Session Information
23 SES 07 A, Education as a Site of Struggle: Policy Contestation
Paper Session
Contribution
The Swedish Folk high schools have an established and distinguished identity, developed through history and traditions. The implementation of governance the dispensation of means instead of rules, decentralization, reduction of public funding, and the introduction of rules imitating the market in the 1990s, have contributed to changed relations both between and within the Folk high schools.
The development of markets of education creates relations characterised by competition between the different providers, which includes Folk High Schools. In the single school organization this leads to a striving primarily to achieve efficiency and cost reduction. For the teachers it implies higher work intensity and an enforced flexibility, with vague or unsecure conditions of employment. While head masters and school boards are expected to follow the rationalities of the market, teachers have other rationalities connected to their profession, bound to being good teachers, fostering students etc.
These changes have also affected the content of the work of the headmasters as well as the relations within the school. Instead of participating in teaching their tasks nowadays include raising support and funds for the school, and adapting the staff to accomodate changes in budget and assignments. The measures they have to take in many cases directly affect the teachers. One result is that a high number of recently employed headmasters only stay for a short period and resign owing to conflicts with the school-board or, more frequently, with the teachers (Mustel 2009).
In this case I will apply theoretical tools from institutional theory in order to analyze the exposed and contradictory position of the headmasters and the tensions in the school organization. One way is to study the different and conflicting institutionalized rationalities that coexist within and between folk high schools in the same organizational field.
I have found the concept of organizational fields (Powell & DiMaggio 1991) useful to understand the change and development of folk high schools. Together they can be analyzed as an organizational field, where the autonomous folk high schools share an institutional environment (Scott 2008). In an organizational field different organizations which engage in common or similar kind of activities in common, are kept together and influence on each other in the field. An organizational field is in constant change as conditions in society changes.
Institution, in this context, can be defined as rules and models for social action, that are in accordance with norms and values in the environment or society (Czarniawska Wolff 1998). Friedland and Alford state that “institutions are constituted by symbols and material practices, and that society is composed of multiple institutional logics which are available to individuals and organizations as bases for action.“(1991, p 253).
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Czarniawska, Barbara and Wolff, Rolf. (1998). Constructing new identities in established organization fields: Young universities in old Europe. International Studies of Management & Organization, 28(3): 32-56. DiMaggio, Paul and Powell, Walter (1991a). Introduction. In Paul DiMaggio & Walter Powell (Eds) New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (s 1-38). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Friedland, Roger and Robert A. Alford (1991). Bringing Society Back In: Symbols, Practices and Institutional Contradictions. In Paul DiMaggio & Walter Powell (Eds) New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (s 232- 263). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mustel, Kerstin (2009). Omsättningen av rektorer på folkhögskola 2003-2009. Stockholm: Svenska Folkhögskolans Lärarförbund Rowan, Brian (2006). Lessons learned and future directions i Heinz-Dieter Meyer och Brian Rowan (Red) The New Institutionalism in Education (s 203- 215). Albany: State University of New York Press. Runesdotter, Caroline (2010) I otakt med tiden. Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis Scott, W. Richard (2008). Institutions and organizations: ideas and interests. Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage. Runesdotter, Caroline (2010) Att förvalta det gemensamma i folkhögskolan. In Bernt Gustavsson & Gunnel Andersdotter (Eds) Folkhögskolans praktiker i förändring II. Örebro: Örebro Universitet Scott, W. Richard (2008). Institutions and organizations: ideas and interests. Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage.
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