Between Structure and Agency: Contextualizing School Leaders' Strategic Responses to Market Pressures

• In Event: Beyond Economics: Using Sociological Lenses to Explore Market Forces in Education

Abstract

Objective
One of the primary aims of charter school policies is to introduce competition between all public schools. When parents can choose where to send their children to school, this creates pressure on schools to attract and retain students. However, little research has examined how competition for students actually operates in socially embedded education markets.

Theoretical Approach
Economic worlds are also social worlds (Fligstein, 2001; Granovetter, 1985). But economic approaches tend to emphasize individual actors’ choices and agency, an “under-socialized” perspective, while sociological approaches provide an over-socialized view, emphasizing social structure, such as race, class, and institutions, over agency. In this study, I examine the interplay between structure and agency in education markets to explore how where a school sits in a socially constructed market hierarchy (Brint et al. , 2006; Gewirtz et al., 1995), who it views as its rivals, as represented in a social network of competitors (Braha et al., 2011), and how the school’s leader perceives competition influenced strategic responses to market pressures.

Methods
I use multiple methods, including qualitative case studies of 30 schools and network analysis, to explore how school leaders’ social and economic positions influenced how they coped with competitive pressure. I focus on New Orleans, the city with the largest charter-school market share in the country, a place where market processes are most likely to be at play. I used stratified sampling based on the geographical density of schools in the area to select the sample of schools, and I interviewed all school leaders of those schools about their perceived competitors and strategies in response to competition. I coded and analyzed the data, looking for patterns and themes, and used matrices to test hypotheses from theory and previous literature, as well as those that emerged from the data.

Findings
I find that a school’s social context mediated its experiences of competition, and constrained or enabled school leaders’ actions in response to competitive pressures. School leaders experienced especially strong market pressures, yet their responses to such pressures sometimes reinforced inequities in an already tiered marketplace, with particularly harmful consequences for the most under-served students. This analysis provides insight into when and under what conditions schools were likely to adopt these various strategies and examines the interplay between the micro-level, individuals’ perceptions and responses to competition, the meso-level market structures and networks of competitors, and the macro contextual factors that influence both the actors and market structures.

Significance
This study contributes to our understanding of the process by which competition influences school leaders’ behaviors. The findings presented broaden existing theories of competition through conceptual tools that are taken from areas combining economics with sociology, shifting away from a purely economic and agentic perspective on school leaders’ actions in a competitive marketplace, and shining a light on the constraining nature of various contextual, political, historical, and social factors. This approach provides an example of how bridging structural and agentic approaches to study economic action is most useful to understand how competition plays out in educational settings.

Author

• Huriya Jabbar, The University of Texas - Austin