The Impact of Administrators' Organizational Practices on White and Black Teachers' Social Ties

• In Event: 15.014 - Fresh Perspectives on Hiring and Retaining Educators

Abstract

This paper draws on 11 months of multi-site ethnographic fieldwork and 103 interviews to investigate how teachers in school faculty of varying racial compositions form social ties. Taking an organizational embeddedness perspective, this project examines how organizational practices on the part of the principal influence numerical minority teachers’ opportunities for building relationships with and securing resources from same-race colleagues. Findings show that organizational practices of asymmetric hiring strategies, classroom placement, and selective policing of teachers’ informal socializing impacted the speed, cliquishness, multiplexity, and expansiveness of white and black numerical minority teachers’ in-group social ties. These findings have implications for how management quality should be assessed, not only for enhanced teacher performance but also for mitigating active discrimination and workplace-level inequality.

Author

• Jennifer Lauren Nelson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign