Policy and identification: Exploring the influence of identity perceptions on school leader sense-making in the Swedish school-age Educare

Sense-making, school leaders and identity

When confronted with ambiguous events in organisational life, and not knowing how to act in the proper sense, actors try to understand and give meaning to the situation by the ongoing social and retrospective process of sense-making (Maitlis and Christianson, 2014; Weick, 1995). This is a socially constructed process where actors extract cues from their different social surroundings (Maitlis, 2005) and connect them to prior cognitive frameworks (Coburn, 2006) in order to understand the situation, enable action and create new situations in which cues can be extracted (Weick, 1995). Furthermore, sense-making is a context-dependent process (Evans, 2007; Spillane et al., 2002b). Actor’s interpretation and enactment of extracted cues relies on contextually dependent conditions, traditions and values, which interrelate to the beliefs, experience and values of the individual actor, providing meaning to the situation (Weick, 1995).

Encountering organisational events that bring a sense of uncertainty might trigger actors into reflecting upon identity-related aspects of themselves and the organisation, which in turn shapes how the situation makes sense and is acted upon (Dutton and Dukerich, 1991; Weick et al., 2005). Prior research investigating these processes within educational settings has shown that school leaders’ sense-making is guided by both individual role identity and context-dependent aspects. A school leader’s professional role identity and micro-institutional context are considered important influences in the process of translating and implementing educational policy, where leaders rely on their professional expertise and context as a way to conceptualise and interpret the policy message (Mizrahi-Shtelman, 2019). When connected to the perceived ideology and identity of the school organisation, role identity has been shown to guide the way in which school leaders make sense of demographic changes in schools (Evans, 2007). Similar findings have been made by Spillane et al. (2002b) in their study of how district-enforced accountability policies were made sense of and enacted by school leaders. Multiple contextual and environmental features of the school organisation, accompanied by the leaders’ perceived professional role of intermediator between the district level of management and school personnel, steered the way in which the school leaders implemented the demands.

Organisational identity and identification with organisations

In this article, the level of analysis is aimed at individual school leaders’ perceptions of the identity of their managed educational programme, and the ties these perceptions have to the individual school organisation. In order to examine how these individual perceptions connect to the organisational level in making sense of policy demands, I utilise the concepts of perceived organisational identity and identification. Organisational identity can be defined as self-identifying claims or referents expressed by members when talking about or acting in regard to their organisation (Whetten, 2006). According to Albert and Whetten (1985), these claims constitute members’ understanding of what is central, distinguishable and enduring about the organisation. The identity is closely tied to its image, which has been conceptualised in various ways in prior research. It has been described as the way members perceive their organisation to be viewed by outsiders (Dutton et al., 1994), external actors’ perception of the organisation (i.e. the reputation) (Brown et al., 2006) or as a concept of desired future image (Gioia and Thomas, 1996). The identity of an organisation is not necessarily a stable notion among its members, notably in times where the organisation is going through change (Gioia et al., 2000). When there is a disruption to the perceived core attributes of the identity (Elsbach and Kramer, 1996), or to the alignment between perceptions of the image and identity, members may perceive this as an identity threat and take measures in order to make sense of the situation (Ravasi and Schultz, 2006) and restore the alignment (Dutton and Dukerich, 1991).

The concept of organisational identification connects the individual member perceptions to the larger organisational entity (Ashforth et al., 2008). The way in which individuals identify with core attributes of the organisation, and compare it to preferred attributes (expectations), influences actions and behaviour within the organisation (Foreman and Whetten, 2002; Reger et al., 1994). It also plays a role in the process of members’ sense-making of identity-changing events, illustrating the importance of perceived organisational tradition, culture and history (Ravasi and Schultz, 2006) and members’ resistance to change when strategic goals are not in line with these perceptions (Humphreys and Brown, 2002). Actors’ notion of a contradiction between current and future ideal identity and the level of congruence between the two trigger them into responding with measures to decrease the gap (Foreman and Whetten, 2002). Actors might also ‘dis-identify’ with aspects of the organisation by distancing themselves from negative associations that might be related to the organisation identity, and by this define their own self-distinction (Elsbach and Bhattacharya, 2001).

Study design

The research approach of this study was interpretive and designed as a qualitative semi-structured interview study in order to examine the school leaders’ narratives concerning sense-making of the policy demands. The article was written as part of a larger research project on organising processes connected to policy implementation in the Swedish extended education system.

Sample

The study’s sample consisted of 11 deputy and primary school leaders, responsible for implementing the teacher certification policy in 11 different school-age Educare programmes across seven municipalities of the southern regions of Sweden. The respondents were selected based on a purposeful sample (Marshall, 1996), motivated by wanting to examine school leader sense-making in similar organisational conditions with regard to the demands of the policy. Therefore, only school leaders managing an organisation with a qualification level for certification among personnel within 10%, over or under, the national average of 39% (Skolverket, 2019) were asked to be part of the study. The previous experience of the respondents varied with respect to years in the profession and educational background. Three of the respondents had less than 2 years of experience working as administrators, while three had worked between 15 years and 20 years in the profession. On average, respondents had worked 7 years as deputy or primary school leaders at the time of the interviews. A majority (9 of the 11 respondents) had an educational background in educational sciences and were former teachers at different levels of the educational system in Sweden. The two school leaders without a background in teaching were both closely affiliated with school practice and had long experience working in educational settings. The school-age Educare programmes of this study were located in areas with different levels of socio-economic status, ranging from low-income city areas to middle-class, smaller towns in rural areas. A majority of the managed programmes explored in this study were located in rural areas, with low- to middle-income residents.

Data collection

Data collection was initiated with a pilot interview conducted with a school leader meeting the criteria of the purposeful sample in order to support and revise the questions and structure of the interview protocol. First contact was then made with executives at the educational administration of each municipality to receive contact information for school leaders matching the sample of the study, which was followed by an invitation letter to potential respondents. The recorded interviews, which were carried out through the fall semester of 2019, were conducted in spaces of the respondents’ choosing (all taking place at the respondents’ workplaces), and varied in length from 45 minutes to 70 minutes.

Data analysis

The recorded interviews were transcribed in Swedish and later translated to English. Analysis of the data was continuing throughout the research process, assembling note and network-based themes of basic and a more organised nature (Attride-Stirling, 2001). In the later stages of the process, the material was analysed through a theoretical filter based on the sense-making perspective and the theoretical concepts of organisational identity and identification, giving rise to more specific themes, which were assembled along with the initial themes. All of the material was then read for a second time and checked for coherence between the different stages (Braun and Clarke, 2006).

A history of various groups of personnel within the organisation

All of the interviewed school leaders interpreted the teacher certification as a restrictive policy, which constrained mainly two aspects of the inner workings of the school-age Educare. First, achieving educational responsibilities for content and planning of teaching requires personnel to have the right qualifications, that is, a proper teacher education; and second, the hiring of additional personnel for tenure positions requires school leaders to find people with these qualifications. A prior exception in the hiring policy of the school-age Educare, which was not in place in other school venues, enabled school leaders to hire personnel without teacher qualifications. This, in many cases, rather large part of the staff with employment spanning decades had according to many of the school leaders an intrinsic role in day-to-day work and was considered an obvious part of the organisation:

The school leaders saw this group as part of an informal structure of the school-age Educare. In some organisations, they provided a role as ‘doers’, performing the more practical and leisure-oriented aspects of the educational objectives. This could, for example, involve recess duty, being present in the ‘voids’ of the school day (walking to lunch, putting on clothes, etc.) and being responsible for crafts and play activities in the afternoon. In others, they held a more comparable role to teachers in the organisational structure, being considered equal or in some cases above the teachers with the right educational background.

The value of the non-qualified staff was in some instances represented as a counterweight to recent policy demands aimed at school-age Educare (the teacher certification policy being one of them). The leisure-oriented practice of this group represented a traditional teacher role that was better associated with what some of the school leaders believed to be the actual objective, or the core, of school-age Educare. This role was contrasted with the more ‘school-based’ and advanced position of the educated and newly examined teachers.

Changes to the organisation: From a flat to a hierarchical structure

In order to meet the demands of the teacher certification policy, many of the school leaders restructured their staff from a relatively flat organisational structure, built horizontally between those with and without access to certification, to a more hierarchal structure. Personnel with the proper educational background now had the option of becoming certified and therefore had a formal responsibility to plan and implement the educational objectives. A couple of the school leaders deprived the unqualified personnel of their responsibilities for planning, relocating them to certified workers. Some of the school leaders took the distribution of responsibilities a step further and made selected personnel ‘group leaders’, accountable for the quality and overall planning in school-age Educare departments.

Others did not consider distributing the responsibilities a worthy solution to meet the requirements. Either they already had a system of ‘working teams’ (with more of a horizontal structure) which they kept after the policy was enforced or they made the arrangements surrounding these teams more formal. The primary reasons for not making the changes were grounded in beliefs regarding what it ‘is’ to work at the school-age Educare, and personal values concerning equality and work group hierarchies:

Embracing changes or taking a step back

The school leaders elaborated on what the policy changes meant for their organisation in terms of quality and future endeavours. These prospective reflections unveiled two distinct lines of thought, grounded in different sets of beliefs concerning the identity of the educational programme. One group of school leaders saw the changes as desirable, claiming that it would strengthen the professional role of the personnel and increase the organisational status of the school-age Educare as a school establishment:

A more opposing view of the policy changes came from a couple of school leaders expressing that the certification policy is yet another reform aimed at decoupling school-age Educare from what it used to be, and is supposed to be. Some expressed a fear of the educational programme turning into an extension of the school objectives, instead of a complementary programme to ordinary school. The future solution for the problems of school-age Educare, according to some of the school leaders, is to take a step back and further separate it from ordinary school: