Studying Institutional Logics: Drawing on Neo-Institutional Theory to Advance Critical Policy Analysis

• In Event: 52.034 - Doing Critical Policy Analysis in Education

Abstract

This paper draws on emerging work in neo-institutional theory—namely work on institutional logics—to guide critical policy analysis. While neither neo-institutional theory nor the recent attention to institutional logics operate explicitly from a critical theoretic perspective, our paper incorporates this work in a critically-oriented framework to explore relationships between policy making, policy implementation, power dynamics, and more and less socially just outcomes. To illustrate this approach, we employ institutional logics to examine two phenomenon associated with neoliberal educational reforms: school responses to marketization and the emergence and maintenance of the so-called school-to-prison pipeline. By opening inquiry into ways in which particular logics are invoked, applied and maintained in these phenomenon, we explore ways that injustice and civil wrongs emerge and are recreated through taken for granted educational practices and processes.

Authors

• Rodney S. Whiteman, Indiana University

• Brendan D. Maxcy, Indiana University - IUPUI

• Samantha Paredes Scribner, Indiana University - Indianapolis