Book Review Maton, K. Knowledge and knowers. Towards a realist sociology of education. London: Routledge.

The late and well-known British sociologist of education, Basil Bernstein, claimed that in educational research (although this could apply to many more fields) we need less of an allegiance to a theory and more of an allegiance to the problems we need to solve (Maton, 2013). There are indeed many problems in education around the world today that need to be solved and many questions that need to be answered. But in order to tackle these problems and begin to answer our many questions, we need theoretical and analytical frameworks and conceptual tools that we can put to work to look not just at the problems themselves, but at what is beneath or behind them so that we can better understand the nature of the struggles within education, as well as how to bring about sustainable and necessary changes. Legitimation Code Theory, or LCT, the subject and focus of Karl Maton’s book, Knowledge and Knowers, is such a framework. In Knowledge and Knowers, and in his work leading up to this book, Karl Maton introduces us to a way of thinking and working that represents a focus on solving problems with a strong explanatory and conceptual framework that allows researchers to go beyond and beneath what can be seen and understood through a constructivist or instrumentalist lens. His broader aims, in a body of research that reaches beyond this book, are to address a significant gap in educational research left by a lack of strong, generative theoretical and conceptual frameworks and tools, and an inability of much educational research to build on past research findings more cumulatively (something noted by the National Research Foundation in South Africa in a recent report). This lack of cumulative building of knowledge about education and about the nature of educational knowledge and knowing itself is something with which LCT is particularly concerned. Legitimation Code Theory, or LCT as it is known, is the conceptual and explanatory framework that is the focus of this book. This is a theory, as Maton argues, in Bourdieu’s sense, where the latter argued that ‘Theories ar