Toward a Theory of Racialized Institutional Logics in Education

• In Event: Constructing New Possibilities for Racialized Organizations Theory in Educational Research

Abstract

Educational scholars are increasingly attending to the role of organizations in maintaining racial inequality. The institutional logics perspective has utility for studying how the structures, policies, and practices of educational organizations persist or change, yet there has been strikingly little attention to the role of institutional logics in disrupting racial inequities. Extending Ray’s (2019) racialized organizations framework, this conceptual essay elaborates the racialized institutional logics perspective. We depict how researchers can apply the racialized logics lens to understand–and ultimately advance–efforts to dismantle racial inequities in schools.
This essay applies and extends Ray’s (2019) theory of racialized organizations to illuminate how institutional racism influences organizational dynamics of educational policy, leadership, and practice. Connecting the sociological literature on race with organizational theory, Ray (2019) puts forth theoretical arguments on how racism pervades and continually affects myriad organizational elements, ranging from ideologies, or logics, to individual mindsets. While most scholarship taking up the racialized organizations perspective focuses on the nature and role of racialized organizational structures, this essay explores how the broader institutional logics that are drawn on to rationalize those structures and practices are racialized.
Based on the power of the logics perspective to address questions about institutional change and the potency of racialized organizations as a sociological lens, this conceptual article advances a needed theoretical direction, that of racialized institutional logics (Ishimaru & Galloway, 2020). Bringing together Ray’s (2019) theory of racialized organizations with the institutional logics perspective, we delineate how to replace the color-evasive notion of logics with that of logics as “constituting and constituted by racial processes” (p. 27). We demonstrate how institutional logics are racial structures that operate across multiple levels of analysis, how racism shapes the evolution of logics, and how educators’ engagement with logics contributes to the maintenance or disruption of racial inequities. In sum, this essay discusses how the racialized logics perspective can foreground the complex, racialized realities of educational change efforts.

Authors

• Sarah L. Woulfin, University of Texas at Austin

• Maxwell Yurkofsky, Radford University