Past, Present, and Future of Coupling as an Organizational Concept in Schools

• In Event: Using Weick to Understand, Explore, and Sense-Make: Implications for School Organizations and the Development of Educational Leaders

Abstract

The concept of loose coupling (Orton & Weick, 1990; Weick, 1976) has fundamentally guided research on schools as organizations. The concept of coupling attends to the tight versus loose relationship between the environment’s ideas and actions on the ground (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Weick, 1976). Weick (1976) asserted that loose coupling involves separate, yet responsive, organizational elements. In the field of education, loose coupling has been used to investigate the relationship between the policy environment, including ideas and rules from the federal, state, and district levels, and teachers’ instruction in schools (Coburn, 2005; Spillane & Burch, 2006).

The attractiveness of loose coupling is apparent in the large number of studies that draw on this concept to describe the way in which educators implement practices intended to change schools (Diamond, 2007; Firestone, 1984; Gamoran & Dreeben, 1986; Spillane et al., 2011; Young, 2006) and as an explanation of persistent gaps between policy and practice (Coburn, 2004; Hallett, 2010). Yet dramatic change has occurred in the educational environment, including the enactment of first and second generation accountability policies (DeBray-Pelot & McGuinn, 2009; Mehta, 2013; Smith & O’Day, 1990), the rise of charter schools and the school improvement industry (Rowan, 2006; Trujillo & Woulfin, 2014), and shifts in educator certification and evaluation (Sartain, et al., 2011; Steinberg & Donaldson, i.p.). This increasingly rationalized and complex environment presents a paradigm shift for actors in the educational field, and, we argue, presents a ripe opportunity for taking stock of the continued utility of loose coupling as a lens for analyzing contemporary school organizations.

To illuminate how researchers have engaged with, extended, and challenged Weick’s original conceptualization of loose coupling, this paper reviews and analyzes the empirical literature within and outside of educational settings. Throughout, we heed Orton & Weick’s (1990) caution not to use a “unidimensional interpretation of loose coupling”(203). We focus on three conceptual advances that build upon the foundations loose coupling: decoupling, recoupling, and coupling within complex environments.

To strengthen this discussion, we integrate research from outside of education that enriches our understanding of loose coupling and its promise as a tool for the analysis of contemporary school organizations (Binder, 2007; Bromley & Powell, 2012; Dick, 2015). Next, we examine empirical evidence of tighter coupling (as opposed to patterns of persistent loose coupling) in U.S. education settings (Coburn & Woulfin, 2012; Hallett, 2010; Sauder & Espeland, 2009). We highlight scholarly implications of empirical findings on what loose coupling means and looks like in environments that are increasingly complex, plural, and rationalized (Heusinkveld, Benders, & Hillebrand, 2013). Finally, we suggest directions for future qualitative and quantitative research employing the concept of loose coupling that could advance our understanding of the realities of school reform and extend organizational theory over future decades.

Authors

• Angeline Kathryn Spain, Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago

• Sarah L. Woulfin, University of Connecticut