Crossing Over to the Principal’s Office: How Novice Principals Make Sense of Schools’ Pluralistic Institutional Environment

• In Event: Roundtable Session 90
  In Roundtable Session: On Becoming a School Principal: Novice Principals Make Sense of a New Role

Abstract

Purpose: Crossing over into the public space of the principal’s office represents a sizable shift for most newcomers (Crow & Glascock, 1995; Lortie, 1975; Wolcott, 1973). That the principalship is both part of the “taken-for-granted standardization” of US education and also, in recent years, a more frequent policy target and topic of public discourse only adds to the complexity, shaping the expectations that novices bring to the role and encounter from others upon enacting it (Crow, 2006; Lortie, 2009). Focusing on those having just made this “boundary passage” (Schein, 1971), we explore the processes by which newcomers make sense of what it means to be a public school principal and the principal of a particular school.

Perspective: To frame this work, we draw from literature on occupational and organizational socialization and newcomer sense-making (Weick, 2006; Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005). Sense-making—with its emphasis on how meanings materialize in situ, thus informing and constraining identity and action—is a particularly appropriate lens given new principals’ need to navigate a “pluralistic” institutional environment marked by persistent internal tensions, contending logics, and tendencies among diverse stakeholders to “project different identities and purposes upon it” (Kraatz, 2008, 2009). Leaders—in this case new school leaders—must work to demonstrate their school’s cultural fitness and also work at knitting together the expectations of diverse stakeholders in order to create an “organizational self” that is minimally coherent, integrated, and self-consistent (Mead, 1934). This paper adds to extant empirical and theoretical knowledge bases by exploring how novice principals make sense of legitimacy and integrity imperatives (Selznick, 1992) in light of their new positions.

Data and Methods: The paper is based on data from a longitudinal study of new Chicago Public Schools (CPS) principals. For this analysis, we used NVivo to code transcripts of interviews conducted with 19 purposefully selected new elementary school principals. Coding focused on what participants noticed about their new roles and environments (diagnosis), how they interpreted what they noticed and what practices, or tactics, they planned to enact (prognosis).

Results: Even prior to the start of the school year, newcomers’ attention was drawn to the plurality and simultaneity of stakeholders’ expectations. While all expressed concerns related to ensuring legitimacy and integrity, these imperatives manifested in different ways and primed participants to view stakeholder groups differently depending upon schools’ positions within the broader institutional environment. In proposing plans of action, participants made sense of their new organizational and professional environments in ways that both “pulled down” from and “built up” to broader, and sometimes conflicting, institutional logics.

Significance: Whereas much of the sense-making literature focuses on micro-processes (Powell & Colyvas, 2008), this paper attends more concertedly to how the institutional environment enters sense-making (Weber & Glynn, 2006). In doing so, it adds to the knowledge base concerning the micro-foundations of institutional theory as it plays out in the educational field and enriches the relatively thin empirical research base concerning new principals’ expectations and experiences in contemporary public schools.

Authors

• James P. Spillane, Northwestern University

• Lauren M. Anderson, University of Southern California