ABSTRACT
This chapter explores an historical overview of both organisational and educational administration research focused on educational organisations and school culture. Martin and Frost noted that many North American organisations had, in the early 1970s, blindly adopted Japanese management styles without paying heed to cultural differences among countries. The most significant contemporary discourse to enter the organisational cultural research has been postmodernism. Smircich defined culture as systems of meanings shared to greater or lesser extent within the group. Schein conceptualised three levels of culture: artifacts, espoused beliefs and values, and basic underlying assumptions. Detert, Schroeder, and Mauriel in 2000 completed a qualitative content analysis on culture literature; they describe eight dimensions embodied in the organisational culture phenomenon. As educational administration culture research has continued to investigate the themes of the past quarter century, with a limited number of empirical studies reported, Firestone and Seashore-Louis have argued that it is time for cultural research in education to extend to other areas.
