Abstract

The paper places itself in conversation with literature about how the experience and outcomes of university education are structured by intersections between social class, ethnicity, gender, age and type of university attended. The focuses is on the acquisition of sociological knowledge of undergraduate students in four universities of different reputation. It employs Basil Bernstein’s concepts of pedagogic identity, pedagogic rights, classification and framing. Drawing on curriculum analysis and a longitudinal study of 31 students, the paper describes and illustrates the nature of the sociology-based disciplinary identity found; and, shows how the formation of this identity gives access to pedagogic rights thereby developing valuable capabilities. Addressing the question of whether pedagogic rights are distributed unequally by university, it was found that they were not distributed, as might be expected, according to institutional hierarchy. It is argued that the acquisition of university sociological knowledge can disrupt social inequality.