calculator? Are they really doing arithmetic? The really there is a very important question. Now I would say that in trying to recognise, for example, the discipline of sociology, we don't have in our heads an enormous rulebook of characteristics that we're looking at. What's happened I would say is that a form of connectionist learning has gone on and here I'm drawing again on Turner's work that over time we have a series of experiences from which we infer an understanding of a concept and we apply our inferences and from the feedback we receive we establish whether we've correctly inferred our understanding or not. So we're not learning rote fashion a rulebook. We're having a series of experiences, we're making connections in our minds and we're beginning to come to an understanding as we use those and get feedback on whether we're using them correctly or not. A lot of language learning, first language learning is like that. Nobody ever teaches us the meaning of words like however, for example, we infer them. So in the same way we're by inference, by connectionist learning, we're inferring the meaning of terms like sociology. We're developing a set of ideas and we're applying them when we look at the world. There is a grouping of elements, a set of familial resemblances in disciplines of course and it's interesting to think about what they are. I would say they're things like patterns of discourse that you can identify across different disciplines, a set of concerns, research concerns and so on, conceptual theoretical tools, a disciplinary saga, a kind of history, a set of knowledge resources of course, concepts and so on, theories and a set of conventions of appropriateness that might be more or less rigid about research and teaching as well as a dominant set of assumptions around issues of epistemology and ontology. But as I say, those are not core characteristics that need to be there. They are the components of familial resemblances and through connectionist learning they give us a sense of what Bourdieu calls a sense for the game or what Giddens calls practical consciousness, an understanding that is usable that we can apply. So for example, to give something that, to give an example that might be a bit closer to home for some of you, marking criteria when we're judging a student's essay and trying to give it a grade. Of course we've got marking criteria, the rule book if you like, but the experienced teacher and examiner doesn't actually look at the marking criteria, doesn't need to look at the marking criteria. They actually know from experience through the inferences that they've made through the inputs that they've had what kind of level we're talking about here and in fact the attempt that marking criteria make to capture levels and so on is always going to be doomed to failure as Alison Wolfe showed us back in 1995 in thinking about competence based education. So what we've got essentially is the functional equivalent of a set of rules that help us to recognise these family resemblances. They're not rules themselves, but they do the job of rules. And those functional equivalents are situationally contingent. They depend on the context at which the rule equivalent is applied, as I say from university to university, from situation to situation and from different sites of practice. And they're teleorelative, in other words they depend upon the ends that people are putting them for the needs that are being addressed at the time. So they're purpose relative. So what we've got in a sense is a very complicated situation with different sites of practice, different levels of analysis, and so on. And so for example as Chris Winberg has shown as Chris from Seaport, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, if you take the example of mechanical engineering or architecture, what you see is a different articulation of that discipline in different sites of practice. So for example, an architect articulates that discipline differently in the lecture theatre, in the field, at the drawing board, and so on. It becomes essentially a different thing, and yet we can still recognise it as architecture. So just to draw to a conclusion then, I began the talk by saying that disabling dualisms close down alternative ways of thinking. They create ontological tunnel vision and inhibit explanations I'm drawing on Seher in that. So what does a moderate, less dualist position open up and enable us to do in terms of thinking about disciplines? Well, I think the first thing it does is to help us extend beyond Bernstein's discipline as research and discipline as curriculum. Discipline as it's articulated in the research field and discipline as it's articulated in the classroom. To think about the other sites of practice that academics engage in, for example in committee work, in the politics of what they do, in placing applications for funding and so on. The discipline is re-contextualised and re-articulated in those different sites of practice. So I think it's quite helpful to think about in terms of research how that happens and what happens to the discipline as for example a philosopher or a social work academic sits in a committee and uses their discipline, applies their discipline for particular purposes, for example to get resources and so on. So I'd like to extend the notion of, Bernstein's notion of the pedagogical advice to these other sites of practice and to recognise, as Sue Matheson does, that disciplines are socially situated and that matters. And secondly, just to conclude as I say, I think it's really important to recognise that disciplines are articulated differently in different social situations at a broader level, different universities. So for example sociology, as it's expressed at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Quare in Italy, a Catholic university obviously, will be very different I think from sociology as it's expressed at Lancaster or as it's expressed perhaps at Rhodes University in Graemstown. Sociology will be a different thing in smaller or bigger ways and yet when we go to those different universities we'll see things that we recognise as well as things that perhaps strike us as surprising. And Paul Ashwin and his colleagues have written interestingly on this in their chapter in the new Tribes and Territories book. And lastly I think it's important as I say to recognise that the generative power of disciplines, waxes and wanes over time both in the long and the short term and between contexts, different universities and different sites of practice, research, teaching, committee work and so on. So it's not possible to make any general statements about the power of disciplines other than I think probably a broad statement to say that their power in general has waned over time as other forces have begun to impinge on practices in universities. Other forces such as technologies, ideologies, marketisation, globalisation and the rise of the evaluative state as Neve calls it. So the generative power and the statements we can make about that generative power is highly variable. So as researchers then I think my argument has been that we need to be careful in designing our research and in thinking about our research questions not to go too far to either end of the essentialism, social constructionism, dualism. To recognise that the truth claims that we can make about disciplines, the power of disciplines and so on need to be somewhat circumscribed and in trying to establish what we mean by a particular discipline to recognise that some of the characteristics that have been taken for granted in the past actually are more like familial resemblances than necessary, always necessary, core characteristics of a discipline. So I think this argument then has quite significant implications for the research we do and in particular close-up research that we do into disciplines in universities. Thank you very much for listening and I'll look forward to having a question and answer session with you shortly. Thanks.