Management Theories for Educational Change

Keith Morrison, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 1998
• Print ISBN: 9781853964046
• eBook ISBN: 9781446231906
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildungsverwaltung

`This is an exceptional book. It tempted me to throw out most of my collected works on the management of change, because the author has somehow succeeded by including almost every aspect of educational change that any practitioner would wish to consider....Overall this is a very stimulating book. It is packed with information and the ideas and concepts contained could pack a school development plan for many years? - School Leadership and Management

The theories and practices from the literature on business, manufacturing and commerce which inform principles for managing change in education are identified in this book.The author shows how the complexity of change can be addressed effectively.

One principle of effective management of change is its potential to empower the individuals and organizations, its power to create and operate win/win situations. That can only be done by addressing the human side of organizations. The strength of the business literature is that far from advocating the austere, over-rationalized, dehumanized and objective pursuit of profit at all costs, it suggests that the effective management of change is an affirmation of the humanity of business.

Part I
Macrocontexts of Change

1

The context of change

Introduction

The industrialist Senge wrote that yesterday’s solutions become today’s problems (Senge, 1990: 57). This ‘soundbite’ indicates that change is inescapable, it is inbuilt into developing societies. Uncertainty and change are ubiquitous and the case for having to cope with change does not need to be made. The need to be able to live with change is one of the great truisms of the present day. Change is accelerating and the paradigms that are being used to analyse society are themselves changing (Dalin and Rust, 1996: 31). Hammer (1996: 105) suggests that new technologies are being used not to render existing practices more efficient – ‘paving the cow paths’ – but to revolutionize the way we think about things. There are no longer absolutes; values are debatable and indeed are debated. The aims, objectives, content, pedagogy, evaluation and direction of education are not fixed but fluid.

The wholesale scale of change is being experienced in all walks of life, in society, in science, in political, economic and educational practices. Education is part of these broader currents of society and change is a fact of life; it is irresistible and unstoppable. At the forefront of many developments are changes in the economy and the bringing of a business mentality in many spheres of life; hence this chapter provides a justification for the underlying premise of the book, viz. that, though there are fundamental differences between the worlds of business and education, nevertheless practices for the management of change in business and industry have a vast amount to offer the world of education in its management of change.

Changes in society

We are moving from a modernist world and a modernist conception of the world and industry to a postmodern world and a postmodernist conception of the world and industry (Clegg, 1992). A modernistic, closed view of the world separates the family and work, brings mass production and the industrialization of the workforce, with international monopoly capitalism and socialism striving for profit and survival. The modernistic institution is the large, hierarchical, bureaucratic, departmentalized, demarcated, specialized, mechanistic, standardized, ordered, Fordist, technocratic, impersonal, inflexible organization with clearly defined strata of power, control and decision-making. Conception and execution are sundered. It is the great manifestation of the success of science and technology elevated to scientism.

We are moving from a modernist society towards a postmodern society, with the decline of the large-scale factory system, the increasingly rapid production of smaller, niche-targeted goods, the rise of the service sector (Handy, 1991), the growth of international capitalism, the move from ‘organized capitalism’ to ‘disorganized capitalism’ (Lash and Urry, 1987), the expansion of the information revolution, the cult of immediacy and post-Fordist forms of organization and production. Flexibility, responsiveness, consumerism and client satisfaction are the order of the day, with flatter management organization and organic rather than mechanistic views of an organization (discussed in subsequent chapters), multifunctional and fluid teams, multiskilling, and an emphasis on team rewards, personal fulfilment and empowerment, and trust in senior managers. The typical organization here adopts the Japanese model (discussed in Chapter 3).

Whilst it is perhaps invidious, in the definition of postmodernism, to prescribe the nature of postmodernism, nevertheless Jameson (1991) argues that there are several elements that characterize postmodernism and its partner – late capitalism:

1) the ‘tendential web of bureaucratic control’ (ibid.: xviii);

2) the absence of grand metanarratives or overall coherence;

3) the valorization of discontinuity, difference and individuality;

4) the rise of consumerism and commodification in all walks of life – the economic, cultural and aesthetic;

5) the supremacy of a market mentality and market forces;

6) an ‘utter forgetfulness of the past’ (ibid.: xii) and the autoreferentiality of the present (ibid.: 42);

7) the celebration of heterogeneity, depthlessness and multiple superficialities together with a concomitant emphasis on the irresponsible, the complacent, the decadent;

8) the appeal to populism and populist culture.

Further, Jameson argues that the logic of late capitalism is dispersive, atomistic and individualistic, ‘an antisociety rather than a society’ (ibid.: 343).

However, postmodernism itself brings difficulties, for example the rise in experiences of fragmentation, anomie, alienation, uncertainty and a search for meaning and authenticity, the thrust towards opportunism and impression management, the need for flexibility and problem-solving capability, the problem of coping with unpredictability, volatility and impermanence, the elevation of the individual over the social, the compression of time and space that can lead to stress and premature burnout, the uncertain, tentative and provisional nature and status of knowledge. All is in flux! Jameson (ibid.: 376) suggests, too, that much of postmodernism is an indulgence of the affluent and is too time-bound (see also O’Neill, 1995: 199; Morrison, 1996).

What one can see in a postmodern reading of society is that change inheres in society because society is fragmenting, partly in response to the ever-changing and metamorphosing requirements of capital, partly in response to the cultures of difference and personal freedoms of expression, and partly in response to rampant bureaucratization.

Change and reform in education are inescapable. Regardless of how one views society, education, as a significant component in sociocultural and economic renewal and development, is caught up in change. These changes are wide-ranging and question the aims, structure, contents, organization of schools, schooling and other educational institutions. Hargreaves (1994), for example, argues that most large educational institutions typify modernistic conceptions of education as mass schooling on the factory model, whilst Toffler (1990) reinforces the message so far that schools will need to change to become ‘moving mosaics’ of small and often independent units, i.e. to become postmodern institutions.

The impact of theories of chaos and complexity

One feature of postmodernism is its celebration of disparateness and chaos. Not only in social theory but also in the scientific community change and uncertainty are ubiquitous. As metaphors for change, emergence, uncertainty, unpredictability and instability, the need for self-organization and adaptability, recent theories of chaos and complexity are potent reminders of the need for a paradigm shift in the way we view the world, from a stable world-order to an ever-changing, unfixed scenario.

In the physical sciences Laplacian and Newtonian theories of a deterministic universe have collapsed and have been replaced by theories of chaos and complexity in explaining natural processes and phenomena, the impact of which is being felt in the social sciences (e.g. McPherson, 1995). For Laplace and Newton, the universe was a rationalistic, deterministic and clockwork order; effects were functions of causes, small causes (minimal initial conditions) produced small effects (minimal and predictable) and large causes (multiple initial conditions) produced large (multiple) effects. Predictability, causality, patterning, universality and ‘grand’ overarching theories, linearity, continuity, stability, objectivity, all contributed to the view of the universe as an ordered and internally harmonistic mechanism in an albeit complex equilibrium, a rational, closed and deterministic system susceptible to comparatively straightforward scientific discovery and laws. The link between this view of the universe and the project of modernity is not difficult to discern; both are premised on the same principles for progress.

From the 1960s this view has been increasingly challenged with the rise of theories of chaos and complexity, themselves capturing the spirit of change, uncertainty, openness and unpredictability of earlier in the century (with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, quantum physics and theories of relativity). Central to chaos theory are several principles (e.g. Gleick, 1987):

• small-scale changes in initial conditions can produce massive and unpredictable changes in outcome (for example the movement of a butterfly’s wing in the Caribbean can produce a hurricane in America);
• very similar initial conditions can produce very dissimilar outcomes (for example using simple mathematical equations – Stewart, I., 1990);
• regularity and uniformity break down to irregularity and diversity;
• even if differential equations are very simple, the behaviour of the system that they are modelling may not be simple;
• effects are not straightforward continuous functions of causes;
• the universe is largely unpredictable;
• if something works once then there is no guarantee that it will work in the same way a second time;
• determinism is replaced by indeterminism; deterministic, linear and stable systems are replaced by ‘dynamical’, changing, evolving systems and non-linear explanations of phenomena;
• continuity is replaced by discontinuity, turbulence and irreversible transformation;
• grand, universal, all-encompassing theories and large-scale explanations provide inadequate accounts of localized and specific phenomena;
• long-term prediction is impossible (in matters as diverse as the weather and the economy).

More recently theories of chaos have been extended to complexity theory – the ‘edge of chaos’ (Waldrop, 1992; Lewin, 1993), itself applied to the realm of economics (Waldrop, 1992; Kauffman, 1995) as a ‘complex adaptive system’ with components at one level acting as the building blocks for components at another. A complex system comprises independent elements (which themselves might be made up of complex systems) which interact and which give rise to patterned behaviour in the system as a whole (e.g. Åm, 1994). Order is not totally predetermined and fixed, but the universe (however defined) is creative, emergent (through iteration, learning and recursion), evolutionary and changing, transformative and turbulent.¹ Order emerges in complex systems that are founded on simple rules for interacting organisms (Kauffman, 1995: 24); life is holistic, if complex.

Through feedback, recursion, perturbance, autocatalysis, connectedness and self-organization, higher and greater levels of complexity and differentiated, new forms arise from lower levels of complexity and existing forms. These complex forms derive from often comparatively simple sets of rules – local rules and behaviours generating complex global order and diversity (Waldrop, 1992: 16–17; Lewin, 1993: 38; Am, 1994). Dynamical systems (Peak and Frame, 1994: 122) are a product of initial conditions and often simple rules for change – the dynamics of change. General laws can govern adaptive, dynamical processes (Kauffman, 1995: 27). There are laws of emergent order. The basic rules and components are simple but give rise to emergent complexity through their interaction (Waldrop, 1992: 86). Complex behaviours and systems do not need to have complex roots (ibid.: 270).

Systems, however defined, are complex, unstable, emergent, adaptive, dynamical and – significantly for our purposes – changing. In huma...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• About the Author
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Macrocontexts of change
• Part II Microcontexts of change
• Postscript
• Bibliography
• Index