Embedded Elaborations: Professional Socialization, Experience, and Institutional Isomorphism in Teacher Careers

• In Event: 572 - Regular Session. Social Psychology 1

Abstract

In this paper, we help address a need for empirical research on the micro-foundations of isomorphic forces in institutional environments. We bring the insights of the organizations branch of social psychology into further dialogue with institutional theory by examining professional socialization that unfolds over the teaching career. We combine interview data with public and private school teachers across career stages (what we call novice, second-stage, and veteran teachers) with ethnographic data of a university-based teacher education program to analyze the ways that the meanings people develop about their work is shaped concomitantly by accumulated experience and institutional settings. We develop a conceptualization of adult socialization processes that we call “embedded elaborations,” a concept that focuses analytic attention on the ways that people’s ongoing sense-making (or elaborations) about their lives is situated (or embedded) both temporally and institutionally. We also show how embedded elaborations act as isomorphic forces that operate via social interaction. In the case of teachers, we show how teachers develop an “arsenal of practices” as a product of ongoing experience, and how new teachers are primed through training and mentoring to develop arsenals of practice of their own as they transition through the stages of their careers.

Authors

• Judson G. Everitt, Loyola University Chicago

• Taylor Tefft, Loyola University Chicago