Basil Bernstein was both the most interesting and important British sociologist of recent times, internationally better known for longer than any other [...]. His ideas offer the most developed grammar for understanding the shape and character of our current educational practice. At its various points, his emerging corpus has offered a combination of connectedness and openness. He was a constant reviser of his ideas, arguing always that this was necessitated by the relationship between the empirical and the theoretical. <BR> This volume is replete with cameos of various aspects of his corpus that the individual researchers represented have regarded as particularly important both for themselves and their analyses. They celebrate a joint dedication to ''developing a more systematic and general language of description''. [...]. This book also contains a paper by Bernstein and a video conference. (Brian Davies, From the Introduction)