Large-scale educational organizations have become dominant forms in almost all countries (Coombs, 1968). That is, not only has formal education become dominant, but this education is organized in [79] large bureaucracies managed by political systems; no longer is it simply a matter of exchange between families and local educational organizations.

 

This circumstance is not surprising. Many other social activities have come under political and bureaucratic control in modern societies. It is customary to suppose that, as the scale of these activities expands, higher levels of coordination and control are required and that bureaucratic controls emerge to structure these activities efficiently. This view does not fit educational organization, however. There is a great deal of evidence that educational organizations (at least in the United States) lack close internal co-ordination, especially of the content and methods of what is presumably their main activity — instruction. Instruction tends to be removed from the control of the organizational structure, in both its bureaucratic and its collegial aspects. This property of educational organizations, among others, has led March and Olsen (1976) and Weick (1976) to apply the term "loosely coupled" to educational organizations. By this they mean that structure is disconnected from technical (work) activity, and activity is disconnected from its effects.

 

In this chapter, we offer an explanation of the rise of large-scale educational bureaucracies that consistently leave instructional activities and outcomes uncontrolled and uninspected. We argue that educational bureaucracies emerge as personnel-certifying agencies in modern societies. They use standard types of curricular topics and teachers to produce standardized types of graduates, who are then allocated to places in the economic and stratification system on the basis of their certified educational background. In such matters as controlling who belongs in a particular ritual classification — for example, who is a certified mathematics teacher, a fifth-grader, an English major — educational organizations are very tightly, not loosely, organized. As large-scale educational organizations develop, they take on a great deal of control over the ritual classifications of their curriculum, students, and teachers. The reason for this is that the standardized categories of teachers, students, and curricular topics give meaning and definition to the internal activities of the school. These elements are institutionalized in the legal and normative rules of the wider society. In fact, the ritual classifications are the basic components of the theory (or ide[80]ology) of education used by modern societies, and schools gain enormous resources by conforming to them, incorporating them, and controlling them. (J. Meyer and Rowan, 1977).

 

Schools less often control their instructional activities or outputs, despite periodic shifts toward "accountability." They avoid this kind of control for two reasons. First, close supervision of instructional activity and outputs can uncover inconsistencies and inefficiencies and can create more uncertainty than mere abstract and unenforced demands for conformity to bureaucratic rules. Second, in the United States centralized governmental and professional controls are weak. Schools depend heavily on local funding and support. Maintaining only nominal central control over instructional outputs and activities also maintains societal consensus about the abstract ritual classifications by making local variations in the content and effectiveness of instructional practices invisible. This also allows instructional practices, although prescribed by rules institutionalized at highly generalized levels, to become adapted to unique local circumstances.

 

In the American situation, attempts to tightly link the prescriptions of the central theory of education to the activities of instruction would create conflict and inconsistency and discredit and devalue the meaning of ritual classifications in society. Educators (and their social environments) therefore decouple their ritual structure from instructional activities and outcomes and resort to a "logic of confidence": Higher levels of the system organize on the assumption that what is going on at lower levels makes sense and conforms to rules, but they avoid inspecting it to discover or assume responsibility for inconsistencies and ineffectiveness. In this fashion, educational organizations work more smoothly than is commonly supposed, obtain high levels of external support from divergent community and state sources, and maximize the meaning and prestige of the ritual categories of people they employ and produce.

 

Our argument hinges on the assertion that education is highly institutionalized in modern society. Its categories of students and graduates, as well as its ritual classification of production procedures — types of teachers, topics, and schools — are all derived from highly institutionalized rules and beliefs. Educational orga[81]nizations derive power and resources when such rules are institutionalized in society, and they are thus inclined to incorporate and remain in close conformity with such categorical rules.

 

In this chapter, we (1) describe the prevailing pattern of control in educational organizations, (2) consider the inadequacies of conventional explanations of this pattern, (3) formulate an alternative interpretation, and (4) consider some research implications and issues in organization theory that arise from the discussion.

 

The literature on educational organizations manifests a peculiar contradiction. On the one hand, there are depictions of the educational system as highly coordinated and controlled — to the point of restricting local innovation (for instance, Holt, 1964; Rogers, 1968). On the other hand, conventional sociological discussions hold that actual educational work — instruction — occurs in the isolation of the self-contained classrooms, removed from organizational coordination and control. In this view, local innovations fail, not because the system is rigid but because the system lacks internal linkages (Lortie, 1973; Deal, Meyer, and Scott, 1975). Both of these views contain an element of truth. Instructional activities — the work of the organization — are coordinated quite casually in most American educational institutions. But the ritual classifications and categories that organize and give meaning to education are tightly controlled. Our first concern is to describe this situation in more detail.

 

Loose Coupling of Structure and Activities. Consider some of the ways in which educational organizations lack coordination and control over the technical activity within them — a situation called "loose coupling" by March and Olsen (1976) and Weick (1976).

 

Evaluation. Educational work takes in the isolation of the classroom, removed from organizational controls of a substantive kind (sec, for instance, Bidwell, 1965; Dreeben, 1973; Lortie, 1973). Neither teaching nor its output in student socialization is subject to serious organizational evaluation and inspection (Dornbusch and Scott, 1975). The weak formal inspection of instruction is evident from a 1972 survey of San Francisco Bay area elementary [82] schools conducted by the Environment for Teaching Program (Cohen, and others, 1976). Survey data were obtained from 34 district superintendents, 188 principals of schools within these districts, and 231 teachers in 16 of the schools. The schools were selected by stratified random sampling from the population of elementary schools in the eight counties adjoining San Francisco Bay. The data show that the inspection of instructional activity is delegated to the local school and takes place infrequently. For example, only one of the thirty-four superintendents interviewed reported that the district office evaluates teachers directly. Nor does it appeal that principals and peers have the opportunity to inspect and discuss teachers' work: Of the principals surveyed, 85 percent reported that they and their teachers do not work together on a daily basis. Further, there is little evidence of interaction among teachers: A majority of the principals report that there are no day-to-day working relations among teachers within the same grade level, and 83 percent report no daily work relations among teachers of different grades. Teachers reaffirm this view of segmented teaching. Two thirds report that their teaching is observed by other teachers infrequently (once a month or less), and half report a similar infrequency of observation by their principals.

 

Direct inspection of the teaching task is, of course, only one means of organizational control. Organizations can also exert control by inspecting outputs (Ouchi and Maguire, 1975). Schools, for example, could determine which teachers have students that score well on standardized rests. But a striking fact about American education at all levels is that student achievement data are rarely used to evaluate the instruction of teachers or schools. For example, in 1972, only one of the thirty-four superintendents in the Environment for Teaching survey reported using standardized achievement data to evaluate district schools. Many reasons have been given for this failure to employ output controls – among them, the unavailability and low reliability of the measures. These reasons are made less plausible by the fact that such measures are routinely used to assess and determine the life chances of students.

 

Curriculum and Technology. Another critical ingredient of organizational control – a teaching technology or even a detailed instructional program of socially agreed-on efficacy– is largely miss[83]ing in schools. Routine technologies with high consensual standards of efficiency are thought, in organization theory, to create great pressures for effective control (Perrow, 1970). But in schools there are few detailed standards of instructional content or procedure. For example, 93 percent of the principals interviewed in the Environment for Teaching survey report having only general or informal curriculums guidelines, as opposed to detailed policies. Such diffuse standards are even more the case with teaching methods. Only 4 percent of the principals report that they are extremely influential in determining the instructional methods used by teachers.

 

There is similar lack of coordination and control over technical interdependencies. Schools appear to minimize problems of coordination that might arise from instructional practices. For example, it may seem necessary for sixth-graders to have mastered fifth-grade work, but in fact students are often processed from grade to grade with little regard for how much they have learned. In this way, schools minimize sequential interdependencies inherent in their instructional core, and teachers adapt informally to student variability. Schools also minimize the interdependence among instructional programs. Webster (1976) reports that specialized program administrators seldom interact or discuss the activities of other programs.

 

Authority. It also seems that educational administrators have little direct authority over instructional work. While administrators have a generalized responsibility to plan and coordinate the content and methods of instruction, their authority to carry out these activities is in fact evanescent. As an illustration, only 12 percent of the San Francisco Bay area principals say they have real decision power over the methods teachers use. On the other issues than instruction, however, principals assume real decision rights: Of those surveyed, 82 percent claim to decide about scheduling, 75 percent about pupil assignment. And 88 percent claim to decide (alone or with district consultation) about hiring.

 

These data and examples suggest that educational organizations only marginally control their central instructional functions — especially when it is remembered that the data concern elementary schools, which are the types of schools ordinarily thought to have the highest levels of control, as organizations, over the content [84] and methods of instruction. But an important caveat is needed: This discussion is limited to American schooling. In contrast, schools observed Britain show much more internal coordination. Evaluation and control are exerted under the authority of the headmaster, whose role in the school and in British society is substantial and is rooted in established tradition. Similarly, some continental educational systems also vest substantive power and authority in central ministries. Our description of the loose control of instruction, as well as our subsequent explanation, will therefore need to take into account particular features of American society and education.

 

The Tight Control of Ritual Classifications. The description just given has highlighted the structural looseness (Bidwell, 1965) of educational organizations. But, although the evidence seems to show loose controls in the area of instruction, there is some evidence of tight organizational controls in such areas as the credentialing and hiring of teachers, the assignment of students to classes and teachers, and scheduling. This suggests that within schools certain areas of organizational structure are more tightly controlled than others. In contrast to instructional activities, there seem to be centralized and enforced agreements about exactly what teachers, students, and topics of instruction constitute a particular school. Also, in the allocation of space, funds, and materials schools exercise considerable control. Teachers in different, isolated classrooms seem to teach similar topics, and students learn many of the same things. One of the main emphases in our discussion will be to explain how educational organizations, with few controls over their central activities, achieve adequate coordination, and how they persist so stably.

 

The tight control educational organizations maintain over the ritual or formal classification systems is central to our understanding of education as an institution. To a considerable extent, educational organizations function to maintain the societally agreed-on rites defined in societal myths (or institutional rules) of education. Education rests on and obtains enormous resources from central institutional rules about what valid education is. These rules define the ritual categories of teacher, student, curricular topic, and type of school. When these categories are properly assembled, educa[85]tion is understood to occur. But for the rites to occur in a legitimate way some general exigencies of the physical and social require practical management. All participants assembled for their ritual performances must be properly qualified and categorized. Consider the procedures for controlling the properties of ritually defined actors, for assembling the legitimate curricular topics, and for assembling these into an accredited school.

 

Teacher Classifications. There are elaborate rules for classifying teachers. There are elementary school teachers, high school teachers, and college teachers — each type with its own specifications, credentials, and categories of specialists. Each type has a legitimate domain outside of which instruction would be deemed inappropriate — for example, elementary teachers do not teach college physics. Each type also possesses appropriate credentials, which are defined and controlled in an elaborate way (see Woellner, 1972, for specific descriptions). Educational organizations, then, have detailed, definitive specifications delineating which individuals may teach in which types of classes and schools.

 

Further, particular educational organizations maintain lists of teachers, with their formal assignments to topics, space, students, and funds. These teachers are defined by name, recorded background and training, and types of credentials. Schools are very tightly coupled organizations in defining who their teachers are and what properties these teachers have. Yet there is almost no formal control exercised to ensure that each teacher enacts the substance of the typological category in daily activity. That is, documents of what teachers do are either nonexistent or vacuous, while documents that define persons as teachers are elaborately controlled.

 

Student Classifications. Similarly, elaborate sets of formal rules define types of students. Students are sharply distinguished by level or grade, by programs or units completed, by subject area specialization, and even by special abilities (for instance, educationally handicapped). Student classifications are tightly controlled, and schools can define exactly which students are fifth-graders, chemistry majors, or enrollees. Adding a new type of student (for instance, economics majors or emotionally handicapped students) is an explicit and important organizational decision. But, while the documents and rules relevant to the classification of students are [86] explicit and carefully maintained, little formal organization ensures that students are being treated (or acting in it manner) appropriate to their type (for instance, see Hobbs, 1975). It is very clear whether given school has an economics major or not, but there may be no one in the organization who keeps track of exactly what economics majors study or learn.

 

Further, there are rules governing the students' entrance into and movement through the system. Residence, age, previous education, or ethnic background often govern entrance into a particular school, grade, of program. Changes from any ritual category — for instance, to sixth-grader or to college student — require close coordination ensuring the propriety of the ritual transition. However, although there is great clarity in formal assignment or transition, few formal organizational mechanisms ensure that these assignments are enacted substantively — for instance, that twelfth-graders are actually doing twelfth-grade work or that third-graders who are being promoted have actually met some standards.

 

Topic Classifications. Definitive sets of topics are organized in schools and assigned to teachers, students, space, and funds. Each school has a formalized set of curricular topics. An elementary school, for instance, may cover the standard elementary curriculum from kindergarten through the sixth grade. A high school may offer instruction in history and business but not in Latin. There is a definitive agreement, built into the school's formal structure, about what topic the school is and is not offering instruction in at any given time. These topics are carefully documented, as are the particular teachers who manage them and the particular students who receive (or have received) instruction in them. But there is extraordinarily little formal control to define exactly what any given topic means or to ensure that specific topics are taught in the same way. Business courses, for example, can vary greatly from teacher to teacher. Similarly, what actually constitutes sixth-grade mathematics can show remarkable variation from classroom to classroom. Yet, despite the vacuity in specified content, elaborate rules make sure that each elementary school has something called a sixth-grade and that this sixth-grade contains instruction in something called sixth-grade mathematics.

 

School Classifications. Finally, students, teachers, and topics [87] are assembled into formal units by an elaborate and precise set of rules. Such units are then assigned to funds, space, and materials. The expected location of each teacher and student is recorded in detail as are the topics they will cover, and missing teachers or students are promptly recorded.

 

The assembly of teachers, students, and topics into classrooms creates the larger institutional classification called school, and although little attention may be focused on what actually goes on in these units, detailed records are kept by districts, local and state boards of education, and accrediting agencies that certify their existence as valid schools of a particular class (for instance, elementary schools or colleges). So, for example, elaborate lists of state "high schools" are kept, even though one may stress college-level work while another provides only very rudimentary instruction.

 

The internal and external emphasis on the formal categorical status of schools and their elements may seem at first to be a misdirected obsession. But in many ways the meaning of schooling in modern society seems to be captured by these definitions and categories. Without such general understandings, the educational system would not receive the massive social support that it does. Without such social classifications and understandings, parents and the state would not legitimately extend broad powers over children to random adult strangers. What sensible person would devote years and money to disorganized (and not demonstrably useful) study without the understanding that this is "college" or "economics"? These shared ideas of teacher, student, topic, and school — and some implicit assumptions about what will or will not go on — give schooling its social plausibility.

 

Educational organizations are formed to instruct and socialize. Their specific activity in these two areas, however, seems to be diffusely controlled, in good part outside formal organizational controls. On the other hand, the ritual classifications of schools are precisely specified, closely inspected, and tightly controlled. Our purpose here is to discuss explanations that are often used to ac[88]count for this pattern of control in educational organizations. The conventional dynamic in these accounts begins with the question of what is wrong with schools and then goes on to a consideration of how it can be changed. Our problem, however, is to account for this situation, not to decry it. By way of clarification, we consider the following conventional accounts.

 

The Reform Perpective. Reformers abound in the world of education. They paint a picture of schools as archaic, as organizations not yet rationalized by proper output measures, evaluation systems and control structures, and therefore as systems that rely mainly on traditional types of authority among students, teachers, and school administrators. Reformers imagine that rationalized control and accounting measures can drive out less "modern" mechanisms of control once a few recalcitrant and reactionary groups are eliminated.

 

The difficulty with the reform view is its faith in the inevitable progression toward rationalization. This idea is not new. In many ways, it characterizes Horace Mann's ideas, and it certainly describes the perspective of the educational reformers of the late nineteenth century (for example, see Cubberly, 1916). The "new" organizational forms advocated at that time were to bring measurement, evaluation, and organizational control to instruction (Tyack, 1974). The guiding image was that of the factory, with its emphasis on organizationally controlled design and production. But a good case can be made that there is now less organizational control and evaluation of instruction than there was in the nineteenth century, before all the reforms (Tyack, 1974).

 

One cannot keep on asserting that the educational system is archaic, a passive anachronism itching for reform, when it seems to systematically eliminate innovations that bring inspection, evaluation, coordination, and control over instructional activities (Callahan, 1962). In any event, the view that education is weakly controlled because it lacks output measures is misdirected. Schools use elaborate tests to evaluate pupils and to shape the course of their present and future lives. But the same data are almost never aggregated and used to evaluate the performance of teachers, schools, or school systems. (Some data of this kind are made available for [89] school and district evaluation in California, but only under the pressure of the state legislature, not the local school system.)

 

One other feature of the reform perspective deserves special note. Reformers tend to view American education as fragile, inept, disorganized, and on the edge of chaos and dissolution. Schools are seen to be in a poor state of organizational "health" (Miles, 1975). This is an astonishing description of a network of organizations that has grown rapidly for many decades, that obtains huge economic resources in a stable way year after year, that is protected from failure by laws that make its use compulsory, that is constantly shown by surveys to have the confidence and support of its constituency (Acland, 1975), and that is known to have high levels of job satisfaction among its participants (J. Meyer and others, 1971). Reformers may wish educational organizations were on their last legs, but all the "crises" reformers have declared subsided quickly, and the system has remained stable.

 

The Decentralist Stance. Another view has it that educational organizations are oligarchic structures, headed by educational administrators and the elites that control them. In this view, educators are entrenched bureaucrats, resisting local community control and evaluation and building up their status rights and immunities in the system. This system resists accountability, the argument goes, and should be decentralized to the local level where the lay public can be involved in educational decision staking (for example, see Fantini and Gitlell, 1973; Rogers, 1968).

 

This view does not easily come into accord with the following facts. First, the American educational system has enormous popular support. This is inconsistent with the view that the system is controlled by a resistant and entrenched bureaucracy, unless one agues that the entire populace is afflicted with false consciousness in the matter. Second, even if the bureaucrats who presumably control the educational system were uninterested in effective education and were only seeking self-aggrandizement, why would they not inspect and control teachers more carefully to make sure that they conform to elite or bureaucratic interests?

 

In fact, the main difficulty with the decentralist's position is that it ignores the fact that local control of education in America [90] is not conflict with the organizational structures we have described. We will later argue that the local community obtains important benefits from the present dearth of systematic inspection and evaluation and that accountability could only arise from more, not less, centralization of educational power.

 

The Professionalization of Teaching. It is possible to argue that educational instruction is not controlled by central administrators but rather by the teaching profession. In this view, schools are loosely coupled simply because they provide a setting in which professional teachers, thoroughly socialized to use the expert techniques of their discipline, ply their trade. Educational administrators merely form a sort of holding company to provide and maintain the facilities in which teachers work, in much the same way as hospital administrators service doctors.

 

This view is not seriously maintained in most quarters. Teachers themselves turn out not to believe this myth of professionalism. Dornbusch and Scott (1975) show that teachers report that their training has little to do with their ability to perform effectively (in sharp contrast to nurses, for example). And in the San Francisco Bay area survey reported earlier (Cohen and others, 1976), of the elementary teachers interviewed, 77 percent agreed that the personality characteristics of the teacher were more important for success in teaching than any particular knowledge or professional skills a teacher might possess.

 

Moreover, the school is not organized to delegate all the responsibilities for instruction to teachers. Thus, a school is unlike it hospital, where doctors, not administrators, control task activities. In schools, there is a more generalized locus of responsibility for planning and coordinating instructional matters. Centralized policies about what teachers should teach, how they should teach, and what materials they should use to teach are often developed jointly by teachers, administrators, and sometimes parents.

 

Teachers, then, appear to be professionals because they have much discretion within a loosely coupled system. The myth of teacher professionalism is an interesting and important feature of the American educational system. It does not, however, provide an explanation for the structure of educational organizations.

 

Organizational Theory. The most conventional idea in organi[91]zations research that could be used to explain the lack of central control over instructional activities is the idea of "goal displacement": the notion that organizations shift their control systems to focus on those outputs for which they are most accountably — in this case, the ritual classifications — and not on those which they were originally intended to maximize. This idea is, in large measure, true. But it does not go far enough. First, while both the school and the environment have evolved an elaborate scheme to control ritual classifications, the idea of goal displacement does not explain why a tacit agreement not to create an accounting scheme based on the "actual effectiveness" of these classifications evolved.

 

Second, in one sense goals may not be far displaced after all. We should not lose sight of the fact that a very high proportion of the resources schools receive is devoted to instructional activity. Teachers' salaries are a major expenditure item, as are instructional materials. Administrators and other district staff make up a very small proportion of the total employees of most school districts. The resources, in other words, continue to be focused on the instructional aspects of the system, even though achievement of instructional goals is not measured.

 

This fact suggests that educational organizations direct resources to their main goals but do not carefully control or evaluate the consequences of these allocations. It is as it society allocates large sums of money and large numbers of children to the schools and the schools in turn allocate these funds and children to a relatively uncontrolled and uninspected classroom. All of this seems to be done in a great act of ritual faith.

 

As we will see, this depiction is not inappropriate. Further, the parties involved may not be as foolish as they seem in conventional depictions of education. It is unfortunately true that most depictions of the educational system see its organizational administrators as somehow misdirected. The reformers see backwardness everywhere the magic of rationalization does not reach. The decentralists see self-aggrandizement. The myth of professionalism depicts administrators as factotums who submit to professional authority. And organization theorists see administrators who have lost sight of their original purposes. It may make sense, however, to consider another view of educational organization, one in which [92] the participants are sensible people running a highly successful enterprise.

 

The explanation developed here begins with the context with which educational organizations are presently found. Modern education today takes place in large-scale, public bureaucracies. The rise of this kind of educational system is closely related to the worldwide trend of national development. The first step in our argument, therefore, is to relate national development to the organization of education.

 

The Growth of Corporate Schooling. From the preceding characterizations, we know that bureaucratic schooling has not arisen from a need to coordinate and standardize instruction, for this is precisely what modern American educational organizations do not do. Nor do these bureaucratic organizations merely fund and administer an exchange between educational professionals and families needing educational services. Educational bureaucracies present themselves not as units servicing education but as organizations that embody educational purposes in their collective structure. A theory of their emergence and dominance should explain why these bureaucracies assume jurisdiction over educational instruction.

 

The most plausible explanation is that modern schools produce education for society, not for individuals or families. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, national societies everywhere took over the function of defining and managing the socialization of their citizen personnel (Coombs, 1965; J. Meyer and Rubinson, 1975; Ramirez, 1974). In national societies, education is both a right and duty of citizenship (Bendix, 1964). It also becomes an important way of gaining status and respect (for example, see Blau and Duncan, 1967). For reasons that do not require elaborate discussion here, education becomes the central agency defining personnel — both citizen and elite — for the modern state and economy.

 

Since World War II, the trend toward corporate control of education has intensified. As nation-states have consolidated their control over a growing number of elements of social life, they have established educational systems to incorporate citizens into the po[93]litical, economic, and status order of society. This incorporation is managed by a large public bureaucracy that uniformally extends its standardization and authority through all localities. Thus, educational organizations have come to be increasingly structured by centers of political authority (J. Meyer and Rubinson, 1975).

 

Bailyn (1960), Field (1972), M. Katz (1968), and Tyack (1974) describe the steps of this process in pretwentieth-century American history. First local, and later national, elites became concerned with the social control of peripheral citizen groups — who need control precisely because they are citizens. At first, the rural New Englanders who escaped from the control of clergy and town community (Bailyn, 1960), then the Irish immigrants (Field, 1972; M. Katz, 1968), and finally the great waves of nineteenth-century immigration (Tyack. 1971) created the pressures to control, standardize, and coordinate the educational system. As these steps progressed, the impetus to organize schooling on a large scale — to certify and classify pupils, to certify teachers, to accredit schools, and to control formal curriculum — gained force.

 

The growth of corporate control of education has major implications for educational organizations. As citizen personnel are increasingly sorted and allocated to positions in the social structure on the basis of classified or certified educational properties, the ritual classifications of education — type of student, topic, teacher, or school — come to have substantial value in what might be called the societal identity “market.” A workable identity market presupposes a standardized, trustworthy currency of social typifications that is free from local anomalies. Uniform categories of instruction are therefore developed, and there is a detailed elaboration of the standardized and certified properties comprising an educational identity.

The result of this social expansion of education is a basic change in social structure. Education comes to consist, not of a series of private arrangements between teachers and students, but rather of a set of standardized public credentials used to incorporate citizen personnel into society. Society and its stratification system come to be composed of a series of typifications having educational meaning — ordinary citizens are presumed to have basic literacy. Strata above ordinary citizens are composed of high school [94] and college graduates. The upper levels contain credentialed professions, such as doctors and lawyers.

 

Thus, as societies and nation-states use education to define their basic categories of personnel, a large-scale educational bureaucracy emerges to standardize and manage the production of these categories. The credentials that give individuals status and membership in the wider collectivity must come under collective control. Such collective control would not be necessary if instruction were conceived of as a merely private matter between individuals and teachers. But, as educational organizations emerge as the credentialing agency of modern society and as modern citizens see their educational and corporate identities linked — that is, as education becomes the theory of personnel in modern society — it is consequently standardized and controlled.

 

Society thus becomes "schooled" (Illich, 1971). Education comes to be understood by corporate actors according to the schooling rule: Education is a certified teacher teaching a standardized curricular topic to a registered student in an accredited school. The nature of schooling is thus socially defined by reference to a set of standardized categories the legitimacy of which is publicly shared. As the categories and credentials of schooling gain importance in allocation membership processes, the public comes to expect that they will be controlled and standardized. The large-scale public bureaucracy created to achieve this standardization is now normatively constrained by the expectations of the schooling rule. To a large degree, then, education is coordinated by shared social understandings that define the roles, topics, and contents of educational organizations.

 

The Organizational Management of Standardized Classifications. The political consolidation of society and the importance of education for the allocation of people to positions in the economic and stratification system explain the rise of large-scale educational bureaucracies. These processes also explain why educational organizations focus so tightly on the ritual classifications of education. Educational organizations are created to produce schooling for corporate society. They create standard types of graduates from standard categories of pupils using standard types of teachers and topics. As their purposes and structures are defined and institu[95]tionalized in the rules, norms, and ideologies of the wider society, the legitimacy of schools and their ability to mobilize resources depend on maintaining congruence between their structure and these socially shared categorical understandings of education (Dowling and Pfeffer, 1975; J. Meyer and Rowan, 1977; Parsons, 1956).

 

Consider this matter from the viewpoint of any rational college president or

school superintendent. The whole school will dissolve in conflict and illegitimacy if the internal and external understanding of its accredited status is in doubt: If it has too few Ph.D.'s or properly credentialed teachers on its faculty, it may face reputational, accreditational, or even legal problems. If it has one too many "economics" courses and one too few "history" courses (leave aside their actual content), similar disasters may occur as the school falls short of externally imposed accrediting standards. No matter what they have learned, graduates may have difficulty finding jobs. No matter what the school teaches, it may not be capable of recruiting funds or teachers. Thus, the creation of institutionalized rules defining and standardizing education creates a system in which schools come to be somewhat at the mercy of the ritual classifications. Failure to incorporate certified personnel or to organize instruction around the topics outlined in accreditation roles can bring conflict and illegitimacy.

 

At the same time, the creation of institutionalized roles provides educational organizations with enormous resources. First, the credentials, classifications, and categories of schooling constitute a language that facilitates exchange between school and society. Social agencies often provide local schools with "categorical funding'' to support the instruction of culturally disadvantaged or educationally handicapped students or to support programs in bilingual or vocational education. Second, schools can exploit the system of credentials and classifications in order to gain prestige. They can carefully attend to the social evaluations of worth given to particular ritual classifications and can maximize their honorific worth by hiring prestigious faculty, by incorporating programs that are publicly defined as "innovative," or by upgrading their status from junior college to four-year college. Finally, the school relies on the ritual classifications to provide order. Social actors derive [96] their identities from the socially defined categories of education and become committed to upholding these identities within the context of their school activities. To the degree that actors take on the obligation to be "alive to the system, to be properly oriented and aligned to it" (Goffman, 1967), the whole educational system retains its plausibility.

 

In modern society, then, educational organizations have good reason to tightly control properties defined by the wider social order. By incorporating externally defined types of instruction, teachers, and students into their formal structure, schools avoid illegitimacy and discreditation. At the same time, they gain important benefits. In schools using socially agreed-on classifications, participants become committed to the organization. This is especially true when these classifications have high prestige (McCall and Simmons, 1966). And, by labeling students or instructional supported programs so that they conform to institutionally supported programs, schools obtain financial resources. In short, the rewards for attending to external understandings are an increased ability to mobilize societal resources for organizational purposes.

 

The Avoidance of Evaluation and Inspection. We have explained why schools attend to ritual classifications, but we have not explained why they do not attend (as organizations) to instruction. There are two ways that instructional activities call be controlled in modern education bureaucracies. First, many of the properties of educational identities may be certified in terms of examinations. Second, many of the ritual classifications involve a reorganization of educational activity, and some school systems organize an inspection system to make sure these implications are carried through. Thus, two basic kinds of instructional controls are available to educational organizations — the certification of status by testing, and/or the inspection of instructional activity to ensure conformity to rules.

 

Our explanation of the loose control of instruction in U.S. school systems must in part focus on specific features of U.S. society, since most other societies have educational bureaucracies that employ one or both forms of instructional control. In many other nations, for example, assignment to a classification such as student, graduate, or teacher is determined by various tests, most often con[97] trolled by national ministries of education. Also, national inspectors are often employed to attempt to make sure that teachers and schools conform to national standards of practice, regardless of the educational outcome. Thus, in most societies the state, through a ministry of education, controls systems of inspection or examination that manage the ritual categories or education by controlling either output or instructional procedure (Ramirez, 1974: Rubinson, 1974).

 

In American society, tests are used in profusion. However, most of these tests are neither national nor organizational but, rather, are devices of the individual teacher. The results seldom leave the classroom and are rarely used to measure instructional output. In the United States, the most common national tests that attempt to standardize local output differences — the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) — are creatures of private organization. Further, only the New York State Board of Regents examination approximates (and, at that in a pale way) an attempt to standardize curriculum throughout a political unit by using an examination system.

 

The apparent explanation for this lack of central control of instruction in American education is the decentralization of the system. Schools are in large part locally controlled and locally funded. While higher levels of authority in state and federal bureaucracies made many attempts to impose evaluative standards on the educational system, the pressures of continued localism defeat them; category systems that delegate certification or evaluation rights to the schools themselves are retained. The reason for this is clear. A national evaluation system would define almost all the children in some communities as successes and almost all those in others as failures. This could work in a nationally controlled system, but it is much too dangerous in a system that depends on legitimating itself in and obtaining resources from local populations. Why, for instance, should the state of Mississippi join in a national credentialing system that might define a great proportion of its schools and graduates as failures? It is safer to adapt the substantive standards of what constitutes, say, a high school graduate to local circumstances and to specify in state laws only categories at some remove from substantive competence. [98]

 

There is yet another way in which the institutional pattern of localism reduces organizational controls over instruction. In the United States, the legitimacy of local control in some measure deprofessionalizes school administrators at all levels (in contrast to European models). They do not carry with them the authority of the central, national, professional, and bureaucratic structures and the elaborate ideological backing such authority brings with it. American administrators must compromise and must further lose purely professional authority by acknowledging their compromised role. They do not have tenure, and their survival is dependent on laypersons in the community, not professionals. Their educational authority of office is, therefore, lower than that of their European counterparts, especially in areas dealing with central educational matters such as instruction and curriculum. This situation is precisely analogous to the "red" versus "expert" conflict found in many organizations in communist societies, where organizational managers must often act contrary to their expert opinion in order to follow the party line. The profusion of local pressures in American society turns school administrators into "reds" as it were.

 

Decoupling . American educational organizations are in business to maintain a "schooling rule" institutionalized in society. This role specifies a series of ritual categories — teachers, students, topics and schools — that define education. Elaborate organizational controls ensure that these categories have been incorporated into the organization. But the ritual categories themselves and the system of inspection and control are formulated to avoid inspecting the actual instructional activities and outcomes of schooling. That is, a school's formal structure (its ritual classifications) is "decoupled" from technical activities and outcomes.

 

External features of American education, especially the local and pluralistic basis of control, help to account for this pattern. But there are more elaborate internal processes involved as well. From the viewpoint of an administrator, maintaining the credibility of his or her school and the validity of its ritual classifications is crucial [99] to the school’s success. With the confidence of the state bureaucracy, the federal government, the community, the profession, the pupils and their families, and the teachers themselves, the legitimacy of the school as a social reality can he maintained. However, if these groups decide that a school's ritual classifications are a “fraud,” everything comes apart.

 

There are several ways in which the decoupling of structures from activities and outcomes maintains the legitimacy of educational organizations. Consider some reasons why am American administrator would avoid closely inspecting the internal processes of the school.

 

First, the avoidance of close inspection, especially when accompanied by elaborate displays of confidence and trust, can increase the commitments of internal participants. The agreement of teachers to participate actively in the organized social reality of the ritual classifications of education is crucial, and an administrator can trade off the matter of conformity to the details of instruction and achievement in order to obtain teachers' complicity and satisfaction. By agreeing that teachers have instructional competence and by visibly not inspecting instructional activities, an administrator shifts maximal social responsibility for upholding the rituals of instruction to the teachers. The myth of teacher professionalism and the autonomy associated with it, for example, function to increase the commitments of teachers.

 

A second reason for avoiding close inspection and evaluation arises from the fact that a good deal of the value of education has little to do with the efficiency of instructional activities. If education is viewed as a ceremonial enactment of the rituals of schooling, the quality of schooling can be seen to lie in its costs: spectacular buildings, expensivc teachers in excessive number (a low student-teacher ratio), and elaborate and expensive topics (French for first-graders, or nuclear physics). To the state, the accrediting agencies, the community, and the participants themselves, costs of these kinds index the quality and meaning of a school. It therefore makes little sense to view at school as if it were producing instructional outcomes in an economic marketplace, since an economizing perspective would treat many of the critical features of a school as costly waste, as liabilities rather than assets. [100] It is enormously damaging for a school to view the categories that validate it, as well as the cost of their upkeep and prestige, as liabilities. The ritual of schooling is evaluated according to a logic in which quality and costs are equivocal. Expenditures per student or the number of books in the library are among common indices of educational quality, even though maximizing these indices may require a studied inattention to an economizing logic. The wise administrator will call attention to the elaborate and expensive structure of ritual classifications his school has, not to the amount of learning achieved per dollar.

 

Third, decoupling protects the ritual classification scheme from uncertainties arising in the technical core. In education, it is quite common that roles of practice institutionalized at state and federal levels create technical uncertainty at the local level. State-mandated curricula may be too advanced for the students at hand. And innovative state and federal programs often need to be adapted to the specific circumstances unique to the local school. Measuring what pupils actually learn in these programs or what teachers are actually teaching introduces unnecessary uncertainty, increases coordinative costs and creates doubts about the effectiveness of the status structure of the school and the categorical rules that define appropriate education.

 

Fourth, decoupling allows schools to adapt to inconsistent and conflicting institutionalized rules. Schools, of necessity, are plural organizations adapted to plural environments (Udy 1971). This is especially true of American schools, with their welter of external pressure. One way to manage the uncertainty, conflict, and inconsistency created by this pluralistic situation is to buffer units from each other. Udy, in fact, sees this as a main explanation for the differentiation of modern organizations into specialized components. When differentiation is accompanied by isolation and autonomy of subunits rather than by interdependence and coordination, jurisdictional disputes among categories of professionals or incompatibilities among inconsistent programs are avoided. For example, in schools, the work of a large number of specialists — vocational educators, speech therapists, reading specialists — is organized separately and buffered from the usual classroom work.

 

Our point is this: By decoupling formal structures from ac[101]tivities,  uncertainty about the effectiveness of the ritual categories is reduced. When the behavior of teachers and students is uninspected or located in isolated classrooms, the state, the community, and administrators are presented with little evidence of ineffectiveness, conflict, or inconsistency. And the teacher and student are free to work out the practicalities of their own unique relationship little disturbed by the larger social interpretation of which activity is appropriate to a given category. Further, in a pluralistic setting the number of ritual classifications institutionalized in the environment is large, and there are frequent additions and subtractions. By decoupling ritual subunits from one another, the school is able do incorporate potentially inconsistent ritual elements and to recruit support from a larger and more diverse set of constituencies.

 

By minimizing the resources devoted to coordination and control, the school furthers its ability to increase the ceremonial worth of its ritual categories. This strategy also cuts down the costs involved in implementing new categories and maximizes their chance of success. New programs or specialists need not be integrated into the structure; they merely need to be segmentally added to the organization. Further, new categories need not even imply a substantial reorganization of activity, as the activities of particular ritual actors and programs remain uninspected. The decoupling of the internal structure of education is therefore a successful strategy for maintaining support in a pluralistic environment.

 

The Logic of Confidence. The classifications of education, however, are not rules to be cynically manipulated. They are the sacred rituals that give meaning to the whole enterprise, both internally and externally. These categories are understood everywhere to index education. They are not understood to be education, but they are also not understood simply to be alienating bureaucratic constraints. So the decoupling that is characteristic of school systems must be carried out by all participants in the utmost good faith.

 

Interaction in school systems, therefore, is characterized both by the assumption of good faith and the actualities of decoupling. This is the logic of confidence: Parties bring to each other the taken-for-granted, good-faith assumption that the other is, in fact, carrying out his or her defined activity. The community and the [102] board have confidence in the superintendent, who has confidence in the principal, who has confidence in the teachers.  None of these people can say what the other does or produces (for example, see Chapter Nine), but the plausibility of their activity requires that they have confidence in each other.

 

The logic of confidence is what Goffman (1967) calls "face work" — the process of maintaining the other's face or identity and thus of maintaining the plausibility and legitimacy of the organization itself. Face work avoids embarrassing incidents and preserves the organization from the disruption of an implausible performance by any actor. Goffman (1967, pp. 12-18) discusses three dimensions of this face-saving procedure: avoidance, discretion, and overlooking. Decoupling promotes each of these dimensions. Avoidance is maximized when the various clusters of identities are buffered from each other, when the organization is segmentalized, and when interaction across units is minimized (as by the self-contained classroom). Discretion is maximized when inspection and control are minimized or when participants are cloaked with "professional" authority. Finally, participants often resort to overlooking embarrassing incidents or to labeling them as deviant, as characteristic of particular individuals, and therefore as nonthreatening to the integrity of the ritual classification scheme.

 

It must be stressed that face work and the logic of confidence are not merely personal orientations but are also institutional in character. For instance, a state creates a rule that something called "history" must be taught in high schools. This demand is not inspected or examined by organizational procedures but is controlled through confidence in teachers. Each teacher of history has been credentialed. There is an incredible sequence of confidences here, with faces being maintained up and down the line: The state has confidence in the district, the district in the school, and the school in the teacher. The teacher is deserving of confidence because an accrediting agency accredited the teacher's college. The accrediting agency did not, of course, inspect the instruction at the college but relied on the certification of its teachers, having confidence in the universities which the teachers attended. The accrediting agency also has confidence in the organization of the college — its admin[i]strators and departments. These people, in [103] turn, had confidence in their teachers, which enabled them to label certain courses as history without inspecting them. The chain goes on and on. Nowhere (except in the concealed relation between teacher and pupil) is there any inspection. Each link is a matter of multiple exchanges of confidence.

 

The most visible aspect of the logic of confidence in the educational system is the myth of teacher professionalism. Even in higher education — where teachers typically have no professional training for teaching — the myth is maintained. It serves to legitimate the confidence the system places in its teachers and to provide an explanation of why this confidence is justified. This explains one of the most puzzling features of educational professionalism — why the professional status of teachers rises dramatically with the creation of an educational bureaucracy. It is conventional to assume that professionalism and bureaucracy are at odds, although the evidence rarely supports this view (Corwin, 1970). In fact, even though the ideology supporting the creation of large American educational bureaucracies argued for close control, evaluation, and inspection of teachers, it seems clear that these bureaucracies greatly lowered the amount of such control (Tyack, 1974). Prebureacratic teachers were often under direct inspection and control of the community that hired them. The bureaucracy, justified on the grounds that it would assume responsibility for inspection and control of instruction, however, almost immediately began to inspect and control only the superficial and categorical aspects of teachers. To account for this lack of specific inspection and control of instruction, the myth of professionalism arose very early, despite the original intentions of the founders. Our argument — that professionalism serves the requirements of confidence and good faith — explains this growth: The myth of teacher professionalism helps to justify the confidence placed in teachers and to legitimate the buffering of uncertainly in the performance of pupils and teachers in educational organizations.

 

Overview of the Argument. With the growth of corporate society, especially the growth of nation-states, education comes into exchange with society. Schooling — the bureaucratic standardization of ritual classifications — emerges and becomes the dominant form of educational organization. Schools become organized in [104] relation to these ritual categories in order to gain support and legitimacy. In America, the local and pluralistic control of schools causes these classifications to have little impact on the actual instructional activities of local schools. Thus the official classifications of education, although enforced in public respects, are decoupled from actual activity and can contain a good deal of internal inconsistency without harm. As a result, American schools in practice contain multiple realities, each organized with respect to different internal or exogenous pressures. These multiple realities conflict so little because they are buffered from each other by the logic of confidence that runs through the system.

 

In this fashion, educational organizations have enjoyed enormous success and have managed to satisfy an extraordinary range of external and internal constituents. The standardized categories of American society and its stratification system are maintained, while the practical desires of local community constituents and the wishes of teachers, who are highly satisfied with their jobs, are also catered to. As new constituents rise up and make new demands, these pressures can be accommodated within certain parts of the system with minimal impact on other parts. A great deal of adaptation and change can occur without disrupting actual activity. And, conversely, the activities of teachers and pupils can change a good deal, even though the abstract categories have remained constant.

 

The arguments we have discussed have many implications for research on educational organizations. We see schools (and other organizations) as vitally — and in complex ways — affected by their institutional environments. Much more research is needed, carefully examining such institutional variations — among societies or among institutions within societies — and their organizational impact.

 

Propositions Comparing Societies. First, the formal structure of educational organizations tends to come into correspondence with environmental categories. These ritual categories, further, tend to be linked to the nation-state, implying that formal education struc[105]ture ought to vary more between societies than within them. Second, educational content and instruction is organizationally most loosely coupled in societies with pluralistic systems of control, such as the United States, and is more tightly controlled with centralized systems. Furthermore, ambiguities and vacuities in the educational languages specifying the meaning and implications of the ritual elements of educational organization should be found to be greatest in pluralistic systems. Third, the more education is a national institution of cental importance, the more loosely coupled its internal structure and the more control rests on the logics of confidence and of professionalization.

 

Propositions Comparing Education with Other Institutions. First, instructional work in institutionalized educational systems is less closely inspected or coordinated than similar work in other institutions such as businesses or armies. Second, educational structures are more responsive to even inconsistent environmental pressures than organizations in other institutional settings. In part, this is because they are buffered from their own internal technical work activity. This situation permits more internal and external constituent groups to perceive that they have [more] power in educational organizations than in other organizations.

 

Propositions Comparing Educational Organizations. First, the formal structure of educational organizations responds to environmental (or societal) categories. It varies less in response to variations in the actual characteristics of clienteles or of problems of instruction. Similarly, changes in environmental rules defining education produce more rapid formal structural changes than do changes in the content or methods of instruction. Second, educational organizations are internally coordinated and legitimated by their environmental categories, not primarily by their own technical activity or instructional output. Variations in their success at maintaining correspondence with environmental rules predict the success, survival, and stability of educational organizations more than do variations in their instructional effectiveness. Third, loosely coupled educational organizations structurally respond more effectively to environmental pressures and changes than do tightly coupled organizations. Instruction adapts more quickly, in such organizations, to the informal pressures of teachers and parents, [106] while structures respond more quickly to environmental institutional categories.

 

Propositions Comparing Internal Components of Organizations. First, in educational organizations, feedback concerning the work and output of teachers and schools tends to be eliminated, even if it happens to exist. Participants employ logic of confidence, and overlook observations of actual work and outcomes. Feedback on the categorical status of teachers, schools, students, and programs tends to be retained.

 

Second, educational organizations respond to external institutional pressures with programmatic or categorical change, minimizing the impact on instruction. They respond to variations in teacher or parent preference with activity change, but not necessarily with categorical change. Each part or level of the system responds relatively independently to its environment. Thus, the greatest part of organizationally planned innovation in instruction is never implemented, and the greatest part of instructional innovation is not organizationally planned.

 

Third, the loose coupling of instructional activity in educational organizations permits more internal and external constituent groups to perceive that they have power in this area than over other policy decisions.

 

Implications for Organizational Theory. The arguments above have many implications for theory and research on organizations other than schools. Our arguments seem quite plausible in terms of the literature on school organization, but some of them are sharply at odds with the theory of organizations (for a more detailed suggestion, see J. Meyer and Rowan, 1977). Perhaps organization theory is imperfect. It seems unlikely that educational organizations are so extremely unusual. Indeed, a most fundamental observation in research on all sorts of organizations is that rules and behavior — the formal and the informal — are often dissociated or inconsistent. This is the same observation we have been making about schooling organizations, and it may be time to stop being surprised at it. The surprise arises, not because the observations are novel, but because researchers take too limited a view of formal organizations. They see formal structure as created to actually coordinate production in the case of market organizations and con[107]formity in the case of political bureaucracy (see Thompson, 1967; Scott, 1975). And they are consequently surprised when formal structure and activity are loosely linked.

 

It is true that production requires some coordination, as political structure demands some conformity. But it is also true that the myth or social account of production and conformity is critical. Much of the value of what we purchase lies in intangibles. Much of the value of social control and order inheres in the faith that is generated. Put differently, organizations must have the confidence of their environments, not simply be in rational exchange with them. And those that have this confidence and legitimacy receive all sorts of social resources that provide for success and stability. That is, organizations must be legitimate, and they must contain legitimate accounts or explanations for their internal order and external products. The formal structure of an organization is in good part a social myth and functions as a myth whatever its actual implementation. In small part, it is a mythical account the organization attempts to institutionalize in society. In much greater part, the formal structure is taken over from the accounts already built into the environment. Incorporating the environmental myth of the organization's activities legitimates the organization both externally and internally (Dowling and Pfeffer, 1975) and stabilizes it over and above the stability generated by its network of internal relations and production. Organizations integrate themselves by incorporating the wider institutional structures as their own.

 

Thus, if systematic safety problems are “discovered” by the environment, safety officers are invented: Their existence explains how the organization has "taken into account" safety problems. (Who actually deals with safety is another matter.) So also with pollution control, labor relations, public relations, advertising, affirmative action, or research and development. Some of these activities may, in a day-to-day sense, actually get done: Our point here is that incorporating them in the formal structure of the organization has the function of legitimating myths and that such myths may be created quite independently of the activities they index. All these units represent the formal incorporation by the organization of environmental definitions of activities that then become part of the firm's account. Incorporating them deflects [108] criticism from internal coalitions. It also legitimates the organization externally: Banks lend money to modern firms. Role handles are provided: Other organizations have someone inside the first "with whom they can deal." The legal system may require such forms of accountability. Firms often incorporate external values in a very explicit way by attaching units and products "shadow prices" derived not from any production function but from market prices external to the first.

 

The formal structure of an organization incorporates (and in some respects is) an environmental ideology or theory of the organization's activity. As the environmental ideology changes, so does the formal structure. No wonder the formal structure may be poorly adapted to the actual ongoing activity, which has to coordinate internal exigencies of its own.

 

A critical aspect of modern structure arises from the rationality of modern society and of organizations as myths. Formal organizational structures represent more than mere theories of activity: They must represent rational, functional theories. The structural account they present to society must give every appearance of rationality. Much of the irrationality of life in modern organizations arises because the organization itself must maintain a rational corporate persona: We must find planners and economists who will waste their time legitimating plans we have already made, accounts to justify our prices, and human relations professionals to deflect blame from our conflicts. Life in modern organizations is a constant interplay between the activities that we need to carry on and the organizational accounts we need to give.

 

This discussion generates several implications for organization theory. First, formal organizational structure reflects and incorporates prevailing environmental theories and categories, often without altering activity. These environmental rules constitute taken-for-granted understandings in the organization. Organizational actors are constantly in the business of managing categories abstracted directly from environmental theories.

 

Second, organizational structure has two faces: It conforms to environmental categories and categorical logics, and it classifies and controls activity. Organizational actors must take into account both what they are doing and the appearances of what they are doing. [109]

 

Third, to accommodate both appearance and reality, organizational structure must always be partly decoupled from actual activity. Special managers may arise to adjudicate relationships between the categories of the formal structure and actual activities. Personnel officers classify persons and jobs into categories, registrars and admitting physicians institutionalize diagnoses, accountants organize activity into budgets and budget categories, and so on. Linking the organization as a formal structure with organization as a network of activities is a major task, and it tends to introduce inconsistencies and anomalies into both domains.

 

This view of organizations as constituted and coordinated at every point by taken-for-granted environmental understandings is considerably different from most prevailing views. Both "closed-systems” and “open-systems” views of organizations tend to see them as encountering the environment at their boundaries. We see the structure of an organization as derived from and legitimated by the environment. In this view, organizations begin to lose their status as internally interdependent systems and come to be seen as dramatic reflections of — dependent subunits within — the wider institutional environment.