ABSTRACT
This chapter opens with a review of the literature on the subject of scholastic self-organization. Among the topics dealt with: weak ties, distributed control, distributed leadership, communities of practice and collaborative management. The authors then conceptualize the capabilities and focus on the articulation of the capabilities of self-organization in order to build a framework for measuring them in the school environment. The proposed framework of self-organization is based on the activation of four macro capabilities (interconnection, redundancy, sharing and restructuring) expressed in 19 meso-capabilities and incorporates the concepts emerged in the literature on scholastic self-organization. A specific questionnaire for the assessment of the capabilities is also provided.
Finally, attention is placed on who the actors of self-organization are (groups of students, parents’ associations, groups of teachers and technicians, networks of teachers and technicians, networks of school principals and networks of schools) and what the styles of leadership in self-organized schools are (laissez-faire schools, hierarchical authoritarian schools, enlightened hierarchical schools and self-organized schools).
