Introduction.  The institutional environment in which schools operate has changed considerably over the past quarter century with standards and accountability, markets, and evidenced based decision-making logics becoming staples in policy initiatives about improving education around the world.  These ideas have become staples in broader policy discourses - systems of practice, beliefs, and values outlining what is acceptable, “obvious, common sense and ‘true’” (Ball, 2008, p. 5).  Such rationalization efforts reflect the emergence of an “audit culture” across institutional sectors globally (Strathern 2000; Boli 2006; Colyvas 2012; Sauder and Espeland 2007; Mehta 2013; Power 1994; Zucker 1987).  At the same time, these rationalization efforts were layered onto and into an educational sector where other logics, such as a professional logic and democratic logic, were already commonplace.  In this paper, we explore how school principals mange in this changed institutional environment exploring the challenges they encounter and the institutional logics they draw on in framing challenges and working to address these challenges.

Theoretical Framing.  Our analysis theorizes relations among the school principal’s work and the institutional environment in which schools operate.  We focus on how principals make sense of their work over time.  Specifically, we pay attention to how school principals use materials, meanings, and practices from their environment to make meanings about their practice and school work practice more broadly. Central to this perspective is a focus on how organizational members use environmental materials to negotiate meanings in their everyday practice (Binder, 2007; Hallett, 2010; Scully & Creed, 1997). These scholars press for an “inhabited institutionalism” (Binder, 2007) - a reframing of the ways we conceptualize the relations between organizations and environments that surfaces how organizational members negotiate meanings through the use of institutional logics     

We frame our analysis using the construct of institutional logics.  Institutional logics operate at the macro (e.g., educational sector) and micro (e.g., school system, school) levels, denoting “the socially constructed, historical patterns of material practices, assumptions, values, beliefs, and rules by which individuals produce and reproduce their material subsistence, organize time and space, and provide meaning to their social reality” (Thornton & Ocasio, 1999, p. 804). At the macro level we can think of markets, the state, the profession, the family, and religion as logics that individuals use to negotiate meaning. At a more micro level, we can think about standardization, test-based accountability, marketization, and equitable access, as logics. We can think of rationalization efforts in education sector of many countries over the past quarter century as involving several logics about schooling, for example: using test scores to measure student and teacher progress; holding schools accountable for student achievement; and improving school performance by giving parents choice.  Institutional logics include materials, meanings, and practices; in this paper we use institutional logics to frame system leaders’ sense-making about their institutional environment. While named in various ways across the literature, two consistent elements of these logics are the cognitive scripts or ideas, and resources or tools. These categories represent the ideological and material products of institutional logics and policy discourses that we will refer to throughout the paper (see also Sewell, 1992).

Research Question:  What are the core challenges that school principals construct about their work and how, if at all, do their sense of these challenges change over their first five years on the job?  What institutional logics do principals use in defining and addressing their challenges?  How do the institutional logics that principals use change over time?       

Sampling. Data for this paper comes from a longitudinal, mixed-methods study of urban school principals over their first five years on the job. We used a theoretical sampling approach to select 35 new principals in order to maximize diversity by gender, race/ethnicity, and school circumstance (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Data Collection. We used a combination of surveys, semi-structured interviews, observations, and administrative data to study how school principals made sense of their work. Interviews ranged from 45–100 minutes. Principals were interviewed five times and all interviews were audio recorded, transcribed, and then compiled into an NVivo project file for coding along with other data sources (e.g., survey data, observation data). Data Analysis. We used a combination of inductive and deductive approaches to code the data. In Phase 1, for data reduction purposes we identified all excerpts in which the principals described challenges of the job (Miles & Huberman, 1994). In Phase 2, we “open coded” all the data coded under challenges for all principals identifying and categorizing different types of challenges (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). In Phase 3, we used “closed coding” applying types of challenges to the entire data base and examining changes over time. In Phase 4, we open coded a random sample of the challenges in order to identify the institutional logic used identifying and defining a set of logics. In Phase 5, we closed coded all challenges using the set of institutional logics we defined in Phase 4. We used the reporting feature of NVivo to examine patterns both overtime and among principals in challenges and institutional logics employed in addressing these challenges, developing assertions using analytical memos. We checked on validity in several ways: For example, we used three triangulation methods—investigator triangulation, theory triangulation, and data source triangulation (Denzin, 1984; Stake, 1995).

Systematically examining similarities and differences a) within principals over time, b) across principals, and c) within and across principals by stakeholders (e.g., teachers, parents), we support and develop three interrelated arguments theorizing how school principals construct their work as principals as they manage in a changing institutional sector. First, we show that school principals use an array of institutional logics in defining challenges and addressing these challenges though the particular logics they draw on differ depending on the school principals and the particular stakeholder group(s) they are addressing. In particular, we show how the logics that principals invoke differ depending on how their school is situated vis-à-vis different stakeholders in their institutional environment. For example, we show how the manner in which the local government treats and designates schools fundamentally shapes the logics they use and how they use them. Second, we show how the challenges principals define and the logics they use to define and address these challenges change overtime. And, changes in challenges and logics contribute to principals redefining their role and their leadership style over their first several years on the job. In this way, we show how principals’ understanding of the principalship evolve not only as a function of the work challenges they construct but also the logics they use as they define these challenges and work at addressing them. Third, while our analysis shows how school principals’ understandings of and responses to the challenges of being principal are constrained by the institutional logics they use, we also show how principals exercise agency in constructing their role as principal. Specifically, we show how principals combine different institutional logics, often in unique ways, to define and/or address particular challenges and in doing so exercise agency. We show how principals engage in “institutional entrepreneurship” (Dimaggio, 1988) as they combine different institutional logics.

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