The paper reports about the first finding of a research project in which change processes in 15 secondary schools during the last five years are reconstructed retrospectively from an organizational culture perspective. Using a qualitative mixed-method approach organizational structures and individual perceptions and representations are revealed to identify internal and external conditions promoting shared action and resistance in change processes. A special focus is on the role of school leadership and steering groups in facilitating or preventing change. The study aims at reconstructing the change process that schools as organisation and its members the school principal and established steering groups as well as the teachers experience. A sample of German schools is surveyed with a retrospective time frame of five years to illuminate structures, roles, relationships and representations of change and leadership in educational organizations. The chosen perspective draws from organizational theory as well as from organizational culture and communication research. Organizational culture is seen as an epistemological metaphor for examining schools as cultures. Educational organizations are regarded as loosely-coupled systems that exist in a state between regulation and uncertainty, producing high amounts of both ambiguity and potential for innovation. Leadership is seen as an important factor in the initiation and successful completion of change, while the inherent complexity of school organizations indicates a limited usefulness of deterministic control strategies.

The study will use an exploratory mixed-method research design: In a first and qualitative step, schools will be analyzed using in-depth interviews, questionnaires and social network analysis to ascertain the formal and informal communication structures and to gain an insight into individual representations, perceptions and imagery concerning roles, objectives and the general attitude toward change. Both resistance to change and support of change projects will be evaluated as embedded in the school organization. Findings will be generalized to a larger population in a second, more quantitatively oriented phase. The sample for the first step of the study will consist of 15 German schools in the same urban environment. Interviews will be conducted with principals, steering group members and teachers at each school. Questionnaires will be administered to principals and teachers.

The results generated from this study may be conducive to identifying areas in which current educational leaders are particularly challenged and in which future educational leaders can benefit from adapted training and instruction. This is accompanied by the intention to illuminate the inherent complexity and ambiguity in school organizations as a step to re-evaluate and refine current theories of educational leadership.