ABSTRACT
The interactionist model has shown that the school can be reconstructed as a set of official roles from the strategic interests and motives of its members which are enmeshed in turn with the societally sanctioned definitions of schooling embodied in the ‘myths and ceremonies’ of institutionalised organisations. However, for many pupils this model of conformity simply does not ‘work’. Having shown schools may be subjectively possible, we must also consider the pattern of deviation from the model just constructed. This exercise turns the interactionist approach back upon itself, for we must account here for the non-acceptability of the myth of formal qualification to so many pupils as well as the aversion of so many teachers to the officially held notions of ‘commitment’ to school and profession. Any exploration of the tenability of the ‘ideal types’ of strategic and collective reciprocity will therefore put the interactionist approach to the test. Is the consciousness of the actor by itself, for example, sufficient to account for the patterning of educational organisation? Should it be possible to show that resistance, rule-infringement, misbehaviour and delinquency follow patterns which are not entirely explainable through a subjectively based framework, other, more ‘constraining’ models will need to be considered. This need not, however, prefigure a return to the rigid normative schema of the systems approach but will set up a number of topics which may be addressed in the section on the structuralist perspective.
