Institutional orders contain different, complementary and interwoven layers of knowledge. Starting from the everyday level in the life-world, where most things are evident we can draw a line up to the symbolic universes (like science, religion etc.), where paradigmatic forms of knowledge in the sense of Kuhn prevail. These various layers of knowledge form the nomic structure - not only for the members of an institution themselves -, but also for the social order of a society in general (Berger & Luckman 1967). This ideal-type like framework stemming from the sociology of knowledge is used in our research project “The Representation of the Elementary School in the Swiss-German Debate on Education. A Sociology of Knowledge Approach” (funded by the Swiss National Research Fund SNF: see Brosziewski & Maeder 2013) in order to embed the debate on the public school by means of a discourse analysis.

            Our research questions are content analytic on the one hand: Who is raising what issue? What issues are abundant where and for whom? When do these issues get raised? What topics make the school appear in the public media? etc. This allows us in a first step to ‘map’ the actors, the range and the content of the debate around the public school. After this descriptive part we pose different questions on a second level: Who addresses whom and why, what becomes described as real in these statements related to the school? And how is the legitimation of the ‘speaker’ about the ‘real’ constructed? Now discursive formations and schemes and different modes and strategies of the production of truth (Foucault 1972) around the public school emerge (Ball 2008, 2013).

            On the first, and surely superficial sight this debate seems to linger on quite chaotically along the usual lines of interests from policy makers, teacher’s unions, parent’s associations and educational scientists. And indeed they all contribute vividly to the debate. In our more sophisticated approach the discursive structures of the regimes around schools and sometimes education in general emerge. In my presentation I will 

Ball, Stephen J. 2013. Foucault, Power, and Education. London: Routledge. Ball, Stephen J. 2008. The Education Debate. Bristol: Policy Press. Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. 1991. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. London [u.a.: Penguin Books. Brosziewski, Achim, and Christoph Maeder. 2013. “Wandel, Reform und Kritik der Volksschule: Ein diskursanalytischer Zugang.” Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Soziologie 39(2):187–204. Foucault, Michel. 1972. "The Discourse on Language.“ Appendix to the Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon, pp. 215–37. Keller, Reiner. 2013. Doing Discourse Research: An Introduction for Social Scientists. London: SAGE Publications Ltd.