Analyzing Problems in Schools and School Systems

A Theoretical Approach

Alan K. Gaynor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136497230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Although there are many textbooks in the field of educational administration describing various organizational theories, this text is unique in tying organizational theory explicitly and systematically to a well-formulated problem- analysis methodology. It provides particular examples of bureaucratic, political, and leadership theories as well as descriptions of two broader theoretical frameworks: Burrell and Morgan's conceptual matrix and systems thinking. Special features include:
* a fully developed methodology for describing and documenting problems in schools;
* a systematic method for using different theoretical perspectives to analyze the causes of problems in schools;
* carefully formulated questions illustrating how different theoretical frameworks lead policy analysts to look at problems differently and to focus on different types and sources of information concerning their possible causes;
* substantial sample papers illustrating the methodology; and
* a range of illustrative organizational theories, amply described and succinctly grounded intellectually. This book is directed toward students in organizational theory and problem analysis classes and their professors, as well as to school administrators seeking to examine their problems and policies from perspectives that go beyond personal experience.

PART I

METHODOLOGY

1

Conceptual Framework and Overview

Knowledge of a science of organization and administration can never be a substitute for specific experience in a specific organization. The usefulness of the more general knowledge to the administrators of organization comes from the rational understanding it gives of behavior that is largely based on trial and error or repetitive experience. Its immediate practical use is limited. Its ultimate practical value is great, sharpening observation, preventing the neglect of important factors, giving the advantages of a more general language, and reducing the inconsistencies between behavior and its verbal description.

—Chester Barnard (1947, p. xi)

Managers and administrators have a special responsibility for knowing about organizational problems and seeing that something gets done about them.¹ Decisions have to be made and resources mobilized to gain support for needed changes. Even for experienced administrators, thinking through problems, formulating sensible policy ideas, and galvanizing interest and support are not easy tasks.

Typically, administrators are under constant pressure; yet moving an organization is not something you do easily off the top of your head. Regardless of the problems to be addressed, you will achieve better results by following a clear and systematic line of reasoning, pursuing an established set of steps, and availing yourself extensively of other people’s thinking. This means drawing fully on your own experience, not just tapping the surface of it. It means taking optimal advantage of the interests others have in the problems that concern you, of the commitment they bring to solving them, and of their special skills and resources. It also means drawing on the minds of great organizational thinkers, not for answers, but for ways of thinking about the problem so that you do not miss anything important. An effective process for solving organizational problems includes (a) describing and documenting the problem; (b) identifying and describing important stakeholders, positive and negative, and decision makers; (c) using theory to guide you in analyzing the causes of the problem; (d) formulating general strategies to address the causes you have identified; and (e) making recommendations specifically tailored to the interests, powers, skills, and resources of individual stakeholders and stakeholder groups.

It is important to recognize that, although clearly rational, this approach is also fundamentally political. It identifies leadership in policymaking as rational in employing systematic processes to formulate and analyze organizational problems as well as political in its recognition of important stakeholders and its involvement of these stakeholders in defining the problem and debating its relationship to value-laden standards. At root, then, the method outlined in this book lies usefully between the technical–rational (analogous to operations research)² and the incremental (Lindblom, 1959, 1965, 1968; Lindblom & Cohen, 1979). Although this methodology separates the problem from the solution in ways that contrast with the views of the pure incrementalists,³ it accepts practical limits on the amount of information that can be gathered for making decisions (Lindblom, 1959) and the information processing limitations of human decision makers (Simon, 1957a, 1957b).

In this chapter, an overview of the five phases of problem analysis is presented. Then each phase is developed in detail in chapters 2 through 4. Chapters 1 through 4 comprise Part I of the book. Part II incorporates seven additional chapters: chapters 5 through 11. Chapters 5 through 10 sketch a set of selected theoretical frameworks that serve as a backdrop to the practical problem analysis approaches detailed in the first four chapters. Chapter 11 suggests ways in which organizational problem analysis can usefully be understood as a hermeneutic process. The theory sketches include illustrations and guidelines for analyzing organizational decision making and the causes of organizational problems from different conceptual perspectives. Part III (chapters 12–15) presents two case examples of the analysis process described in the book and two examples of critiquing decisions and decisional processes theoretically. These chapters were written by students in my doctoral classes and seminars. An extensive bibliography is included.

PROBLEM DESCRIPTION AND DOCUMENTATION

There are four major tasks involved in describing and documenting organizational problems: identifying specific problem indicators, documenting each of them, examining these indicators in the light of appropriate and persuasive standards of comparison, and presenting to potential stakeholders and decision makers your case that an important problem exists.

Identification

Be clear about why you think you have a problem on your hands. Talk with people, check any records available to you, and identify the specific indicators of the problem. This is important because problems often are cast in vague terms. For example, you may say, “We’ve got a morale problem!” But what makes you think you’ve got a morale problem? Absenteeism? Turnover? Error rates? Formal grievances? Informal complaints over coffee and in the cafeteria? Sour faces? When people think they’ve got a problem, and it’s a real problem, there are always concrete trails of evidence, some statistical, others qualitative in nature.

Documentation

After you’ve made a list of the salient indicators of the problem, try to track down as much documentation for each problem indicator as you can. Do this from records, from memory, and from talking with others. You may find the problem isn’t as big as you thought it was. If the problem is serious, perhaps because it is contributing to other important problems, your examination of specific indicators will help you to be clearer about its scope, about how long it’s been going on, and whether it’s getting worse.

Examination

After you’ve clarified why you think a serious problem exists, you need to do a little soul searching. Given the concrete evidence, why do you think there is something you would really call a problem? Obviously, you think things should be better in some ways. Why do you think that? Against what standards are you evaluating the evidence you have? Why are these standards important? Are there other standards that you could reasonably and persuasively use instead of or in addition to the standards that first came to mind? What values do these standards represent for you? Are these important values? Are they values shared by major stakeholders and decision makers? Values may include, for example, those of effectiveness, efficiency, equity, and justice.

Presentation

When you have clarified to your satisfaction as many reasonable standards as possible—standards you believe will persuade other key audiences about the importance of the problem—prepare a presentation of documentation. Charts, graphs, and tables, both quantitative and qualitative, are helpful in showing how performance fails to meet the expectations embodied in persuasive standards. By illustrating the problem, you validate your belief that a serious problem exists while you also build a compelling case for mobilizing support from others to do something about the problem.

STAKEHOLDERS AND DECISION MAKERS

Now that you have built a solid case in defining and documenting the problem against compelling standards, you need to build a political foundation for effective action that will bring about the changes necessary to reduce or eliminate the problem.⁴ Begin by identifying others who have a stake in resolving the problem and those who will most likely be involved in making the decisions and taking the actions required to bring about needed changes. Stakeholders often include groups and individuals who are concerned about the problem as it relates to their own values and political and organizational agendas. Because of their prior words and actions, some stakeholders can be expected to favor needed changes and to work to resolve the focal problem; others can be expected to oppose recommendations for change. These are positive and negative stakeholders respectively. Even stakeholders who are concerned about a problem and would like to do something about it may favor certain solution strategies and oppose others out of self-interest or for theoretical reasons. Moreover, decision makers may or may not be current stakeholders, positive or negative.

Make a list of significant stakeholders and decision makers and describe the interests, powers, skills, and resources each would bring to any campaign for the changes needed to remove the major causes of the problem. Be clear about evidence you have of their concerns about the problem. It is not uncommon for people to think others should care about a particular problem, yet have no evidence that these others do care. This is important because, in the last analysis, your major strategic recommendations will focus on involving the positive stakeholders—consistent with their individual interests, powers, skills, resources, and levels of commitment—in doing something about the problem, in dealing with potential negative stakeholders, and in influencing key decision makers, who may or may not presently be stakeholders.⁵

CAUSAL ANALYSIS

The Value of Theoretical Analysis

In complex organizations it is difficult to unravel specific causes of important problems from the welter of factors impinging on a problem situation. Precisely for this reason, you must use to maximum advantage your own experience, the knowledge of others around you, and the insights, written and oral, of experienced managers, consultants, and researchers. Yet arguments persist about the worth of social science theory.

It is broadly understood that the social science disciplines differ in fundamental ways from the natural sciences. Furthermore, it has been strongly argued that management science has not successfully validated significant general laws that reliably predict human behavior or organizational phenomena. Maclntyre (1984) said, for example:

According to…conventional account—from the Enlightenment through Comte and Mill to Hempel—the aim of the social sciences is to explain specifically social phenomena by supplying law-like generalizations to which the managerial expert would have to appeal. This account however seems to entail—what is certainly not the case—that the social sciences are almost or perhaps completely devoid of achievement. For the salient fact about those sciences is the absence of the discovery of any law-like generalizations whatsoever. (p. 88)

But, even if true, this is not to deny, as Maclntyre himself suggested, the value of the thinking of those who have worked in and with organizations and those who have engaged for long periods in systematic research on various aspects of organizational life. In fact, as Donaldson proposed (1985, p. xi), their concepts and theories constitute an important source of ideas for experienced administrators seeking help in thinking about their problems.

If evidence were required that organizational studies contains [sic] theoretical and empirical work of both volume and breadth, then this has been amply furnished by the many reviews of the literature (Child, 1977; Etzioni, 1975; Hage, 1980; Hage & Azumi, 1972; Hall, 1977; Khandwalla, 1977; Kotter, Schlesinger, & Sathe, 1979; Mintzberg, 1979).

Most administrators would be glad for help in locating and interpreting various management theories, which represent what have been variously called frames, lenses, and perspectives for thinking about organizational life. Their value lies not in telling experienced administrators what to do, but rather in helping them systematically to focus their experience in different ways as they think about what might be causing their problems and how to solve them. As Bolman and Deal counseled (1984), “Understanding organizations is nearly impossible when the manager is unconsciously wed to a single, narrow perspective.” They discussed the concept of organizational frames in the following terms:

We have consolidated the major schools of organizational thought into four relatively coherent perspectives [the rational systems frame, the human resource frame, the political frame, and the symbolic frame]. We have chosen the label “frames” to characterize these different vantage points. Frames are windows on the world. Frames filter out some things while allowing others to pass through easily. Frames help us to order the world and decide what action to take. Every manager uses a personal frame, or image, of organizations to gather information, make judgments, and get things done. (p. 4)

Once you are clear about the nature of the problem in focus and the way it manifests itself concretely in your organization—presently, historically, and, perhaps, projected into the future—you are ready to think systematically about the causes of the problem. This involves drawing on your experience and talking to others (informally or in focus groups), but also reviewing social science and management theories to highlight important causal dimensions of the problem situation.

It should be cl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• PART I: METHODOLOGY
• PART II: THEORY SKETCHES
• PART III: CASE EXAMPLES
• References
• Suggested Readings
• Author Index
• Subject Index