How Truancy Compliance Officers Navigate Competing Institutional Logics

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 2:15 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Logics & Learning: Organizational Theory as a Tool for Improvement and Reform

Abstract

Educators and staff navigate tensions between competing institutional logics (Diehl & Golann, 2023). Normative tensions emerge within logics of formulation, shaping how problems are defined and what purposes are prioritized, while operational tensions emerge within logics of implementation, shaping the procedural and operational means through which those purposes are enacted. Different complexities emerge in each, but they also interact where logics of purpose and operation are not always aligned. For truancy-focused staff, the emergence of chronic absenteeism as a non-academic indicator of student success has layered these normative and operational tensions in intriguing ways. The purpose of this study is to examine how state policy and district bureaucracy for managing absenteeism create organizational tensions for those meant to enact them.

Authors

• Ryan Anthony La Barrie, Vanderbilt University

• Eli Rolfes, Vanderbilt University

• Hannah Morris, Vanderbilt University

• David K. Diehl, Vanderbilt University

• Joanne Golann, Vanderbilt University