Destreaming in a ‘pressured' academic environment*

The connection between the form of an organization and its consequences for human behaviour is a complex and challenging aspect of sociology. It has a broad and classical lineage extending through grand theory ¹ to small scale studies ² and social anthropology. ³ It has more recently crystallized out into a specialist area in sociology. ⁴ It is very disappointing, therefore, that much of the empirical work concerning the effects of organizational forms has degenerated to the level of looking for simple ‘one-to-one’ relationships between a narrowly defined organizational arrangement and some desired characteristic of human behaviour. This is particularly true of studies involving school organization and levels of scholastic attainment. Studies have all too frequently failed to spell out the assumption underlying the investigation and failed, therefore, to fertilize the development of theory. The time has long since passed when it was possible to review the literature in the field without the aid of a tabulation summarizing the number of studies that have found positive, negative or mixed effects of, say, ability grouping on educational attainment. ⁵ The generally recognized outcome of a tremendous research effort culminating in studies of whole school systems in the United States and Sweden ⁶ and of many thousands of schoolchildren in other countries is that there is no clearcut advantage in terms of academic achievement for either homogeneous or heterogeneous ability grouping. Why this should be the case has not been looked into with anything like the energy devoted to the original research.