Resources for Discussion

Case Study

An Abrupt Culture Change—Part Deux

On November 15, Bob Feeley became Fairhaven Elementary’s new principal. He replaced Ginny Khan after her ten weeks of offending parents and teachers alike. Bob knew Fairhaven’s former principal, Mary Love. She had become the assistant superintendent in the neighboring district where he was an assistant principal. In fact, Mary’s recommendation played a large part in Bob getting the Fairhaven position.

The superintendent and assistant superintendent had met with Bob to explain the transition from Mary Love to Ginny Khan. Mary also had told him about the situation. Bob knew that under Mary, an empowering culture of teacher development and student achievement flourished. Mary and teacher leaders had set up professional learning communities to help colleagues improve their instructional practices. Teachers made instruction, curriculum, and assessment more intellectually rigorous. Procedures became more equitable and culturally responsive. As a result, after several years of continuous improvement, Fairhaven’s test scores had gone from near the state’s lowest performers to meeting state standards in every subject—except math (where they were one point below the cutoff). Bob knew that he had to replicate Mary’s leadership approach rather than “Genghis Khan’s” (as the Fairhaven teachers call his predecessor).

On his first day at Fairhaven, Bob called for an after-school faculty meeting. “I know you have been through a lot these last couple of months,” he said. Bob told the group that he had gotten to know Mary Love. She was his assistant superintendent and encouraged him to apply for this job. “Mary has a talent for working with people. She knows teaching and learning and how to organize a school for success,” he continued. “Most importantly, she believes in her teachers and their abilities to become highly effective educators who can advance student learning.” “And so do I.” Bob knew it might take some time to restore teachers’ confidence and reignite their motivation, but he thought they could work together and help every student learn to high standards.

The faculty felt great relief, their tensions starting to evaporate. They knew what they had been doing with Mary Love, increasing their own work satisfaction as well as boosting student learning and achievement. Their students had met state standards in all subjects except math. They sensed that their new principal and their colleagues would help them reach this goal, too. After the meeting, Bob spent time consoling individual faculty members. He convinced the grade level chairs to resume their leadership, and he involved the faculty in the hiring process to replace those teachers who had resigned. He believed the faculty had reset the organizational culture.

By February, teacher venting had ended. Bob reminded teachers of the next round of benchmark tests scheduled for the following week. On February 20, the results came back, indicating that student progress in several areas had fallen below that in October. Bob did not blame teachers for the poor results. Instead, he encouraged them to keep focusing on helping every student master the content to be assessed and helping their colleagues become more effective. Bob knew it would take a miracle for Fairhaven to pass April state tests. As he was about to leave for the day, the superintendent called and asked to see him in the morning. Bob wondered what he would say at the meeting.

LEADERSHIP BEHAVIORAL THEORIES

The Managerial Grid

Between 1958 and 1960, Robert Blake and Jane Mouton, two University of Texas management scholars adapted concepts very similar to initiating structure and consideration concepts into a well-known model for understanding managers’ behaviors—the Managerial Grid. Prior research findings had suggested that high consideration was associated with high subordinate satisfaction, whereas high initiating structure was linked with high effectiveness—and also with high grievance levels and absenteeism. Research suggested, too, that when leaders were high on both dimensions, high effectiveness and high satisfaction would occur (but the grievances and absenteeism would not). To remedy these perceived weaknesses, Blake and Mouton created a two-axis model—“concern for production” (initiating structure) and “concern for people” (consideration)—to examine their relationship in management behavior. They predicted that that grid would identify five visible and widespread leadership behavior orientations. A “high” score on each dimension would reflect an integration of both task and people dimensions, the optimal management strategy. Despite the grid’s popularity among industrial organizations using it for leadership training, critics of the managerial grid find that it does not account for the situational factors that influence leaders’ behavior.

Situational Leadership Theory

Paul Hersey and Kenneth Blanchard’s Leadership Theory suggests that the optimal amount of task and relations behavior between the organizational leader and the employee depends on the subordinate maturity—his or her confidence and skill relative to the assigned task. Although managers liked the theory (400 of the Fortune 500 companies used this model in their leadership training programs), leadership scholars did not. Researchers who tested the theory found only partial, faint support, and several writers have identified conceptual weaknesses in the theory, including ambiguous constructs, oversimplification, and a lack of other explanatory processes (such as the situational factors).

Normative Decision Theory

Victor Vroom and Phillip Yetton’s Normative Decision Theory identifies the decision procedures most likely to generate effective decisions in a particular situation. Characteristics of the immediate situation act as moderator variables that determine whether a particular decision procedure will increase or decrease the decision quality and acceptance. Research findings generally support the model, but certain decision rules received more data support than others and limiting conditions existed. In addition, the model addresses only a small fraction of leadership behavior and contains several conceptual weaknesses—namely, oversimplification of decision processes, and unnecessary complexity that makes it difficult to understand and use. Vroom and Arthur G. Jago proposed revisions to the earlier model, but their added complexity makes the model even more complicated to use.

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Blake, R.R. & Mouton, J.S. (1964). The managerial grid. Houston, TX: Gulf Publishing; Blake, R.R., Mouton, J.S. & Bidwell, A.C. (1969). The managerial grid. In W.B. Eddy, V.A. Dupre, & O.P. South (Eds), Behavioral science and the manager’s role (pp. 167–174). Washington D.C.: NTL Institute for Applied Behavioral Science.

Molloy, P.L. (1998). A review of the managerial grid model of leadership and its role as a model of leadership culture. Aquarius Consulting. Retrieved from: http://www.aquarico.com/web-storage/Publications/Aquarius%20Grid%20Paper%20Mar%2098.pdf

Blake, R.R. & Mouton, J.S. (1982). Management by grid principles or situationalism: Which? Group and Organization Studies, 7, (2), 207–210.

Bernadin, H.J. & Alvares, K.M. (1976). The managerial grid as a predictor of conflict resolution method and managerial effectiveness. Administrative Science Quarterly, 21 (1), 84–92.

Hersey, P. & Blanchard, K.H. (1969). Life cycle theory of leadership. Training and Development Journal, 23(2), 26–34; Hersey, P. & Blanchard, K.H. (1988). Management of organizational behavior (5th ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Hersey, P. & Blanchard, K. (1993). Management of organizational behavior: Utilizing human resources (6th ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, p. 215.

Blank, W., Weitzel, J.R. & Green, S.G. (1986). Situational leadership theory: A test of underlying assumptions. Paper presented at the meeting of the Academy of Management, Chicago; Blake & Mouton. (1982). Op. cit.; Vecchio, R.P. (1987). Situational leadership theory: An examination of a prescriptive theory, Journal of Applied Psychology, 72, (3). 444–451.

See: Blake & Mouton (1982); Graeff, C.L. (1983). The situational leadership theory: A critical review. Academy of Management Review, 8 (3), 285–296.

Vroom, V.H. & Yetton, P.W. (1973). Leadership and decision making. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

See: Vroom, V.H. & Jago, A.G. (1988). The new leadership: Managing participation in organizations. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall; Crouch, A. & Yetton, P. (1988). The management team: An equilibrium model of management performance and behavior. In J.G. Hunt, B.R. Baliga, H.P. Dachler & C.A. Schriesheim (Eds), Emerging leadership vistas (pp. 107–127). Lexington, MA: Lexington Books; Ettling, J.T. & Jago, A.G. (1988). Participation under conditions of conflict: More on the validity of the Vroom-Yetton model. Journal of Management Studies, 25 (1), 73–83.

Crouch & Yetton (1987). Op. cit.; Field, R.H.G. (1982). A test of the Vroom-Yetton normative model of leadership. Journal of Applied Psychology. 67 (5), 523–532; Yukl,
G. (1989a). Leadership in organizations, 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Vroom, V.H. & Jago, A.G. (1988). The new leadership: Managing participation in organizations. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Yukl (1989b). Op. cit.

What Has Happened Here?! The Prequel

Joe Murphy, a school counselor at Pines Middle School for the last nine years and a teacher at the high school for five years before that, was appointed assistant principal at Pines to work with Susan Johnson. (This happened at the same meeting where the superintendent and assistant superintendent had been fired). Joe started work the next day. Susan had recommended Joe for the job, and Joe loved the way Pines ran under Susan’s leadership. They were both excited to work together. The next week the notification about teacher transfers arrived. Susan shared the news with Joe, and they studied the transfer list.

Susan looked at Joe and said. “You just finished your Master’s degree in Educational Leadership. You also have been a counselor. You understand how these incoming teachers’ needs—as well as our remaining Pines’ teachers’ needs—motivate their thoughts and actions. As our school’s leaders, we need to provide enough structure to set direction, plan, and direct what happens at Pines but enough flexibility to deal with the realities of this situation. What do you think about this, and what would you recommend we do?” Joe saw immediately that the Pines Middle School’s social system was about to take a shock. Joe told Susan that he had worked with most of the high school teachers who would be transferred to Pines, and they were mediocre teachers at best. He also mentioned that Pines would be losing many of its best teachers. Joe said, “This is just not fair to the Pines’ students” (or to us, he thought).

Together, Susan and Joe met with the superintendent and voiced their concerns. The superintendent told them that the transfers would go through. Their job was to make it work. If the transferred teachers did not meet expectations, Susan and Joe should document deficiencies and remediation efforts and put those teachers on plans of action. If the problems remained, Susan should recommend dismissal—following all procedures, of course. Susan and Joe left disheartened.

Joe told Susan how he had seen her change from a transactional leader to a transformational leader over the last nine years, as she helped the faculty unite around a shared vision of what the school could be and do for students. Joe suggested that they might have to go back to being more transactional leaders with the new faculty until they embraced Pines’s culture. Susan disagreed. She thought that would be undoing all the gains and changed practices they had developed as a faculty over the past ten years. She vetoed Joe’s idea. Instead, she suggested that she and Joe meet the new teachers individually, find two who were at least open to Pines’s vision and practices, and invite them to accept leadership positions at Pines—on the Leadership Team or the School Improvement Team. That way they could become familiar and comfortable with the Pines’ culture—and ideally, persuade their former high school colleagues to be open, too.

Susan told Joe to think about everything they had discussed. She asked him to recommend two plans. First, Joe should design a process for how they could address the needs of returning and transferring in teachers in a way that prepared Pines to be up and operational for the first day of school. Next, Joe should plan how to continue the acculturation process for the entire faculty during the coming school year. Joe started to think this through.

INSTITUTIONAL THEORY

With its roots in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and its home in economics, sociology, political science, history, and ecology,institutional theory has reemerged as a topic of scholarly interest. In earlier days, scholars tried to reconcile organizations’ presumed rationality with the actuality that they are peopled with individuals who are not always rational. Employees’ personal needs and interests, individually and in informal groups, strongly influence how they—and their organizations—perform. And, although organizations seek stability and order, their social structures are subject to conflict and change. In fact, many organizational models are more “rationalized” than rational, their validity depending on widely shared norms and practices important to their stakeholders and audiences, rather than because they efficiently guide work behaviors. As a result, scholars came to realize cultural, social, and political processes shape work arrangements; natural economic laws do not. And as befitting varying societies, cultures, and local influences, different organizations have different standards for controlling social behavior.

Institutional theory considers the processes by which organizational structures—including rules, norms, and routines—become established as authoritative guidelines for social behavior: how these elements are created, spread, adopted, modified—and discarded—over space and time. The theory sees organizations as “rationalized” systems—sets of roles and related activities in a means-ends sequence oriented to obtain certain goals. Since models of rationality are, themselves, cultural systems, every organization uses methods “appropriate” to that society and culture. But at its core, institutional theory offers two propositions. First, it suggests that organizations’ formal structures can never overcome the non-rational dimensions of human behavior because individuals bring other interests, values, commitments, and social/cultural norms with them to their formal roles that limit rational decision-making. Second, institutionalization is a social process by which individuals come to construct—or give meaning to (or make sense of) their experiences—and share a common understanding of reality that exists independent of the person’s own views or actions. Eventually, they take these understandings for granted as “the way things are” and/or “the way things should be done.”

Philip Selznick (1919–2010), University of California, Berkeley sociology and law professor, is considered the founder of the institutional theory. He saw the organization as both a formal system (of related resources, efficiency, and effectiveness used to achieve the organization’s stated goal) and an adaptive and social system (of interacting individuals, sub-groups, and formal and informal relationships) mutually influencing each other. To accomplish the formal system’s goals, leaders must win their employees’ consent to do their jobs. This makes formal organizations cooperative systems in which informal groups (such as cliques) might contribute to achieving the organization’s goals. If an organization is to survive and meet its objectives, it must adapt to its environment’s influences and constraints—including its non-rational members and non-rational forces within its milieu. Therefore, organizations are defined by the tensions between their stated formal goals, the non-rational pressures that come from individual employees (who have personalities, ideas, needs, habits, values, emotions, and commitments that affect their thoughts and actions in day-to-day situations beyond their formal roles), and environmental stresses. These factors add unpredictability to ongoing processes. And, these non-rational dimensions are both indispensible to system coordination as well as a “source of friction, dilemma, doubt, and ruin.”

In Selznick’s view, the ongoing adaptations to external and internal environments and departures from the formal organization eventually become institutionalized as “unwritten laws.” Institutionalization is a neutral idea, a process that happens over time as an organization reacts to its internal and external pressures. Organizations take on a certain character, a distinct personality, and achieve a unique competence or built-in capacity. To institutionalize an organization is to “infuse it with value beyond the technical requirements of the task at hand,” to give intrinsic worth to a structure or process that uniquely fulfills personal and group needs. In education, we call this quality, organizational culture. When a practice becomes institutionalized as a rule or mode of informal cooperation, the original variation is transformed from what once was a personality difference into a persistent structural part of the formal organization—for better or worse. For the better, institutionalization promotes an organization’s stability and persistence over time. For the worse, it resists essential changes needed to keep the organization functioning productively in shifting environments. Selznick’s conclusion: an organization’s personality is in what it does, not what it claims to do. Monitoring the process of institutionalization is a major leadership responsibility.

In cooptation, organizations absorb new elements into their leadership or policy that make consequential changes as a way to avert threats to their stability or existence. In an example of cooptation, Selznick offers the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the 1930s southern Appalachian water control project: how a system’s non-rational aspects can be strong enough to change the organization’s stated goals to ensure its institutional survival. The TVA was established to provide income for impoverished residents, generate regional hydroelectric power, and help conserve farms and forests. To gain the trust and cooperation of local skeptics, TVA administrators invited some area leaders to serve on TVA advisory boards. Instead of helping TVA meet its environmental protection goals, these local board members turned forest watersheds into logging areas and gave land intended for public use to private developers. By studying how the TVA’s goals and functions morphed over time, Selznick illustrates how a system’s formal goals and practices can, in response to non-rational pressures, evolve into something quite different.

Sociology, management, and information technology prominently use institutional theory as a lens to interpret and analyze institutional change and agency (employees as catalysts for structural change in organizations). Research variables include the interactions between actors (called “institutional entrepreneurs”) and enabling factors (such as their social position and specific personal characteristics), their institutional environments (called “field-level conditions” and the processes by which they enact change (such as by using effective communication and mobilizing resources). Typically, research relies on critical analysis of organizational documents and single, in-depth longitudinal case studies. Studies appear to confirm many aspects of the theory.

Criticism of institutional theory begins by noting its conceptual complexity and ambiguity that allows investigators to use the term as a “buzzword” or “catch-all” to explain social phenomena—despite the lack of agreement to the term’s specific meaning. As a result, research on the theory lacks operational definition, a coherent theory of action, wider range methodologies, and more “finely grained” analyses to aid investigators seeking valid and reliable empirical measures to evaluate and test the theory’s accuracy or completeness. Likewise, institutional theory scholars argue with each other about whether “new” views of institutional theory dispute—or complement—the “old” views and whether an “undesirable preoccupation with polarities and polemics” are more important than problem solving.

Institutional theory is most widely used in professional domains outside education. As illustrated, their terms and concepts are not those with which educators are familiar. Nonetheless, their literature explores issues similar to those of Kurt Lewin, Chris Argrys, and Edgar Schein whose theories on leading organizational change and organizational culture will be discussed in Chapter 5. And its ideas about the social construction of meaning—sensemaking by individuals and groups to structure the unknown so as to better understand and act in the world—would increasingly appear in the organizational leadership literature.

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For a detailed discussion of institutional theory’s many faces, see: Scott, W.R. (1987). The adolescence of intuitional theory. Administrative Science Quarterly, 32 (4), 493–511.

Scott, W.R. (2004a). Institutional theory: Contributing to a theoretical research program. In K.G. Smith & M.A. Hitt (Eds), Great minds in management: The process of theory development. (pp. 460–480). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Retrieved from: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/W_Scott/publication/265348080_Institutional_Theory_Contributing_to_a_Theoretical_Research_Program/links/54de42450cf2966637857c60.pdf.

Meyer, J.W. & Rowan, B. (1977). Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony. American Journal of Sociology, 83 (2), 340–363.

Scott. (2004a). Op. cit.

Scott, W.R. (2003). Organizations: Rational, natural and open systems. 5th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Scott. (1987). Op. cit., 496.

Scott. (1987). Op. cit.

Selznick, P. (1948). Foundations of the theory of organization. American Sociological Review, 13 (1), 25–35 (25).

Selznick, P. (1996). Institutionalism: ‘Old’ and ‘new’. Administrative Science Quarterly, 41 (2), 270–277.

Scott, W.R. (1987). The adolescence of intuitional theory. Administrative Science Quarterly, 32 (4), 493–511; Selznick, P. (1957). Leadership in administration. New York, NY: Harper & Row, p. 17.

Selznick. (1996). Op. cit., 271.

Selznick. (1948). Op. cit.

Leca, B., Battilana, J. & Boxenbaum, E. (2009). Agency and institutions: A review on institutional entrepreneurship. Retrieved from: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bernard_Leca/publication/228479483_Agency_and_institutions_A_review_of_institutional_entrepreneurship/links/0c960524341c744afd000000.pdf; Walsh, J., Meyer, A.D. & Shoonhoven, C.B. (2006). A future for organization theory: Living in and living with changing organizations. Organization Science, 17 (5), 657–671.

Currie, W.L. & Swanson, E.B. (2009). Special issue on institutional theory in information systems research: Contextualizing the IT artifact. Editorial. Journal of Information Technology, 24 (4), 283–285; Colomy, P. 1998. Neofunctionalism and neoinstitutionalism: Human agency and interest in institutional change. Sociological Forum, 13 (2): 265–300; DiMaggio, P.J. (1988). Interest and agency in institutional theory. In L. Zucker (Ed.), Institutional patterns and organizations. (pp. 3–22), Cambridge, MA: Ballinger; Eisenstadt, S.N. (1980). Cultural orientations, institutional entrepreneurs and social change: Comparative analyses of traditional civilizations. American Journal of Sociology, 85 (4), 840–869.

For a detailed discussion of the research findings and methodologies of institutional theory, see: Leca, Battilana & Boxenbaum. (2009). Op. cit.

Leca, Battilana & Boxenbaum. (2009). Op. cit.

Thornton, P.H. & Ocasio, W. (2008). Institutional Logics, in R. Greenwood, C. Oliver, K. Sahlin and R. Suddaby (Eds) The SAGE handbook of organisational institutionalism. (pp. 130–148), London, UK: Sage.

Currie, W.L. & Swanson, E.B. (2009). Special issue on institutional theory in information systems research: Contextualizing the IT artifact. Editorial. Journal of Information Technology, 24 (4), 283–285

DiMaggio, P.J. & Powell, W.W. (1991). Introduction. In W.W. Powell & P.J. DiMaggio, (Eds), The new institutionalism in organizational analysis (pp. 1–38). Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Leca, Battilana & Boxenbaum. (2009). Op. cit.

Zucker, L.G. (1987). Institutional Theories of Organizations, Annual Review of Sociology 13, 443–446.

Scott. (1987). Op. cit., p. 509.

Selznick. (1996). Op. cit., pp. 275–276.

Weick, K.E. (1985). Cosmos vs. chaos: Sense and nonsense in electronic contexts. Organizational Dynamics, 14 (2), 51–64; Weick, K.E. (1993). The collapse of sensemaking in organizations: The Mann Gulch disaster. Administrative Science Quarterly, 38 (4) 628–652; Weick, K.E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Case Study

What Needs are Being Met—Or Not?

Steve Myran was the new principal of the 600-student Cripstown Elementary School, an urban school surrounded by gang-affiliated neighborhoods in the city’s poorest section. The school board appointed him to raise test scores, a perennial problem. He would be the school’s fifth principal in the last four years. Teacher transfers out of the building had been averaging 40 percent per year. The school counselor quit in February, and the school system has been unable to hire a replacement. During the previous year, eight teachers and an assistant principal were assaulted in the building. Sixteen fifth graders received suspensions ten or more times for bullying younger students for lunch money. Stray bullets from feuding gangs killed three middle school students. Test scores continued to drop. The superintendent told Steve that his job was to get test scores up.

Steve started by meeting with staff members individually. He asked them what it had been like here for the last several years. Each person (most had only been at the school for fewer than three years) told him it was the same thing every year: a new principal, pep talks about improving test scores, a new curriculum, reminders about test scores, bad teacher evaluations (in response to poor student performance on benchmark tests and state tests), followed by a new principal. They barely knew their colleagues or administrators. This school had a revolving door.

Steve met with Althea Later, the Director of Guidance for the school system. Althea filled in one day a week as the school counselor. Since she had been Director of Guidance for the last seven years, Steve asked for her impressions and recommendations. Althea told Steve that the students lacked structure and discipline. They needed a firm hand and to know that they were headed for a horrible life unless they took school seriously, paid attention in class, and did their homework. Steve listened in stunned disbelief.

Steve then met with students in groups of three or four in the school library. He called each child by name and asked how each felt about the school. While they visited, Steve provided them with pizza and soda. Several said this pizza was all they had to eat that day. Almost all the students said the same thing: the teachers did not want to be at their school, they were only interested in test scores, teachers were not friendly, and they didn’t care about the students. Students all said they didn’t feel safe at school, in their neighborhood, or at home. Steve listened closely. When the discussion ended, Steve smiled, thanked them for meeting with him, and shook each of their hands. Several children threw their arms around Steve and hugged him. All the students in the first group looked shocked after getting a handshake or seeing the hugs. Steve was puzzled at the reaction until on little third grade girl offered that was the first time anyone at the school ever touched her. He told her that it would not be the last time. She was welcome to come by the office anytime she wanted to chat.

For Steve, focusing on test scores was “putting the cart before the horse.” Teachers’ and children’s needs, beliefs, and goals—as well as their environment—affected their motivation and performance in school. At the very least, teachers and students needed to feel safe if they were to be able to teach and learn. They also needed to feel respected, have a sense of belonging, and find some satisfaction in their work. And, children needed to be adequately fed if they were to pay attention in class. His job as the school’s leader was to create the conditions and practices to better energize and support teachers’ and students’ self-efficacy. He started to plan.

ERG THEORY—CLAYTON ALDERFER

Trying to remedy the weaknesses in Maslow’s theory by aligning the needs hierarchy with empirical research, Clayton Alderfer, (1940– ), a Yale and Rutgers research psychologist, focused on understanding motivation in the workplace. Building on Maslow’s hierarchy, Alderfer proposed three categories of human needs: existence, relatedness, and growth (ERG).

Figure 4.1 Comparison of Maslow’s and Alderfer’s Motivation Theories
Source: Based on Schneider, B. & Alderfer, C.P. (1973). Three studies of measures of need satisfaction in organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly, 18 (4), 489–505 [Figure 1. Comparison of Maslow and ERG Concepts, p. 490] and Maslow, A.H. (1968). Towards a psychology of being. (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Harper & Row.

Alderfer’s ERG motivational model explains the somewhat simultaneous nature—rather than the hierarchy—of Maslow’s needs. Existence needs include physiological and safety needs (such as food, water, air, shelter, and salary). Relatedness needs include social and interpersonal relationships with family, friends, colleagues, and employers; and gaining others’ esteem. Growth needs include having self-esteem and the desire to be creative, productive, pursue and complete meaningful tasks. Figure 4.1 above compares Maslow’s and Alderfer’s human needs models.

Alderfer’s theory differs from Maslow’s in three main ways. First, it suggests that people can be motivated by needs from more than one level at the same time. The needs hierarchy is flexible; a strict progression from one level to the next is not necessary. Second, it recognizes that the importance of needs varies depending on the person and circumstances. For instance, certain individuals may value relationships (Maslow’s Level 3) more than safety (Maslow’s Level 2) at certain life stages. Third, the ERG theory proposes movement between levels of need. Alderfer posited a “frustration-regression” element; if needs remain unsatisfied at one of the higher levels, the person will become frustrated and return to meeting lower level needs again. For example, a teacher repeatedly denied the opportunity to teach Advanced Placement courses (growth needs) might decide to find enjoyment with friends and family (relatedness needs).

Many contemporary researchers regard the ERG theory as a more valid version of Maslow’s needs hierarchy, and research partially supports the ERG theory. Studies find that organizational leaders and top managers are primarily motivated by growth needs and seek a challenging work environment that offers occasions for creativity, self-fulfillment, advancement, and autonomy. Satisfying relatedness (collegiality) and existence (salary) needs are primary motivators for front line workers, but growth needs can also motivate them. At the same time, Alderfer’s critics claim his ERG concept is difficult to test empirically, assert that it lacks support as a universal theory of human needs, and challenge the idea underlying needs theories altogether.

Although Alderfer’s ERG theory has more empirical support and practical use as a workplace tool for increasing morale and productivity, it is less popular than Maslow’s theory. Speculations that Maslow’s theory’s introduction to popular thought decades earlier and its widespread acceptance might help explain why.

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Robbins, S.O. (1998). Organizational behavior: Concepts, controversies, applications. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Alderfer, C.P. (1969). An empirical test of a new theory of human needs. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 4 (2), 142–175.

Eyre, E. (n.d.). Alderfer’s ERG theory. MindTools. Retrieved from: http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMM_78.htm.

Luthans, F. (1998). Organizational behavior. Singapore: McGraw-Hill; Robbins. (1998).
Op. cit.; Zimbardo, P. (1988). Psychology and life. (12th ed.). Glenview, IL: Scott Foresman.

Alderfer, C.P. & Guzzo, R.A. (1979). Life experiences and adults’ enduring strength of desires in organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly, 24 (3), 347–361; Arnolds, C.A. & Boshoff, C. (2002). Compensation, esteem valence and job performance: An empirical assessment of Alderfer’s ERG theory. International Journal of Human Resource Management, 13 (4), 697–719; Yang, C-L., Hwang, M. & Chen, Y-C. (2011). An empirical study of the existence, relatedness, and growth (ERG) theory in consumer’s selection of mobile value-added services. African Journal of Business Management, 5 (19), 7885–7898. Retrieved from: http://www.academicjournals.org/article/article1380546863_Yang%20et%20al.pdf.

Arnolds & Boshoff. (2002). Op. cit.

Arnolds & Boshoff. (2002). Op. cit.

Wahba & Bridwell. (1976). Op. cit.; Luthans (1998). Op. cit.

Landy, F.J. & Becker, W.S. (1987). Motivation theory reconsidered. Research in Organizational Behavior, 9 (1), 1–38

Leadership-central.com. (n.d.). ERG theory. Retrieved from: http://www.leadership-central.com/erg-theory.html#axzz3hxwG9mGI
See: Frederick Herzberg’s Motivation/Hygiene Theory.

Alderfer, C. (1972) Existence, relatedness, and growth. Human needs in organizational settings. New York, NY: Free Press. Retrieved from: http://www.valuebasedmanagement.net/methods_alderfer_erg_theory.html.

Case Study

A Golden Opportunity?

Tim had been a very successful principal in Silver Rock County before applying and getting the job as elementary principal in the elite (and better paying) Golden County school system. At Silver Rock, Tim took a failing school (about to be taken over by the state), and after nine years of his leadership, the school was fully accredited. It even achieved the National Blue Ribbon status. He was a bit sad to leave, but Golden County was too much of an opportunity not to pursue. He started work at the new school on July 1.

Golden Elementary School was fully accredited and the test scores, which were above the state average, were increasing yearly. But Tim believed the students could be scoring higher. He told himself that all he needed to do was take charge as he did in Silver Rock, rearrange a few things, tweak the schedule a bit, and Golden’s test scores could be the state’s highest. Tim knew that growing involved change, and he was going to change certain aspects of the school.

Over the summer, Tim met briefly with the grade level chairs. They told him that although the school was moving forward in increasing every student’s learning and achievement, not all faculty were “on the same page.” This encouraged Tim to keep his “strong leader” approach as he prepared his recommendations for the faculty workweek before the students returned. At the first faculty meeting, Tim introduced himself to the teachers and told of his experience at Silver Rock. He shared that he would like to see Golden Elementary achieve Blue Ribbon status; it would increase community pride and support for the school. Tim told the faculty that he would like to change the mascot, The Golden Teddy Bear, to the Golden Eagle—a more proud and mature symbol. He told the faculty that there were other things that needed to change to be in line with state standards. Some field trips did not align with state curriculum. The weekly pep rallies took up too much instructional time, and they would be ended. The practice of having Friday as Grandparent’s Day—when grandparents would come to classes and tell students stories about the Korean War, the Civil Rights movement, and other historical events through which they lived—would need to end to increase time on the tested curriculum.

Tim dismissed the faculty to go back and work in their rooms. Although the teachers left silently, they formed small cliques as they returned to their rooms. They began to criticize the changes and Tim’s high-handed leadership. The new principal did not understand their school or what was making it work so well for teachers and students. He was trying to undo the attitudes, practices, and traditions that made their school successful! By the end of the day, almost all the teachers identified three trusted colleagues to speak with the principal tomorrow about his wrong-headed approach to improving their school. If the new principal did not respond well to their pointed concerns and suggestions, they would seek redress with the school board.

The next morning, the teacher leaders met with Tim. They politely but directly expressed their concerns about his approach to school improvement. They believed that Tim needed to understand their school before he tried to change it. Their teachers and students had demonstrated successful practices that resulted in learning and achievement. Of course, improvements were still possible. But Golden’s teachers were professionals who knew their students, had strong instructional skills, and wanted a say in how the school functioned. Besides, a strong education was about more than test scores. School climate and mutual respect also mattered. Those practices working well should continue while teachers and parents collaborated with Tim to identify additional ways boost student learning, achievement, and wellbeing.

Tim listened quietly. He felt humiliated. He knew the teachers were right. This was a different school with different conditions than his previous school. It would need a different type of leadership. He agreed to learn the school culture, leave effective practices in place, and work with teachers and the community on school improvements. How, he wondered, could he have begun his Golden leadership more appropriately? And how should he proceed?

LOOSE COUPLING THEORY—K.E. WEICK

A work group’s links with the rest of the organization—its coupling—influence its opportunities for learning and change. Karl Weick (1936– ), a University of Michigan professor of psychology and organizational behavior, popularized the view of organizations as loosely coupled systems. His loose coupling theory posits that although organizations and systems are composed of autonomous elements that are often unresponsive to one another (they may not be rationally, hierarchically, or bureaucratically controlled), organizational parts are related, or coupled.The strength of the coupling relationship varies along a continuum from loose to tight. Bureaucratic and cultural ties connect organization members, as do their job functions, their reliance on shared resources, and their vertical and horizontal networks. Members can be both loosely coupled (by separate locations and infrequent interaction) and tightly coupled (by shared interests and job functions) at the same time. The degree of looseness or tightness of coupling affects the organization’s response to learning and change.

Loosely coupled organizations tend to share certain characteristics. These include unclear, diverse, or ambiguous organizational practices and goals; low levels of coordination of employees’ productive activities; low levels of organizational control and managerial authority; and high levels of employee autonomy. To some, this lack of tight centralized control looks likes a substantial absence of cohesion and integration. Studies summarizing research on organizational coupling identify the degree of hierarchical control by a central authority or decentralized delegation in organizations as the major factor in determining the degree of coupling.

Weick theorized that loose coupling affords several advantages and disadvantages to organizational learning and change. Table 5.1 depicts these. Advantages include allowing parts of an organization to develop independently of the rest because they are more sensitive to local environmental demands. Their autonomy and flexibility allow them to respond with the necessary adaptations and innovations without committing the whole system to unproven novelties. For instance, one school in a district can pilot a new instructional program. Teachers can learn and practice the techniques, and the school can assess whether the innovations produce the desired student outcomes. But the entire district does not have to commit itself (and its resources) to an ineffective method. On the flip side, disadvantages include allowing separate units to use unproductive practices (because the coordination and pressure are not present to end them). This exposes the system to costly mistakes and limits the widespread adoption of fruitful innovations that could improve the entire system.

Table 5.1 Advantages and Disadvantages of Loosely Coupled Systems to Change

Source: Based on: Weick, K.E. (1976). Educational organizations as loosely coupled systems. Administrative Science Quarterly, 21 (1), 1–19.

Although Weick viewed schools as loosely coupled systems, today we see schools as complex organizations that are both loosely and tightly coupled. The loose coupling appears in educators’ autonomy, granting teachers the flexibility and authority to make professional judgments about their students, curriculum, and teaching methods; in schools separate facilities and locations within a school district; and in the school’s array of professional roles that assert autonomy about practicing according to their field’s specialized skills and ethics.

Alternately, tight coupling in schools—the norms, routines, hierarchy, and role-based relationships—provides its relative stability and continuity. Tight coupling appears in the uniform outcomes; an orderly process for moving students through the grades; the hiring of staff to schools and assigning them to classrooms; and the purchasing and allocating of materials requires logical, routine procedures. Teachers must also abide by the prescribed curriculum, grading policies, school schedules, standardized tests, and district policies about what may and may not be discussed in class (typically, sexuality, religion, and political ideology). In the past, tight coupling has meant that teachers had too little input into important school decisions and issues affecting them.

Yet, despite the variations in class size, classroom format, locations, and building architecture, we can still recognize these sufficiently similar facilities as “schools” (a combination of loose and tight coupling). The strength of the coupling depends on the types of activities the separate parts share: few common activities suggest looser coupling while overlapping or interactive activities suggest tighter coupling. For example, the counselor and the AP who work with the same seventh graders and believe that “good discipline is problem solving” will have more occasions to collaborate (relatively tighter coupling) than would counselors and APs who work with separate grade levels, different students, and different theories of practice (relatively looser coupling).

Wayne Hoy and Cecil Miskel, educational leadership professors at Ohio State and University of Michigan, respectively, conclude that schools contain two basic organizational domains: bureaucratic and professional. The bureaucratic one, typically a tightly coupled and cohesive structure, contains institutional and managerial functions. Too rigid at times, it prevents necessary adaptations and changes. The professional one, more loosely structured, addresses the technical processes of teaching and learning. Too independent at times, it produces problems with conflict, confusion, and coordination, reducing productivity and efficiency. As schools are open systems, changes in the environment exert pressure to tighten or loosen organizational links. No Child Left Behind’s public accountability thrust, for example, pressed schools to tighten its linkages.

Research supports Weick’s concept of loosely coupled organizations. Notably, loosely coupled systems can neutralize the impact of learning and change, as compared with tightly coupled systems; make it difficult for administrators to plan, predict, control or change; and only partially prevents the spread of difficulties or decline to the larger system. At the same time, loosely coupled systems are more open to experimentation than tightly coupled systems. The research of loosely coupled organizations’ effectiveness is mixed, however. For the most part, tight and loose coupling in schools coexist as matters of degree. Nonetheless, misleading findings can stem from methodological issues or trying to draw rough distinctions between bureaucracy and loose coupling.

Critics challenge loose coupling theory’s concept. First, they assail the theory’s conceptual ambiguity and multiple meanings that make it difficult to operationalize and study. Even its advocates note its “metaphoric” quality and its “cutting edge mysticism.” Next, critics assert that the traditional separation between “loose” and “tight” is a misleading, value-laden oversimplification that makes it difficult to identify the actual degree and form of control and coupling within schools. Further, comparing schools to the traditional industrial model’s ideal of a rational organization (as Weick did initially) may be using an invalid standard. Simply because schools don’t look or function like factories does not mean schools lack order, coordination, or purpose. Similarly, some educators challenge the view that schools, as loosely coupled systems, resist change; they point to the school effectiveness research and teacher effectiveness literature as contradicting this assertion.

As a concept, loose coupling is both a paradox and durable idea because it allows organizational analysts to explain the presence of both rationality and uncertainty at the same time. Any location in an organization has interdependent elements that vary in number and strength of connections. The resulting system is open and closed, rational and spontaneous, stable as well as open to outside influences. The degree of coupling, however, becomes an important factor in planning organizational learning and change.

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Weick, K.E. (1976). Educational organizations as loosely coupled systems. Administrative Science Quarterly, 21 (1), 1–19; Orton, J.D. & Weick, K.E. (1990). Loosely coupled systems: A reconceptualization. Academy of Management Review, 15 (2), 203–223.

Snook, S.A. (2000). Friendly fire: The accidental shootdown of U.S. Black Hawks over Northern Iraq. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Beekun, R.J. & Ginn, G.O. (1993). Business strategy and interorganizational linkages with the acute care hospital industry: An expansions of the Miles and Snow typology. Human Relations, 46 (11), 1291–1318.

Ingersoll, R.M. (1993). Loosely coupled organizations revisited. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 11 (1), 81–112.

Ingersoll. (1993). Ibid.

Aldrich, H. (1978). Centralization versus decentralization in the design of human service delivery systems: A response to Gouldner’s lament. In R. Sarri & Y Hasenfeld (Eds), The management of human services. (pp. 51–79). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Weick. (1976). Op. cit.

Hoy, W.K. & Miskel, C.G. (2013). Educational administration. Theory, research, and practice. New York, NY: McGraw Hill; Ingersoll, R.M. (1993). Loosely coupled organizations revisited. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 11 (1), 81–112.

Bidwell, C.E. (1965). The school as a formal organization. In J.G. March (Ed.), Handbook of organizations, pp. 972–1022. Chicago, IL: Rand McNally.

Orton & Weick. (1990). Op. cit.

Hoy & Miskel. (2013), pp. 126–128.

Glassman, R.B. (1973). Persistence and loose coupling in living systems. Behavioral Science, 18 (2), 83–98; Wilson, B.L. & Corbett, H.D. (1983). Organization and change: The effects of school linkages on the quality of implementation. Educational Administration Quarterly, 19 (4), 84–104.

Meyerson, D. & Martin, J. (1987). Cultural change: An integration of three different views. Journal of Management Studies, 24 (6), 623–647.

Perrow, C. (1984). Normal accidents: Living with high-risk technologies. New York, NY: Basic Books; Rubin, I.S. (1979). Retrenchment, loose structure, and adaptability in the university. Sociology of Education, 52 (4), 211–222; Cameron, K.S., Kim, M.U. & Whetton, D.A. (1987). Organizational effects of decline and turbulence. Administrative Science Quarterly, 32 (2), 222–240.

Hedberg, B. (1984). Career dynamics in a steelworks of the future. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 5 (1), 53–69; Manning, P.K. (1979). Semiotics and loosely coupled organizations. Revised version of a paper presented to the Southern Sociological Society, Atlanta.

See: Lutz, F.W. (1982). Tightening up loose coupling in organizations of higher education. Administrative Science Quarterly, 27 (4), 653–669; Murphy & Hallinger (1984). Op. cit.; Covalesky, M.A. & Dirsmith, M.W. (1983). Budeting as a means for control and loose coupling. Accounting, Organizations, and Society, 8 (4), 323–340.

Hoy & Miskel (2013). Op. cit. Most elementary schools are more tightly structured than secondary schools, but routine tasks and functions tend to be more bureaucratically organized in secondary schools.

Willower, D. (1982). School organizations: Perspectives in juxtaposition. Educational Administration Quarterly, 18 (3), 89–110.

Boyd, W.L. & Crowson, R.I. (2002). The quest for a new hierarchy in education: From loose coupling back to tight? Journal of Educational Administration, 40 (6), 521–533; Corwin, R.G. & Borman, K.M. (1988). School as workplace: Structural constraints on administration. In N.J. Boyan (Ed.), Handbook of research on educational administration (pp. 209–237). New York, NY: Longman; Orton & Weick. (1990). Op. cit.

Beekun, R.I. & Glick, W.H. (2001). Organization structure from a loose coupling perspective: A multidimensional approach. Decision Sciences, 32 (2), 227–250; Willower. (1982). Op. cit.

Orton & Weick. (1990). Op. cit.

Ingersoll believes the oversimplification stems from theorists’ and researchers’ “overlapping assumptions,” including: (1) The belief in the classroom/school division of labor (that teachers instruct and principals manage) and that classroom instruction is school’s primary educational function (rather than seeing the school’s social and institutional functions of passing on society’s norms, beliefs, and roles to the next generation); (2) The belief that schools should be judged in comparison to the machine model (and its rational and technical orientation); and (3) The theory’s disregard for control that the underlying social organization’s actors—with divergent power, needs, and values—express.

Ingersoll. (1993). Op. cit.

Ingersoll. (1993). Op. cit.

Murphy, J.A. & Hallinger, P. (1984). Policy analysis at the local level: A framework for expanded investigation. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 6 (1), 5–13.

Orton, J.D. & Weick, K.E. (1990). Loosely coupled systems: A reconceptualization. Academy of Management Review, 15 (2), 203–223.

Case Study

Preventing a Battle at Battlefield High School

As an AP physics teacher at Battlefield High School for the last ten years, Glen Schultz was very popular with students and faculty alike. He finished a Leadership Preparation program at the local university and had just been appointed the new assistant principal at his school. Many of his close friends on the faculty were glad to have him there. He and the school’s new principal, Dr. Janice Fine, began school on the same day.

Dr. Fine firmly believed that all students should have an intellectually rigorous academic program of curriculum, instruction, and assessment. But Battlefield High School’s practice was to “track” students by achievement levels. The school had an International Baccalaureate (IB) program and an Advanced Placement (AP) program for its highest achievers. It also had an Honors program, “regular” classes, and remedial classes for the other students. Dr. Fine believed in equity of educational opportunity. She wanted to eliminate the “regular” and remedial classes and place so-called “slower” achievers into the Honors classes. First, she knew she would have to give affected teachers adequate professional development so they could learn how to teach and support average students in a culturally responsive manner using a high challenge curriculum.

At their first meeting after introductions, Dr. Fine explained her goals to Glen and asked how he suspected the faculty might respond to her proposal. From his years at Battlefield, Glen knew that not all teachers would accept this idea. He told Dr. Fine that most likely, the veteran teachers believed in “tracking” high achieving students into IB, AP, and Honors classes to help these “advanced” students “reach their potential.” They thought the “slower” students should be grouped together in other classes so teachers could help meet their learning needs. They also liked their status as the “gifted” teachers. On the other hand, many of the newer teachers and a few others would welcome this more academically challenging approach. They were dissatisfied with teaching an unmotivating curriculum to unmotivated students. The new plan would allow them to teach a more stimulating curriculum, and they would be eager to develop their capacities to do so.

As Glen spoke, Dr. Fine sensed the potential for conflicts ahead—between certain teachers and administrators, among teachers themselves, and maybe between the school leadership, certain teachers, and parents. Many teachers have worked together for years. This issue of providing educational equity and excellence generates strong emotions. Teachers share offices in the same department and have time each day to talk about their concerns. A major upheaval could disrupt the school environment and make teaching and learning more difficult. Moreover, parents and the community could start taking sides. Although Dr. Fine had the authority to enact a new program, teachers had the power to make it fail. How could she and Glen think through this dilemma and explain (or justify) pursuing this conflict to themselves and their students, teachers, parents, and community? And once they had answers, how should they proceed?

As a whole class, discuss pairs’ findings. Survey the class to assess the current presence and level of functioning (high, medium, or low) of these three conditions in classmates’ own work sites. What recommendations would each classmate make for his/her principal or superintendent given these findings?

RANDALL COLLINS—CONFLICT, MOBILIZATION, AND INTERACTION RITUALS

Randall Collins (1941– ), a University of Pennsylvania professor and sociological theorist, focuses on understanding how conflict and the organizational hierarchy work at the interpersonal level. This includes how emotionally motivated—rather than rationally motivated—behaviors shape, make cohesive, and destroy societies. In his 1975 book, Conflict Sociology, Collins argued that “interaction rituals,” symbolic goods, and emotional solidarity are among conflict’s main weapons. In 1993, he presented a “mature” conflict theory as a body of principles that could help analyze social issues in a “difficult reality.” By introducing a wider and more distinctive view of conflict theory, Collins expands Coser’s and Dahrendorf’s perspectives.

Collins highlighted four main points of conflict theory. First, each social resource produces a potential conflict between the “haves” and the “have nots.” Second, potential conflicting interests are effective to the extent that opposing interests mobilize. Third, conflict now causes conflict later. And fourth, conflicts diminish as resources for mobilization are used up. Figure 6.4 depicts Collins’ four main point of conflict theory. Let’s consider each concept in turn.

Figure 6.1 Collins’ Conflict Theory
Source: Original figure by Leslie Kaplan and William Owings, 2017

Scarce Social Resources Produce Potential Conflict

Conflicts can erupt over control of three types of limited resources. These resources include economic resources (i.e., all material conditions), power resources (i.e., social positions within control or organizational networks), status or cultural resources (i.e., control over rituals and group symbolism that generate group solidarity). Conflict over any of these resources can produce long-term, historical changes. For instance, teachers often join unions to gain more power and leverage in negotiating with school district management over salaries, benefits (economic resources), and input into instructional, curricular, and governing decisions (power and status/cultural resources).

Potential Conflicting Interests Become Actual Conflicts

Groups with conflicting interests draw on a variety of resources to help them mobilize. These resources include: (1) emotional, moral, and symbolic resources and/or (2) material resources. First, groups need more than material goods (i.e., communications equipment, people, or money) to enter a conflict. Groups can also use clear-cut emotional and symbolic items—collective rituals that give the group a shared identity, meaning, values, and a sense of social membership—to wage conflict. These collective rituals—such as the annual convocations in which the district superintendent welcomes teachers and administrators back to the school district before the new school year begins—occur in the interaction practices of everyday life. Likewise, when principals distribute school T-shirts or school or district insignia lapel pins, they are using a distinct, symbolic item to generate school spirit. These rituals help people form friendships, build small groups, and create status equals (while excluding “outsiders” from such intimacy). They also motivate and energize members to develop organizational coherence and unity, learn about new issues, and organize for united action on behalf of their interests. The more a group can physically assemble together, create boundaries for their ritual practices (i.e., who can participate and who cannot), share a common focus of attention, and generate a collective emotional mood, the more the members will have a strong, explicit sense of group identity and a perspective that divides the world into “us” and “them,” “right” and “wrong.” The sense of group membership gives individuals a sense of social solidarity and the necessary “emotional energy” to make sacrifices for the group and their collective cause.

While emotional, moral, and symbolic resources may animate members to action, material resources enable a group to continue its conflict. These resources include communication and transportation technologies, material and money to support members while they are in conflict, weapons (if the conflict is military), and ample numbers of people (and, often, their physical strength). The need to mobilize resources for conflict is obvious, but the capacity to do so is the critical issue. Accordingly, Collins added two qualifications.

First: A conflict’s outcome depends not only on who has the most resources at the start but also who can replenish their used up, exhausted, and depleted supplies. During conflicts, people die; weapons break; and communications and transportation equipment become depleted. Moral fervor, shared rituals, and meaningful symbols, in contrast, may last longer. For instance, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights’ marches’ moral commitment, emotional energy, collectively singing “We Shall Overcome” illustrate the movement’s superior ritual mobilization that segregationist foes could not match. Of course, when each side has comparable levels of material and ritual resources, conflict may result in a stalemate. Similarly, fluctuating levels of ritual and material resources shift the advantage from one side to another.

Second: When using ritual mobilization for conflict, timing matters. Emotional energies peak and fade. If the conflict is not resolved while these emotions are high, the members may become emotionally exhausted. And, in the long run, conflicts decline unless members can rekindle their emotional energies. In other words, it is important to “strike while the iron is hot”—when members still feel motivated by righteousness, anger, fear, group solidarity, and willingness to sacrifice. The symbols and ideas themselves are not sacred or moral, but they do act to spur people’s emotions and reinforce the group’s identity. But unless the collective rituals are performed continuously and their collective symbols constantly exalted (and the “outsiders’” symbols constantly debased), people will grow disheartened. Many will start holding differing views about what is happening and what it means and become unable (or unwilling) to make the sacrifices needed to keep the conflict going.

Conflict now Engenders Conflict Later

By redistributing resources, one conflict’s end lays the groundwork for the next conflict—if the other side has the necessary resources and the ability to mobilize. To activate a potential conflict, parties must have a sense of their moral rightness—an emotional intensity greater than simply the need to have or control material goods. But as social solidarity can be positive, it can also be negative. During conflict, as a group’s culture becomes emotionally charged, it tends to lose its objectivity or neutrality. When this happens, people may exhaust their ability to see the “big picture.” Becoming ideologically polarized, each side in the conflict comes to see the worst in their enemies.

As a result, highly mobilized conflicts tend to become a ritualized exchange of atrocities. No group ever enters into a conflict knowing or sensing that they are wrong; they usually feel morally justified in doing what they do to their “enemies.” History—and today’s news—gives us many ghastly examples of this process: conflict groups committing reciprocal mayhem and “ritual punishments” in the guise of “justice” that satisfy their moral outrage, enact retribution, gather support, and further affirm social solidarity. The terrorists who flew hijacked planes into the World Trade Center on 9/11 believed they were morally vindicated in attacking the “corrupt” United States. Islamic State fighters in Iraq and Syria behead those they consider to be “infidels” and post videos of the grisly scenes on social media to inspire followers and generate jihadist recruits. The back and forth exchange of cruelties reproduces and boosts members’ emotional motivation and moral justification and creates additional symbols for ritual performances. Yet each side in the conflict is blind to the notion that their enemies will perceive the punishments as abominations—and create a backlash. As the uncommitted public looks on, the balance of power tends to swing against the movement that is perceived to have gone too far.

And, on a much smaller scale, one does not have to be a jihadi to feel intensely angry, resentful, and waiting for a chance for “payback” after investing a lot of time and emotional energy participating in an weighty dispute at work—only to lose. In schools as in the larger world, poorly managed or resolved conflicts often lead to more of the same.

Conflicts Diminish as Opponents use up Resources for Mobilization

Decreases in conflict—de-escalation or demobilization—happen largely in reverse of how conflicts mobilize. Decreases in conflict can occur in one of two ways: when the material costs of conflict become too high to continue or when conflict groups lose the conditions that allowed identity rituals that strengthen group solidarity to continue. In the first instance, although emotional resources are essential in the short run to keep the conflict going, material resources are key to sustained conflict in the long run.

Two reasons explain why. First, milder or sporadic forms of conflict tend to go on longer than more intense ones: they use fewer, more easily rekindled resources. For instance, terrorism, guerilla warfare, and relatively peaceful political movements may continue for decades because they occur intermittently and members can stay motivated to agitate for a while. Second, relatively mild forms of conflict—such as those that occur in schools—tend to de-escalate because the conflict is bureaucratized. Bureaucracies’ formal rules, permanent organizational positions, and specialized personnel tend to take the concessions that the conflicting parties make and institutionalize them—that is, make them part of the organization. For instance, contemporary conflicts over dangerous working conditions or product liability lead to new or expanded government regulations. Teachers who believe their principals or department chairs are treating them unfairly can file a grievance with their school district and receive due process investigations and protections. Likewise, the civil rights and gender equality movements—once the sources of significant social conflict—now have official status (i.e., special academic departments and administrative officials to monitor affirmative action standards) within organizations and universities. Some might say that the bureaucracy has “co-opted” many an ideological movement, creating a living testament to past conflict victories.

In the second instance (when conflict groups lose the conditions for identity rituals), group members disperse. They can no longer get together daily to participate in collective rituals to renew or boost their emotional energy, needed to keep the conflict going. Also, as conflicting group members get to know each other—or develop mutual friends—the group boundaries and the identity of the conflict weaken. A new conflict may override the initial conflict and become more important to group members, splintering their attention. Early twentieth century ethnic conflicts between Anglo-Americans and non-Anglo European immigrants were largely replaced in later years by group identification along racial/ethnic lines. In the 1990s, the gay rights community began a widespread movement for social, economic, and legal respect. The reality that many families had gay members as loved ones supported this expansion. Only if members mobilized in conflict can direct their attention and energies to a single focus and interaction ritual can they sustain their emotional and symbolic intensity. In contrast, Collins posited that a long series of separate conflicts tends to demobilize each in turn.

Research and Criticism

Views on the research support for Collins’s theory are mixed. Collins claimed strong research support for his conflict theory, validating it by synthesizing prior coherent theories (consistent with how the world actually operated) by well-regarded thinkers and their empirical support (even if it had “fuzzy edges”) along with micro-research (studying the smallest levels of naturally occurring interactions) that supported the conflict theory’s main propositions. In his view, triangulating the data from different research methods on related topics in this way “vindicated” his theory. Collins also validated components of conflict theory by considering conflict research as it appeared in other areas of sociology. By contrast, the merits of his approach are subject to vigorous debate in sociology. Several scholars criticized Collins’s methodology as an “extraordinarily narrow,” reductionist, “radical microsociology” approach to validating theory as a serious threat to sociology’s traditional range of concerns (i.e., social structure, culture, and how people construct reality); and asserted that his methods ignored much of social reality. So despite other investigators identifying conflict (in general) as a major determinant of organizational phenomena, the specifics of Collins’s theory lack empirical support.

Collins’s critics also take aim at his theory. In reviewing Collins’s Conflict Sociology (1975), Louis Coser (who knew something about conflict theory) called Collins’s theory “important…but seriously flawed,” noting that it neglected certain areas. Others saw Collins’s conflict theory as a work of general sociology, or as a precursor to his “radical microsociology” rather than as a new look at social conflict theory. Certain critics challenged Collins’s emphasis on interactive rituals that techno-bureaucratic structures had largely replaced in all areas of modern social life.

Despite these limitations, Collins added unique and insightful contributions to conflict theory: symbolic goods and emotional solidarity are among conflict’s main weapons, and they are part of everyday life’s interactions. Conflict does not occur only between warring parties. Rather, conflict depends on—and occurs in—subtle forms, in face-to-face interactions and rituals. In addition, Collins asserted that since conflict produces ideological blinders that morally glorify “insiders” and demonize “others,” members cannot see that mutually escalated conflict “puts their fates in each other’s hands.” In Collins’s conflict spiral, nobody wins absolutely. In contrast, those who understand conflict theory gain the insights to rise above the ideological viewpoints, identify the mixed costs and benefits inherent in every conflict, and are more likely to find alternate paths to workable solutions.

As a class, discuss how participants in the conflict noted above used emotional, moral, and symbolic resources to advance their goals.

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Allen, K. (2011). Conflict theory: Lewis Coser, Ralf Dahrendorf, and Randall Collins.
In The social lens: An invitation to social and sociological theory, 2nd ed. (pp. 223–262).
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Collins, R. (1975). Conflict sociology: Toward an explanatory science. New York, NY: Academic Press.

Collins, R. (1993). What does conflict theory predict about America’s future? 1993 Presidential address. Sociological Perspectives, 36 (4), 289–313.

Collins. (1993). Ibid.

Collins. (1993). Op. cit.

Collins. (1993). Op. cit., pp. 290–291; Allen. (2011). Op. cit.

Collins. (1993). Op. cit., pp. 291–292.

Allen. (2011). Op. cit.

Collins. (1993). Op. cit., pp. 292–294.

Collins. (1993), pp. 292–294.

Collins. (1993). Op. cit.

Collins. (1993), Op. cit., pp. 295–297.

Halle, D. (1984). America’s working man: Work, home, and politics among blue collar property owners. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Collins. (1993). Op. cit., p. 297.

The thinkers upon whose work Collins validated his theory included Machiavelli, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Max Weber, Elton Mayor, and Ralf Dahrendorf.

Collins, R. (1990). Conflict theory and the advance of macro-historical sociology. In G. Ritzer (Ed.), Frontiers of social theory: The new synthesis. (pp. 68–87). New York, NY: Columbia University Press; Collins. (1989). Ibid., p. 124; Collins, R. (1981a). On the microfoundations of macrosociology. American Journal of Sociology, 86 (5), 984–1014. Collins admits that his theory is “radical micro-sociology.” Collins also built his conflict theory on the empirical findings of Harold Garfinkel (1967), Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, and Erving Goffman (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. New York, NY: Doubleday.

Collins, R. (1981b). Sociology since midcentury: Essays in theory cumulation. New York, NY: Academic Press, pp. 13–44; Collins, R. (1989). Sociology: Proscience or antiscience? American Sociological Review, 54 (1), 124–139.

Collins. (1990). Op. cit.

Ritzer, G. (1985). The rise of micro-sociological theory. Sociological Theory, 3 (1), 88–98; Turner. (2006). Op. cit,

Collins. (1981a). Op. cit.

Ritzer. (1985). Op. cit.; Turner. (2006). Op. cit.

Crozier, M. (1964). The bureaucratic phenomenon. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press; Dalton, M. (1959). Men who manage, New York, NY: Wiley; Gouldner, A. (1954). Patterns of industrial bureaucracy, New York, NY: The Free Press.

Coser, L.A. (1976). Review. Conflict sociology: Toward an explanatory science. By Randall Collins. American Journal of Sociology, 81 (6), 1507–1511 (p. 1508).

Oberschall. (1978). Op. cit.; Turner. (2006). Op. cit.

Ritzer. (1985). Op. cit.

Henry, P. (2001). Randall Collins, ideas and ritual solidarity. Sociological Forum, 16 (1), 167–174.

Collins. (1993). Op. cit., p. 311.

Case Study

How Did My Professional Development Session Go?

Sonja Henie, a high school physical education teacher with two years experience, became the new assistant principal of Lake Staten Middle School effective July 1. Her principal assigned her the task of preparing a staff development workshop for all of the English Language Arts (ELA) teachers concerning a new program from the Central Office. She could take up to four of the six workdays before students returned in September for the meeting. After consulting the grade level team leaders, Sonja decided to take only one day so teachers could have more time to prepare their rooms and discuss how to implement the new program among themselves.

Lake Staten Middle School teachers have a tradition of taking their jobs very seriously. They are proud of their parent and community involvement. Parent satisfaction with the school is very high. Children like to go to school there, and test scores are among the highest in the state. The principal is supportive of the excellent teachers, but wants a Central Office position. As a result, he is spending more time participating in Central Office projects than in leading the school and is relying heavily on Sonja to oversee many of the school’s projects.

Thomas Jenney, the school’s ELA lead teacher—a district-wide model teacher who provides demonstration lessons and workshops for ELA teachers—is highly respected and holds the principal’s total confidence. Jenney was one of the people who asked Sonja to remember the teachers’ need to prepare their classrooms (among other things) in the few days before the students returned. Jenney quietly wondered why Sonja, the new AP without ELA experience, was designing and conducting the ELA workshop.

Sonja’s staff development meeting lasted only four hours. She reviewed program components while teachers listened. At the end, she told the teachers she would be looking to see how they were implementing the new program when she came to observe classes. Then, she gave teachers a 400-page manual that she had written and told them that it contained all the information they needed. She dismissed them without time for questions.

The next week, Sonja asked the ELA lead teacher Jenney how he thought the new program was being implemented. Jenney replied, “There was a great deal of confusion about what the new program was and how it was to be put into classroom practice. The manual was poorly written and very unclear about what to do.” Jenney did not know that Sonja had written the manual. He added that Sonja’s workshop was, “way too short for teachers to know how to make this program work in their classrooms. There was no time for questions and answers or guided practice with feedback.” Sonja quickly retreated to her office, shut the door, and cried.

Sonja was frustrated, hurt, and worried. She knew she had a problem on her hands—and she needed to quickly figure out what it was and decide how to fix it. Where should she begin?

ROBERT T. CRAIG—THE COMMUNICATION METAMODEL

Robert T. Craig (1947– ), a University of Colorado at Boulder professor emeritus and founding editor of the journal, Communication Theory, saw communication itself as a socially constructed practice, the primary process by which humans experience life. Rather than a secondary phenomenon to be explained by psychology, sociology, cultural or economic factors, Craig theorized communication as the primary, constitutive social process that explained all these other factors. In his view, communication constituted reality. How people communicate about their experiences helps to shape that experience. In turn, the many types of human experiences result from the many forms of communication. The meanings of our words change from one group to another, from one locale to another, and from one situation to another because communication, itself, is dynamic across situations. Likewise, Craig viewed theories as special forms of communication. Different theories are various ways of “talking about talking,” and each theory has its strengths and limits.

But in the late 1980s, the field of communication theory operated mainly in separate domains. Books and articles on communication theory seldom mentioned works on the same topics by scholars from other disciplines. Mostly, communication scholars from varied disciplines ignored each other. To remedy what he saw as intellectual narrowness, Craig expanded the view of communication to include theory and practice informing each other. Recognizing that all communication theories are alternate responses to some aspect of communication faced in everyday life, Craig reasoned that the dialogue within the field could focus on what and how various theories addressed the social world in which people lived. Accordingly, he created a metamodel that integrated an array of traditions into a coherent framework. He devised a way to compare and contrast different communication theories’ compatibilities and tensions, their problems and practices. In short, Craig intended his metamodel to facilitate “talk about talk”, about communication in society.

The Constitutive Model as a Metamodel

Craig proposed a constitutive—an organizing—metamodel of communication theories to create coherence among the disjointed array from varied academic disciplines. Craig proposed that communication is not merely a neutral conduit for transmitting existing information. Rather, it is the primary social process through which we construct our meaningful common world. Communication has no “absolute reality” apart from how people perceive it. Accordingly, every theory of communication offers a certain way of depicting the communication process from some practical orientation.

Craig offered several reasons for his observations. First, ideas about communication have their own cultural and historical contexts: they are time and culture-bound. Since they reflect their culture, they actually help create the very phenomena that they propose to explain. Language and culture evolve to fit the ideas and needs of people who live it. If Eskimos living in Artic climes have 50 words for snow, they see snow in at least 50 different ways. Second, these historical and cultural ties have practical and political implications. Because communication theories influence society, they tend to serve privileged and powerful interests, ignoring interests of those with less societal influence. For example, a society that prizes scientists and engineers will advance a transmission model of communications (source-message-receiver), which can further the goals of technical experts, using language to reinforce cultural beliefs that celebrate the value of experts as reliable and respected information sources.

Table 7.1 Craig’s Constitutive Metamodel of Communication

Source: Adapted from: Craig, R.T. (1999). Communication theory as a field. Communication Theory, 9 (2), 119–161 (133).

In his metamodel, Craig proposed a matrix representing the seven “traditions” of thought in communication theory. Table 7.1 depicts Craig’s matrix using the four traditions this chapter will discuss. Each tradition presents unique definitions of communication, how it theorizes communication, its ideas of communication problems, specialized vocabularies, and everyday assumptions about communication that either show its practical believability or challenge its credibility. The matrix also includes lines of argument for discussion across the seven traditions, suggesting how they tend to disagree in their approach to practical problems. For example, the cybernetic tradition, theorizes communication as information processing. It posits problems of communication as noise, overload or underload; a malfunction is a “bug” in the system. It uses vocabulary such as source, receiver, signal, information, noise, feedback, redundancy, network, and function. It is credible when referring to everyday events such as the value of information and logic and its assertion that complex systems can be unpredictable.

Craig intended the metamodel to explore communication theory and encourage coherence, theoretical diversity, argument, and debate—even “academic sniping”—about communication. He did not intend to develop a unified theory. In his view, the field of communication theory is so consequential that agreeing to disagree is acceptable. Talking about the theories is the important point. And, even as these seven traditions of thought have evolved historically, Craig reasoned that they would likely continue to develop, recombine, and redivide along different lines of separation, making new perspectives on communication possible.

Research and Criticism

Although Craig’s communication theories metamodel has been widely cited in the scholarly literature and textbooks, it has not been directly subject to empirical research. Its contribution has been to increase scholars’ consciousness of communication’s breadth as a field.

Severalcritics have taken issue with Craig’s metamodel. One claimed that it diminished philosophically incompatible thought traditions and trivialized important differences. Another claimed that the metamodel was not a neutral framework but rather an attempt to impose Craig’s preferred viewpoint (in this case, social constructionism) to create a grand theory. In response, Craig admitted to his own bias, asserting that no neutral metamodel can exist. A different critic pointed to Craig’s failure to clarify the role of pragmatism (i.e., John Dewey’s philosophy) as a tradition in the field and its role in the metamodel’s design. Largely agreeing with this critique, Craig revised his metamodel accordingly. He also acknowledged that the metamodel could not be tested by empirical research, and advised that the brief descriptions of the traditions cannot substitute for deep reading across traditions.

Although Craig’s communication metamodel has not facilitated coherence in a highly diverse academic field, it does offer (as do all communication theories) a metadiscourse, a way of “talking about talk. ” It receives much of its credibility and interest by appealing to ordinary communication practices. In modern societies, everyday people talk about communications. In fact, certain scholars claim that ours is a culture in which we tend to suspect that all interpersonal difficulties are basically communication problems. We often find we need to “sit down and talk” so we may “work out problems” in our relationships. Many affirm that communication is the only tie that can hold together a diverse society across the large geographical and cultural gaps that divide us. Bringing coherence to the varied traditions, as Craig attempts to do, may facilitate that process.

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Littlejohn, S.W. & Foss, K.A. (Eds) (2009). Encyclopedia of communication theory, 1.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 8–9.

Craig, R.T. (2006b). Pragmatism in the field of communication theory. Paper presented to the Annual Conference of the International Communication Association, Dresden, Germany, June 2006.

Carey, J.W. (1989). Communication as culture. Essays on media and society. Winchester, MA: Unwin Hyman; Krippendorff, K. (1997). Seeing oneself through others’ eyes in social inquiry. In M. Huspek & G.P. Radford (Eds.), Transgressing discourses: Communication and the voice of the other (pp. 47–72). Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Robinson, D. (2013, January 14). There really are 50 Eskimo words for “snow.” Health & Science, The Washington Post. Retrieved from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/there-really-are-50-eskimo-words-for-snow/2013/01/14/e0e3f4e0-59a0-11e2-beee-6e38f5215402_story.html.

Craig, R.T. (1999). Communication theory as a field. Communication Theory, 9 (2),
119–161.

These seven traditions include: rhetorical, semiotic, phenomenological, cybernetic, socio-psychological, sociocultural, and critical. This chapter will look more closely at the last four because they have relevance to educational leadership.

Craig. (1999). Op. cit., p. 133.

Craig, R.T. (2009). Reflection on Communication theory as a field. Communiquer. Retrieved from: http://communiquer.revues.org/346.

Martinez, J.M. (2008). Semiotic phenomenology and the ‘dialectical approach’ to intercultural communication: Paradigm crisis and the actualities of research practice. Semiotica, 2008 (169), 135–153.

Myers, D. (2001). A pox on all compromises: Reply to Craig (1999). Communication Theory, 11 (2), 231–240.

Craig, R.T. (2001). Minding my metamodel, mending Myers. Communication Theory, 11 (1), 133–142; Craig. (2006b). Op. cit.

Russill, C. (2005). The road not taken: William James’ radical empiricism and communication theory. The Communication Review, 8 (3), 277–305.

Craig. (2006b). Op. cit.

Craig. (2009). Op. cit.

McKeon, R. (1957). Communication, truth, and society. Ethics, 67 (2), 89–99.

Katriel, T. & Philipsen, G. (1981). What we need is “communication”: “Communication” as a cultural category in some American speech. Communication Monographs, 48 (4), 301–331.

Carey. (1989). Op. cit.

Case Study

A Tale of Two Counties

On March 1, Helen White began her role as the new principal of the urban Thomas Jefferson High School (TJHS). For the past six years, TJHS had been struggling with declining student achievement. Her primary task, as the school board instructed, was to reverse this trend. Over the last ten years, Jefferson County’s economy had suffered: businesses and industries had left, unemployment increased, and teacher turnover approached 70 percent per year. Pay had been frozen for the past five years due to the economic turndown. As a result, the average teacher had just three years of experience. The school’s accreditation was in danger, and employee morale was abysmal. Helen thought it could only improve.

During the same period, neighboring suburban community, Madison County, flourished. The economy boomed, unemployment was near 3 percent, and the schools’ test scores increased. Starting teacher pay in Madison was $6,000 higher than in Jefferson with much better benefits. Many of Jefferson County’s best teachers moved to Madison County. James Madison High School had moved from obscurity to a National Blue Ribbon school over the last eight years.

As Helen started to learn about TJHS over the rest of the semester, she was not certain where to start. So many factors needed attention. Three of her department chairs and seven teachers turned in their resignations; they planned to work in other school districts. Perplexed, she called her graduate advisor, Dr. Scribner, and explained the situation. Dr. Scribner helped her frame the situation around three concepts—the staff’s instructional capacity, the staff’s motivation and commitment to meet school goals, and the conditions under which they worked. Considering all three aspects as contributors to teachers’ changed pedagogical practices and increased student learning made sense to Helen.

After thinking the situation through, Helen concluded that due to the economic conditions of the county, there was little she could do to improve motivation and commitment; and building instructional capacity would take time. So, she decided to work on improving the school’s working conditions. For the next six months, she did all she could to improve working conditions—serving breakfast once a week to the faculty and staff, having the administrators take care of some paperwork for the teachers, and making the staff feel valued and appreciated. Helen felt as if she were making good progress, and teachers were working harder to help students succeed.

At the end of the second week of April the State Benchmark tests came back, and scores indicated the year-end tests would be the worst decline in eight years. On top of that, the teachers’ intent to return forms for the following school year came in. More than 50 percent of the teachers indicated they did not plan to come back the following year.

The next day the Superintendent called and requested a meeting that afternoon. Helen wondered what would happen later in the day and why her plan had not worked.

FEMINIST THEORY AND ORGANIZATIONAL CAPACITY BUILDING

The term glass ceiling first used in 1984, refers the invisible barrier that keeps women (and minorities) from achieving organizational leadership. As feminists see it, this lack of professional opportunity and advancement occurs not because these employees lack skills, experience, or ability. It happens because corporate leaders (and their social culture) hold bias against women (and minorities) in leadership positions. And, despite the last 30-plus years’ evolving attitudes towards gender (and race), few women occupy top corporate leadership positions.

According to the Pew Research Center, in the Fortune 500 companies, only 26 of 500 CEOs are women (5.2 percent). Women make up only 17 percent of their corporate board members. Although women occupy more than half of managerial and professional occupations (52.2 percent in 2013), they still account for less than one quarter of senior management (22 percent in 2014). Twenty-four women CEOs led only 4.8 percent of Fortune 500 companies. This is despite the data that shows women in leadership positions bring their organizations higher financial returns. These data suggest that women cannot assert fair expectations for career advancement and give credence to feminist theories that organizations are gendered to consistently advantage males and disadvantage females.

Although the feminist literature about women in organizations is too large and complex to present here, their central theses about gender and organizations deserves attention. First, in the late 1960s, feminist scholars defined a difference between “sex” and “gender.” Sex, they suggested, is a biological category associated with a person’s chromosomes and expressed in genitals, reproductive organs, and hormones. Gender, by contrast, is a social category associated with a complex set of social processes that create and sustain differences between women and men. Sex is in the body; gender is in the mind. Therefore, gender is socially constructed in a hierarchy that privileges men, whereas sex is innate. As a result of thinking sex rather than gender, organizations have used small differences between men and women at work to legitimize their differential treatment. As a result of this insight, feminist theorists concluded that sex differences were a fiction that organizations, typically headed by men, used to justify unequal treatment.

Second, according to feminist theory, organizations are not gender-neutral social phenomena. Rather, organizations are designed (by white men) with certain structural factors to facilitate the smooth entry and upward mobility of white men into positions of power. White men establish the criteria for entry into similar positions, define success, identify rewards, decide how to distribute resources, and set the institutional goals and priorities in ways that perpetuate their power.

In short, as feminist theory sees it, white men-designed organizational rules and structures to distribute opportunity (i.e., mobility prospects, who will advance within the organization), power (i.e., influence), and location (i.e., using numerical gender ratios to place men and women into certain jobs which may or may not have opportunities for advancement) differentially. These gendered structures define and shape the ways that organization members respond to their jobs and to each other—to women’s economic and professional disadvantage. This unequal distribution of opportunities tends to keep women in certain career positions, limits women’s opportunities to build capacity or advance in responsibility and status, and hinders their ability to earn increasingly larger salaries. Those women who do receive growth opportunities and career advancement are often “tokens,” given positions of authority outside the true power centers (i.e., as CEOs, presidents, trustees, members of governing boards, and on review panels of granting agencies). Considering how organizational structure is gendered to affect opportunity, power, and location to women’s disadvantage can make this assertion clearer.

Gendered Organizations

Feminists assert that organizations traditionally have used gender as a sorting mechanism to assign people into certain roles, opportunities, and power. As Joan Acker, professor emerita of sociology, University of Oregon, and feminist scholar, defines it, “a gendered organization (or any analytic unit) means that advantage and disadvantage, exploitation and control, action and emotion, interpretation of events and personal/professional identity are patterned in distinctions between male and female.” Gender ratios are the proportion of men-to-women that organizations prescribe for certain positions. And, gendered organizations usually involve subordinating women, either concretely or symbolically.

In organizations, gendering occurs in at least five interacting processes. First, it creates divisions along gender lines. Gender-based divisions of labor, permissible behaviors, power, and locations in physical space are well documented. In American education, men traditionally became the professionals who maintained the school’s continuity (the principals), whereas females became the (replaceable and interchangeable) teachers. Second, gendering constructs symbols and images that explain, express, reinforce or sometimes challenge those gendered divisions. For instance, until the late twentieth century when women’s pantsuits, “business casual,” and “workplace functional” clothing became acceptable professional attire, women’s work wardrobe of skirts and dresses limited their physical movement and the occupational roles they could hold.

Third, gendered organizations shape the interactions between men and women, women and women, and men and men, signaling dominance and submission. For example, conversational analysis shows gendered differences in interruptions, turn taking, and topic setting that recreate gender inequality in ordinary talk. Fourth, these processes help to produce gendered parts of individual’s identity, such as choice of appropriate work, language use, wardrobe, and presentation of self as a gendered member of an organization. Until the mid-to-late twentieth century, intelligent women who wanted careers outside the home could only expect a welcoming environment in teaching, nursing, and secretarial fields—each allegedly devoid of heavy lifting (physically or mentally).

Fifth, gender is a basic element in creating social structures in complex organizations as it does in families. Organizations have a gendered substructure—a hierarchy of opportunity, power, and location—that places certain proportions of men and women in certain organizational positions that determine who receives opportunities for professional growth, who has influence beyond their specific role, and who will advance up the career ladder. The gendered substructure determines the job evaluation systems and assigns salaries. These organizational structures and norms impact which employees will be selected for repeated occasions to build capacity and in which particular chain of positions will allow them to advance into supervision and leadership. Substantial research findings support claims of the historical development of the gendered division of labor, gender discrimination at work, and status differences in authority and power between men and women in the workplace.

Gendered processes and practices in organizations may be open and overt. Managers may choose only men or only women for certain positions. Until recently, sexual jokes demeaning women could be an acceptable part of the workplace culture. In contrast, gendered practices may be deeply hidden in organizational processes and decisions that appear to have nothing to do with gender. For instance, a “good” leader in the workplace is expected to be strong, confident, and assertive. But if a woman leader acts in this manner, she is judged to be uncaring, self-promoting, and aggressive (i.e., “not good”). Likewise, although an organization may offer work/life balance policies (such as paid family leave and flexible schedules), the organization’s “ideal” employee puts work before family, works long hours, and takes little (or no) time for personal matters. Both instances reflect a gendered organizational culture. In these workplaces, since most women continue to have primary responsibility for child, family, and home care, males may appear to be the more committed, “ideal” employee.

Studies suggest that managerial stereotypes about women and men have been relatively stable over time: results from a 2002 survey about “good” organizational leaders’ personality traits were essentially the same as survey results from 1989 and 1979. Gender roles and stereotypes have long histories in Western cultures. “Masculine” traits were prized; “feminine” traits were viewed as irrelevant or harmful. Nonetheless, a 2012 study found that the gender composition in organizations has changed significantly in the last decades, with more women in leadership and managerial positions. Results suggest that managerial stereotypes about gender could change as the result of personal experiences with women managers in organizations.

Organizational Structure and Opportunity

Feminist theory asserts that organizations have been designed around male workers, and masculine ideals control their authority structures. For centuries, the “typical” worker has been a man. Men’s life choices shaped the organization’s expectations about priorities, relationships, family, and salary. Accordingly, organizational roles come with gender models for the types of characteristics and persons who should hold them. The early image of managers—typically men—tended to exhibit the “masculine ethic:” rationality and reason, cognitive superiority, tough mindedness, and analytic planners and problem solvers able to separate personal and emotional concerns from the need to accomplish workplace tasks. This ethic elevated the traits assumed to belong to men with educational advantages as the ideal prototype person essential to organizational effectiveness.

Likewise, organizational assumptions, structures, processes, and work relations—embedded in its bureaucratic rationality, rules, and procedures—reflect these deeply embedded beliefs about gender differences. As a result, the organization’s hierarchy defines which people will receive occasions for growth so they can advance to higher positions. Gender becomes a sorting mechanism, a criteria for social placement in roles and positions that are deemed “appropriate” for men and women. Typically, the result has been for organizations to pack women into dead-end jobs at the bottom or promote them as “tokens” at the top.

Accordingly, women’s behavior should be understood as the result of their position in the organization’s opportunity structure—typically, lower on the hierarchy—not mainly as the result of being a woman. Organizational structure—not the gender traits—defines how organization members should behave towards their work tasks and their peers. If women sometimes have lower aspirations, lesser involvement in work, higher concern for peer group relations, are less preferred as leaders, and generate lower morale among subordinates, feminists argue—so do men in low status positions of limited organizational power or blocked mobility. People in low status or blocked mobility jobs tend to temper their aspirations. They seek satisfaction outside work, creating sociable peer groups in which interpersonal relationships are more important than other aspects of their jobs. By comparison, high mobility situations foster rivalry, unstable work groups, self-comparisons with those higher in the organization, and concern with intrinsic aspects of work. This is true for both men and women.

Research in organizational behavior supports the view that people at upper levels of organizations tend routinely to be more motivated, involved, and interested in their jobs than those working at lower levels. The available upward mobility situations generate either vertical or horizontal orientations.

Organizational Structure and Power

In organizations, power and gender are structurally linked. Men tend to be more represented in jobs with higher salary, greater status, and more formal organizational, political, and institutional power. Likewise, power and gender are culturally linked. Social practices construct tasks, positions, and traits that reflect traditional gender roles. Tradition asserts, for instance, “men are commanding and women are compliant,” and “fathers go to work while mothers stay home.” Rarely acknowledged, power in organizations operates through formal policies and procedures; informal work practices, norms, and patterns of work; and language and other symbolic expressions. These features can reinforce traditional gender roles or disrupt them. Traditionally, they have benefitted men while they have limited options and opportunities for women. The fact that a society socializes people to enact certain family and societal roles further propels these choices.

Power networks outside one’s formal role—having strong links with those placed higher in the organization and holding more status—suggest the power of potential influence. And, having actual—or potential—power and influence contributes to employees’ perceptions of their leaders’ effectiveness. It adds to the power base beyond the legitimate authority of the person’s current office. Research finds that people who come into a group with higher external status tend to be liked more, speak more often, and receive more communications than those with low external status. Likewise, having a preferred location in the power structure brings real and symbolic benefits. Having the structural advantages of close contact and good relations with the system’s other power holders and enjoying a position on the “inside track” in the power structure gives leaders more rewards (or threats) to offer (or coerce) subordinates.

Since organization leaders with higher status characteristics and “inside-track” positions have tended to be men, men usually hold the power advantage over women. Even women leaders may be excluded from the organization’s informal network and influence networks of professional peers, regardless of her competence or style (unless they have high status male sponsors to provide the visible sign—the “reflected power”—of outside and upward influence). Since our society has long viewed gender as a symbol of power, organizations simply reproduce the social structure, assumptions, and relations of its surrounding society.

Organizational Structure and Location (Gender Ratios and Tokenism)

Organizational structure impacts how men and women are placed within the organization. The gender ratio comes into play when considering the problems and behaviors of women placed highly in the hierarchies as “tokens” in male-dominated (numerically) groups. The gender ratio is the proportion of males to females in an organization or in a type of position. According to tokenism theory, when only a few managers are female (less than 15–20 percent), they can be considered as tokens.

Tokens face three negative experiences. First, their high visibility increases pressure on them to perform very well. Second, the exaggerated differences between women (as tokens) and men (as dominants) lead to tokens’ feelings of isolation: they cannot find common bonds either with the dominant group or with the few other tokens. Third, tokens face expectations that they will behave like others of their gender. As a gender minority in the leadership cadre, their sex becomes highlighted and more likely interpreted by gender stereotypes.

Research shows mixed support for the tokenism theory. Women in male dominated occupations and leadership roles tend to experience discrimination related to the occupation’s traditional view of women. Even contemporary studies conclude that male employees especially dislike female leadership traits in organizations where female managers are tokens. But not all women tokens face these problems. In fact, recent thinking about effective leadership has shifted. Today, “feminine” skills such as effectiveness in interpersonal relationships are highly valued. Similarly, current studies find that as organizations’ gender management ratios change, and organizations have more female leaders and managers, employees who have actual experiences working with these women leaders tend to find male-female distinctions less important. In fact, investigations conclude that employees working in an organization with a high percentage of female managers have a stronger preference for feminine characteristics of managers and for female managers. Experimental studies also find that presenting information that is inconsistent with the stereotype undermines the stereotype. The more women in organizational leadership and management positions, the less stereotyping and related issues occur.

Criticism of Feminist Theory

Feminist theory in the United States often faces criticism that its basic tenets and conclusions apply only to women in developed industrialized countries. Some challenge feminists’ primary focus on male societal power over other marginalizing forces—such as differing socialization of boys and girls outside the organization —and fault their narrow attention to gender inequality while ignoring other categories of discrimination, such as race, class, or sexual orientation. Several dispute the view that asserting that men and women are equal denigrated women’s unique contributions. A number of feminist theorists have also criticized what they consider to be the oversimplifications and generalizations, especially those derived from considering only white, middle class, heterosexual women.

Feminists would agree that in the past half century, women in organizations have made progress, gaining opportunities for growth and development, professional mobility, and influence. But progress toward equity has been slow, partial, and superficial. Although the glass ceiling’s height may have been raised, the invisible barriers still prevent certain groups from reaching the highest-level positions—or even have prospects to develop their skills and move up within middle ranks—in organizations. Opportunities for women employees’ capacity building and power still merit attention.

CRT AND INSTITUTIONAL RACISM IN SCHOOLS

In the late 1990s, a number of education scholars began applying critical race theory to education issues, looking analytically at the American education system’s failure to properly educate—build the capacity of—the majority of culturally and racially minority students. To accomplish this, CRT tries to identify, analyze, and transform schools’ structural, cultural, and interpersonal aspects that maintain racial, ethnic, and gender subordination inside and outside the classroom.

As CRT sees it, the public schools’ pedagogy, curriculum, academic tracking, school discipline, high stakes testing, school funding, and desegregation continue to perpetuate racism in American society. CRT scholars argue that these practices and their supporting beliefs are designed to differentiate racial groups and to show the superiority or dominance of the Caucasian race over all the others. Research supports many of these statements.

CRT also challenges teacher bias as a form of education’s institutionalized racism. Deficit thinking—the conceptual framework that points to what students do not have, genetically and culturally, rather than look to the assets and resources they do have—is one example of teacher bias. The cultural deficit model states that so-called minority cultural values as taught by “dysfunctional” families—such as focusing on the present and not the future, emphasizing cooperation rather than competition, and placing less stress on education and upward mobility—cause low educational and occupational attainment. Research does not support this viewpoint. In fact, research supports the opposite beliefs: students with positive racial, cultural, and achievement identities are more likely to be successful in school and show better school adjustment, learning, and behavior. The better the students’ sense of belonging toward their racial or cultural group, the higher the students’ self-confidence, self-esteem, and school success.

Lastly, CRT stresses that racial/ethnic stereotypes about intelligence and education (i.e., whether the students are smart or dumb), personality or character (i.e., whether the students are lazy or violent), and physical appearance (i.e., whether the students are clean or dirty) sway many teachers’ views about and behaviors towards African American, Hispanic, and Native American students. Educators may use these stereotypes to justify having low educational and occupational expectations for students of color and placing students of color into low-level academic courses. In CRT’s view, the resulting attitudes and actions blame the unequal outcomes on the students of color themselves rather than on social culture and its institutions that are structured to prevent their fullest educational growth. Simply put, schools undermine students’ of color’s opportunities for capacity building at the most basic levels.

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DiStefano, D. (1990). Dealing with differences. In L.J. Nicholson (Ed.), Feminism/postmodernism: Thinking gender. (pp. 63–82). New York, NY: Routledge;
Ely, R. & Padavic, I. (2007). A feminist analysis of organizational research on sex differences. Academy of Management Review, 32 (4), 1121–1143.

Kanter, R.M. (1976). The impact of hierarchical structures on the work behavior of women and men. Social Problems, 23 (4), 415–430; Acker, J. (2015), Gendering organizational theory. In J. Shafritz, J. Ott & Y. Jang (Eds), Classics of organizational theory (8th ed.). (pp. 420–428). Boston, MA: Cengage.

Acker, J. (1990). Hierarchies, jobs, bodies. Gender & Society, 4 (2), 139–158.

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Kanter, B.M. (1977). Men and women of the corporation. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Kaplan, L.S. & Owings, W.A. (2015). Educational foundations (2nd ed.). Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning, p. 38.

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See: Davies, R. (1975). Women at work. London, UK: Arrow; Mackie, L. & Pattullo, P. (1977). Women at work. London, UK: Tavistock; Lewenhak, S. (1980). Women and work. Glasgow, UK: Fontana.

Kanter, R.M. (1975). Women and the structure of organizations: Explorations in theory and behavior. Sociological Inquiry, 45 (2-3), 34–74; Meeker, B.F. & Weitzel-O’Neill. P.A. (1977). Sex roles and interpersonal behavior in task-oriented groups. American Sociological Review, 42 (1), 91–105.

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Stoker. J.I., Van der Velde, M. & Lammers, J. (2012). Factors relating to managerial stereotypes: The role of gender of the employee and the managers and management gender ration. Journal of Business Psychology, 27 (1), 31–42.

Stoker, Van der Velde, & Lammers (2012). Ibid.

Acker, J. (1990). Op. cit.; Kanter (1974), p. 43; Kanter. (1977). Op. cit., p. 250.

Kanter. (1976). Op. cit.

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Hurwitz, J.T., Zander, A.F. & Hymovich, B. (1968). Some effects of power on the relations among group members. In D. Cartwright and A. Zander (Eds), Group dynamics. New York, NY: Harper and Row.

Cussler, M. (1958). The woman executive. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace; Epstein, C.F. (1970). Woman’s place: Options and limits on professional careers. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kanter. (1976). Op. cit.

Cussler (1958). Op. cit.; Hennig, M. (1970). Career development for women executives. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard Business School.

Kanter. (1977). Op. cit.

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King, Hebl, George & Matusik. (2010). Op. cit.; Yoder, J.D. & Schleicher. T.L. (1996). Undergraduates regard derivation from occupational gender stereotypes as costly for women. Sex Roles,34 (3/4), 171–188; Voci, A., Hewstone, M., Crisp, R.J. & Rubin, M. (2008). Majority, minority, and parity: Effects of gender and group size on perceived group variability. Social Psychology Quarterly,71 (2), 114–142.

Stoker, Van der Velde & Lammers. (2010). Op. cit.

Sackett, P.R., DuBois, C.L.Z. & Noe, A.W. (1991). Tokenism in performance evaluation: The effects of work group representation on male-female and White-Black differences in performance ratings. Journal of Applied Psychology,76 (2), 263–267.

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Ayman, R., Korabik, K. & Morris, S. (2009). Is transformational leadership always perceived as effective? Male subordinates’ devaluation of female transformational leaders. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 39: 852–879.; Eagly, A.H. & Sczesny, S. (2009). Stereotypes about women, men, and leaders: Have times changed? In M. Barreto M.K. Ryan & M.T. Schmitt (Eds), The glass ceiling in the 21st century: Understanding barriers to gender equality. (pp. 21–47). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association; Ely, R.J. (1995). The power in demography: Women’s social constructions of gender identity at work. Academy of Management Journal, 38 (3), 589–634.

Stoker, J.I., Van der Velde, M. & Lammers, J. (2012). Factors relating to managerial stereotypes: The role of gender of the employee and the manager and the management gender ration. Journal of Business Psychology, 27 (1), 31–42.

Asuncion, A.G. & Mackie, D.M. (1996). Undermining social stereotypes: Impact of affect-relevant and behavior-relevant information. Basic and Applied Social Psychology,18 (4), 367–386; Tausch, N. & Hewstone, M. (2010). Social dominance orientation attenuates stereotype change in the face of disconfirming information. Social Psychology, 41 (3), 169–176.

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See: Ely & Padavic. (2007). Op. cit.

Sen, G. & Grown, C. (1987). Development, crisis and alternative visions: Third
world women’s perspectives. New York, NY: Montely Review Press; Lorde, A. (1984). Sister outsider. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press; Davis, A. (1981). Women, race, and class. New York, NY: Random House.

Fraser, N. & Nicholson, L.J. (1990). Social criticism without philosophy: An encourager between feminism and post-modernism. In L.M. Nicholson (Ed.), Feminism/post-modernism: Thinking gender (pp. 19–38). New York, NY: Routledge.

Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Ruddick, S. (1989), Maternal thinking: Toward a politics of peace. Boston, MA: Beacon Press; Tannen, D. (1990). You just don’t understand: Women and men in conversation. New York, NY: Morrow.

Fraser & Nicholson (1990). Op. cit.

Ely, R.J. & Meyerson, D.E. (2000). Theories of gender in organizations: A new approach to organizational analysis and change. Research in Organizational Behavior, 22 (4), 103–151.

See: Ladson-Billings, G. (1998). Just what is critical race theory and what’s it doing in a nice field like education? International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 11 (1), 7–24; Solorzano, D. (1997). Images and words that wound: Critical Race Theory, racial stereotyping, and teacher education. Teacher Education Quarterly, 24 (1), 5–19; Solorzano, D. & Yosso, T. (1998). Toward a critical race theory of Chicana and Chicano education. In C. Tejada, C. Martinez, Z. Leonardo & P. McLaren (Eds), Demarcating the border of Chicana(o)/Latina(o) education. (pp. 35–65) Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

Matsuda, M., Lawrence, C., Delgado, R. & Crenshaw, K. (1993). Words that wound: Critical race theory, assaultive speech, and the first amendment. Boulder, CO: Westview; Tierney, W. (1993). Building communities of difference: Higher education in the twenty-first century. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey; Lynn. (1999). Op. cit.

Banks, J. (1995). The historical reconstruction of knowledge about race: Implications for transformative teaching. Educational Researcher, 24 (1), 15–25; Solorzano & Yosso (1998). Op. cit.

See: Huebert, J.P. & Hauser, R.M. (Eds). (1999). High stakes: Testing for tracking, promotion, and graduation. Washington, DC: National Academy Press; Oakes, J. (1992, May). Can tracking research inform practice? Technical, normative, and political considerations. Educational Researcher, 21 (4), 12–21; Losen, D.J. & Martinez, T.E. (2013, April 8). Out of school & off track: The overuse of suspensions in American middle and high schools. Los Angeles, CA: The Center for Civil Rights Remedies Project, University of California at Los Angeles. Retrieved from: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED541735.pdf.

Carter, T. & Segura, R. (1979). The Mexican Americans in school: A decade of change. New York, NY: College Entrance Examination Board.

See: Kretovics, J. & Nussel, E. (Eds) (1994). Transforming urban education. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon; Solarzano, D. (1991). Mobility aspirations along racial minorities, controlling for SES. Sociology and Social Research, 75 (4), 182–188; Solarzano, D. (1992). An exploratory analysis of the effect of race, class, and gender on student and parent mobility aspirations. Journal of Negro Education, 61 (1), 30–44.

See: Carter, D.J. (2008). Achievement as resistance: The development of a critical race achievement ideology among black achievers. Harvard Educational Review, 78 (3), 466–497; McMahon, S.D. & Watts, R.J. (2002). Ethnic identity in urban African American youth: Exploring links with self-worth, aggression, and other psychosocial variables. Journal of Community Psychology, 30 (4), 411–431; Yasui, M., Dirham, C.L. & Dishion, T.L. (2004). Ethnic identity and psychological adjustment: A validity analysis for European American and African American adolescents. Journal of Adolescence, 19 (6), 807–825.

Solórzano, D. (1997). Images and words that wound: Critical race theory, racial stereotyping, and teacher education. Teacher Education Quarterly, 24 (3), 5–19.

Case Study

Are You Satisficed Yet?

Betty Blair was the newly appointed principal of Franklin High School, which had one of the highest dropout rates in the state—15.8 percent. The Superintendent and School Board made it clear that reducing the dropout rate was a high priority. Betty knew this issue well. She helped reduce the dropout rate in her prior school and felt confident that she could do the same here.

Betty met with her two APs, Johnny Smith and Mary Mason, and the guidance director, Susan Brown, to discuss the dropout rate. Susan said that in this rural area, students have a culture of dropping out of school to help with work on the farms. That is why Franklin has a history of loosing football teams, she added. The players can’t spend too much time practicing and playing when they are needed on the farm. Johnny and Mary disagreed. They said the school needed to do a better job meeting student needs. Betty asked if the school had ever conducted a study contacting students who dropped out and asking them why they left school. The reply: The school leaders were too busy trying to “get things done” to use their time like that. Listening, Betty thought to herself, “Clearly, this school’s influence leaders have different mental models at work.” After the meeting, Betty asked the secretary, Margaret Moore, to compile a list of all the students who had dropped out of school in the last five years with their contact information.

Over the next six months, Betty contacted more than 70 percent of the students who dropped out. She determined the following:

• 75 percent were male and overweight; 31 percent stated they would not wear the gym uniform because the largest uniform size was L whereas many of the students were size XXL. The students were embarrassed and did not want to look ridiculous.
• 82 percent decided to drop out in grade 9—half for academic and half for social reasons.
• 91 percent found the transition from middle school interdisciplinary teams (IDT) to a seven period day with seven different teachers too stressful.
• 68 percent said that no one really took an interest in them at school.
• 10 percent were females who became pregnant and dropped out to take care of their child.

Betty shared the information she collected with the APs, the Guidance Director, and the Department Chairs and asked for ideas. Most said the school couldn’t make students lose weight, avoid pregnancy, revamp the middle school program to fit more closely with the high school schedule. These had been perennial problems. But Betty sensed that the former students could still help her. She again contacted some of the people on the dropout list and asked them what might have been done to keep them in school. Slowly, the answers came. Get larger PE uniforms. Have the 9th grade on interdisciplinary teams. Start more clubs they could join. Provide child care at the high school.

Betty went to work. The PE teachers didn’t want to change the uniforms. They thought if students were embarrassed, they would be motivated to lose weight. Plus, they didn’t realize students were dropping out. Betty asked the 9th grade teachers about starting IDTs. Four agreed to form an interdisciplinary team for at-risk students. Next, Betty approached the superintendent about starting a child care program at the high school. She would work with students to obtain initial state child care licensing, open the program for pregnant teens to stay in school, and provide child care for students’ and teachers’ children. The Superintendent liked the idea, despite the fact that several school board members thought the program would encourage teen pregnancy.

In Betty’s second year as principal, the PE uniforms were designed through a student design competition and came in all sizes. The 9th grade interdisciplinary team was working well. The school opened a new vocational program in childcare for students, caring for teen mothers and faculty children. Three years later, the dropout rate had been reduced by 75 percent. “Satisficed” with the progress, Betty reflected on what happened and why it worked. Which mental models were at play—and which need to be expanded? What combinations of experience, intuition, and cognition did she use? How did the Franklin staff’s decision premises and mental models affect how they addressed the dropout issue? Which approaches did she use for problem solving—and at which points? (Note: this rubric contains different questions for readers to consider).

CHARLES E. LINDBLOM: THE INCREMENTAL MODEL

In response to rationalistic decision-making theory’s heavy (and unrealistic) demands on cognition, time, and costs, Charles E. Lindblom (1917– ), Yale emeritus professor of political science and economics, proposed a model of “disjointed incrementalism.” Disjointed incrementalism—sometimes called “incrementalism” or the “science of muddling through”—seeks to adapt decision-making strategies to the decision maker’s limited cognitive capacities by reducing the scope and cost of information collection and analysis. For public administrators and policy makers who must make complex decisions within the limits of what is legally and politically possible, Lindblom offered a realistic decision making system, although imperfect, that practicing administrators actually use.

Lindblom reasoned that at times, issues are complex, uncertain, and in conflict;
decision alternatives are nearly impossible to identify; consequences difficult to predict; and satisficing ineffective. As a result, administrators spend more time “muddling” than in systematic means-end analysis. To simplify the decision-making process, Lindblom’s incremental model posits that the decision makers begin with policies currently in force, rather than with an ideal goal. Then, they outline and compare a limited number of mostly familiar alternatives (that combine values in differing ways), and use past experiences to predict the consequences of similar steps extended into the future. The alternatives typically differ only slightly, and change occurs incrementally, at the margins. And, since every important value or interest has its watchdog, bringing diverse stakeholders to decision making in a process of partisan mutual adjustment (i.e., the process of negotiating and bargaining where decision makers compromise and adjust to each other) ensures that a range of society’s values will be considered. With incrementalism, decision makers expect to only partially achieve their goals. As conditions and objectives changed, they repeat the decision process, making sure both remediation and reversibility are possible.

Suite of Comprehensive Incremental Techniques

In 1979, Lindblom developed a suite of comprehensive decision-making techniques for analyzing complex problems. He called this set of mutually supporting, simplifying, and focusing stratagems incrementalism, disjointed incrementalism, and strategic analysis. Incrementalism limits analysis to considering alternative polices, all of which differ only marginally from the status quo. A more sophisticated set of strategies, disjointed incrementalism, includes:

1. Limit analysis to a few somewhat familiar policy alternatives (Rationale: Humans have limits to their cognitive capacities and time.)
2. Intertwine analysis of policy goals and other values with the empirical aspects of the problem (Rationale: Practical reasoning and applied knowledge, experience, and judgment are useful decision making tools.)
3. Focus on the ills to be remedied rather than on goals to be sought. (Rationale: A practitioner or organization official—unlike academic experts—must focus on addressing and accountably solving specific issues in the real—as opposed to the theoretical—world).
4. Use trial, error, and revised trials, continually redefine the problem and make adjustments when the direction is wrong (Rationale: Decisions can be reversible.)
5. Analyze only some, not all, of the important possible consequences (Rationale: Given limitations, people should use time efficiently and effectively.)
6. Fragment the analytical work to many (partisan) participants in policy making (Rationale: Invite key stakeholders to the table.)

Lastly, strategic analysis limits scrutiny to any calculated or thoughtfully chosen set of stratagems, a way to simplify complex policy problems and “short cut” classical comprehensive “scientific analysis.” These “informed” stratagems might include trial and error learning, management by objective, and program evaluation and review techniques. In Lindblom’s view, these incremental strategies of “deliberately designed incompleteness” (rather than accidental incompleteness) encourage experimentation and adaptive innovations on the organizational edges without risking organizational survival. He also saw democratic nations such as the United States changing policies by making incremental adjustments resulting from the give-and-take negotiations among many societal players.

Generally, a policy or decision is considered “good” or “correct” if it can be shown to achieve some specific objective. For basic incrementalism, Lindblom saw a “good” decision as one about which the decision makers agree on the decision or policy. Agreement on the decision or policy becomes the only practical test of a decision or policy’s correctness. “Poor” decisions, by contrast, are those that exclude actors capable of influencing the projected plan of action from participating in the decision making. In addition, partisan mutual adjustment provides the many decision makers a degree of coordination, making up for the inadequacies of any individual decision maker, thus reducing the likelihood of making poor decisions. Lindblom acknowledged that not all complex problems are equally open to incrementalist solutions.

Choosing among Values in Alternatives

In making decisions, administrators must choose directly among alternative policies that differ only marginally in their combinations of values. But one cannot rank order values before considering alternative solutions; objectives do not always have the same relative values and the order may shift with varying circumstances. For example, secondary school principals may value speed, accuracy, and favorable public relations. In June, they want students to receive their next year’s course schedules (complete with assigned teachers) for the following September. To do this, principals will need to reconcile competing values. Is it worth sacrificing speed (waiting until August to provide the individual course schedules) for a more accurate product and happier parents and students? And, on a larger scale, where are the tradeoffs between the values of privacy and security? The answers will vary with the circumstances. Therefore, Lindblom asserts, evaluation and empirical analyses are intertwined; one chooses among values and polices, the means and their ends, at the same time.

Research and Criticism

Research on incrementalism in public budgeting in the United States and Great Britain, on materials handling, and in laboratory simulations generally supports incrementalism. Other studies reinforce the incrementalist view that overambitious objectives often lead to negative results. In contrast, research on large-scale policy making, especially in the space program (as with the Challenger disaster), argues that those circumstances where damaging errors can be extremely costly in lives and materials lost require non-incremental policy making. In certain situations—such as those where people’s lives literally depend on it—policy makers need to get the right answer the first time. Also, methodological issues—such as the 12 distinct meanings of incrementalism in the literature —suggest that these studies may not all be analyzing the same phenomenon, putting their findings in question.

Criticisms of incrementalism tend to address perceived weaknesses in its early (1959) version (no doubt provoking Lindblom to refine his original ideas). These early criticisms center on several broad categories. First, incrementalism is not sufficiently goal oriented or ambitious: more moving away from trouble than moving towards a goal. Second, incrementalism is overly conservative. By seeking consent among partisans within a society, it tends to reflect the most powerful interests, while its inertia reinforces the status quo. Third, incrementalism gives short shrift to analysis in the decision-making process. Decisions tend to focus on remedial and short term change, seek only limited variations from earlier policies, underestimate the number of fundamental decisions to be made, lack clear objectives to guide the decision making process, and contain no evaluation criteria to guide an accumulation of small steps that may lead to significant change (or prevent taking the organization or society in the wrong direction.) And, while touted as practical, this approach may be extremely costly in terms of failure to fully or systematically assess relevant alternatives. Fourth, incrementalism is only appropriate in a narrow range of decision situations where the environment is stable, no crisis impends, the organization’s survival is not at stake, resources are available, and current problems resemble past problems —unlike today’s most important dilemmas.

A dominant model of policy change since the early 1950s, incrementalism (in its 1979 version) continues to expand and refine, advancing its strengths and overcoming some of its weaknesses. It is consistent with the more recent work on decision making. For educational leaders, incrementalism (as a continuum of decision-making strategies with varying degrees of analytic completeness) is typical of how they make most school-level decisions. Rather than an aspirational approach, incrementalism is a pragmatic solution to decision makers’ bounded rationality. Every decision requires trade offs. As Lindblom observes, complex problem solving simply calls for more skillful “muddling through.”

AMITAI ETZIONI: MIXED SCANNING MODEL

Israeli–American sociologist Amitai Etzioni (1929– ), the George Washington University professor, linked theory, empirical research, and policymaking. He rejected the rationalist models for their unrealistic demands on human cognition for “optimal” outcomes. In its place, Etzioni proposed a mixed-scanning method of decision-making that reduced rationalism’s unrealistic aspects but was more comprehensive than a narrow incremental approach that addressed problem solving by tinkering around the margins.

According to Etzioni, mixed scanning is a hierarchical mode of decision-making that combines higher order, fundamental decisions with lower order, incremental decisions that prepare for higher order ones. Scanning refers to searching, collecting, processing, and evaluating information and drawing conclusions in the decision-making process. Mixed scanning decision-making occurs in two phases. First, decision makers conduct a broad initial sweep of policy options assessed against their stated values in general terms. These are the fundamental decisions. Second, within this framework, decision makers gather and assess details in limited areas, with decision-making proceeding incrementally. Mixed scanning also contains rules for allocating resources among the levels of decision-making and for evaluating decisions’ effectiveness based on changes in the situation. In Etzioni’s view, this decision model provides a realistic description of how decision makers across varied disciplines actually act and offers a strategy for effective actors to follow. Figure 9.1 gives a graphic view of the mixed scanning model of decision making.

Source: Original figure by Leslie Kaplan and William Owings, 2017

Etzioni posed an example of mixed scanning in action. Assume the U.S. government wanted to set up a worldwide weather observation system. The rationalist approach would exhaustively survey weather conditions around the world using cameras able to give detailed observations, schedule reviews of the entire sky as often as possible, and spend lots of money to analyze the data and make recommendations. By comparison, an incremental approach would focus on those regions in which similar patterns developed in the recent past (and perhaps nearby regions) but ignore all weather formations in unexpected areas.

In contrast, a mixed-scanning approach includes elements of both approaches using two types of scanning with two conceptual lenses or cameras: a general all-encompassing level and a highly detailed level. In the first scanning level, a broad-angled lens would cover the entire sky but only in general detail. For the second scanning level, another lens would zero in on those areas that the first lens identified as needing more in-depth study. Although the mixed-scanning approach might overlook areas in which only a detailed camera could reveal problems, it is less likely than an incremental approach to miss obvious trouble spots in unfamiliar regions. To capture more coverage and degrees of detail, scanning may be divided into more than two levels. Including an all-encompassing level ensures that no major option will be missed, and a highly detailed level will permit the fullest yet viable exploration of the selected option.

Fundamental and Incremental Decisions

Fundamental and incremental decisions differ, yet both benefit from the mixed-scanning approach. Decision makers produce fundamental decisions by exploring the main alternatives that will reach the intended goal; this is an overview without the details and specifications. Later, the decision maker makes incremental decisions within the fundamental decision’s context.

For example, a school board realizes that it must respond to a new housing development going up within their boundaries. After broadly considering an array of relevant factors, they decide to rezone its school attendance lines to more evenly distribute students among schools. The decision to rezone is a fundamental decision. Figuring out how to gather the needed demographic and fiscal information, select a process to inform the community, and meet with educators and key stakeholders to design and conduct the actual redistrict process are incremental decisions. In this way, each mixed-scanning element helps reduce the shortcomings of either rationalist or incremental approach.

Strategy and Criteria for Allocating Resources

With its detailed yet feasible examination of certain parts of a problem and a “truncated” review of other parts, mixed-scanning provides a guided procedure for collecting information, a strategy about allocating resources, and criteria for relating the two. The relative investment of these two types of scanning—full detail and abbreviated—and the act of scanning depends on how costly it would be to miss an important problem (such as a hurricane), the cost of additional scanning, and the amount of time it would take. Deciding on how to allocate the investment of time and assets is part of the scanning strategy. The actual amount of time and resources depends on the total amount available, on experimenting with varied inter-level scanning and funding combinations, and addressing potential and emerging issues with high scanning coverage in changing (or changed) environments.

For instance, chess players cannot review all their options but want to think more than one or two steps ahead. To best spend their time and mental energy, they may first decide among fundamental approaches (i.e., “ready to attack” vs. “must further develop the forces”) and then consider the detail options within the chosen approach. Rules for allocation come into play when the game must be finished within a given time. Then, players engage in less higher-level scanning as the game continues unless they run into difficulties.

Pragmatically, decision makers should review the funding and asset levels at predetermined intervals and changed over time as needed. School districts’ annual budget processes present regular opportunities to review academic and organizational requests, identify current and emerging needs, and set district priorities. Aging school buildings need major overhauls: new roofs, new heating and air conditioning, and updated wiring for technology. The superintendent and school board first wide scan for the fundamental decisions. Should the district rent temporary classrooms or arrange schedules at several schedules at schools to permit two school populations to attend the same school facility during the reconstruction? Where will they find the sufficient resources to support available options? Once answered, finer scan incremental decisions come next. Decision makers may go back and forth between wider and finer scans to gather more data and refine their thinking. Both sets of decisions will affect facilities, staffing, materials, and transportation needs at certain schools that must be matched to available (or obtainable) resources.  

Environmental Factors

Etzioni recognized that environmental factors also impact organizational decision making. Decision makers’ positions and power play a key role in the decision strategy followed. In certain situations, the decision makers with higher organizational rank may want to stress the overall picture and become impatient with the details. For example, the central office English supervisor, responsible for the entire district language arts programs, will likely stress the number of state standards the proposed new reading series addresses whereas the English teachers who actually teach the courses are more likely to focus on details. But in other circumstances, those with higher organizational rank may prefer to bury themselves (and their administrators and publics) in details to avoid facing the “big picture.” The instructional coordinator may know the exact number of students enrolling in each English course but may not know if the English curriculum contains the breadth, depth, and amounts of higher-level learning experiences students need to develop academic mastery.

No one effective decision making strategy exists apart from the context into which it finds itself. But since mixed-scanning is flexible—all-encompassing and fine scale, with subtler degrees of each possible—it can adapt to the particular situation.

Individual Factors

Etzioni believed that to a significant extent, individuals’ emotional involvements and value/moral commitments—to fairness, equality, and ethical behavior, for example—shape how they make decisions about which goals to pursue and how to achieve them. These individual factors help determine how much information they gather (and from which sources), how they interpret what they see or hear, the inferences they draw, the options they consider, and those alternatives they ultimately select. What is more, these normative/affective factors play a part at least equal to those of logical/empirical factors in decision making. Normative values may increase the weight of certain options while excluding others. Studies support this view.

Studies also show that emotions facilitate interpreting and organizing information about one’s own functioning and the environment (i.e., “If I am tired and achy, my body needs rest.”); mobilizes and allocates resources (i.e., hearing a sudden loud noise or abruptly seeing a fast moving object creates an emergency reaction and pumps adrenaline to help fight or flee); seeks or avoids sensation (i.e., when stimulation is too low, boredom results whereas when stimulation is too high, stress and anxiety result); and communicates with others (such as facial expressions, body posture, and exclamations all express one’s feelings and preferences to onlookers and listeners). In contrast, affect may jeopardize rationality. If it excessively restricts the decision-making situation, unduly advances one option compared to others, or interrupts logical-empirical deliberation, it undercuts rationality and good decision making. Whether affect helps or disrupts decision-making depends on the specific situation and the person’s ability to manage their emotions. Thus, to a large degree, cognition, inference, and judgment are not logical-empirical events but mediated by individuals’ normative-affective (non-cognitive) factors and collective processes.

Research and Criticism

Empirical studies, field studies, and legal case reasoning support the concept of using both wide and finer scans to correctly identify and successfully resolve real-world problems. Conceptual studies also confirm Etzioni’s notion that fundamental and incremental decisions can be identified; mixed scanning provides guidance for distinguishing fundamental from incremental decisions; and that incremental decisions may follow fundamental decisions and vice versa.

Critics disagree with Etzioni’s claim that mixed scanning avoids the shortcomings of rationalistic and incremental models. On the contrary, critics assert, these limitations may be confirmed, moved elsewhere in the decision-making process, or even heightened. Nor does mixed scanning theory reconcile rationalist and incrementalist views. In addition, the model’s flexibility gives no guidance to decision makers about how to determine the number of levels scanned and the detail of those scans for different situations. Likewise, concerns arise regarding the nature of fundamental and incremental decisions. Fundamental is too large and vague a decision category to guide decision-making, and a fundamental decision in one context may be an incremental decision in another (and vice versa). Critics also challenge Etzioni’s belief that decision makers can summarize and rank their values, noting that values need contexts of specific choice before they can be prioritized.

As a decision-making model, mixed scanning has certain advantages over other approaches. It makes fewer demands on decision makers than rationalism and is more strategic and innovative than a strictly incremental approach. It uses wide-angle and zoom perspectives to provide clues warranting further investigation and specific details, respectively, in decision-making. It assumes the actors’ capacity to adapt to changing circumstances, even major ones—without becoming overburdened with data. As a result, the mixed scanning model can be suitable for a full range of decisions, from national policy making to the schoolhouse.

CRITICAL THEORY AND DECISION MAKING

Critical theory (CT) joins other perspectives in challenging the rational model of organizational decision-making. But unlike Barnard, Simon, Etzioni, and Weick and their colleagues, CT views rationality politically, both as a means of control and a means for resisting it. Studying issues including exploitation, power, and authority in organizations—viewed as socially constructed systems designed to manipulate human potential—CT describes how work organizations’ structures, social relations, and practices skew their governance and decision-making in ways that deliberately exclude minorities (by socioeconomic class, gender, race, or position). By doing this, persons with organizational influence reinforce society’s prevailing power and economic elites. The results, in CT’s view, are reduced decision quality and reduced organizational capacity to meet important human needs.

According to CT, contemporary organizations’ celebration of technocracy and managerial expertise—as compared with more democratic forms of organizations and management philosophy—perpetuates narrow concepts of reasoning and participation in decision-making. Technical reasoning is instrumental, governs thought and action by relying on the theoretical and hypothetical, and controls by developing “efficient” links between means and ends to optimize output. Highly specialized experts, usually management elites, prioritize technical reasoning for its supposed “neutrality” and “objectivity in making decisions. With favored places in organizational decision-making, these “experts” select the values through which decisions are made; they have the final say as to what is or is not “rational” or “acceptable.” This technical reasoning is a guise, argue CT adherents, to pretend those in authority have no self-interest beyond what is objectively “best for the organization.” In contrast, practical reasoning,as CT defines it, focuses on the process of understanding and mutually determining the ends and means to be sought rather than controlling and developing the means for accomplishing the organization’s goals. Critical theorists prefer shared goal setting and decision-making using a wider scope of criteria and values beyond “efficiency” and to include politically and ethically informed judgment.

In CT’s view, management advances technocracy by giving power to “specialists” who hold “monopolies of expertise” in their respective areas. Even organizations’ “human side”—such as climate, culture, job enrichment, quality of work life, and worker participation—come under technical control as a way to extend the organization’s interests. Human resource specialists promote and defend their positions by using an elaborate battery of supposedly “objective” techniques for managing, selecting, and promoting employees. In a similar way, strategic management institutionalizes a certain way of maintaining their power and influence by elevating certain employees as “strategists” and subordinating others as “troops.” As a result, an expert-dominated workplace tends to limit, ignore, or subordinate intrinsic work qualities—such as creativity, variety, professional development, autonomy, and meaningfulness—in favor of what those in authority see as “more useful” values. As a consequence, the relationships between the technical and managerial elites and non-expert employees become increasingly unequal.

Given this, critical theorists argue for changed social structures that might actively support (rather than exploit) expanding worker autonomy and involvement in decision-making. This would permit a fuller discussion of alternative means and ends and give room for employees’ creativity, purposiveness, discretion, autonomy, and responsible behaviors toward others. In a balanced system, CT asserts, technical and practical reasoning would naturally complement each other.

Criticism of critical theory’s position on human reason and decision-making point to its intellectualism, oversimplification, and negativity. First, critics assert that human reason has its limitations. Likewise, CT does not consider how irrational, intuitive, emotional, and idiosyncratic actions productively contribute to decision-making. Further, including marginalized groups and individuals in organizational decision-making does not guarantee higher quality decisions will result. Second, power relations in organizations are not always from a single source (i.e., capitalism, top management, or “the state”). Nor is it totally and intentionally repressive. Rather, power relations in social organizations reflect a complicated and fragile network of control, authority, and struggles whose dynamics and outcomes are more ambiguous and contradictory than CT adherents admit. Third, although questioning conventional beliefs and assumptions is important, CT shows a tendency for one-sidedness that, ironically, matches the one-dimensional technocracy that they decry. These critiques—coupled with CT’s inaccessible language—may account for its slow acceptance within management and organization studies. Lastly, although well-meaning in intent, CT’s disregard for traditional management and organization scholarship and their emphasis on differences between their own and mainstream theories, overlooks the areas they share.

Critical theorists note that rationalism and sensemaking focus on reproducing the socially learned existing ideas of organization rather than using new ideas to understand (and promote) social change. Nonetheless, CT brings awareness of how organizations can use technocracy and monopolies of expertise to exclude others who might have useful skills and insightful perspectives from participating in goal setting and decision-making. This is true even in schools when teachers occasionally use edu-jargon during parent conferences and administrators and special educators slip into legalistic compliance language with parents during I.E.P. (Individualized Education Plan) meetings, implicitly (or explicitly) wielding their professional expertise to influence (or intimidate) non-educators.

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Lindblom, C.E. (1959). The science of middling through. Public Administrative Review, 19 (2), 79–99; Dahl, R.A. & Lindblom, C.E. (1953). Politics, economics, and welfare. New York, NY: Harper and Brothers.

Lindblom, C.E. (1965). The intelligence of democracy: Decision making through mutual adjustment. New York, NY: The Free Press.

This definition of incrementalism reflects Lindblom’s original 1959 version.

Lindblom, C.E. (1979). Still muddling, not yet through. Pubic Administration Review, 39 (6), 517–526; Pal, L.A. (2011). Assessing incrementalism: Formative assumptions, contemporary realities. Policy and Society, 30 (1), 29–39.

Lindblom. (1979). Op. cit., p. 318.

Lindblom, C.E. (1964). Contexts for change and strategy: A reply. Public Administration Review, 24 (3), 157–158; Lindblom, C.E. (1965). The intelligence of democracy. New York, NY: The Free Press (pp. 293–294); Lindblom. C.E. (1975). The sociology of planning: Thought and social interaction. In M. Bornstein (Ed.), Economic planning. East and west. (pp. 23–60). Cambridge, MA: Ballinger (p. 52); Lindblom, C.E. (1977). Politics and markets. New York, NY: Basic Books (pp. 65–89).

Lindblom. (1959). Op. cit.

Wildavsky, A. (1964). The politics of the budgetary process. Boston, MA: Little Brown; Davis, O., Dempster, M. & Wildavsky, A. (1966). A theory of the budgetary process. American Political Science Review, 60 (3), 529–547; Heclo, H. & Wildavsky, A. (1974). The private government of public money: Community and policy inside British political administration. London, UK: Macmillan.

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Strategies barriers and alignment. Industrial Markets Management, 37 (3), 316–328.

Schulman, P. (1980). Large-scale policy making. New York, NY: Elsevier; Schulman, P.R. (1975). Nonincremental policy making: Notes toward an alternative paradigm. American Political Science Review, 69 (4), 1354–1370; Lustick, I. (1980). Explaining the variable utility of disjointed incrementalism: Four propositions. American Political Science Review, 74 (2). 342–353.

Berry, W.D. (1990). The confusing case of budgetary incrementalism: Too many meanings for a single concept. The Journal of Politics, 52 (1), 167–196.

Arrow, K.J. (1964). Reviewed work: A strategy of decision: Policy evaluation as a social process by David Braybrooke, Charles E. Lindlbom. Political Science Quarterly, 79 (4), 584–588; Etzioni, A. (1989). Humble decision making. Harvard Business Review (July–August issue). Retrieved from: https://hbr.org/1989/07/humble-decision-making; Dror, Y. (1964). Muddling through – “Science” or inertia? Public Administration Review, 24 (3), 153–163 (p. 155).

Etzioni. (1967). Op. cit. Etzioni explains that not all partisans have equal power, and demands of the disadvantaged and politically unorganized lack adequate (if any) representation in the decision making; Smith & May. (1980). Op. cit.; Lustick. (1980). Op. cit.; Forester. (1984). Op. cit.

Dror. (1964). Op. cit.; Smith & May. (1980). Op. cit.

See: Dror. (1964). Op. cit.; Etzioni. (1967). Op. cit.; Etzioni, A. (1986). Mixed scanning revisited. Public Administration Review, 46 (1), 8–15; Forester, J. (1984). Bounded rationality and the politics of muddling through. Public Administration Review, 44 (1), 23–31; Self, P. (1974). Is comprehensive planning possible? Policy and Politics, 2 (3), 193–203; Smith & May. (1980). Op. cit.; Wiseman, C. (1978). Selection of major planning issues. Policy Sciences, 9 (1), 71–86.

Etzioni (1967). Op. cit.; Etzioni, A. (1986). Mixed scanning revisited. Public Administration Review, 46 (1), 8–15.

Tarter, C.J. & Hoy, W.K. (1998). Toward a contingency theory of decision making. Journal of Educational Administration, 36 (3), 212–228.

Boulding, K.E. (1964). Review of A strategy of decision. American Sociological Review, 29 (6), 930–931.

Etzioni. (1967). Op. cit.

Arrow. (1964). Op. cit.; Smith & May. (1980). Op. cit.

Lustick. (1980); Op. cit.; Ahrari, M.E. (1987). A paradigm of ‘crisis’ decision making: The case of Synfuels policy. British Journal of Political Science, 17 (1), 71–91; Bourgeois, L.J., III & Eisenhardt, K.M. (1988). Strategic decision processes in high velocity environments: Four cases in the microcomputer industry. Management Science, 34 (7), 816–835.

Lindblom. (1979). Op. cit.

Etzioni, A. (1967). Mixed-scanning: A ‘third’ approach to decision making. Public Administration Review, 27 (5), 385–392; Etzioni, A. (1986). Mixed scanning revisited. Public Administration Review, 46 (1), 8–14.

Etzioni. (1986). Ibid, p. 8.

Etzioni, A. (1986). Op. cit., p. 8.

Etzioni, A. (1988). The moral dimension: Toward a new economics. New York, NY: The Free Press; Coughlin, R.M. (1996). Frameworks and findings: Assessing Etzioni’s contributions to sociology. In D. Sculli (Ed.), Macro socio-economics: From theory to activism. (pp. 13–31). New York, NY: Routledge.

Lefford, A. (1946). The influence of emotional subject matter on logical reasoning. The Journal of General Psychology, 34 (1946), 127–151.

For many studies supporting these claims, see: Pieters, R.G.M. & van Raaij, W.F. (1988). The role of affect in economic behavior. In W.F. van Raaij, G.M. van Veldhoven, and K-E Warnery (Eds), Handbook of economic psychology (pp. 108–144). Amsterdam: North-Holland.

Etzioni, A. (1988). Normative-affective factors: Toward a new decision-making model. Journal of Economic Psychology, 9 (2), 125–150.

Deshler, J.D. (1974). Utilizing mixed-scanning as a strategy for administrative decision making. (unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of California, Los Angeles; DeVall, M. V., Bolas, C. & Kang. T.S. (1976). Applied social research in industrial organizations: An evaluation of functions, theory, and methods. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 12 (2), 158–177.

Parkinson, G.W. (1980). Policy making at the state level for K-12 education. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Ohio State University; Wiseman, C. (1979). Policy making for the Scottish health services at national level. Scottish National Yearbook 1980, 135–160.

Snortland, N.E. & Stanga, J.E. (1973). Neutral principles and decision-making theory: An alternative to incrementalism. The George Washington Law Review, 41 (5), 1006–1032.

Lee, K. (1979). Health care planning, policies, and incentives. Futures, 11 (6), 482–490; Alexander, E.R. (1972). Choice in a changing world. Policy Sciences, 3 (3), 325–337; Fenno, R. F. (1966). The power of the purse. Boston, MA: Little, Brown.

Starkie , D.(1984). Policy changes, configurations, and catastrophe. Policy and Politics, 12 (1), 71–84.

Smith & May. (1980). Op. cit.

Smith & May. (1980). Op. cit.

Smith, S.L. & Stupak, R.J. (1994). Public sector downsizing decision-making in the 1990s: Moving beyond the mixed scanning model. Public Administration Quarterly, 18 (3), 359–379.

Smith & Stupak. (1994). Op. cit. Some suggest separating fundamental decisions into categories: The decision’s importance (critical or routine?), the time frame, and the potential impact of wrong decisions.

Smith & May. (1980). Op. cit.

Smith & May. (1980). Op. cit.

Deetz, S. (2005). Critical theory. In S. May & D.K. Mumby (Eds), Engaging organizational communication theory and research. (pp 85–112). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage; Alvesson, M. & Deetz, S.A. (2006). Critical theory and postmodernism approaches to organizational studies. In S.R. Clegg, C. Hardy, T. Lawrence & W.R. Nord (Eds), The SAGE handbook of organization studies (pp. 255–265). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

See: Stablein, R. & Nord, W. (1985). Practical and emancipatory interests in organizational symbolism: A review and evaluation. Journal of Management, 11 (2), 13–28; Fischer, F. (1990). Technocracy and the politics of expertise: Newbury Park, CA: Sage; Alvesson, M. & Willmott, H. (1996). Making sense of management: A critical analysis. London, UK: Sage: Alvesson, M. & Willmott, H. (Eds), (2003). Studying management critically. London, UK: Sage.

Habermas, J. (1971). Knowledge and human interests. Translated by J. Shapiro. London, UK: Heinemann; Habermas, J. (1975). Legitimation crisis. Translated by T. McCarthy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press; Alvesson & Deetz. (2006). Op. cit.

Apel, K. (1979). Toward a transformation of philosophy. Translated by G. Adey and D. Frisby. London, UK: Routledge.

Holloway, W. (1984). Fitting work: Psychological assessment in organizations. In J. Henriques, W. Hallway, C. Urwin, C. Venn & V. Walkerdine (Eds), Changing the subject (pp. 26–59). New York, NY: Methuen; Steffy, B.D. & Grimes, A.J. (1992). Personnel/organizational psychology: A critique of the discipline. In M. Alvesson & H. Willmott (Eds), Critical management studies. (pp. 181–201). London, UK: Sage; Deetz, S. (2003). Disciplinary power, conflict suppression, and human resource management. In M. Alvesson & H. Willmott (Eds), Studying management critically (pp. 23–45). London, UK: Sage; Shrivastava, P. (1986). Is strategic management ideological? Journal of Management, 12 (3), 363–377; Levy, D.L., Alvesson, M. & Willmott, H. (2003). Critical approaches to strategic management. In M. Alvesson & H. Willmott (Eds), Studying management critically (pp. 92–110). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Sievers, B. (1986). Beyond the surrogate of motivation. Organization Studies, 7 (4), 335–351; Alvesson, M. (1987). Organization theory and technocratic consciousness: Rationality, ideology, and quality of work. Berlin and New York: DeGruyter.

Alvesson, M. & Willmott, H. (1992). On the idea of emancipation in management and organization studies. Academy of Management Review, 17 (3), 432–464.

Alvesson & Willmott. (1992). Op. cit., p. 99.

Mills. (2008). Op. cit.; Holt, R. & Cornelissen, J. (2014). Sensemaking revisited. Management Learning, 45 (5), 525–539.

Case Study

Affection or Abuse?

Dan Dapper, 22, the new science teacher at Kennedy High School, was the school’s youngest teacher. Tall, handsome, and single, Dan was an academic and athletic standout in college. He was captain of the varsity football and baseball teams and obtained his B.S. and M.S. degrees in physics and gained his teaching license in four years. Dan was the only science teacher qualified to teach honors and AP physics. Some of the older teachers thought him too young and too “cute” to be trusted with students only four years younger than he.

By November, rumors were buzzing among students of an all too friendly relationship between the young science teacher and Sally Stellar, the probable senior class valedictorian and cheerleading squad and debate team captain. Sally received an early admission to the state’s flagship university on a full academic scholarship—where Dan had graduated. She, too, planned to major in physics.

In February, a concerned student in Dan’s AP physics class went to the school counselor and shared the rumors she had heard about Dan and Sally. The counselor went to the principal to report what might be construed as child abuse. His moral intuition aroused—the situation felt wrong—the principal scheduled a meeting with Dan for the next afternoon.

The following afternoon Principal O’Malley got right to the point. He confronted Dan with, “Are you having an affair with Sally Stellar? I need to hear the entire story from you—and don’t leave anything out.” Dan was shocked. He told his principal that Sally was one of the brightest folks he had ever met. They shared a passion for physics. Sally’s parents, neither of whom went to college, had invited Dan to dinner several times to discuss college applications, interviews, and scholarships. Nothing inappropriate had gone on between the two. Dan then told O’Malley that he did have feelings for Sally and might consider dating her when she went off to the university, but nothing like that would happen while she was one of his students. He added that the university had recruited him to work on his Ph.D. in physics, and he was giving that idea considerable thought.

O’Malley arranged for a meeting with Mr. and Mrs. Stellar. They told the principal they had invited Dan to dinner on several occasions to discuss Sally’s college plans. They knew of no inappropriate behavior but hoped Dan would go back to the university for his Ph.D. They would not be upset if a relationship developed between Dan and Sally. In fact, they thought Dan and Sally would make a nice couple.

O’Malley’s pulse was racing. Despite the Stellars’ seeming comfort with the situation, O’Malley recognized that he was dealing with an ethical issue. He felt obligated to think this through and take the right action. What issue, individual, and environmental factors did he need to consider? And what would he do?

ALBERT BANDURA: SOCIAL COGNITIVE THEORY

Alfred Bandura (1925– ) a Stanford University professor, developed social cognitive theory (1986), a psychological model of behavior that undergirds organizational ethics theorizing and research. Briefly, social cognitive theory tries to explain three key aspects of human behavior: how people learn, reason, and act. Moving away from early psychology theory that viewed human behavior as an input-output model, with human actions involuntarily and mechanically shaped and controlled by environmental stimuli, Bandura initiated a paradigm shift in thinking about human psychology. Living in the computer age in which multifaceted dynamic models solved multiple problems simultaneously and interactively, the human mind could be seen as complex and conscious, allowing individuals to thoughtfully respond to and act upon their environment. Accordingly, Bandura believed that people’s social cognitive learning gave them the capacity to be “the producers as well as the products of their social systems.” Further, he saw their ability to influence the nature and quality of their lives as “the essence of humanness.”

Social cognitive theory has three main thrusts. First, it asserts that learning occurs in a dynamic social context. Just as babies and toddlers study their parents and older siblings to learn how to speak and behave appropriately in the family setting, people gain knowledge and skills by continually interrelating with others in the wider society and observing how others perform in varied circumstances. These ongoing interactions with people—at home, in the neighborhood, at school, and in larger complex environments—promote experiential learning in ways that prompt human development, adaptation, and change.

Second, the capacity to reason—to abstractly manipulate symbols to create meaning—is what makes humans human. Being able to think, plan ahead, create, and learn from experience are essential to progress and survival. Thus, human reasoning processes are generative, creative, proactive, and reflective. Individuals’ cognitive capacities allow them to engage in intentionality (being able to plan for and enact a future action); forethought (to be able to set goals, anticipate likely consequences, and select and create courses of action likely to produce desired outcomes); self-control (a multifaceted self-direction and self-regulation that links thought to action in sync with personal standards and values, sense of morality, self-identity, and corrective self-reactions); and reflective self-appraisal (a metacognitive capability to assess oneself and the adequacy of one’s thoughts, motivations, and actions in life pursuits). By acting intentionally—tying specific actions to their ideas—people can influence their environments, not merely react to them. In turn, by controlling their motives and activities, people can select and engage in the experiences that form the conceptual foundations for the symbolic, social, psychomotor, and other skills that influence their lives.

Third, social cognitive theory views people as being able to intentionally act to make things happen. To Bandura, agency—or the capacity to play a role in one’s own development, adaptation, and self-renewal by acting purposely on their environment—consists of one’s physical aptitudes, belief systems, self-regulatory skills, and other structures and functions through which people can influence their world. As individuals experience, grow, and mature, they become the agents of their own lives, able to exert some degree of control over their own functioning and over environmental events. Within their environments, people use their sensory, motor, affective, and cerebral systems as tools to accomplish tasks and reach goals that give their lives meaning, direction, and satisfaction.

Moral behaviors also have a place in social cognitive theory. Through their reasoning capacities and agency, people are able to make and enact ethical decisions. More specifically, people become agents in a moral context when they judge the rightness or wrongness of conduct against their personal standards and situational circumstances. Self-reflective, they continually check on the “rightness” of their own thinking. Figure 10.1 portrays social cognitive theory and ethical decision making.

Figure 10.1  Social Cognitive Theory and Ethical Decision Making

Source: Original figure by Leslie Kaplan and William Owings

But although individuals acquire and expand their knowledge, gradually increasing their sense of competence to successfully meet life’s challenges, people’s internal standards for controlling their conduct are relatively stable. What one holds as “right” or “wrong”, “good” or “bad”, does not change from month to month. Rather, their self-control and self-criticism keep their behavior aligned with their personal standards. As a result, people tend not to act in ways that they anticipate will bring them social disapproval and self-blame. Instead, using self-control, individuals are motivated toward pro-social (“ethically correct”) behavior; they intentionally regulate their ethical conduct to act in ways they and their society believe are “right” or “good.” But if (or when) they do act in ways that betray their moral values, individuals may cognitively reconstruct the event to make their harmful actions look more socially acceptable—such as by using euphemisms (“Take these shoes. They fell off the back of a truck.”), blaming others (“The devil made me do it!”), depicting the behavior as serving socially a worthy end (“I didn’t help because I believe in tough love.”), or degrading the victims (“The loser had it coming to him.”). Sometimes we call this type of thinking rationalizing.

Bandura’s ideas about human agency extend to collective agency—people’s shared beliefs in their collective ability to produce desired outcomes. On sports teams, in schools, and in business organizations, groups accomplish their goals by sharing plans, knowledge, and skills in interactive, coordinated, and synergistic ways. In the best circumstances, they develop a strong sense of individual and collective efficacy. Studies find that the higher the group’s ambitions and their emotional investment in their shared endeavors, the stronger their persistence in the face of obstacles and setbacks, the higher their morale and resilience, and the larger their achievements. Cross-cultural research affirms these conclusions, although different cultures influence how their members develop these efficacy beliefs, the purposes for which they are used, and the social structures through which they are best expressed.

Bandura’s theoretical assumptions about the power of individuals’ cognitive capacities interacting with social environments to regulate one’s thoughts, motives, and behaviors provide the conceptual basis for scholars constructing theories of ethical decision-making in organizations. But because social learning theory assumes forethought and depends heavily on cognition, some believe that it may need to be augmented with theories that consider the less conscious, intuitive and affective processes that also influence ethical decision-making in organizations.

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Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Bandura, A. (2001). Social cognitive theory: An agentic perspective. Annual Review of Psychology, 52 (1), 1–26. Retrieved February 11, 2015 from: http://moodle2.cs.huji.ac.il/nu14/pluginfile.php/179670/mod_resource/content/1/Bandura_2001.pdf.

Bandura. (2001).Ibid.

Bandura. (2001). Op. cit., 1–26.

Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York, NY: Freeman.

Bandura, A. (1991). Social cognitive theory of moral thought and action. In W.M. Kurtines & J.L. Gerwirtz (Eds), Handbook of moral behavior and development, 1 (pp. 45–103). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Bandura. (2001). Op. cit.

Rationalizing is an attempt to explain or justify one’s or another’s behavior or attitude with logical, plausible reasons, even if these are not true or appropriate.

Bandura. (1997). Op. cit.

Bandura. (2001). Op. cit.

Bandura. (2001). Op. cit.

Treviño, L.K., den Nieuwenboer, N.A. & Kish-Gephart, J.J. (2014). (Un)ethical behavior in organizations. Annual Review of Psychology, 65 (1), 635–660.

Case Study

Rydell High School Grew as it Shrank

Eight years ago, in the Great Recession’s aftermath, Rydell High School’s staff and programs downsized. Class size increased and pay scales froze. Danny Zuko is still the principal. He and the staff have matured together. Finally, the economy has begun to rebound.

During these past eight years, Danny, the SLT, the entire staff, and the community have become closely aligned in focusing their resources on high quality instruction and student learning outcomes. Working together with staff and community, they determine the school’s priorities. Ensuring every child’s academic success and wellbeing topped the list. Danny realized making these priorities public and clearly (and continuously) explaining their rationale helped safeguard teacher and community support during the bad times, and helped keep it in good times when funds are restored. And now was such a time.

One consensus priority was to develop a new STEM program. The staff and community wanted every student to gain the knowledge, marketable skills, and workplace attitudes that would bring them meaningful full time employment and responsible citizenship.

During the Great Recession, a local major high-tech manufacturer, TriTek, struggled to stay open. They paid their workers well; employees received starting salaries at $45K and a full array of benefits. Danny had a win-win idea. He asked the county’s Economic Development Coordinator, a friend from the Rotary Club, to set up a meeting with the TriTek President. If the company would donate some TriTek machinery to Rydell and teach the one remaining vocational teacher how to use the equipment, the teacher would donate his time to work with several 12th grade students who had an interest in TriTek. In turn, this small school group would manufacture and sell parts back to the company. If TriTek agreed, Danny would propose to the superintendent that Rydell have a pilot program in partnership with TriTek. TriTek agreed.

The equipment was complex. The vocational teacher worked with a TriTek engineer as well as with math and science teachers to help the five interested students learn not only how to use the equipment but also the math, science, technology, and programing of how the equipment worked. The school buzzed with excitement as news about the innovative program spread. The math and science teachers took their students to see how math and science worked in the real world. AP physics and calculus students treated the five participating vocational students as experts, asking them detailed questions about how the equipment worked and what it could do. AP students were now learning from peers whose paths they might never have crossed previously. Danny led tours of the project to parents, business leaders, local government officials, the Economic Development Coordinator, and other influential community members. Rydell students had a new STEM program that taught them highly marketable skills.

By the year’s end, the students had sold back more than $50K worth of parts to TriTek—a good deal for TriTek and Rydell. Upon graduation, TriTek hired all five students at $45K—more than a starting teacher’s salary! Danny approached the Superintendent about starting a full-fledged high tech manufacturing (STEM) program at Rydell. The School Board approved, with supportive parents, teachers, business and civic leaders, and five gainfully employed high school graduates in the audience. (Note the revised rubric questions).

COMPLEXITY LEADERSHIP THEORY AND RESOURCE ALLOCATION

As Chapters 3 and 5 discussed, complexity leadership theory (CLT) describes how leaders create an organizational environment that enables people, interacting and networking throughout the organization, to rapidly produce and apply innovative solutions to unfamiliar problems. Since complex systems depend on the flow of information as an essential resource, leadership in a changing environment has important implications for resource allocation and improved outcomes in schools.

THREE TYPES OF INTERACTIVE LEADERSHIP

Expressed simply, CLT involves three broad interactive leadership functions: administrative, enabling and adaptive leadership. These leadership approaches are embedded in a particular culture that gives an organization its unique sets of interactions among people, ideas, hierarchies, and environments. And since these leadership functions overlap, the same persons may enact several of these leadership roles.

Administrative leadershiprefers to the actions of persons in formal managerial positions within an organizational hierarchy who plan and coordinate organizational activities, structure tasks, build vision, acquire resources to achieve goals, and manage crises, personal conflicts, and organizational strategy. In schools, principals, assistant principals, and often department chairpersons enact administrative leadership.

Adaptive leadership is an informal, interactive dynamic among interdependent agents in a social system (called a complex adaptive system, or CAS) that responds to struggles over conflicting needs, ideas, technologies, or preferences. Their interactions result in alliances of people, ideas, and cooperative efforts to produce a useful outcome (usually with new understandings, fresh knowledge and creative ideas). If the ideas have enough significance and impact, they drive change. As adaptive leaders, principals, assistant principals, and teachers are visible throughout the school, using their situational awareness and professional knowledge to know what is happening so they can effectively notice and help resolve situations that would interfere with every student’s academic success and well being.

Enabling leadership, positioned between administrative and adaptive leaders, help these two roles function in tandem. Enabling leaders foster a school’s climate, structures, and conditions that allow informal leaders to solve problems and learn. In fact, they make adaptive leadership possible. Enabling leaders facilitate the flow of knowledge and creativity from work groups’ adaptive solutions into administrative structures, bringing decision makers essential information to use in planning and resource allocation. For instance, as enabling leaders, principals, assistant principals, and teacher leaders have access to information resources through their direct involvement in the schools’ teaching and learning activities. Expanding their personal networks increases their access to more knowledge. Similarly, when they encourage teachers and staff to use their autonomy to notice and informally resolve difficulties, enabling leaders both increase adaptive leadership through the school and get fresh information, innovative ideas, and successful practices to spread upward and through the formal leadership system.

Enabling leaders also contribute to the flow of information across the school by keeping themselves informed and knowledgeable on issues important to their school, their district, and their profession. They monitor the larger political, social, economic, national, and technical environments that influence their practice, and they frame issues in ways that those listening to them can understand and value. Enabling leaders guide adaptive problem solving by continually articulating the school’s vision and mission, offering technical support, and evaluating periodically what is happening to ensure that education practices are moving teachers and students towards the desired outcomes. In addition, enabling leaders protect the creative process from forces (such as other administrators and environmental pressures) that could undermine the subsystem’s capacity to adapt and learn. They provide resources that strengthen access to information (such as entry to electronic databases). And, they coordinate acquiring and allocating resources (such as money, supplies, information, and personnel) that support creative, learning and adaptive behaviors, motivating similar interdependent problem solving behaviors into the future.

In education terms, a CAS may be a school, a department, a grade level, or other interdependent work group within the school or district. At upper organizational levels, agents (typically district superintendents with their central office directors) deal with future planning, resource acquisition, and strategic relationships with the environment. At middle organizational levels, agents (typically principals and assistant principals) deal with focused planning, and resource allocation. And, their interdependencies—the mutual wellbeing among central office, principals’ offices, and teachers’ classrooms—create pressure to act on information, to coordinate and adjust to their mutual benefit. For instance, if the Math Department and English Department in a small high school both plan to schedule their highest-achieving juniors during the second instructional time block for math analysis and 11 A.P. English, respectively, and they share the same 28 students who need both courses, the department chairs depend on each other to make certain mutual schedule adjustments and reallocate their resources if the students are to enroll in both courses during the same semester.

Therefore, according to CLT, resource acquisition and allocation relies on getting the most relevant and timely information from a wide array of sources. The more heterogeneous and diverse the agents’ experiences, knowledge, and skills, the wider the array of insights, preferences, and outlooks available to resource decision makers. Diversity in hiring brings advantages to the organization as does structuring work groups to foster interaction of varied ideas. Enabling leadership also promotes internal tension by supporting an atmosphere that welcomes dissent and divergent viewpoints on problems, and by expecting individuals to resolve their differences and find workable solutions to their obstacles.

Research and Criticism
When it comes to research support, complexity leadership theory has both defenders and detractors. Defenders assert that CLT’s constructs (that favor networks, interactivity, feedback, and context in open systems) make traditional empirical inquiry difficult. In fact, isolating phenomena into measurable variables and focusing only on a selected few would be to miss synergies and the significance of the whole. As a result, CLT lacks a substantive base in traditional research. Existing CLT research tend to be computer-generated model simulations and qualitative case studies. Both methods can generate usable knowledge needed to develop a more complete understanding of the world, but they limit generalizability. This is especially true for CLT because people in organizations behave according to socially constructed rules of interaction rather than according to laws of nature. By contrast, detractors suggest that since CLT cannot be studied objectively and quantitatively with randomized controls (as one might with a closed system of stable practices and inflexible rules), and the organization as a natural complex adaptive system may be a myth, best used as a metaphor for understanding organizational development. Nonetheless, case studies support the CLT view that complex leaders enable rather than control beneficial future outcomes for their organizations, and virtual experiments with computer models support CLT’s ideas about complex individual and organizational adaptation. Plus, its concepts make holistic sense of dynamic organizational processes and change.

Complexity leadership theory has received praise for its comprehensive perspective that increases the number of factors to explain and model organizational leadership processes. It helps educational leaders recognize that despite their apparent control, rules, and routine procedures, they are working in often unpredictable, varied, and changing environments. Notably, relationships among organization members facilitate communication and the information flows essential for identifying, securing, and allocating needed resources.

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Uhl-Bien, M., Marion, R. & McKelvey, W. (2007). Complexity leadership theory: Shifting leadership from the industrial age to the knowledge era. The Leadership Quarterly, 18 (4), 298–318.

Reiter-Palmon, R. & Illies, J.J. (2004). Leadership and creativity: Understanding leadership from the creative problem-solving perspective. The Leadership Quarterly, 15, 55−77.

According to CLT, complex adaptive systems (CAS) are neural-like networks of interacting, interdependent agents who engage in some measure of cooperative behavior. Appearing at all levels of the organization, CAS share common goals, outlook, and needs and multiple overlapping hierarchies. Its agents are able to interact with each other and with the environment; each work group’s productive wellbeing depends on the productive wellbeing of other work groups. These CAS are capable of solving problems creatively and are able to learn and adapt quickly to environmental changes.

Heifetz, R.A. & Laurie, D.L. (2001). The work of leadership. Harvard Business Review, 79 (11), 131−141.

Cohen, J. & Stewart, I. (1995). The collapse of chaos. New York, NY: Harmondsworth, Penguin; Morrison, K. (2008). Educational philosophy and the challenge of complexity theory. In M. Mason (Ed.), Complexity theory and the philosophy of education. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. (pp. 16–32). Retrieved from:https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rebecca_Luce-Kapler/publication/227747553_Educating_Consciousness_through_Literary_Experiences/links/00b7d521f1624e7007000000.pdf#page=29.

Morrison. (2007). Op. cit.

Avolio B.J., Walumbwa, F.O. & Weber, T.J. (2009). Leadership: Current theories, research, and future directions. American Review of Psychology, 60 (1), 421–449. Retrieved from: http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.psych.60.110707.163621.

Carley, K. & Svoboda, D.M. (1996). Modeling organizational adaptation as a simulated annealing process. Sociological Methods and Research, 25 (1), 138−168;
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Bradbury, H. & Lichtenstein, B. (2000). Relationality in organizational research: Exploring the space between. Organization Science, 11 (5), 551−564; Goldstein, J. (2000). Emergence: A construct amid a thicket of conceptual snares. Emergence, 2 (1), 5–22; Rosenhead, J. (1998). Complexity theory and management practice: Science as culture. Human Nature.com. Retrieved from: www.human-nature.com/science-as-culture/rosenhead.html; Houchin, K. & MacLean, D. (2005). Complexity theory and strategic change: An empirically informed critique. British Journal of Management, 16 (2), 149–166.

For example, people in organizations typically want to reduce disequilibrium and novelty (and anxiety) and reinforce stability, unlike what occurs in certain natural or physical systems. See: Prigogine, I. & Stengers, I. (1984). Order out of chaos: Man’s new dialogue with nature. New York, NY: Bantam Books; Berger, P.L. & Luckmann, T. (1966). The social construction of reality. New York, NY: Penguin, Harmondsworth; Weick, K. (1979). The social psychology of organizing. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Houchin & MacLean. (2005). Op. cit.

Morgan, G. (1997). Images of organization. (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage; Tsoukas, H. & Hatch, M.J. (2001). Complex thinking, complex practice: The case for a narrative approach to organizational complexity. Human Relations, 54 (8), 979–1013.

Plowman, D.A., Solansky, S., Beck, T.E., Baker, L., Kulkarni, M. & Travis, D.V (2007). The role of leadership in emergent, self-organization. The Leadership Quarterly, 18 (4), 341–356. Their study concluded that complex leaders enabled rather than controlled beneficial outcomes by disrupting existing patterns, encouraging novelty, and interpreting emerging events and acting as sensemakers.

Carley & Svoboda. (1996). Op. cit.

Morrison. (2007). Op. cit.