ABSTRACT
Teaching has long been portrayed as lacking both organizational and professional controls, conventionally conceived (Bidwell, 1965; Lortie, 1975; Weick, 1976; Meyer and Rowan, 1977). Neither professional socialization nor organizational policy provides clear definition of teachers’ roles and classroom practice; and neither schools nor collegial bodies have much capacity to meaningfully evaluate and sanction teachers. Yet, despite the effective absence of such formal controls, observers of teachers and teaching comment on the regularities in teaching practice (Cuban, 1984; Cohen, 1988) and the appearance of logic and rational management in ‘real school’ (Meyer and Rowan, 1977; Metz, 1990). Institutional theorists argue that the constancies observed across schools arise largely from teachers’ and schools’ enactment of institutional rules enforced by public expectations and agencies in the periphery of primary-secondary teaching. In this view, conditions external to the school and ultimately to the education-policy system are responsible for the apparent sameness of America’s schools.
