Abstract
Schools are interesting as complex organizations in and of themselves but even more so for how they refract the societal dynamics by which inequality is reproduced, an enduringly vexing question (Fligstein & McAdam, 2012:3). Educational attainment is core to socioeconomic status and connected to outcomes in housing, health, and employment. Unequal schools in fields characterized by stratification are often the subject of reform attempts (Tyack, 1974). We examine how a wealthier and a poorer school responded to a state-level regulatory mandate for change, in the U.S. context of schools as putative engines of opportunity. Bourdieu’s “master concepts” of field, habitus, and cultural capital (Swartz, 2008) are often applied, and we used them to answer frequent but still relatively unanswered calls in the literature: first, to use the master concepts together rather than singularly, and second, to attend specifically to the organization level and what it refracts (Dobbin, 2008; Emirbayer & Johnson, 2008; Hallett & Gougherty, 2018; Lounsbury & Ventresca, 2003; Mohr, 2013). For this integrative and organizational level approach, we derived the concept of “class signature,” which enabled us to focus on practices in organizations. This lens revealed “resistant compliance” in the wealthier school and “compliant resistance” in the poorer school, both of which reshaped the stratified field, even if stratification was not rectified. These responses appeared to reproduce inequality, not simplistically, we argue, but along a winding path fraught with practical experiments, protection against penalties, redefinition of the reform’s terms, and some small gains to remedy intra-organizational inequalities.
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Acknowledgements
We appreciate the guidance from the reviewers and editor, the support of David Swartz, early mentorship on studying social problems from Jerome Karabel, Lisa Peattie, and Martin Rein, feedback on previous drafts from colleagues Edward Carberry and Stephan Manning, suggestions from the Organizations and Social Change seminar at UMass Boston, insights from the EGOS (European Group for Organization Studies) track on Inequality, Institutions, and Organizations, and of course especially, the wisdom and efforts of the teachers in this study.
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Goldman, J., Scully, M. Class signature in schools: Field, habitus, and cultural capital intertwined to understand the reproduction of inequality at the organizational level. Theor Soc (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-024-09545-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-024-09545-8