ABSTRACT

People who study school organizations often refer to them as bureaucracies. In popular parlance, many people associate this term with excessive fussiness about rules or the frustrations of red tape. For scholars, bureaucracy means something different. It characterizes the social patterns that organize what people do together in schools. Bureaucratic patterns set some social boundaries on what we can and cannot do as teachers and administrators. Understanding these patterns offers an initial form of organizational literacy for reading the recurrent social interaction in schools. Consider the teacher and school district illustrated here.