The Sociology of School Organization

Contemporary Sociology of the School

Ronald King

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780415790246
• eBook ISBN: 9781351808613
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First published in 1983, this volume assembles recent theory on school organization, drawing on a wide range of research, mainly on schools in contemporary Britain but with some illuminating historical and overseas comparisons. It examines elements of organization both within and outside the school, and shows how they vary with the age, sex, ethnicity and social class of pupils, as well as school size and efficiency. It argues how, with understanding, organizational patterns may be changed to respond to new objectives and how they may become more effective and responsive to human needs in schools and classrooms.

1 Approaches
to school organization

Despite the title of this book there are several sociologies of school organization. This is because there are several perspectives in the sociology of education and this chapter considers some of them in relation to the organization of schools. These could be called ‘theories of school organization’ but that phrase does have a number of meanings. Some are examples of what Hoyle (1965) calls ‘a theory of approach’ – a way of looking, through research, and then explaining the ways schools are organized. Others again are not so much theories to explain the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of organization, but prescriptions for how schools should be organized.

I begin with a theory of approach that I have developed in my own studies (King, 1982b). This is principally derived from the sociology of Max Weber (1864–1920), but also draws upon the work of a number of neo-Weberians, especially Collins (1975). I use this approach to comment upon the other sociological perspectives that follow. A brief reference to psychological approaches is included because these, together with sociological and other perspectives, have a place in administration and management studies, outlined in the last section.

A Weberian action approach to school organization

Unlike Durkheim or Marx, Weber did not construct models of the nature of society; instead he provided ways of studying, and thereby explaining, the nature of society. Hence we do not have, and cannot have, a Weberian theory of organizations or of school organization, but the possibility of explanations of the organization of real schools based upon Weberian perspectives. Sociological theory should consist of attempts to explain real social events.

My starting-point is a definition of social structure made by Collins (1975), ‘structure in so far as it really occurs … can be found in the real behaviour of everyday life, primarily in repetitive encounters’. This is not the image of people inside a social structure; the pattern of their behaviour towards one another, their social relationships, is the structure. Individuals may feel themselves to be ‘inside’ a social structure, such as a family or nation-state, because the other individuals with whom they relate, directly or indirectly, are physically external to them. This, understandably, often leads to the reification of social structures, where the set of social relationships between people is regarded as a non-or extra-human thing.

From this it follows that the social structure of a school consists of the patterns of social relationships occurring between those defined as members of ‘the school’, that is, principally, pupils and teachers. In social terms they are not ‘inside’ the structure of the school; what they repetitively do is the structure of the school. Overnight, or at the weekend or during the holidays, a ‘school’ does not exist in real social terms, except as a construct held subjectively by the members (and others). The bricks and mortar material reality of a ‘school’ is the context in which, weekend or holiday over, pupils and teachers relate to reconstruct the social reality of the ‘school’. In some areas of Africa the ‘school’ has no material existence much beyond a large shady tree; there is no ‘school’ visible in any sense when classes are over.

The organizational structure of a school consists of those social relationships between the totality of members which are arranged or allowed by those with the power to do so. In English maintained schools, headteachers or their delegates have legal power in this respect; in Weberian terms, bureaucratic authority (Weber, 1948). In the Soviet Union such organized behaviour as the wearing of school uniform and school rules are under central political control (Grant, 1979). The extent to which social relationships are formally organized must be established empirically. Some of those between teacher and pupils in a classroom may be ‘school’ organized, where, for example, there is the standardization of work marks or homework timetable. Some of the relationships between teachers, for example in a staffroom, are not organized in the sense used here, nor are most of those between pupils in the playground. Sometimes organized relationships, organizational structures, may have unintended consequences for other relationships. Pupil learning groups are not usually organized for the purpose of creating friendships between the group members, but this is a common consequence (King and Easthope, 1973).

When people relate to one another they are not just behaving, they act – that is to say, they have a purpose or purposes in so behaving. This concept of social action, the subjectively intended meaning of behaviour, is fundamental to Weber’s sociology. ‘Action is social in so far as, by virtue of the subjective meaning attached to it by the acting individual (or individuals), it takes into account the behaviour of others and is thereby orientated in its course’ (Weber, 1947). If we wish to explain a given social structure we must try to establish the subjective meanings of the acting individuals whose relationships constitute the structure. Weber’s is a humanistic sociology; the social behaviour of human beings should be explained in human terms. To explain the organizational structure of a school we must attempt to understand the subjective meanings of the teachers and pupils in the social construction of the ‘organization’. What subjectively defined interests are served in their entering into these relationships?

Some possibilities, to be empirically demonstrated (as some have been and will be described later), are: economic; teachers are paid, pupils may hope for a job on the basis of passing exams; and status, the distribution of social honour, respect among friends and colleagues. Many organized relationships are power relationships. Power is ‘the chance of a man or number of men to realize their own will in a communal action even against the resistance of others who are participating in the action’ (Weber, 1948). Where children must attend school the relationships between pupils and teachers must involve an element of power. Waller (1932) dramatically called teaching ‘institutionalized domination and subordination’. Subordinates in power may be in fear of coercion (caning is not uncommon in the United Kingdom and in the Republic of Ireland), but the exercise of power may be regarded by subordinates to be legitimate, a right of those who wield it, and their own obedience a duty. However, compliance with power does not necessarily involve its being legitimized and Weber considered that compliance may be defined by the subordinate to be in his interests. Teachers may have career and preferment interests in their compliance with headteachers’ orders.

This analysis indicates that although the ‘smooth running’ of the organization of a school may suggest consensus among its members, conflict is likely to be an element in the relationships constituting the organization. Conflict is also part of the competition for scarce resources. Pupils may compete among themselves for marks and examination success, which they may hope not only will gain them high formal status at school, but also success in the pursuit of economic and status interests in the job market. The maintenance of the organizational structure of a school is accomplished by the repeated social behaviour of its members. Organizational structure is not static but a process, a continual creation, and given the competition of members for scarce resources (competition makes them scarce, and scarcity makes for competition) it is a conflict process.

A humanistic explanation of why the relationships among school members are organized as they are must take into account the plurality of subjective meanings and interests of those whose behaviour is so organized. It follows that any explanation is likely to be multi-causal, that is, there are likely to be several reasons why people relate to one another in the organized way they do.

Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) on school organization

It would be wrong to suggest that Durkheim wrote extensively on school organization, but what he did write is worth noting. Durkheim is not only one of the undisputed founding fathers of sociology but perhaps also the founding father of the sociology of education. In his collected, anthologized lectures given to student teachers, published as Education and Sociology (1956), he categorizes education as a ‘social fact’ – external to the individual and constraining his behaviour. From this it follows that ‘the school organization’ is a social fact – effectively a social structure. The sociology of education deals with observed, selected verified social facts and, according to Durkheim, is (or should be) concerned with ‘disinterested knowing’ and should ‘express reality not judge it’. This is very much in accord with Weber’s (1948) insistence on the importance of value-freedom in sociology, the suspension of personal views and political opinions. Durkheim contrasted the sociology of education with pedagogie, usually translated as educational theory, which ‘does not study systems of education scientifically but reflects on them in order to provide the activity of the educator with ideas to guide it’. Some approaches to the organization of schools, to be discussed later, are closer to educational theory than the sociology of education, even when they purport to be part of the latter.

In this same volume Durkheim provides a number of definitions of education: ‘Education is the means by which society prepares within the children the essential conditions of its existence’. There is a functionalist element in this definition, in that education is explained in terms of its contribution to the maintenance of society. If we substitute ‘purpose’ for ‘function’ then it would be hard to disagree with the proposition that in any state-provided mass education one official purpose must be the maintainence of the existing social relationships called society. The way schools are organized may seem rather remote from this discussion, but as we shall see some explanations of school organization are in terms of this societal ‘function’ of education.

Another of Durkheim’s definitions takes us closer to the school level:

Education is the influence exercised by the adult generations on those that are not yet ready for social life. Its object is to arouse and develop in the child a certain number of physical, intellectual and moral states which are demanded by the political society as a whole and the special milieu for which he is specifically destined.

The deterministic quality of ‘special milieu for which he is specifically intended’ perhaps needs modifying in a period of greater social mobility, but the origins of the concepts of the allocation and selection ‘functions’ of education are quite clear, and these form parts of theories of school organization to be discussed later.

In the second volume of lectures, Moral Education (1961), Durkheim makes the distinction between moral and intellectual education, where the former refers to attempts to create consensus, allegience to society and to ‘appropriate subgroups’. To this end Durkheim (slipping towards educational theory) expresses approval of disciplining pupils by detentions (but not corporal punishment), orientating them towards the moral authority of the teacher and leading towards their internalizing the morality: ‘It is by respecting the school rules that the child learns to respect the rules in general, that he develops the habit of self-control and restraint simply because he should control and restrain himself’. He hoped that a secular, rational morality would enable what he saw to be the disruptive consequences of industrialization, the increasing division of labour, urbanization and social mobility, to be better coped with.

The third volume of lectures, The Evolution of Educational Thought (1977), is the most relevant here. Durkheim leaves aside all the functionalist elements of his other work and presents a conflict model of the struggle for the control of French secondary education by competing groups in pursuit of economic, social and religious interests. One interesting section of this detailed analysis concerns the establishment of Jesuit education as a response to religious competition from Protestants. Here we see the origins (in France at least) of such organizational elements as interpersonal academic competition and the use of the emulation of teachers and high-status pupils, all in the context of boarding. This study shows a remarkable convergence with Weberian sociology. When sociologists make detailed studies of real situations as Durkheim did with secondary schooling, and where they take into account the meanings and purposes of the people concerned, then they tend to make explanations of a multi-causal kind about what are viewed as conflict processes.

Talcott Parsons (1902–79): the structural-functional or systems approach to school organization

Parsons’s theory of school organization is a small part of his writings and is best presented in the context of some of his more general theorizing. An appropriate starting-point is his definition of a social system as a ‘plurality of individual actors interacting with one another’ (Parsons et al., 1953). This sounds like an acceptable definition of social structure but Parsons’s system is more than this; it is the association of the structure of social relationships with the functions or outcomes of those relationships – hence structural-functionalism. Every social system must solve four basic ‘problems’ (or meet four ‘functional imperatives’) for its adequate maintenance. These are:

1 The end (called ‘instrumental’) of adaptation to external systems or the environment.

2 The means (called ‘consummatory’ or ‘expressive’) of goal-attainment external to the system.

3 The means of internal integration.

4 The end of latency, the maintenance of internal patterns of shared values (also called ‘pattern maintenance’ and ‘tension-management’).

These problems exist for all systems from the social system (society) figuratively downwards, so that all structural forms and their functions are basically alike. From this it follows that there is a fundamental similarity between an educational system, the individual schools, the classrooms, and even the individual teacher-pupil dyad.

We can see some of these abstract systems problems alluded to in Parsons’s (1951a) essay on the American school class as a social system. ‘From the point of view of society [the school class is] an agency of manpower.’ This is the school class, and therefore the school and the educational system, ‘adapting’ to this ‘need’ of society. Education ‘functions to internalize in its pupils both the commitments and capacities of their future adult roles and … functions to allocate these human resources within the role structure of society’. This perhaps is latency in school leading to goal-attainment outside school. Parsons (1956) makes specific reference to schools in his typology of organizations based upon the primacy of function or goal, which may be economic, as in businesses; political, as the government agencies; integrative, such as political parties; or pattern maintenance, in which category he places schools with universities and churches.

This is not the place to present an extended critique of Parsonian structural-functionalism, particularly after so brief a presentation. However a number of points should be made about its adequacy as a theory of school organization. First there is the tendency towards reification. Systems, including schools, can’t have problems or goals – only people may have problems or seek to fulfil goals. The ‘pattern maintenance’ and ‘tension management’, of pupils, that is controlling what they do, may be a problem for their teachers but not necessarily for them. This points to the implicit consensus that is part of Parsons’s analysis; conflict is absent or minimal because of the assumption of patterns of shared values among teachers and pupils. As I have already suggested, conflict may be an element in the process of the construction of school organization even when apparently running smoothly. In Parsons’s analysis the meanings of the actions of pupils (and teachers) are of little account as they are socialized, selected and allocated to meet the ‘needs’ of the higher-order occupational system, according to their (largely) psychological properties of intelligence and achievement motivation. They are in Garfinkel’s (1967) phrase ‘cultural dopes’, filled up with consensual values which lead them to regard the system as ‘fair’. The stress on the external relationships between systems neglects internal processes. Education, school and classroom are explained in terms of their societal functions. Children as the means of goal attainment, in the adaptation to the external system, are processed in the ‘black box’ of the school. If there is an echo of Durkheim in Parsons’s analysis it is the Durkheim of Education and Sociology and Moral Education, not The Evolution of Educational Thought.

Parsonian concepts are seldom used in empirical studies of the organization of schools. What we usually have are exercises where – rather as I have done here – the attempt has been made to fit what we know, or think we know, about school processes into the Parsonian schema. Sugarman’s (1969) analysis of ‘the school as the social system’ ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Approaches to school organization
• 2 Bernstein’s sociology of the school
• 3 Bureaucracy, schools and other organizations
• 4 Power, ideology and school organization
• 5 The organization of pupil behaviour
• 6 The organization of teaching and learning
• 7 Organizational change and efficiency
• References and name index
• Subject index