Basil Berstein and me

I've been reading the work of Basil Bernstein - the leading sociologist of education who sadly died in September 2000. I'm trying to find a theoretical framework to understand and account for, what one of my supervisors, Mary Lea, calls 'institutional conditions'. All the structural things within an academic setting that has an influence on student academic literacy practices. So I'm looking at the immense and influential work of Bernstein. He proposes a theory of codes that allows one to describe how knowledge is produced, transmitted and reproduced - but most importantly, the consequences to different groups of these processes. Basically for Bernstein - education, rather than fulfilling its ideological role of eradicating social class advantages in schooling and society, reproduces the gross inequalities in society, which especially disadvantage children of the working class. His theory offers many concepts and rules, like classification (the degree of boundary maintence between areas of knowledge or subjects), framing (the control exercised over the selection, organisation, pacing and timing of knowledge transmission in the pedagogic relationship between students and teachers) and the pedagogic device (that helps to explain how knowledge is recontextualised into academic forms and structures). Ultimately, he links these processes to broader society especially social class and power relations. I'm wondering how I could use his theories, his work. How I will get to understand his theories and which would be most applicable. I've also wondered about the ontological value and linkage between his theories and those of academic literacies. Are they compatible? Can they be used together? But more importantly are my research aims similar to those of Bernstein's project is i.e. uncovering/accounting for the structural basis for educational inequality prevalent in the research site I'm exploring? I'm starting to think that I need to become clear about what exactly I want this project to become. What do I really want to focus on? What are the core issues and what are the issues that can happily sit on the perimeter? Is my study primarily about academic literacies or is it a sociological project? How can I marry these two theoretical aspects and what possible compromises need to be made by each marriage partner? Alternatively I might be seeing the whole thing in a rather reductionist way into an either/or choice I have to make. The sociological aspects of Bernstein's work is very exciting but also very daunting- his theories are complex and I'm struggling to make sense of all the rules and interpretations of the rules and of course the underlying philosophical/ideological tenants of his theories. Maybe I'm just too scared to embrace a critical theory perspective, being happy to inhabit an interpretativist realm where all views are possible.
My task then for the coming week is to unpack and unearth Mr Bernstein a little more, dig a bit deeper and see what I can find. Hopefully in this whole process my understanding will be enhanced and I can come a bit closer to answering some of the questions posed above or, even better, reframe them.