Institutional Complexity in a Stratified Admissions Field: Organizational Mediation of Unequal Access to Competency-Based Learning

• In Event: Sociology of Education Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 21. School Organizational Policies, Programming, and Processes

Abstract

Competency-based reforms are widely promoted as efforts to broaden definitions of merit and expand learning opportunities beyond standardized knowledge transmission. In stratified admissions systems where postsecondary prospects hinge on high-stakes examinations, however, such reforms intersect with entrenched exam hierarchies and generate uncertainty about instructional priorities. Schools are thus confronted with institutional complexity produced by competing evaluative logics of examination performance and competency development.
How do schools interpret and respond to this tension? Research on institutional logics has emphasized structural arrangements and governance mechanisms, while inhabited institutionalism has highlighted interactional meaning-making. Building on these traditions, this study specifies how organizational conditions shape collective sensemaking and stabilize patterned school-level responses under institutional complexity.
Drawing on in-depth interviews with principals and teachers in 32 Taiwanese high schools, I examine how Course-based Learning Artifacts (COBLAs), policy-mandated competency-oriented work produced through regular coursework and incorporated into college admissions, are enacted within an exam-centered admissions field. I argue that configurations of four organizational conditions—field position, organizational culture, teacher community capacity, and leadership discourse—shape how schools interpret reform risk, legitimacy, and feasibility. Over time, these interpretations consolidate into shared organizational understandings that coordinate instructional priorities and structure decisions about where and how competency-based tasks are pursued.
These stabilized understandings crystallize into three patterned settlements that resolve tensions between exam preparation and competency learning: passive marginalization, curricular integration, and strategic segregation. The findings show that similar structural locations can generate divergent settlements when internal configurations differ, and that similar settlements can emerge from distinct assemblages of organizational conditions.
By identifying collectively stabilized sensemaking as the mechanism linking institutional complexity to patterned strategic response, this study advances a meso-level explanation of how formally unified reform regimes generate differentiated learning environments and produce unequal access to competency-based learning through organizational mediation and sensemaking of competing logics.

Author

• Kuo-ming Lin, National Taiwan University