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New images of organizations and leadership

a
Terrence E. Deal
a
Professor of Education, Department of Educational Leadership, George Peabody College ,
Vanderbilt University , Nashville, Tennessee
Published online: 04 Nov 2009.

To cite this article: Terrence E. Deal (1986) New images of organizations and leadership, Peabody Journal of Education, 63:3,
1-8, DOI: 10.1080/01619568609538521

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 New Images of
Organizations and
Leadership
Terrence E. Deal
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In the 1980s, much attention centers on educational reform. The

President of the United States started the ball rolling by appointing a
special commission which subsequently proclaimed a national crisis.
Since then, senators, governors, state legislators, and mayors have
echoed the concern: something significant needs to be done to upgrade
American education. Their concerns have spawned still more commis-
sions, created a variety of policies and programs to improve schools, and
renewed the vigilance of parents and local communities. Spurred on in
large measure by the effective schools research, administrators and
teachers have not been passive respondents to initiatives from outside.
Their internal efforts to improve schools have often preceded or paral-
leled the call to action from federal, state, or local governing bodies.
Taken in toto, the sheer amount of time, effort, and resources devoted to
improving America's schools should reap an immediate payoff in new
approaches or practices and ultimately yield greater performance divi-
dends.
However, those with long-term memories of prior efforts to change
public schools are less optimistic. We can faintly recollect the attempts to
alter high school staffing patterns and instruction in the 1950s. We can
recall with nostalgia the educational innovations of the 1960s. We can
remember, among others, the experiments with vouchers, individualized
instruction, educational objectives, team teaching, and instructional
technology in the 1970s. Across the memories a familiar scenario takes
form: the basic shape of schools and the core of schooling remains intact
once the whirlwind of activity subsides.

TERRENCE DEAL IS Professor of Education, Department of Educational Leadership, George Peabody

College of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee.

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 PEABODY JOURNAL OF EDUCATION
New Images of Organizations and Leadership

Despite all the fanfare, funds, and finagling, administrators continue to

administer schools in familiar ways, teachers teach as they were taught,
and students behave and learn as most of us always did. From a tradi-
tional cost/benefit analysis, this is a fairly dismal return on a rather
sizeable investment.
hi another sense, the vast amounts of time, money, and attention may
not have not been spent entirely in vain. While the core structure and
practices of schools remains unchanged, other important consequences
undoubtedly exist. For example, shortly after the National Commission's
Report, "Crisis in Education," was released, the Gallup Poll's measure-
ment of public confidence in education showed its most significant
upswing ever. In the short time elapsed between the report and the
reaction, little had been (or could have been) actually done; a recent
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reminder that reform efforts may have significance exclusive of tangible

outcomes (Deal, 1985). If one accepts the premise that the relationship
between schools and their relevant publics is based more on faith and
belief than on results (Meyer & Rowan, 1983), educational reform can be
viewed as important symbolic, rather than as instrumental, activity
(Deal 1985). Like reorganization (Meyer & Rowan, 1977), evaluation
(Folden & Weiner, 1977), leadership (Edelman, 1977), planning, (Edelf-
son, Johnson, & Stromquist, 1977), and other events (Deal, 1981), the
primary organization payoff may derive more from believing differently
than from producing significant differences.
This interesting possibility will not, however, be the primary focus of
this issue. Rather, we will center attention on the match between the
intentions of educational reformers and the organizational realities of
schools. In question are the images of school organization and the
assumptions that lie behind reform initiatives (Morgan, 1986; Bolman
and Deal, 1984; Firestone 1979). To the extent that policy-makers base
legislation on research and listen to researchers for advice, images
embedded in current theories of organizations can have a significant
impact on reform policies and programs. To the extent that practitioners
rely on research as a guide for action, theoretical models, metaphors, or
frames may influence strategies that are invented or adopted in local
schools. If the images policy-makers embrace are congruent with those
of practitioners, then the prospects of reform would seem more opti-
mistic than if their mental pictures were at odds. Problems seen from
one vantage point can disappear when the perspective shifts; solutions
from one level can appear as problems when they are discerned from
either above or below.
Unfortunately, images are often assumed to be real—and usually have
real consequences. A discrepancy in images may blunt the potential of
2
 New Images of Organizations and Leadership

education reform unless we can probe behind the rhetoric to capture the
theoretical conflict that lies at the core of the debate.
It would be one thing if researchers shared common assumptions
about organizational behavior and performance or could even agree on
the key concepts. At this point, however, the world of organizational
theory seems as varied and as in flux as the world of educational
practice. A brief synopsis of the development of theories of organization
illustrates the smorgasbord from which policy-makers or practitioners
may choose.

Changing Conceptions of Schools As Organizations

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It is no accident that the structure of schools today is reminiscent of

the way factories were once organized. Early in the century, the modern-
ization and bureaucratization of most organizations gave rise to assump-
tions that specialization (age-grading) and coordination (standard
policies and professionalization) could be applied to public schools.
Schools were subjected to the same scientific management logic that was
applied to most organizations of the time (Taylor, 1932). The primary
quest of reformers was to make educational organizations more efficient.
Many of the current features of school reflect these early ideals (Calla-
han, 1962).
Later on, schools were influenced by the human relations reaction to
scientific management approaches. Human relations ideas called atten-
tion to the costs of efficiency. While the standardization and routiniza-
tion of work might improve production, it also stifled creativity, created
boredom, and encouraged workers to withdraw or to sabotage collective
objectives (Argyris, 1962). Human relations theorists encouraged organi-
zations to adapt work procedures to fit human needs. In response,
administrators actively solicited input from employees and used praise
and encouragement to motivate them to higher levels of performance.
Humanistic schools replaced efficient schools as the ideal. Morale was
seen as a precondition of high performance. In many ways supervisory
and instructional practices in schools continue to be shaped by human
relations images.
In the late 1960s, a book by Thompson (1968) had a powerful influence
on organizational theory by reemphasizing that rationality and reason-
ableness go hand in hand with results. Organizations strive for ration-
ality, but in the face of uncertainties introduced by technology and the
environment. The new imagery advocated that to the extent formal
structures of authority and work fit technological and environmental
exigencies, organizations would succeed. This work and that of others
3
 PEABODY JOURNAL OF EDUCATION
New Images of Organizations and Leadership

(Lawrence & Lorch, 1967), conditionalized earlier assumptions by argu-

ing that the structure of an effective organization was not absolute, but
was contingent on the technology and environment. The obvious corol-
lary was that there was no one best way to organize. Structure needed to
be tailored to fit demands posed by internal tasks and external condi-
tions. The image of an effective school shifted from the debate of ration-
ality versus human needs to a more relativistic position: "it all depends."
Guided by the structure-technology-environment assumptions, the
Environment for Teaching Program of Stanford's Center for Research
and Development in Teaching undertook in the early 1970s a 5-year
study to examine the relationship between the structure of district,
schools, or classrooms and instructional approaches. Following the
imagery of the time, the study predicted that complex instructional
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patterns (as posed by individualized instruction) would lead to more

complex structional arrangements—and vice versa (Cohen et al., 1979).
Contrary to initial predictions, the analysis of the first wave of ques-
tionnaires and interviews in 31 districts and 188 schools unveiled some
perplexing results. Rather than finding variation in structural linkages
among districts, schools, and classrooms in response to technological or
environmental imperatives, the early results suggested that each level of
an educational organization appears to operate independently from
others (Deal, Meyer, & Scott, 1975). The segmentation was particularly
obvious around instruction—the core technology of the enterprise.
Interpretations of these results (along with others), contributed to an
emerging image of schools as loosely-coupled organizations (Weick,
1976). Because of their unique properties—unclear goals, ambiguous
technology, and political vulnerabilities—schools seemed to operate
with loose linkages between goals and tasks, tasks and roles, or goals
and outcomes. Whether the patterns were a structural pathology or a ra-
tional accommodation to prevailing conditions became both an ideologi-
cal and empirical issue highly dependent on which image of organiza-
tions guided the interpretation. An exploration of loose-coupling as a
dependent and independent variable became fashionable, even though
Weick and others had introduced the notion originally as a metaphor to
encourage or reexamine the structural assumptions that had previously
guided the field.
As antecedents and consequences of loose coupling were being ex-
plored, other theorists entertained still another image. Picking up on
suggestions offered by Weick, their theories and studies begin to look at
how organizations might be tightly knit while loosely coupled. If the
formal structure of goals and roles did not control instructional activity,
perhaps the threads that held schools together could be a symbolic
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 New Images of Organizations and Leadership

tapestry woven together by participants over time. The idea of schools as

cultures revived earlier imagery of Waller (1932) and others.
Parallel to the work in education (including some aspects of research
on effective schools), observers of business were reformulating ideas
about the characteristics of high performing companies. Their informed
speculations suggested that success was predicated more on cultural
cohesion than on structural coherence. Concepts such as myth, ritual,
ceremony, and stories began to compete with those of formalization,
standardization, and span of control (Deal & Kennedy, 1983; Peters &
Waterman, 1984). The existential side of both businesses and schools
once again became a legitimate subject of inquiry as well as a source of
administrative strategies.
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Kuhn (1962) once predicted that the paradigms governing science

followed a predictable sequence. Prevailing images encountered anoma-
lies. Uncertainty paved the way for competing images. Competition
among images (or paradigms) held sway until one prevailed and normal
science returned. In organization theory, however, one image has not yet
triumphed over the others. The result is a pluralistic array of images that
may be embraced almost at will, depending on the training preferences,
biases, and experiences of practitioners, policy-makers, or researchers
(Bolman & Deal, 1984).

The Need for Conceptual Pluralism

At a time when education is the target of reform, conceptions of
schools as organizations are multiple. Many reform strategies appear to
be based on assumption that improvements in the structural charac-
teristics of schools will lead to better performance. Recent evidence,
however, raises serious concerns about these strategies. In fact, they
may do more harm than good (Chubb, 1987). If we accept the idea that
schools are complex human systems where goals and roles, power and
conflict, human needs and skills, symbols and meaning all play a central
role, approaches to reform take on a new cast. Rather than to put all bets
on one guiding image, we need to entertain several (Bolman & Deal,
1984). Rather than to fashion strategies mainly from a structural perspec-
tive, the individual, political, and symbolic realities of schools also need
to be considered. For example, as principals are encouraged to assume a
more prominent role in instructional leadership, other important prin-
cipalship duties such as those of counselor, negotiator, and poet cannot
be overlooked. Or, at a time when schools are encouraged to produce
results, attention must be paid to their other vital social functions as
extended families, arenas, or temples.

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 PEABODY JOURNAL OF EDUCATION
New Images of Organizations and Leadership

The Contributions of This Issue

The articles for this issue represent emerging images of schools as
organizations. While not all address directly the contemporary issues of
educational reform, each has important implications for policy-makers
or practicioners who are grappling with changing schools. While these
articles individually (or in aggregate) are not offered as replacements for
literature reflecting different theoretical assumptions, each, in its own
way, challenges our conventional thinking and understandings of
schools.
In the opening article, Sara Lawrence Lightfoot challenges a prevailing
idea that the tenor or quality of a school can be captured by simple
measures of performance or effectiveness. She introduces the concept of
goodness, a holistic construct which evaluates those subtle and intangi-
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ble aspects of an organization that broad-gauged research filters tend to

overlook. She characterizes schools as organisms capable of significant
growth and transformation on their own volition. Through portraits of
individual schools, she identifies a chain of empowerment consisting of
leaders, teachers, and students as the means through which schools
achieve goodness. Lightfoot's work rigorously and directly challenges
commonly held images and methodology of the educational research
community. In doing so, it indirectly raises significant questions about
typical approaches to school improvement and reform.
Douglas Mitchell's article "Metaphors of Management—How Far
From Outcomes Can We Get?" examines the variety of metaphors (or
images) employed by managers and researchers to make sense of the
complicated world of educational organizations. His four metaphors,
(a) machine, (b) organization, (c) marketplace, and (d) conversation,
roughly parallel the four different traditions in organizational theory, yet
are grounded in the images that are employed by practitioners to make
their strange world familiar or to keep their familiar world from becom-
ing strange. As one reads the Mitchell article, one can easily imagine the
possible conflicts that may arise when subordinates organize their work
isomorphic with one metaphor while supervisors manage work from
another, or when reform initiatives are formulated by policy-makers
whose metaphoric world differs from that of practitioners. In many
aspects, the literal issues surrounding reform may stem from figurative
misunderstandings, a clash of metaphors rather than of arguments
rooted in fact.
In William G. Spady's article, we find a conventional outcome-based
approach juxtaposed against less traditional explanations of exemplary
performance. Spady adapts the characteristics of excellent companies to

6
 New Images of Organizations and Leadership

the world of education, arguing that schools can profit more from
examples of excellence in business than from the literature and policy
that has shaped educational reform. He draws from several examples in
education to show parallels between the excellence movement in busi-
ness and the effectiveness movement in education.
In the final article, Martin Burlingame challenges the typically sacro-
sanct assumption that leaders affect outcomes by assessing and acting
on the most promising alternatives from the array of those that are
possible. As alternatives, he advances two other conceptions of lead-
ership: (a) the leader as symbol, embodying or representing the core
values of a school community, and (b) the leader as explanation, reflect-
ing the direction the followers would choose if left to their own devices.
Each alternative emerges from research that examines schools as micro-
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scopic movies rather than as topographical maps constructed by

researchers with objectives-detached methodologies.
The intended moral of this issue is obvious. By entertaining multiple
images of schools as organizations, practitioners and policy-makers may
avoid the pitfalls of past reform efforts. They may also shape reform
policies and approaches that change educational practice for the better
without destroying the unique character of schools. Researchers who
subject their inquiry to the scrutiny of emerging theories or images may
improve their ability to predict and explain the behavior of educational
organizations. At the very least, the injection of new ideas into the
research community can enliven our intellectural discourse.

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 PEABODY JOURNAL OF EDUCATION
New Images of Organizations and Leadership

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