Our intentions for the Handbook
Developing a Handbook that covers the full range of scholarship in school organization is not an easy undertaking. The field itself is complex and multifaceted, particularly so because writing about school organization falls within the wider, more general field of organizational studies. Furthermore, and notably, the different disciplines that inform the broad literature often stand in sharp contrast to each other. Our approach to this volume, therefore, has been to include a broad range of different perspectives – established and new. Our effort to offer a panoramic view of the current landscape of school organization also reflects our aim to appeal to a broad audience, from practitioners expanding the boundaries of school and school system organization in their practice to researchers developing and pushing the edges of organizational theory. We also aimed to appeal to those emerging scholars and practitioners coming to this Handbook for a fundamental orientation to the field.
We invited contributors who we believed brought to the volume a solid foundation of understanding about the area of their contribution. The reader will see a number of familiar names as a consequence of that endeavor. However, we also encouraged collaboration and new voices. Equally important, we wanted the volume to be solidly international in focus, and we purposefully reached out to colleagues in countries outside the USA and the UK to develop a comprehensive set of understandings. We hope the reader finds the inclusion of this broad range of voices instructive. Furthermore, we encourage the reader to consider the chapters as complementary of each other and to be read with a sense of how theory and practice across contexts and cultures differ and remain the same.
Why this Handbook?
We were motivated to produce this Handbook due to the turbulence that schools and school systems as organizations are currently facing. As a result of this high degree of change, understanding, as well as leading and managing – organizing – schools and school systems in these times raises novel issues. We designed the Handbook as a forum for scholars in school organization to engage in a theoretically critical conversation concerning the historical development, current state, and future orientations of the field. The past three decades of varied and sustained attempts around the globe to change the organizational structure of schools and school systems has revealed more than ever the need for organizational perspectives as a prelude to, not an afterthought of, a focus on leadership. Understanding systemic complexities entails greater awareness of organizational structure, processes and dynamics accompanied with critical clarity about conceptual underpinnings. In pursuing this particular path, our compass is one that steers us to ask, ‘In what ways, and to what extent, contributions elaborate organizational perspectives on schools?’ More simply put, the central question that is explored in this Handbook is the following: What is the nature of school organization as a theoretical and practical discipline?
Defining School as Organization
Three decades ago, Tyler (1988, p. 9) offered what still stands as a serviceable definition of a school: ‘… a localized administrative entity concerned with the face-to-face instruction of the young, usually on a single site…’. It has the following characteristics:
- It has formal organizational properties, however minimal or pre-bureaucratic in the Weberian sense.
- The face-to-face encounter is central to its instructional practices.
- It has spatial and temporal specificity – individual schools typically have ‘a local habitation and a name’.
This definition suggests that we need to understand both the internal organizing features of the school, a micro-analytic perspective, and its social, political and economic environment, a macro-analytic one. These macro- and micro- analytical challenges are of course a long-standing feature and analytic puzzle in organization studies in education, and one that the chapters in this volume reveal as being continuously in search of a secure grounding. Bidwell (2001), whose work in the mid-1960s arguably went on to ignite Weick (1976) and then Meyer and Rowan (1978), identifies two ways of framing schools as educational organizations, with one strand emphasizing teachers’ work and the other the institutional surround, highlighting the micro-analysis/macro-analysis divide. Tyler (1988), in his time, appealed to scholars for suitable conceptual frameworks and analytic tools that might steer us between ‘the Scylla of macro-structural models … and the Charybdis of micro-analysis of situation and episode in the daily encounters of the classroom’ (Tyler 1988, p. 17). Even further back in organizational studies more broadly, Thompson (1967) followed uncertainty into the technical core of organizations, attempting to reconcile the ‘closed-system’ approaches to organizational analysis and rationality that had generated so much management literature and the newer (at that time) natural-systems approach to viewing organizations not as entities but as processes and relations within an institutional environment.
More recently, Scott (2013), in his typical and very useful panoscopic approach, offers an encapsulation of the state of play that will be useful to us. He uses a table from Hoffman and Ventresca (2002) to illustrate a, ‘higher, more encompassing level of analysis’ in ways that:
emphasize the shift from structure to process, insist on attention to the empowering as well as the constraining effects of institutions, attend to both structural and cultural elements, and recognize a larger role for power processes and strategic action. (Scott, 2013, p. 257)
This idea brings into the foreground the middle-level of educational organizing, meso-analytic perspectives, and highlights once again the fundamental push and pull of process and structure in our efforts to capture school organization ‘in the wild’.
The dynamism in the field that is now apparent in theorizing and studying school organization as a multilevel, multidimensional phenomenon challenges our best efforts to present a comprehensive view of the landscape. And yet, it is for that reason that we have set some basic guiderails to structure this volume. Certainly, some chapters will address broader issues, and others narrower ones. However, in the end, we hope that, read in context with each other, the chapters set forth inclusive and far-reaching perspectives that tackle process and structure, micro-meso-macro dynamics, and all while drawing on a range of international experiences.
The Handbook – an Overview
The Handbook is divided into five main sections, each addressing separate questions in regard to the field, as follows.
Part I: Schools as Organizations
The chapters in this section focus on foundational issues that are at the heart of any analysis of schools as organizations: ‘What are schools as organizations?’ and ‘What theories and models have informed our thinking and in what ways have these ideas changed and persisted?’ Central tasks here are concerned with defining and conceptualizing school as organization and broadly characterizing analytic perspectives on the school as organization.
Part II: The Leadership, Management and Governance of Schools as Organizations
In this section, the chapters focus on the key concepts: the leadership, management and governance of schools as organizations. Important questions for this section are: ‘How are schools led and managed?’ and ‘In what ways do our narratives of school leadership and management inform our theorizing about schools as organizations and how are these affected by the governance arrangements?’ In this way, Part II takes on the internal and external contexts of school organizations as foundational to understanding school organizations with any clarity.
Part III: Theoretical Perspectives on Schools as Organizations
The chapters in this section consider schools as organizations from a range of theoretical standpoints and provide contrasting perspectives on schools as organizations. The central questions addressed include: ‘What is the variety of theoretical perspectives that have been adopted in our study of schools as organizations?’ and ‘How, and in what ways, is knowledge about school organization generated in relation to action and policy? Hence, Part III covers a range of topics, some of which are expected, for example, culture and organizational structure, and a number of which cover more novel issues, such as complexity and boundary perspectives.
Part IV: Organizing in Schools
In this section, the various chapters address specific issues that face schools as organizations, opening up those issues for critique and scrutiny. The section includes a number of chapters that focus on issues such as curriculu...
