Exploring the Opportunities, Challenges, and Dilemmas of Institutional Logics as a Tool of Educational Research

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

Institutional logics (IL) is an increasingly popular framework for researchers studying educational change in complex environments. IL usefully offers conceptual tools for drawing connections between educational practices and social and political contexts. Further, IL enables researchers to account for individual agency while acknowledging the primacy of social environments that shape cognition and behavior. Yet IL presents education researchers with formidable challenges. These include drawing connections between macro social structures, the institutional field, and service-delivery organizations (e.g., schools); conceptualizing educational practices in the language of institutional logics; and identifying field-level logics. In this session, researchers will discuss their experience using IL as an instrument of research, the challenges and dilemmas they encountered, and strategies for effectively coping with its complexity.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Organizational Theory

Chair

• Joshua L. Glazer, The George Washington University

Papers

• The Special-ness of Institutional Logics - Sarah L. Woulfin, University of Texas at Austin; Britney L. Jones, Fairfield University

• Interrogating the Diversity of School Options in District Reform Via Institutional Logics: Affordances and Challenges - Julie A. Marsh, University of Southern California; Kate Kennedy, University of Cincinnati

• Adventures in institutional logics: disentangling the extraordinary complexity of urban school improvement - Joshua L. Glazer, The George Washington University

• “The Business of Teaching and Learning”: Institutionalizing Equity in Educational Organizations Through Continuous Improvement - Susan Bush-Mecenas, RAND Corporation

• The Logics of Teaching: How Institutionalized Ideas about Teaching Shape Teachers’ Professional Identities - Maya Kaul, University of Pennsylvania

Discussant

• Maxwell Yurkofsky, Radford University