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Organizational Theory in Education, April 16, 2015 Journal of Organizational Theory in Education, April 16, 2015. Volume 1, Number 1. 9 Organizational Theory: Around the Block Again? Moving Forward? Or Both? KAREN SEASHORE LOUIS COLLEGE OF EDUCATION AND HUMAN SERVICES - UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA Abstract: Tracing organizational theory (OT) early framings (Perrow, 1970) to more recent applications in schools, this essay suggests organizational change may be a productive central focus for future OT thinking. Positing that organizations exist so that mutually agreed upon outcomes may be generated; it is argued that discovering how learning occurs within school organizations has the potential to in- crease understanding concerning the outcomes of work in school organizations. The work concludes with a call for the field to move beyond the development of a theory of school organization to a focus on theorizing around the core issues that school leaders face in order to provide direction toward achieving valued outcomes. Louis, K. (2015). Organizational theory: Around the block again? Moving forward? Or both? Journal of Organizational Theory in Education 1(1). Retrieved from www.organizationaltheoryineducation.com. In the Beginning... behavior and sociological studies of bureaucracy. Most sociologists point to Max Weber’s description of During these early years, however, the study of the basic functions and structures of a bureaucracy as schools as organizations was quite limited. Education as a the invention of organizational theory (Weber, 1968). research field was dominated by psychologists and a Others credit the Functions of the Executive, which laid focus on child development well beyond the nascence out a social psychological theory of the structures and of OT. Although a few articles that reflected the in- behaviors that would induce people to cooperate to creasing interest in organizational structures appeared achieve a goal set by formal supervisors (Barnard, in major educational journals starting in the mid- 1968). Political scientists and economists entered the 1950s, much of the focus was on the increasing reor- organizational theory scene as they began to value ganization of school districts rather than theorizing studies of public administration as well as electoral schools (or school districts) as organizations. The bodies (Boulding, 1952; Smithburg, 1951), while eth- Educational Administration Quarterly, founded in 1961, nographers jumped on the new bandwagon with de- was created to provide a better niche for investiga- scriptive studies such as Dynamics of Bureaucracy and tions of school organization, but like all new journals Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy (Blau, 1955; Gouldner, took some time to become established. During the 1954). The Administrative Science Quarterly (arguably the time when I was in graduate school (late 1960s and premier journal publishing empirical organizational early 1970s), organizational theory was a core feature theory research) was launched in 1956, which suggests of the sociology curriculum, but its application to that the middle of the last century was a turning point schools and educational organizations was still limited. for the development of a “field” of organizational the- ory that was distinguished from a slightly longer tradi -tion of research around administrative and employee Journal of Organizational Theory in Education, April 16, 2015. Volume 1, Number 1. 10 Fragmentation in Organizational Theory (1993) adopted a human relations/social psychological perspective. Still others used an institutional frame- Although OT’s history is relatively brief, it has been work that looked at commonalities in “real theoretically fragmented from its earliest days, as al- school” (Rowan & Miskel, 1999)or the common ternatives to Weber’s focus on bureaucracy and struc- “grammar of schooling “ (Tyack & Tobin, 1994). At ture emerged. Some saw changes in OT as evolution- the same time, additional theoretical perspectives on ary. Perrow (1970), for example, identified four de- school organization began to emerge that would gain velopment strands (classical management theory, hu- increasing traction in educational OT, although having man relations, neo-Weberian, institutional theory), a less impact in the OT field more broadly: (1) school view that privileged a particular structural perspective. effectiveness research (Teddlie & Reynolds, 2000), and Another sociologist, Richard Scott, adopted a compati- (2) critical theory, including post-modernism (Maxcy, ble framework in 1981, but labeled the different phases 1995)1 and critical race theory, which examines the or- “rational” “natural” and “open systems” theories (Scott, ganizational residues of past injustice (Tate, 1997).2 1968). Simplicity amid Complexity Other disciplines contributed divergent perspec- tives that didn’t fit neatly into an evolutionary frame- The proliferation of different organizational theory par- work. Smircich (1983) proposed a cultural perspective adigms in educational research has had less impact on on organizations, while Pfeffer (1981) argued equally published research, where limited sets of frameworks strongly for a perspective that focused on power. Para- are apparent. First, sociological perspectives, both digm diversity rather than easy consensus became the quantitative and qualitative, continue to dominate over norm. By the 1990s, Morgan’s popular Images of Organi- those contributed by other disciplines (law, anthropolo- zation (1991), shaped the teaching of organizational the- gy, social psychology). This is not surprising, because it ory along with Bolman and Deal’s (2003) “frame analy- reflects the general state of organization theory as re- sis,” which identified four dominant paradigms in OT: flected in journals such as Organization Science, Adminis- human relations, structural, political, and symbolic. trative Science Quarterly, or the Academy of Management Perhaps because Bolman and Deal’s text was so acces- journals. Within this general framework, priority is giv- sible (and was initially developed while teaching a class en to: at the Harvard Graduate School of Education), the “let a thousand flowers bloom” perspective quickly domi- School or department as the unit of analysis; nated introductory courses to OT in many departments of educational leadership and administration. It would Questions such as "Why is the school organized the be difficult not to agree with Pfeffer’s (1993) observa- way it is?" and "What are the effects of school or- tion that “In general, the field of organizational studies ganization on [student performance, change, etc.]?” is characterized by a fairly low level of paradigm de- velopment, particularly as compared to some adjacent Structure and /or climate/culture as the focus of study social sciences such as psychology, economics, and even political science” (p. 607). These priorities are apparent not only in research that is implicitly or explicitly functionalist in perspec- In sum, within 40 years the new-ish field of OT had tive, but also in investigations that adopt a critical per- splintered, and the application of this theory to educa- spective. For example, even challenges to an old- tion became equally fraught. Any hopes that a unifying school rational model of school behavior, such as theory of how schools could be better organized col- Weick's (1976) classic article on loose coupling, were lapsed: Even a cursory examination of publications predominantly functionalist in their assumption that from the 1980s and early 1990s in highly regarded edu- organizational goals are best met by structures that do cation journals or books that purported to deal with the not look like a "classical Weberian bureaucracy" but are intersection of OT and schooling reveals that some fo- modified webs or networks. The notion that hierarchy cused on politics (Bacharach, Bamberger, & Sharon, is being replaced by networked organizations persists as 1990; Barnett, 1984), others on structure (Rowan, a theme in studies of both schools and other kinds of Raudenbush, & Kang, 1991; Tyler, 1985). Some em- organizations, but the questions associated with net- phasized the importance of culture and/or norms worked analyses typically focus on questions that are (Cheng, 1993), while others, like Hoy & Woolfolk related to the functionalist assumptions indicated Journal of Organizational Theory in Education, April 16, 2015. Volume 1, Number 1. 11 above. To give just one example, the accumulating However, this is still largely an empty cell in OT: a work on networked schools and districts has focused JSTOR search for the intersection between on the relationship between network structures inside “organizational theory” and “critical theory” found organizational units and information use/change (Daly fewer than 100 published articles. & Finnigan, 2011; Finnigan & Daly, 2012). While the assumptions about structure are different, the underly- In education, a “humanistic” argument that focus- ing question (relationship between structure and out- es on human and community needs has been a part of come) are classic, and have been incorporated into criti- conversations for some time (Beck, 1994; Noddings, cal organizational perspectives on race and class in U.S. 1992; Passow, 1954), but has not had a deep impact schools (Diamond, 2006; Oakes, 1985). on organization theory. Murphy and Torre (2014) bring the issue back into the conversation but are fo- The dominant models in educational have been cused more on praxis than on organization theory. serviceable,
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