Analyzing Schools as Organizations:Long-term Permanence and

Short-term Change

Charles E. BidwellUniversity of Chicago

In this article, principal theoretical developments in the study of schools as orga-

nizations are reviewed, particularly, neo-institutional theory and the analysis of

the faculty workplace. On the basis of this review, a theoretical approach that

integrates the two is proposed. In this approach, institutional constraints on

schools and administrative response to them serve as prime sources of the excep-

tional stability of the formal organization of school districts and schools. Networks

of informal faculty ties serve both to buffer and further stabilize formal structures,

while situating important mechanisms through which teachers can adapt their

work to inherent uncertainties in teaching and to the particularities of local cir-

cumstance. Implications of this approach for the further study of school organi-

zation are suggested, with particular reference to the study of school production.

I merican public elementary andsecondary education underwenttwo profound changes duringthe 20th century: a massive

expansion and democratization of enroll-ment and the elaboration of school admin-istration into a bureaucracy of specializedoffices occupied by professionally trainedpersonnel. The expansion and democrati-zation of enrollment can be attributed pri-marily to the century's steady, sharpincrease in high school completion, whatTrow (1961) called "the second transfor-mation of American education." Forcohorts who were born between 1896 and1900, the high school graduation rateremained at about 30 percent for youngmen and 40 percent for young women. Forthose who were born between 1946 and1950, this rate jumped to about 80 percentfor both males and females. The rate heldconstant at this level through the early1980s, but by 1992 it exceeded 90 percent

(Mare 1995). At the beginning of the 21stcentury, public elementary and secondaryeducation in the United States has becomea truly mass enterprise, and with thespread of community colleges, postsec-ondary education is moving in the samedirection (National Center for EducationStatistics 1995).

The bureaucratization of school adminis-tration became evident in the earlydecades of the 20th century with the emer-gence of fiduciary school boards and ofschool superintendents as full-time, profes-sionally trained administrators (Reller 1935;Tyack 1974). In the ensuing years, schooladministration evolved into a hierarchy ofspecialized offices, a bureaucratic structurethat by the midcentury characterized virtu-ally all public school districts in the UnitedStates CTyack 1974).

One might infer that the expansion anddemocratization of enrollment were primestimuli to the bureaucratization of school

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Analyzing Schools as Organizations 101

districts. Consistent with this inference, amore complex and differentiated organiza-tion of instruction appeared—in particular,the graded school, the specialization of teach-ing by grade and subject matter, and theemergence of specialized programs andschools like those for vocational or technicaltraining or for schooling the mentally or phys-ically handicapped (Cremin 1988; Tyack1974). Moreover, the differentiation of officesthat are responsible for overseeing instruction(e.g., assistant principals for curriculum andinstruction, curriculum directors, subject mat-ter consultants and coordinators, and assis-tant superintendents for curriculum andinstruction) has accounted for a substantialproportion of the emerging school bureau-cracy.

However, the major organizational devel-opments in the instructional area hadmatured by the early years of the 20th centu-ry. Subsequent gains in both the size andcomposition of school enrollments were notaccompanied by significant change in theorganization of instruction. Although curricu-lar and instructional innovation continued,the story of these innovations is almost entire-ly a story of failed implementation (Elmoreand McLaughlin 1988; McDonnell andMcLaughlin 1982). Instead, there has been alinear replication of age-graded and subject-specialized classrooms (Dreeben 1971). Evensuch specialized schools as schools for sci-ence, mathematics, or the performing arts areorganizationally much like all the otherschools that enroll students of a similar age, inboth their instructional and administrativecomponents.

In contrast, the bureaucratization of schooladministration proceeded well into the 20thcentury. Growing administrative complexityin the noninstructional area can be attributedplausibly to continuing increases in the scaleand complexity of such school district opera-tions as fiscal administration, health andsocial services for students, transportation,food services, and security. However, thebureaucratization of instructional administra-tion cannot be explained primarily by growthin either the scale or the complexity ofschools' instructional work.

The juxtaposition of profound changes in

the size, composition, and administrativecomplexity of schools and deep-seated stabil-ity and relative simplicity in the organizationof instruction presents a twofold puzzle. Howcan we explain the essential stability of theformal organization of instruction, despitemassive increases in the number of studentsto be taught and in the range and diversity ofstudents' interests and capabilities? How canwe explain the bureaucratization of schooladministration, especially the bureaucratiza-tion of instructional administration, in theabsence of increasing complexity in theinstructional core of schools?

These questions should lead us to ask alsohow the stability of instruction and thegrowth of administrative overhead in theschools have affected school production—that is, the processes by which schoolingresults in the cognitive development or moralsocialization for which schools are formallyresponsible. Relatively few of the sociologistswho study schools as organizations haveattended explicitly to school production. Inthis, they are in the company of the greaternumber of sociologists of organizations. Forthe most part, the analysis of organizationalproduction—and, indeed, of the internalactivities of organizations generally—hasmigrated from sociology into the businessschools, where it is a main topic of programsin organizational behavior (Perrow 2000).However, a prime objective of an organiza-tional theory of schools should be to showhow organizational structures and the formalspecification of the work of teachers andadministrators affect school production.

Students of educational organizations havefollowed one of two lines of analysis. One ismarked by a strong interest in teachers'work—in its structural setting in the schooland the consequences of the social organiza-tion of teachers' work for the school lives ofboth teachers and students. Inquiries by Bryk,Lee, and Holland (1993), Johnson (1990),Little (1990), Louis (1994), Siskin (1994), andTalbert and McLaughlin (1994) are recentexamples of this line of research. The otherline oi" research is marked by a lack of concernfor the work of teaching, but a strong interestin the institutional linkages that bind schoolsinto their societies and that, in the process.

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give form to educational organizations. Neo-institutional theory and its specification to theschool are the most recent work of this kind.The neo-institutional approach assumes thatthe technical work of instruction is essentiallydecoupled from an administrative apparatusthat deals with legitimacy and resource-pro-viding exchanges with external actors (e.g.,March and Olsen 1976, Meyer and Rowan,1977, 1978). This line of inquiry finds the pri-mary sources of the organizational form ofschools, including the form of their instruc-tional subunits, elsewhere than in the natureof teachers' work.

LINES OF INQUIRY:TOWARD INTEGRATION

In the following pages, I argue that althoughneo-institutional theory provides powerfulideas about processes involved in the formalorganization of schools, it yields only a partialexplanation of the evident imperviousness ofinstructional organization to massive increas-es in the size and heterogeneity of enroll-ment. Nonrandom shocks of such magnitudeshould destabilize even a firmly institutional-ized organization (Stinchcombe 1965). Tounderstand how schools have adapted tothese changes, it is necessary to combine anunderstanding of how institutionalization sta-bilizes organizations with an analysis of thecapacity of informally organized faculties toadapt to environmental and technicalchange. This analysis should reveal ways inwhich school organization affects school pro-duction.

This approach combines a microstructural,network-based analysis of the faculty work-place in schools, a principal element ofschools' internal workings, with a neo-institu-tional analysis of the formal organization ofthe school—both its administrative andinstructional subunits. Taking an essentiallycognitive view of the nature of activity inorganizations, I argue that microstructures inthe faculty workplace provide capacity forcollective faculty problem solving in a locallydynamic environment, nested within a stable,institutionally grounded frame of formal

school organization. In the language of theorganizational behavior literature (Brown andDuguid 1991, Cohen and Sproull 1996,Weick and Westley 1996), this microstructureprovides mechanisms for organizationallearning in schools, at least with respect toteaching (Leithwood and Louis 1998). I pro-pose that the formal organization of theschool, particularly the formal organization ofinstruction, constrains school production byconstraining the structure of the informal net-work. In this way, the adaptive capacity pro-vided by informal faculty organization is anunintended consequence of the stability ofschools' formal organization.

I limit my discussion to public school dis-tricts and public schools, although I believethat the essential elements of the approachthat I propose can be extended across thesectors of K-12 education. An overview of thesociological literature on schools as organiza-tions sets the stage for the effort to integrateits two principal strands.

The School as a Local Institution

Waller's The Sociology of Teaching (1932) hascome closer than any work since to the inte-grated approach that I advocate. Prefiguringthe "old institutionalism" (e.g., Selznick1949), with its stress on local institutionalconstraints on organizational form and activi-ties. Waller combined an analysis of theschool as a local community institution withan analysis of the school as a workplace forteachers. He showed that because the cur-riculum constrains not only what but howteachers teach, both instructional contentand methods express these values. Hisfamous depiction of the school as a "museumof virtue" and of the curriculum as a collec-tion of desiccated subjects that are far fromstudents' experience are particularly goodexamples.

Waller also showed how teachers' workgenerates organizational form. For him, theorganizational structure of schools is an adap-tation to the core regularities of institutional-ly grounded and constrained teaching activi-ties. Dry subject matter, removed from theimmediate lives of children and young peo-ple, forces teachers to hold students to tasks

Analyzing Schools as Organizations 103

for which they cannot be motivated effective-ly. Therefore, teaching is a never-endingeffort to reconcile what cannot be truly rec-onciled—an effort to preserve standards whileengaging students' interest and goodwill.Consequently, the relationship betweenteachers and students is essentially antagonis-tic, and a classroom order of dominationinexorably emerges. Moreover, enforcing theregimen of virtue among both the faculty andstudent body means that the entire school issimilarly ordered in its essential organization-al form—"a despotism in a state of perilousequilibrium" (Waller 1932:10).

Studies of the Faculty Workplace

The Weberian influence in the study of orga-nizations remained strong well into the1950s, long after Waller found it useful tointegrate the study of the workplace with theanalysis of relationships between school orga-nizations and their institutional environments.Studies in this tradition were guided by thetwin premises that organizations are devisedfor the rational conduct of work and that theirboundaries are sufficiently strong to buffertheir production units from external turbu-lence (cf. Thompson 1967). They centered onrelationships between production processesand organizational structure—the sociotech-nical approach associated with Perrow(1967), Thompson (1967), and Woodward(1965)—and on relationships betweenadministrative form and the tasks of coordi-nating and controlling production, associatedespecially with Blau (1957).

My chapter on the school in the Handbookof Organizations (Bidwell 1965) was stronglyinfluenced by Waller's treatment of teachingand by sociotechnical theory.'' I attributeddepartures of school organization from theclassic Weberian bureaucratic model to thenature of teaching. Teaching, I argued, isintractable to organizational routines becauseit involves an artful balance of universalisticevaluation and particularistic motivation thatrequires continuing infusions from a teacher'sown fund of classroom experience and, con-sequently, substantial classroom autonomy.

I reasoned that this pressure toward auton-omy is in tension with the bureaucratic

impulse toward the rationalization of instruc-tion. This impulse is expressed, for example,in curriculum guides and frameworks, the for-mal division of instructional labor, and theultimate accountability of school officials foracademic results and for the regular produc-tion of certified school graduates. Taking thepressure toward autonomy as the stronger ofthe two within the instructional domain, Iexpected the faculty workplace to be morelike a collection of weakly connected class-room ateliers than like a bureaucracy.Consequently, I paid little attention to infor-mal collegial relationships among teachers.

I did not find the juxtaposition of anadministrative bureaucracy and a substantial-ly autonomous instructional workplace puz-zling. I assumed implicitly that this super-structure was the product of an essentiallyrational organizational design. Its motivationwas partly administrative and partly political.It would arise from efforts to bring to tasks ofgrowing scale and complexity efficientresource allocation and effective coordinationand efforts to satisfy diverse parental and con-stituent demands by appeals to a uniformcurriculum and universalistic rules of alloca-tion and classroom management.

Although I based my treatment of teachingon Waller (1932), I ignored his attention tothe institutional frame within which the workof teaching is done and the school's organi-zation is formed. My stress on instructionalautonomy drew my attention away from theadministrative superstructure and its activi-ties. My sociotechnical premises led me toignore the possibility that the work of teach-ing and, partly through it, the larger organi-zational forms of schools can express valuesand beliefs held by educators, students, par-ents, and the public.

By the time my chapter (Bidwell 1965)appeared, organizational theorists werealready envisioning a permeable organiza-tional boundary and discovering that limita-tions of the human mind set limits to rationalplanning and decision making. The effort toopen the organizational boundary definedorganization-environment exchanges, ratherthan events within an organization's produc-tion units, as the theoretically interesting top-ics. As attention turned to cognitive limits to

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organizational rationality, studying the vicissi-tudes of managerial strategies for action inthe environment drew attention away fromthe management of production.

Loose Coupling andNeo-institutional Theory

At this point, the administrative bureaucraciesof schools presented an intriguing puzzle,especially to Weick. Writing about schools asloosely coupled systems (Weick 1976) andabout teaching as a cluster of procedurallyunderspecified activities in pursuit of vague,imprecise goals (Weick 1982), Weick seem-ingly disposed of the idea that the organiza-tional form of schools expresses a rationallymotivated design for administering instruc-tion. Resonating with March and Simon's(1958) view of bounded rationality, Weick's(1976) use of the metaphor of loose couplingin effect swept away the idea that schooladministration has much to do with instruc-tional operations. Given its nature, teachingcould scarcely be rationalized, either as anorganizational plan or as an object of morethan cursory administrative supervision. Toexplain the administrative structure of schoolsand districts, one would have to look some-where other than to teachers' work and itssocial organization.

In principle, Weick's ideas about loose cou-pling and teaching could have motivated anew analysis of the faculty workplace. In hisdiscussion of the functions of loose coupling,Weick (1976) included positive effects on thecapacity of subunits of organizations to adaptto the environment and to engage in relative-ly autonomous action. Within the loose cou-pling framework, one could ask whether andhow, in relation to their formal superiors,teachers, individually and collectively, per-ceive and respond to actors and events intheir work environments. In the decentralizedAmerican educational polity, these environ-ments presumably would be primarily,though not entirely, local, including parents,other constituents of school districts, andlocal publics, and, beyond the locality, broad-er occupational and state and federal policyenvironments. Nevertheless, the loose-cou-pling metaphor, the evident technical weak-

ness of teaching, and the rising interest inboundary exchanges between organizationsand environments combined to draw atten-tion away from instructional structures andprocesses.

This line of analysis is expressed powerfullyin neo-institutional theory. Partly influencedby Weick's ideas, Meyer (1977) and Meyerand Rowan (1977, 1978) depicted schools asprototypical organizations in which formalstructure expresses the "myths of their insti-tutionalized environment" (Meyer andRowan 1977:341). By strong implication, inthis analysis administrators are key actorsbecause they design or imitate organizationalforms that are adapted to this environment.

Meyer and Rowan are among the few sociol-ogists of school organization who haveaddressed school production explicitly.However, they defined school production in aunique way that gives little attention to thesubstance of students' learning or moral social-ization. For Meyer and Rowan, the key productof schools is whatever interested actors defineas an indicator of school quality. Educators, stu-dents, parents, constituents, and the generalpublic alike use the same institutionalized cate-gories, such as credit hours earned, diplomasawarded, or degrees held by teachers, to do so.In addition, the school's own organizationalform is among its products. Schools are pro-ductive and their administrators are successfulwhen they supply successive cohorts of institu-tionally classified individuals and create them-selves as appropriate cultural objects. Their cul-tural compliance is also cultural production. Aschool's legitimacy, of prime importance for theadministrators in the central office if they are tosucceed in their careers, depends on bothforms of institutionalized production.

In the neo-institutional analysis, the mech-anisms that structure schools are external.Although people inside these organizationsmake the decisions that adapt school struc-ture, the constraints to which school structureis adapted arise from the processes of cultur-al change and social control that create andmaintain institutionalized beliefs about whatschools are like and about the meaning ofcategories of school attainment.

This proposition extends to the formalorganization of the instructional core. For

Analyzing Schools as Organizations 105

schools, as for all kinds of organizations, theformative action that gives rise to formalstructures and processes throughout theorganization is essentially subordinate to aninstitutional order that has its own dynamicsin processes of cultural change that arebeyond the immediate realm of organization-al action. For example, DiMaggio and Powell(1983) proposed the diffusion of occupation-al norms as a principal mechanism that pro-duces structural isomorphism within organi-zational fields, so that change of form mustthen be influenced substantially by move-ments of thought in occupations like schooladministration. Consequently, neither howthe organization of instruction affects schoolproduction nor how instruction affects orga-nizational form is of central interest. Instead,the prime question is how the output of per-sons who are certified to have been instruct-ed and the school's formal structural configu-ration affect the school's legitimacy and con-sequent organizational well-being.

A Return to the Faculty Workplace

Recent work on school organization hasturned back to the instructional core and torelationships between the organizationalform of the faculty workplace and the natureof teaching. This work draws on a broaderanalysis of organizations as organic systems,advanced by Burns and Stalker (1961) some40 years ago, prefiguring the subsequentwori< on organizational learning. Organic sys-tem theory treats organizations or parts oforganizations as social structures that areadapted to the collective solution of problemsthat are endemic to the organization's work.In organic organizations, offices are replacedby roles in an informal and adaptively chang-ing division of labor, formal hierarchies bynetworks, authority by communication andpersuasion, and domination by the emergentieadership of the currently most expert. Incontrast to my earlier essay on schools asorganizations (Bidwell 1965), here the infor-mal takes precedence over the formal as abasis for organizational adaptiveness, aproposition with an honorable heritage inorganizational studies (cf. Homans 1950;Roethlisberger and Dickson 1939).

More recently. Rowan (1990, 1995)applied organic system theory to the facultyworkplace. In a significant way, his view ofinstruction differs from Weick's (1982).According to Rowan, schools' instructionalgoals are multiple and changing, rather thanvague and imprecise, reflecting the politicaldecentralization of American education andthe complex of group interests in curricular'content, instructional methods, and academ-ic performance that are at play in schools'local political environments. Like Weick(1982), Dreeben (1996), and Herbst (1989),Rowan assumed that teachers usually work inthe absence of well-specified methods andclear standards.

In sum, teachers work in an immediateenvironment of dynamic and complex inter-ests and demands for performance, unsure oftheir technical footing. As a result, they turnto their colleagues for guidance and support,so that faculties become small, informal prob-lem-solving social systems. Networks of col-league-to-colleague consultation and adviceare the prime structural elements of these sys-tems. These informal networks should bemore differentiated with respect to problem-solving skill than the formal grade- or subject-specialized teacher roles, more responsive todaily instructional problems than the formalcurriculum, and more capable of coordinat-ing the work of colleagues than the formaladministrative hierarchy.

Recent findings on the American highschool are consistent with Rowan's organicsystem analysis, Johnson (1990), Siskin(1994), and Talbert and McLaughlin (1994)have documented the importance of depart-mentally based collegial ties for inducing andstabilizing pedagogical values and norms.Bidwell and Yasumoto (1999) found thatteachers' instructional practices tend to con-verge on normatively preferred teachingobjectives and methods as a function of thecohesiveness of pedagogically consensualsubgroups within informal faculty networks.For the most part, though not always, thesesubgroups are composed primarily withinsubject matter departments. Bidwell andYasumoto inferred that these faculty sub-groups are social structural locations in theschool workplace in which local cultures of

706 Bidwell

practice develop from teachers' collectiveefforts to resolve teaching problems like thosethat Rowan (1995) described. Yasumoto,Uekawa, and Bidwell (2001) subsequentlydiscovered that when high school depart-ments form normatively cohesive faculty sub-groups, the effect of the subgroups' preferredinstructional practices on students' growth inachievement tends to be larger, often sub-stantially larger, than it otherwise would be.

Note that this approach to organizationalstructuring and behavior in the faculty work-place assumes that teachers, like administra-tors, act within the cognitive limits denotedby bounded rationality (March and Simon1958). It takes as given that in an environ-ment of substantive uncertainty, pedagogicaldoctrines rarely provide procedural templatesof sufficient specificity to guide a teacher'sday-to-day practice effectively. It proposesthat to reduce the consequent uncertainty,teachers who are similarly situated in aschool, such as those in the same teachingfield or who specialize in an age group or abil-ity level, pool the resources of their individualtraining and experience in collective problemsolving. Theirs is a collective effort to con-struct templates that are locally useful byinterpreting the classroom problems thatthey encounter, fixing performance standardsthat square with this interpretation, anddevising guides to teaching content or meth-ods that will allow them to reach these stan-dards.

Successful problem solving of this kindgives a group of teachers a track record ofsuccess. These are small, quotidian successes,to be sure, but nonetheless the commonexperience of success should result in a highlevel of group cohesion. As a result, thegroup's pedagogical templates should gainnormative force, while the strength of ties inthe collegial group should induce compli-ance. These collegial foci (Bidwell andYasumoto 1999) should remain stable, bothstructurally and in the content of the tem-plates that order the work of their members,until they encounter teaching problems thatare novel and severe enough to call for newdiagnoses and solutions.

That collegial foci are evidently stronglyconstrained to form within formal depart-

mental boundaries in high schools and, onemay guess, by grade level in elementaryschools is important. Commonality of teach-ing fields (or grade levels) is an importantsource of shared teaching problems and thusa stimulus to teachers' collective problemsolving. However, when formal and informalgroup boundaries coincide, these boundariesare strengthened, which should reduce groupmembers' access to information about peda-gogical approaches and innovations in otherfields, in other schools, and in the broaderoccupational field. Moreover, collectively per-ceived success in problem solving is likely tobecome an anchor of both group and indi-vidual identity, institutionalized within thegroup and highly resistant to change, evenwhen the solution is no longer sound. Reiss(1981) documented this process in families,and it undoubtedly characterizes most infor-mal groups that confront and resolve uncer-tainties that are central to their lives, includ-ing their lives at work.

Integrating the Institutional andthe Informal

Assembling elements of the neo-institutionaland organic systems approaches provides thebasis for a more satisfying theoretical accountof the sources of schools' organizational formand its consequences for school productionthan either approach alone affords. My argu-ment has three main points. First, the stabili-ty of the formal organizational structure ofthe faculty workplace has two sources: (1) theinterest of central office administrators inmaintaining organizational legitimacy bymaintaining a conventional organization ofteachers' work (a neo-institutional proposi-tion) and (2) the capacity of informal facultynetworks to adapt both to local circum-stances and to movements of pedagogicalthought and thus buffer the formal organiza-tion of instruction from pressures to change(an organic systems proposition). Second, thecentrality of informai faculty organization as alocus of technical (pedagogical) adaptationderives from the political weakness of schoolprincipals in school district hierarchies. Third,the analysis of school production must give acentral place to the capacity for instructional

Analyzing Schools as Organizations 107

problem solving and collegial control thatfaculty networks provide, although the formof these networks is constrained by the formalorganization of teachers' work.

Begin with the question of power. The lit-erature on organizational learning in schools(e.g., Leithwood and Louis 1998) stresses theimportance of the principal's instructionalleadership in forming faculties into "commu-nities of practice," that is, making the entirefaculty collegially focal (Brown and Duguid1991). A similar proposition has beenadvanced in the effective schools literature(e.g., Edmonds 1979; Mortimore 1991).However, above some fairly low threshold ofsize (including most high schools and manymiddle schools), teachers' problem-solvingnetworks are likely to differentiate accordingto kinds of problems and kinds of pedagogi-cal and subject matter knowledge and expe-rience. When faculty networks differentiate inthis way, the unifying effectiveness of formalleadership should be reduced.

More fundamentally, in the power struc-ture of a school district, the principal's posi-tion is notably weak.̂ Parsons' (1956) classicanalysis of organizations as political systemsshows why. Parsons posited three principalstrata in organizations. In order, they are gen-eral administration, which is concerned pri-marily with boundary exchanges with theenvironment (e.g., the central office); middlemanagement, which is concerned primarilywith managing production and communica-tion between the two other strata (e.g., theprincipal's office); and the production subunit(e.g., the faculty workplace).

According to Parsons, actors in organiza-tions have power resources that are distinc-tive of their strata. They use these resources topursue organizational aims and to furthertheir particular interests. Production staff canslow down or disrupt production. Middlemanagers have power directed downwardthat derives from their ability to distributeresources, punishments, and rewards amongproduction units and staff. They also have thepower of selective communication, directedboth upward and downward, that comesfrom their unique access to information aboutthe internal workings of the organization. Topmanagers have power derived from control

over the inputs that the organization requiresto survive and prosper.̂

From Parsons's specification of the tasksand power of top administrators, one canderive the proposition that properties of theinput-supplying environment have a strongeffect on the form of this stratum and on theactions of its inhabitants. It is a small inferen-tial step to four subordinate propositions.First, the form of top-level managementshould be adapted to meet the expectationsof significant customers, resource suppliers,and other stakeholders about what a well-managed enterprise should look and act like.Second, top-level administrators should usetheir power to ensure that the rest of theorganization is adapted similarly. Third, mid-dle-level managers should attempt to modify,resist, or derail such efforts (for example, inthe interest of maintaining their own turf in aform suited more specifically to their ownactivities or in the interest of maintaining aproduction organization that is well adaptedto the production technology). Fourth, theirsuccess in these attempts should occur in pro-portion to their own upwardly directedpower—that is, their control of informationabout production that the top managementneeds for its own strategic purposes. Thus, Ihave specified top-level administrators as thechief agents through which organizations infirmly institutionalized environments becomeinstitutionally isomorphic, an agency, howev-er, that is contingent on their power relativeto that of their middle management subordi-nates.

Now consider the school district and itsschools and the nature of the expectations ofthe actors in their environments. Like the neo-institutional theorists, I assume that in virtual-ly all developed and developing societies,schools exist in firmly institutionalized envi-ronments. These environments encompassbeliefs about the purposes of education,about the way in which education should beconducted, and about the organizationalarrangements for its conduct. These arebeliefs that are pervasive in the society, sothat they are held in common by lay personsand educators and cross the major bound-aries of demographic, social, and cultural divi-sion in its population and local, regional, and

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political boundaries and levels. They are bothbasic and extremely general. In the UnitedStates, beliefs about the purposes of educa-tion are of the order of the beliefs that schoolsshould prepare students for effective workand for occupational mobility, that teachersshould be trained to teach, and that classesshould be organized by subject and age.

The generality of these beliefs leaves ampleroom for differences that are derived from thespecification of things more generally agreedon or from inequalities of access to common-ly valued kinds or qualities of education. Suchdifferences are particularly likely to occur atthe boundaries of areas of institutionalizedbelief, where common understandings areparticularly likely to be blurred. Some of thesedifferences bear only indirectly on the facultyworkplace—for example, debates over voca-tional education; the inclusion of evolutionarytheory in science curricula (but not whetherscience should be taught); the place of non-Western history or literature in the highschool or college curriculum (but not thedesirability of teaching history or literature);or the relative amounts of time to be given toart, music, or physical education versus"core" subjects like English or mathematics.

Other disagreements create pressures thatare felt directly by teachers as a result of advo-cacy by parents or others in a school's locali-ty, administrative intervention, or the teach-ers' own attention to curricular and instruc-tional movements and innovations. For exam-ple, elementary school teachers may find thatthe parents of their students want readingtaught by phonics; the central office supervi-sors, by whole words; and university experts,by an eclectic approach. High school Englishteachers may find that au courant parentspress for greater attention to literature andcriticism, while the central office, alert to testresults and accountability, wants stress placedon basic skills.

That agreement about the general charac-ter of schools and instruction occurs at thelocal as well as at nonlocal levels and extendsacross localities and regions is centrallyimportant. It means that the same frame ofinstitutionalized beliefs about education andschools is a part of the local environments ofvirtually all schools and school districts.

Within this broad national consensus, specificdisagreements can sharply define conflictinginterests, again at both the local and nonlocallevels. For many years, American publicschools have been the objects of local-interestpolitics that has often exposed them to con-flicting, strongly held, and effectively articu-lated efforts to realize interests. Interests ineducation that arise, in particular, from eco-nomic, ethnic, or religious politics(Katznelson and Weir 1985, Rubinson 1986)may bear directly on local schools when theyare expressed by such local actors as localchapters of national umbrella organizations.In addition, when any of these interests isrealized in state and federal policies that gov-ern such matters as performance standards orstudents' rights, they increasingly carry incen-tives that matter to local school boards andadministrators.

How, in this environment of multiple, ofteninconsistent or conflicting interests, are thethree major levels of school district organiza-tion—the central office, the principal's office,and the faculty workplace—affected? FromParsons (1956), it follows that central officeadministrators should have a strong interestof their own—to maintain the legitimacy ofthe district, particularly in local eyes, and tosecure resources sufficient to sustain the dis-trict's operations at an acceptable level ofvitality. In other words, their interest is to sat-isfy the expectations of the district's majorconstituents and stakeholders, such as par-ents, employers, local civic elites, and fund-dispensing officials of state departments.When, as at present, the legitimacy of publiceducation seems to have weakened on thenational level, the central office's interest inmaintaining local legitimacy and adequateresources should be especially acute.

When specific local interests are contradic-tory or conflicting, satisfying one is likely toblock the realization of another. Thus, whatcentral office administrators must do is ensurethat the district's formal structure and activi-ties satisfy general expectations—those thatconstitute the institutionalized consensus—while keeping activities that bear on specificinterests as far from public view as possible.Thus, school districts and schools everywherefit an institutionalized template that can be

Analyzing Schools as Organizations 109

copied from one place to another, and thistemplate and popular belief interact in amutually reinforcing process. In short, centraloffice administrators should act exactly asneo-institutional theory predicts.

School principals also work in an environ-ment of heterogeneous interests and interest-group action—both from lay groups and indi-viduals who manage to penetrate the legiti-macy-enhancing shield that the central officehas erected and from professional groups andmovements in which they are involved or ofwhich they are aware. Principals are formallyresponsible for instruction. Therefore, onemay expect them to respond selectively toexternal pressures, particularly curricular andinstructional movements, and attempt toinnovate in ways that are suited to the capac-ities of their faculties and students. If so, ten-sion should often occur between innovator-principals and central office administratorswho resist their efforts because curricular andinstructional innovation invites public scrutinyof the district's classrooms.

However, that tension of this kind is notpervasive in school districts is consistent withthe proposition that principals normally lacksufficient power to innovate effectively, ineffect buffering teachers from intrusions fromthe central office and severing feedback loopsbetween external actors and teachers. In thisrespect, principals' offices are a major locus ofloose coupling in school districts, so that theboundary between the faculty workplace andinterested external actors is highly perme-able.

Principals, in fact, are likely to be the leastpowerful actors in a school district hierarchy.Neither the nature of teaching nor the rou-tinization of key allocation rules in school dis-tricts endows them with power. Teachers'work, although specialized, is seldom interde-pendent; therefore, teaching requires littleadministrative coordination. Low interdepen-dence among teachers also means that thelikelihood of severe disruptions of a district'sinstructional work is low, so that principals donot have a great deal of either tactically orstrategically useful information to give to thecentral office. Because teachers' salaries arebased on seniority and instructional resourcesare usually allocated according to universalis-

tic rules, the significant incentives that princi-pals can offer to teachers are severely limited.Consequently, principals should have lesspower than either a unionized teaching forceor the environmentally connected cadre ofcentral office administrators.

It follows from the foregoing argumentthat central office administrators, interestedprimarily in maintaining organizational legiti-macy and attendant flows of resources, are anessentially conservative force in school dis-tricts, involved in a near-universal project toconform district and school organization andactivities to institutionalized external expecta-tions. At the same time, principals lack thepower to be consistently or systematicallyinnovative. As a result, the formal organiza-tion of school districts, from the central officedown to the classroom, should express thecore of institutionalized beliefs about howschools are to be structured and how theirwork is to be conducted, beliefs that com-prise a truly national consensus.

Firmly institutionalized beliefs about thecore activities of a society are slow to change,and, I have argued, there have been no sig-nificant forces to destabilize their expressionin these formal structures. This neo-institu-tional analysis seems to explain why schooldistricts have progressively bureaucratizedthe administration of instruction, even afterobvious stimuli to this process had dimin-ished, reproducing the same structural form(as does the entire formal structure of thesedistricts) from one place to another. Criticismof public education as ineffective, rigid, orbureaucratic should reinforce, rather thanweaken, this stability by causing administra-tors to make extra efforts to ensure the pub-lic acceptability of their organizations.Indeed, when school districts attempt toreform or revitalize their teaching programs,in response to criticism by public officials,politicians, local elites, or a more general pub-iic outcry, as has been true over the pastdecade in Chicago, the response is essentiallyconservative—for example, upgrading thequalifications of teachers, stressing "basics" inthe curriculum, making summer schoolmandatory, raising standards for graduation,and holding local schools more strictly to per-formance standards already in place."*

110 Bidwell

This analysis is open to the challenge thatthe massive changes in the number and kindsof students whom the public schools enrollmust have created pressures that are suffi-ciently strong to destabilize even entrenchedways of organizing to teach. However, facultynetworks and collegial foci, which tend toemerge within the main formal structuraldimensions of the faculty workplace (subjectmatter departments in middle and highschools and, presumably, grade levels in ele-mentary schools), by providing capacity localinstructional adaptation, also buffer the for-mal structure of the faculty workplace frompressures to change.

Teachers, even in the most cohesive colle-gial foci, do not invent teaching materials,procedures, or standards de novo, Mintzberg(1983) argued that organizations mustdesign their work according to the require-ments of their core technologies ("internalconsistency") and environmental exigency("external consistency"). Following Parsons, Iposit that external consistency is the primetask of the central office. Faculty networksand collegial foci allow groups of teachers toachieve both internal and external consisten-cy. That is, teachers' training, teaching expe-rience, and participation in the professionprovide general knowledge of the concep-tions of instructional purposes, ways of teach-ing, and criteria of performance that teachersthen specify to local circumstances, eitherindividually or, more adequately, in collegialfoci.

The changes in the size and composition ofenrollments that occurred in public educationduring the past century, though cumulativelymassive, were incremental and essentially lin-ear (Mirel 1992). As a result, as these changesworked themselves out in particular, localways, teachers could continue to adapt thebroad pedagogical doctrines of their profes-sion to local instructional exigencies withoutdisturbing the formal organizational equilibri-um.

SCHOOL PRODUCTION

If the foregoing integration of neo-institution-al and organic system approaches is cogent.

then a sociological analysis of school produc-tion must take faculty networks centrally intoaccount. It must consider the problem-solv-ing capacities of faculty networks, the ways inwhich these networks sustain and enforcelocal norms and standards of teaching prac-tice, and the consequences of these network-specific processes for the ways in whichinstruction is conducted. Hence, the sociolog-ical analysis of school production shouldsearch for the correlates of the capacity of fac-ulty groups to diagnose the motivation andcognitive capabilities of their students and toinduce and enforce locally specific proceduralnorms and performance standards.

The putative significance of faculty networkstructure for instructional problem solvingand school production suggests four ques-tions for inquiry.

What Are the Consequences of NetworkForm for Faculty Problem Solving?Standard contagion theory of networkprocesses grounds several propositions.Effective problem solving should be a positivefunction of network density (a consequenceof efficient internal communication and effec-tive interpersonal influence), network central-ity (a consequence of the prestige and powerof informal leaders who are likely to emergeon the basis of expertise), and the permeabil-ity of the network boundary (because of link-ages to external information sources). Itshould be a negative function of the differen-tiation of the network into subgroups(because of interruptions and distortions ofinternal communication and barriers to inter-personal influence).

However, in a differentiated faculty net-work, subgroups may solve problems effi-ciently because of the density of ties withinthem and the emergence of subgroup lead-ers. Moreover, the substantive basis of the for-mation of subgroups (e.g., teaching fields orgrades) may also be the basis for the forma-tion of ties that link the subgroups to externalsources of information. At the same time, byvirtue of their substantive differentiation andrelatively weak interconnections, the exis-tence of subgroups may permit more rapid,flexible, and effective adaptations to local sit-uations and changes than is characteristic of

Analyzing Schools as Organizations 111

undifferentiated faculty networks. This capac-ity, in the informal structure of the facultyworkplace, parallels the adaptive capacity offormal subunits in a loosely coupled structurethat Weick (1976) noted. Thus, subgroup dif-ferentiation should reinforce the positiveeffect of the adaptability of faculty networkson the stability of the formal, institutionalizedstructure of schools and districts.

What Affects the Structure of FacultyNetworks? Effects on network differentiationare of particular importance because of thepotentially negative consequences of the for-mation of subgroups for problem solving. Thehighly stable formal organization of instruc-tion, as I have suggested, should constrainfaculty networks and thus affect school pro-duction indirectly. Faculty size and specializa-tion are perhaps the major factors that affectnetwork differentiation, the former as a con-sequence of the probability that any pair ofteachers will interact and the latter as a con-sequence of the existence of multiple basesfor interaction within the faculty. The level oftraining and professional involvement of afaculty may also be important, especially asthey affect the prevalence of ties to externalsources of information and the tendency ofsubgroups to form around teaching special-ties or less formal interests.

What Conditions Produce Variation in theUncertainty That Teachers Face and ThusStimulate Collective Problem Solving?Variation in the adequacy of resources forteaching is an obvious condition. More inter-esting may be variation in either the motiva-tion or academic capabilities of students. Therelationship may be curvilinear, so that eitherpassive or incapable students or highlydemanding students present the morenumerous and more difficult classroom prob-lems. Exposure to diverse pressures should bea function of the force with which state poli-cies like those for systemic reform bear onindividual school districts, in the form of sanc-tions for compliance or for academic perfor-mance. It also should be a function of theprofessionalism of the central office staff(which should affect the frequency and inten-sity of central office intervention in teachers'

work). Finally, it should be a function of theheterogeneity and educational level of thelocal population (both of which should affectthe diversity and strength of interest groupswith an education agenda) and of the distrib-ution of power between lay actors (individualand collective) and the staffs of local schoolsand school districts.

Under What Conditions Does InformalLeadership Supplant the Principal's FormalLeadership in the Instructional Domain?The proposition that the principal's office ispolitically the weakest link in the formal chainof school district command does not precludevariation in the power of the principal, rela-tive to the central office and faculty. Whendoes the principal emerge as an actual, aswell as a formal, instructional leader? Theintensity of faculty specialization, curricularcomplexity, and sheer faculty size shouldeach militate against the emergence of theformal leader as an effective one. Personaltraits of the principal, such as his or heramount and kind of professional training andexperience, may provide the basis for colle-gial ties between the principal and teachersthat validate the principal's formal status.When the school is embattled, as a conse-quence of a high level of community or cen-tral office demand or intrusion, the very pow-erlessness of the principal may define him orher as one with the faculty in a fighting groupagainst the external threat of organizationalor environmental adversaries.

These possibilities suggest that effectiveleadership by principals, though compara-tively rare, may occur more often in elemen-tary schools than in middle or high schools,more often in large districts than in small ones(where schools presumably are more avail-able and vulnerable to the central office), andmore often in communities with relativelywell-educated parents (where parental intru-sion is more likely to be strong and frequentand where the principals are more likely toshare professional training and experiencewith the teachers). More generally, the rela-tionship between informal faculty networksand the formal structure of power andauthority in schools and districts deservesinvestigation.

112 Bidwell

IMPLICATIONS FOR IMPROVINGSCHOOLS

This analysis has at least two implications forimproving the quality of instruction in schools.First, it suggests that broad national move-ments for instructional improvement are notlikely to diffuse widely, and where they dospread, they are not likely to be implementedsuccessfully. Previous research on the diffusionand implementation of instructional innovation(e.g., Elmore and McLaughlin 1988;McDonnell and McLaughlin 1982) reached thesame conclusion, emphasizing that formalorganization and traits of individual district andschool staff are barriers to implementation. Thepresent approach suggests the further impor-tance of barriers in the informal organization ofthe faculty workplace, particularly the tendencyfor collegially focal subgroups to be stronglybounded and for their local cultures of practiceto resist change in the absence of strong shocksto their institutionalization and their centralityto teachers' individual occupational identities.

Second, it follows that boundary-spanningteachers, who link faculty groups to those inother schools and to broader movements ofpedagogical thought, are critical to the trans-mission of information about innovations tothese groups. It also follows that for this infor-mation to be applied successfully to local sit-uations, these boundary spanners must eitherbe allied with the informal leaders of thesegroups or must themselves have leadershiproles. Intuitively, it seems likely that these fos-tering conditions will occur more often inschools with relatively high-status studentand parent clienteles and other concomitantresources for attracting and holding profes-sionally oriented teachers. If so, then the cen-trality of informal faculty organization toschool production should bias the distribu-tion of the capacity for productive responsesto pedagogical movements toward thoseschools in which the need for improving thequality of teaching is the least acute.

NOTES

1, With the exception, notably, of

Stinchcombe's (1965) discussion of organiza-tional stability and change, the Handbookchapters tend to look inward,

2. An exception to my treatment of theprincipal's power may be small, curricularlyhomogeneous schools in which the facultyand the principals share a common fund ofwork experience that allows the emergenceof collective trust in the competence and reli-ability of all alike.

3. Parsons's (1965) analysis of organiza-tions is consistent with such analyses as thoseby Thompson (1967) and the contingencytheorists (e.g., Lawrence and Lorsch, 1967),who expected the most elaborated and pow-erful administrative subunits where the great-est uncertainties lay for organizational survivalor health. It also forecast the main direction ofresource dependence theory (Pfeffer andSalancik, 1978) and theories centered on thecontrol of information and power in organi-zations (e.g., Crozier, 1964, Williamson,1975).

4. An alternative interpretation is conso-nant with Stinchcombe's (1965) stress on theimportance of structural inertia in organiza-tions. It would propose that once instruction-al administration had been formed, inresponse to the growth in and diversity ofenrollments, it would continue along thesame bureaucratic path, expanding and dif-ferentiating as a consequence of habitualpractice and administrators' propensities toexpand and reinforce their organizationaldomains. This interpretation and the neo-institutional analysis are complementary.Institutionalization is surely a major source ofstructural inertia in organizations. It alsoremoves a major source of nonrandom shocksto organizations, that is, the clash of funda-mentally opposed ideologies.

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Charles E. Bidwell, Ph.D., is William Claude Reavis Professor Emeritus, Departments of Sociologyand Education, University of Chicago. His main fields of interest are schools as organizations andlife-course processes. His current research is on the social organization of American high schools andon the process of career formation during adolescence and early adulthood.

This article is a revised version of a paper, "Stability and Change in the Structure of AmericanSchools During the 20th Century," presented at the Annual Meeting of the American SociologicalAssociation, Chicago, August 8, 1999. Address all correspondence to Dr. Charles E. Bidwell,Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, 5848 University Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637; e-mail: cbidwell@m\dway. uchicago. edu.