In his book Andy Green provides an ambitious comparative sociology of educational development in continental Europe, the USA and England in the nineteenth century, whilst Phillip Brown and Hugh Lauder's collection focuses on the problems of conceptualising the contemporary restructuring of the capitalist economies and its relationship to changes in education and training systems. In different ways these two books offer assessments of the continuing usefulness of the 'correspondence principle' in understanding the relationship between school and work, the development of education systems and the economy, and the links between the social relations of schooling and the social relations of production.