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.
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)