Abstract
This paper focuses on a specific theoretical interlinkage of several relational approaches which enables normativity and legitimisation in education to be studied in non-essential terms, an approach which could lead to greater capacity to empirically detect and trace tensions between actors, knowledges, and claims that might easily be missed both by utilitarian analyses for policy and by critical sociologies. Questions such as how the competence of actors to justify or criticise is established and maintained, and in the mutual relation, how the relevance and reasonability of the educational claim is established are the important ways by which the legitimacy of an educational goal is achieved.
In order to research such relations within an educational legitimising ecology, this paper employs a relational approach (Abbott 2016b; Benjamin 2015) to legitimisation in education.