People make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please (Marx, 1963). Since the World War II, the foundational principles in education have shifted from accumulation of human capitals, market and standardization, control by accountability, to recent advocacy of democracy. These transformations not only reveal that the development of education could be regarded as a sum of economics, culture, politics, and society in a specific field, but also address the adjusting process between social change and education reform (Hargreaves & Shirley, 2009). Knowingly or unknowingly, the democratic participation has become a “regime of truth” (Foucault, 1991) for improving educational effectiveness, even when it leads to the tyranny of majority and reconstructs the power structure in schools (Anderson,1998; Gewirtz, Bowe, & Ball, 1994).

    The structure of educational governance in Taiwan has undergone a tremendous change since 1990s. The authoritarian government was demolished by lifting Martial Law in 1987 and the discourse of democracy therefore constantly permeates everywhere in Taiwan society, even in schools. More and more emancipative demands, such as the establishment of teacher unions, the emergence of principal selection, and parental participation in decision-making, all evolve so-called “invisible hands” which regulate and supervise every actor’s behavior (Chen, 2005). However, would this structure that we tacitly agree be a kind of legitimating ritual (Meyer & Rowan, 1977) when the purpose is merely for emancipation?

    Principal is always expected to be a school’s agent of change (Lunenburg, 1995; MacBeath, Moos, & Riley, 1998). While change is taken for granted, few people care about how the structures behind principals enable and constrain their action paths. In other words, most researchers often focus on front-stage leadership styles instead of back-stage structures (Pan, 2010). In Taiwan, secondary school principals are always seen as a group of people with no voice, the docile characteristic becomes a symbol of them. Paradoxically, why do secondary school principals have less voice during the era of democracy than the authoritarian government? Obviously, the docile characteristic does not exist in a vacuum, and it must be produced through a systemic mechanism.

    Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is trying to understand the standpoint of principals under the pervasive discourse of democratic participation in Taiwan, and investigate the counterbalance between principals’ agency and the duality of structure. For doing so, this paper will draw on the Structuration Theory proposed by Giddens (1984) to develop a theoretical framework and examine interactions taking place between principals and related stakeholders in Taipei City. More specifically, The research questions guiding this paper are: (1) What are the discursive consciousness and practical consciousness of principals under the pervasive discourse of democratic participation? (2) In what kind of the duality of structure do the coping strategies of principals come from? (3) Is “seeking only to avoid blame” an illosory accusation or an authentic existence?

Anderson, G. (1998). Toward authentic participation: Deconstructing the discourses of participatory reforms in education. American Education Research Journal, 35(4), 571-603. Chen H. (2005). Principals’ coping strategies towards the impact of globalizational educational reform: the implications of Giddens’ theory of structure-agency. Educational Policy Forum, 8(2), 143-174. Foucault, M. (1991). Archaeology of Knowledge (A. M. Sheridan-Smith Trans.).New York: Routledge. (Original work published 1972). Gewirtz, S., Bowe, R., & Ball, S. J. (1994). Choice, competition and equity: Lessons from research in the UK. Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, 11(3), 205-228. Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hargreaves, A. & Shirley, D. (2009). The fourth way. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. Lunenburg, F. C. (1995). The principalship: Concepts and applications. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. MacBeath, J., Moos, L., & Riley, K. (1998). Time for a change. In J. MacBeath (Ed.), Effective school leadership: Responding to change (pp. 20-31). London: Paul Chapman. Marx, K. (1963). The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York: International Publishers. Meyer, J.W. & Rowan, B. (1977). Institutionalized organizations: formal structure as myth and ceremony. American Journal of Sociology, 83, 341-363. Pan H. (2010, October). The development of studies of educational leadership and school change. Paper presented at Congress for Educational Policy and Teacher Education, National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan. Yin, R.K. (1994). Case study research: Design and methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.