This article reflects on Collins’s classic work, The Credential Society (1979), situating his critique of educational credentialism within broader ‘conflict sociology’. The discussion reappraises Collins’s work in the context of the ‘new credentialism’, ‘new learning’ and the race, gender and class concerns raised in current debates on higher education. The article characterizes contemporary higher education as being trapped in a Procrustean dynamic: techno-utopianism with job displacement and expansionism with declining public support. Collins attempts to escape the legacy of structural-functionalism through conflict sociology or predictions of systemic crisis. This is contrasted with his contemporary, Herbert Gintis’s eclectic attempt to construct a transdisciplinary social science. The key problem of marketized inequality is linked to the sociology of absences in conflict sociology, and it is argued that inequalities of class, race, gender and coloniality in higher education and credentialism can no longer be ignored.

中文翻译：

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兰德尔柯林斯的信用社会学反思

本文反映了柯林斯的经典著作《证书社会》（1979），将他对教育证书主义的批判置于更广泛的“冲突社会学”中。讨论在“新证书主义”、“新学习”以及当前高等教育辩论中提出的种族、性别和阶级问题的背景下重新评估柯林斯的工作。这篇文章将当代高等教育描述为陷入 Procrustean 动态的特征：技术乌托邦主义与工作取代和扩张主义与公众支持下降。柯林斯试图通过冲突社会学或系统性危机的预测来摆脱结构功能主义的遗产。这与他同时代的赫伯特·金蒂斯 (Herbert Gintis) 不拘一格的构建跨学科社会科学的尝试形成鲜明对比。