Instantiated Recoupling in Principals\u27 Enactment of Teacher Evaluations: Emotion Work and New Forms of Ceremonial Conformity in Educational Institutions

As accountability policies have proliferated and evolved in a number of organizational fields, recent scholarship in organizational sociology has paid close attention to the ways that accountability has forced tight coupling in a variety of organizations. Fewer recent studies examine efforts at ceremonial conformity that organizations may use to buffer internal practices from institutional pressures, or how organizations and their actors might attempt to engage in ceremonial conformity under newer accountability regimes. In this article, we examine how school principals enact state-mandated teacher evaluation policies with their teachers. To manage teachers\u27 stress caused by the evaluations, we find that principals often allow, and at times enable, teachers to put on a “dog and pony show” during formal evaluations, a performance that aligns with district instructional policies but deviates from their common everyday practices. We argue that this is a novel form of ceremonial conformity that we call instantiated recoupling

Examining Healthcare Institutions by Bringing Qualitative Data from Two Eras into Empirical Dialogue

In this paper, we argue that there is new insight to be gained by reexamining the classic text, Boys in White, in strategic ways. Specifically, we share excerpts from Boys in White with current medical students and ask for their reactions in qualitative interviews, examining the relevance (or lack thereof) of earlier meanings about professional training for current processes of professional training. We show how we have employed this technique in our current project revisiting Boys in White with current medical students, and discuss preliminary findings that reveal the potential of this technique for documenting evidence of macro-level forces in healthcare institutions using qualitative data on new doctors. We conclude with discussion of alternative approaches through which scholars could make use of this technique in future professional socialization scholarship that could shed light on dynamics of institutional persistence and change

Lesson Plans: The Institutional Demands of Becoming a Teacher

Winner of the 2019-20 Distinguished Book Award - Midwest Sociological SocietyIn Lesson Plans, Judson G. Everitt takes readers into the everyday worlds of teacher training, and reveals the complexities and dilemmas teacher candidates confront as they learn how to perform a job that many people assume anybody can do. Using rich qualitative data, Everitt analyzes how people make sense of their prospective jobs as teachers, and how their introduction to this profession is shaped by the institutionalized rules and practices of higher education, K-12 education, and gender. Trained to constantly adapt to various contingencies that routinely arise in schools and classrooms, teacher candidates learn that they must continually try to reconcile the competing expectations of their jobs to meet students’ needs in an era of accountability. Lesson Plans reveals how institutions shape the ways we produce teachers, and how new teachers make sense of the multiple and complicated demands they face in their efforts to educate students.https://ecommons.luc.edu/facultybooks/1210/thumbnail.jp

The Social Psychology Behind Teacher Walkouts

Why are we seeing so many teacher walkouts when traditional collective bargaining for teachers has weakened considerably in recent decades? A key part of the answer involves the social psychology through which teachers develop their professional culture, and how the evolution of accountability has been toxic to that culture

The Sociology of Education - A Systematic Analysis (Ninth Edition)

The ninth edition of The Sociology of Education examines the field in rare breadth by incorporating a diverse range of theoretical approaches and a distinct sociological lens in its overview of education and schooling. Education is changing rapidly, just as the social forces outside of schools are, and to present the material in a meaningful way, the authors of this book provide a unifying framework―an open systems approach―to illustrate how the issues and structures we find in education are all interconnected. Separate chapters are devoted to how schools help shape who has access to educational opportunities and who does not; issues of race, class and gender; the organization of schools and the roles that make up educational settings, and more. Throughout the book, readers will have an opportunity to engage with theories and issues that are discussed and to apply their newly obtained understanding in response to emerging and persistent problems in the educational system. The new edition continues to be a critical point of reference for students interested in exploring the social context of education and the role education has in shaping our society. It is perfect for sociology of education and social foundations of education courses at the undergraduate or early graduate level.https://ecommons.luc.edu/facultybooks/1214/thumbnail.jp

“The debt is suffocating to be honest”: Student loan debt, prospective sensemaking, and the social psychology of precarity in an allopathic medical school

Confronted with soaring medical school costs and intensifying disparities in physician compensation by specialty, medical students are forced to make sense of medical education debt during the nascent stages of their careers in medicine. Few studies, however, have examined exactly how medical students make sense of these constraints or how this process might influence decisions about which specialty to pursue or affect doctors’ wellbeing. Leveraging qualitative data collected from current students across all four years of medical education at a Midwestern allopathic medical school, we document how medical students collectively engage in prospective sensemaking about their debt and how it may affect their futures. We find that debt creates a palpable sense of financial precarity for people entering a high-status profession. We frame our analysis within a burgeoning new literature in organizational sociology and the professions known as inhabited institutionalism, which draws attention to the reciprocal relationships between local interaction and sensemaking with wider institutional pressures. We conclude with discussion of the implications our findings have for the supply of physicians across specialties as well as for the wellbeing of physicians across their careers