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The article presents a research work on possible correlations between childhood background and educational values in a group of 700 employees in 80 Danish kindergartens. If the staff's pedagogical work is indebted to the living environment, the individual has grown up in; it can give this work the character of resilience or inertia and stability. This inertia, however, can come into conflict with the instrumental requirements on adaptability to external demands of change, transition and educational development programs. Using the so-called multiple correspondence analysis one obtains first a map of social background of respondents and their professional and cultural resources with the use of indicators of cultural and social capital in the wake of Pierre Bourdieu's theoretical framework. By the next step a new second map is being drawn based on the answers to a number of value questions. And finally one gets the relationship between social structure and educational values by comparing the two maps. The results show that respondents typically agree on the pedagogical values across social background, age and position in the professional job hierarchy. But the project also shows that there are correlations between the possession of social and cultural capital and what is being appreciated in the pedagogical work.

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The article presents a research project that deals with aspects of division of labour among assistants and the professionalized group of social care workers in Danish kindergartens. Theories of P. Bourdieu, M. Douglas and E. Goffman have supported a main hypothesis questioning some possible division of labour and relations of domination in the interchange between the two staff member groups. The empirical part of the research work are primarily gathered around observational studies of four educational assistants in three day care centres situated in three different social locations. The conclusions point out, that the daily social exchanges do not exhibit any evident division of labour among the assistants and the professionalized group of social care workers. The assistant can't on this basis be regarded as the social care workers' assistant. On the contrary, two of the assistants are positioned in some central organising and managing positions within their specific unit.

Expeditions into Trondheim and the educational pursuits of kindergartens. Imposing a range of highly detailed regulatory instruments targeting educational services has revealed diversity between supporters of "neoliberal" modernizations and positions that both experience and problematize such modernizations. This article examines how the two positions clash in preschool practice, education and research. The final theoretical outlines identify how a historically established relatively autonomous sector has come under increasing strain from groups which derive their strength from political and economic sources.