The scheme of delegation as a sensemaking framework in multi-academy trusts in England: Useful tool or constraint?

Collaborations, mergers, or acquisitions?

Defining whether an organisation is a collaboration, acquisition, or merger, is not straightforward, particularly in the public sector, where hybrid organisations, sub-contracting arrangements, and public/private partnerships, abound (Kale and Deshmukh, 2014; Kale et al., 2001). This is also the case in the third sector, where the picture is also mixed. This article refers to MATs as ‘collaborations or alliances’; however, as collaborations or alliances usually come about through the wish of the individual organisations, there are tensions in describing all MATs in this way: as mentioned earlier, sponsored MATs often have little say in whether they join the organisation, and as such, they may not fit within common understandings of this definition. However, sponsored academies, who enter a collaboration unwillingly, will still effectively, formally sign up to the commitment and a common vision and mission statement, which to all intensive purposes, makes them appear as a collaboration or alliance.

Writing on the third sector, Hoskins and Angelica (2005), define an alliance as, ‘a relationship between partners that is strategically formed to accomplish goals that benefit the community while strengthening the partners’. The authors depict a continuum of alliances that ranges from a very loose relationship to a complete merger. But, as Huxham and Vangen (2013: 164) point out, there are many different types of collaboration and the aims of a member organisation may be strongly influenced by the aims of organisations or individuals external to the collaboration. Mentioning that, ‘government is perhaps the most common stakeholder, exerting pressure on organisations, in forming and shaping them.’ (Huxham and Vangen, 2013: 164). They emphasise that although it is argued that members ‘know and agree what and who is involved,’ in reality, there is a great deal of ambiguity when organisations come together, no matter what the circumstances are that bring this about (Huxham and Vangen, 2013: 127). Likewise, the aims of the members of the collaboration are often divergent.

As this study sets out to examine schemes of delegation (SDs) as sensemaking formalisation documents, it uses the term collaboration to describe both sponsored and converter MATs, bearing in mind that the catalyst for joining the MAT may differ between schools. However, the discussion as to how we understand these organisations is an interesting and important one, and will be discussed in a follow-on article.

Research from the USA – in which similar school structures operate and from collaborations (of all natures) in the third sector – indicates that the role of local boards and the ways they interact with central ones is not straightforward and that weak powers of local boards undermine democratic governance of education (Ford and Ihrke, 2016b). In addition, poor or malfunctioning local boards; misunderstanding over roles and decision-making powers; and existing board member schemata that constrain or prevent new understandings of collaborative arrangements, can undermine organisational effectiveness and accountability. Research into the management of interorganisational relationships has focused primarily on the problems of coordination, control, and legitimacy, but as Vlaar et al. (2006: 1618) point out, issues of understanding and sensemaking are equally problematic: ‘such problems arise from differences between partners in terms of culture, experience, structures, and from the uncertainty and ambiguity that these partners experience in early stages of collaboration. To function effectively, SDs are used to outline the powers of different levels of governance within a MAT, and as such, function as a formalising tool, as described by Vlaar et al. (2006) and Weber and Glynn (2006):

“Formalization enables, or even forces collaborating parties to engage in sensemaking, helping them to create common ground and achieve mutual understanding” (Vlaar et al., 2006: 1622)

The study of Vlaar et al. (2006) and Weber and Glynn (2006) is particularly helpful in understanding how formalisation tools, such as SDs or other documents, are used in collaborative organisations to create structures that provide cross organsational understandings and cooperation. Their study has been employed in numerous follow-on studies (see, e.g. Brown et al., 2015; Cunliffe and Coupland, 2012; Hahn et al., 2014), that focus on how and if, these tools can create cohesion and shared understandings in these circumstances. Their frameworks and how they are employed are described later in the article.

The full description of what an SD should include is located in Appendix 1.

Terminology – a note

Members sit at the top of the governance hierarchy; they do not have any specific duties imposed on them by the Companies Act 2006, but they are asked to provide a ‘guarantee’ such that if the Academy Trust were to be wound up and the assets did not meet all of its liabilities, they would be asked to contribute £10 each. They have the power to remove a trustee. Trustee–board members (TBMs) are top of the hierarchy of operational governance in MATs and academy, or local board members (LBMs) are those who are on boards at the academy level. They are both governing bodies with different levels of responsibility and delegated powers, but are termed TBM and LBM to differentiate between them.

MAT boards are multilevel and hierarchical in nature: members at the top level of the organisation ensure that the purpose/charitable object of the trust is being met, and that the trustees are discharging their duties effectively. Powers are set out in SDs and the Governance Handbook (DfE, 2019) states that MATs have flexibility in how to design them.

As Figure 1 illustrates, members sit at the top of the hierarchy, with trustees featuring next; at the lowest level are individual school boards. The individual school boards are referred to in several ways, either as: boards, committees, advisory bodies, or parent representatives. This often depends on powers delegated by trustees. For this article, we shall refer to them as local boards. If the MAT is large and geographically dispersed over a wide area, trustees may decide to include another layer of governance, in the shape of Cluster Committees. These boards sit between the trustees and local boards, and have oversight of schools within a certain geographical area. It should be noted here that the DfE states that SDs in MATs are advisory, rather than obligatory, and that unlike the case of individual stand-alone academies, it is not obligatory for such SDs to include parents. The paper discusses this in more detail in the Context section and also in relation to standardisation between MATs within the Findings and Discussion section.

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Figure 1.

Structure of multi-academy trust governance adapted from Baxter and Cornforth (2021).

According to the DfE, one of the key features of such a scheme of delegation is that ‘it should be drafted clearly so that everyone in the organisation can understand it, in order to be clear about their role and that of others [..], explain the circumstances in which the arrangements set out may vary, and [describe] any triggers that may lead the board to review or change the levels of delegation.’ (DfE, 2019). The Department also describes the SD as a sensemaking tool; a tool for leaders to counter the high levels of ambiguity and uncertainty that emerge when organisations join forces to collaborate (DfE, 2019; Vaara, 2003). Research illustrates that the use of formalisation documents such as the SD are key elements in the micro and macro organising tools of sensemaking, yet it is an under-researched area, particularly in relation to power issues that arise while individuals make sense of their organisations (Brown et al., 2015). Vlaar et al. (2006: 1620) argue that such documents trigger four key mechanisms in relation to sensemaking:

The focus of attention directing sensemaking focus.

Weber and Glynn (2006: 1640), drawing on Hedstrom and Swedberg’s study (1998), argue that as sensemaking both constitutes and is constituted by organisations, investigating the macro (organisational level) activities along with the micro sensemaking activities of actors is key to understanding how one influences the other. Their model rests on the institutional capacity to prime, edit, and trigger sensemaking activities, in which, priming acts as a cognitive constraint on sensemaking; editing is the act of internalisation of particular understandings; and triggering is the act of embodying particular institutional ways of seeing the organisation (and, to a certain extent, the world as embodied by that organisation or in this case, MAT).

Key debates in sensemaking, emphasise not only ‘cognitive dimensions of sensemaking’, but also the linguistic, narrative discourse with its capacity to ‘simultaneously make and unravel sense in organisational settings,’ (Brown et al., 2015: 268) provide powerful insights into sensemaking processes. This is echoed in education research, which uses a narrative to create a ‘landscape of consciousness’, beyond the ‘landscape of action,’ (Bruner, 1996: 231), bringing certain elements into focus, while obscuring or negating others. Sensemaking using Vlaar et al. (2006) and Weber and Glynn’s (2006) study has been used to understand how collaborations use documents and artefacts to create order across these organisations; bringing strands of both elements of study together in this article, offers a useful way to understand whether and to what extent SDs may be used to fulfil this function.

This article uses a narrative approach to sensemaking to test how SDs are being used by boards to make sense of school collaborations and to clarify roles within them, and whether, as such, they are a useful tool to effectively promote sensemaking and understandings in interorganisational relationships in MATs. Combining two key models of formalisation in sensemaking, described earlier (Vlaar et al., 2006; Weber et al., 2006), it investigates; what level of consistency there is between MAT SDs? what evidence there is that SDs align with the model proposed by Vlaar et al. (2006) and promote priming, editing, and triggering processes, outlined by Weber and Glynn (2006); and, what do the findings imply for the use of SDs as sensemaking tools in MATs? In doing so, it furthers the understanding of these complex and multi-faceted organisations.

Boards in English schools

In England (education is devolved in the rest of the UK), the trend to link education strongly with economic competitiveness has exponentially increased since The Black Papers of the late 1960s. They placed increasing pressures on the education sector not only to perform but also to demonstrate performance through league tables, inspection criteria, and a raft of other measures designed to monitor performance, ensure value for money, and convince the parent – as a consumer of education – that in the market place of education, their school was performing (Ozga and Segerholm, 2015). The trend to marketise and use statistics to measure educational quality has been illustrated to be highly problematic internationally, for example, reducing democratic local control of education (Greany, 2018), placing power in the hands of a small number of trustees and executives (Baxer and Floyd, 2019), and failing to bridge the performance gap between different socio-economic groups of learners (Francis et al., 2020).

Powers delegated to the academy school level vary greatly between MATs, presenting two challenges: the first, effectively integrating individual schools into the organisation; the second, ensuring that governing boards at all levels understand their role and powers. Successful integration of a new school into a MAT often depends upon why the school joined the trust in the first place. As discussed earlier, failing schools may be mandated to join a trust by the DfE, or they may have elected to join a trust, either to gain support and back-office services – that because of cuts are often no longer provided by LAs – or to avoid takeover by predatory trusts that may impose their own model on schools, regardless of local school context and climate (Greany and Higham, 2018). One hundred and fifty English LAs currently act as strategic lead for the education of children and young people, but because of the number of academies and MATs in some areas, school improvement departments attached to the LA have closed down (LGA, 2019). Some schools join trusts because of opportunities offered by the organisation: an ethos that matches their own or the opportunity to gain expertise in areas they lack (Baxer and Floyd, 2019). Whatever their reasons, their roles and responsibilities and boards change considerably on joining, as we explain in the next section.

Duties of a school board

In England, school boards have been in existence since the early 19th century; their duties revolving around the fiduciary oversight and monitoring of schools. The 1970s heralded a more democratic approach to governance, with representatives from the community, local government, and for the first time, the parent body (Baxter, 2016). The 1988 Education Reform Act allowed schools, for the first time, to break away from LA control, and from the mid-1990s, lacking LA support, those schools began to adopt a skills-based approach to governance. This more closely resembled corporate models – recruiting people for business skills, such as finance, HR, and marketing (Thody and Punter, 2000). With these changes, the powers and responsibilities of governing boards increased exponentially as boards were interpellated as agents of government oversight (Baxter, 2016): their responsibilities were set out in various editions of the Governors’ Handbook (DfE, 2019a). This important shift reflected a changing accountability regime in which boards would become instrumental in holding schools to account, while the ‘middle tier’ of educational accountability – the Local Education Authority – would see a steady diminution in the scale and shape of their powers within the system (Bagarette, 2011; Wilkins et al., 2021).

Uncertainty and ambiguity in collaborative organisations

As Mandell and Keast (2007) report, the ways in which collaborations tackle collaboration issues are key to their success; but as Agranoff argues, ‘collaborative decisions or agreements are the products of a very particular type of mutual learning and adjustment’ (2006: 59). Research into such organisations indicates that overcoming initial assumptions and organisational hegemonies, based on understandings of the organisation before the collaboration, is one of the greatest challenges for them (Huxham and Vangen, 2013). In MATs, misunderstandings and the lack of understanding of how schools fit into the overall organisational picture are well documented (Greany and Higham, 2018). Communication between levels within the organisation is also key to overcoming risk, assisting parties in defining and redefining ‘the terms of their independence’ (Vlaar et al., 2006: 66). According to the Governance Handbook (DfE, 2019), effective governance should provide confident and strong strategic leadership, which leads to robust accountability, oversight, and assurance for educational and financial performance. All governing boards, no matter what type of school or how many schools they govern, have three core functions:

Ensuring clarity of vision, ethos, and strategic direction.

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Figure 2.

Effective governance of governing bodies.

The challenge for MATs is how, given the multilevel nature of the organisations, they will achieve the six elements for effective governance outlined in Figure 2, as well as ensuring the three core functions above.

SDs as formalisation tools in sensemaking

As our introduction outlined, there are a number of reasons why schools may join a MAT. Research into MATs indicates that many boards are not fully aware of the implications of collaborating in this way, even if they join an organisation voluntarily. For example, they may not realise the degree of curricular standardisation they will need to abide by, or that some/all of their decision-making powers may be removed (Baxer and Floyd, 2019). During this sensemaking process, ‘individuals exchange gossips, stories, rumours, and accounts of past experiences, and take note of symbolic behaviours.’ (Balogun and Johnson, 2004: 524). Gaining an understanding of the organisation and its place within it is even more demanding for governing boards than it may be for staff – as governing boards essentially sit on the periphery of the organisation. Our previous research indicates that communication between levels of the board is not always particularly effective and that trustees often feel ‘cut off’ from the schools within the trust, as well as being unclear about their particular roles (Baxer and Floyd, 2019).

The DfE advocates the use of SDs to ‘generate a professional ethos across the entire governance structure and a culture of one organization and away from any sense of “my school/your school”.’ (DfE, 2019a). It also indicates that SDs are flexible and may change as the MAT grows.

As a result of the discussion above, we argue that in the case of MATs, SDs can be considered to be formalisation tools: as to whether they engage the type of sensemaking activities that build bridges between levels of governance in the organisation, are a key research question for this study. To further elaborate our theoretical framework, we next turn to an explanation of the mechanisms of formalisation tools in sensemaking.

Mechanisms for sensemaking

Vlaar et al. (2006: 1623) describe the first mechanism through which a particular document enables sensemaking, as focusing attention in which, ‘participants in interorganisational relationships display a joint focus…on formal documents and processes, which renders formalization a focusing device’. This is then followed by articulation, deliberation, and reflection, whereby parties are forced to articulate their individual and mutual goals, during the [document forming] process (1624). They also argue that this helps participants to, ‘lift equivocal knowledge out of the tacit, private, complex, random past, and to make it explicit, simpler, ordered, and more relevant.’ This, in relation to schools that have been long established as independent entities, would be crucial if this were indeed the case. The third mechanism is instigating and maintaining interaction. This stage is particularly evident in study on strategic change or reorganisation, such as that of Balogun and Johnson (2004), who looked at sensemaking during an imposed shift from hierarchical to decentralised organisation, found that instigating and maintaining interaction was vital in order for the change to take place successfully. The fourth mechanism, reducing biases, judgement errors, incompleteness, and inconsistency, denotes the extent to which formalisation reduces individual biases by confronting assumptions and revising them in light of new information and interests. According to a number of reports, it also allows the opportunity for relevant information to be considered in decision-making circumstances: this arose during our previous study on communication in MATs, when boards suddenly become aware of new information emanating from particular schools, which subsequently altered their expansion ambitions (see Baxer and Floyd, 2019).

Discourse and sensemaking

In this study, we refer to discourse as both mirroring and creating social reality as well as both creating and reproducing norms: What Bourdieu (1991) calls habitus-socialised norms or tendencies that guide behaviour and thinking. In discursive fields – in this case MATs – different forms of knowledge may compete with one another in a space of practice; helping to define and give meaning to its practices, relationships, and claim the authoritative status of truth, becoming accepted and authoritative in relation to institutional knowledge.

To fully explore the use of SDs as formalisation tools, we also incorporate Weber and Glynn’s (2006) priming, editing and triggering, into our conceptual model (Figure 3), in which, priming acts as a cognitive constraint on sensemaking; editing is the act of internalisation of particular understandings, and triggering is the act of embodying particular institutional ways of seeing the organisation(and, to a certain extent, the world as embodied by that organisation).

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Figure 3.

Theoretical framework.

We then test this adapted model using the method that follows.

Narrative

We employed a narrative methodology to investigate the qualitative data. We chose this method as narrative analysis has the capacity ‘to see what is agreed upon by all organisational members, that which is shared only within certain groups, and that which is fragmented and ambiguous’ (Elliot, 2005: 1149). For this reason, it has been employed successfully in sensemaking studies (Abolafia, 2010). We acknowledge that the narratives are both productive and tension-filled, as individuals and groups work through processes and power struggles to create strategic narratives that create organisational discourses; and are either rejected or become accepted into organisational cultures. Narratives can also convey information that would not be understood or accepted if conveyed directly in literal and explicit terms (Polkinghorne, 1988). In their capacity to link both events and understandings, they provide an effective tool for the analysis of sensemaking activities (Brown et al., 2015), and we have used this method effectively in previous studies of governing boards (Baxer and Floyd, 2019). As this study is investigating particular types of sensemaking, we are interested in how individuals use SDs as sensemaking tools and are looking for evidence of the four key areas outlined by Vlaar et al. (2006), while also exploring the narratives for the evidence of priming, editing, and triggering, as they appear in our theoretical framework (Figure 5).

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Figure 5.

Analysis of schemes of delegation (SDs).

Is there any level of standardisation in relation to SDs?

The SDs from 20 MATs were first analysed to evaluate to what degree they are homogenous. This is key to indicating how much trustees and LBMs may assume about their responsibilities and duties on joining a MAT, for example, if we found that SDs were largely homogenous, then we may be able to assume that board members at both trustee and school level may already know what their responsibilities were. Although this is not a given, as past research indicates, school governors frequently underestimate the scale and nature of their responsibilities (James et al., 2014).

The evaluation of 20 SDs, illustrated in Figure 4, revealed several factors that may impact on sensemaking activities:

Powers of trustees are laid down in law, but how they delegate those powers to local boards is not specified, although governor support agencies and the DfE offer guidance (see Appendix 1 for DfE guidelines).

This effectively means that within our sample, local boards coming into a MAT need to make sense of their new context and powers, while comparing these to their duties and powers in the past. In this case, powerful norms compete with new understandings to create ambiguity, and in some cases, resistance to the new context. Our sample contains a mixture of BMs who came from previous school boards (more broadly), have been recruited as new to the organisation or those who were on boards of schools that have joined the MAT. The sample is too small to discriminate between categories, and a comparison is out of scope for this article. However, this would be an interesting line of inquiry for future research.

From this and in relation to the need and background for sensemaking:

Norms around powers allocated to governing bodies may still be dominant in standalone academies that join a MAT. This will, in terms of sensemaking, create a situation in which old norms compete with new understandings, creating ambiguity, and in some cases, resistance.

How does the model help to illuminate the complexities of the relationships between trust boards and local governing bodies (LGBs)?

Table 1 The narratives were analysed for themes relating to the six areas outlined in Figure 5 and repeated below. Exemplar citations for each are shown in Figure 6 and the remainder in Appendix 3. These are each discussed in the section which follows. A critical analysis of the model is discussed later in the article.

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Table 1.

Key to Figure 5.

Key
*	Not principal
^	Academy level only
$	Without trustee input
YT	In collaboration with trustee board
Y	Yes
N	No
MO	Members only
NM	Not mentioned in the scheme of delegation
N″	Receive only
YRD	In collaboration with regional director
R	Recommends only
ST	Set targets
C	Consulted only
AO	Advisory only but dependent on whether the trustees wish to consult

Focusing attention and priming

Sixty percent of respondents indicated that boards focused on their SD as a way to understand the organisation and its dependencies. This supports Vlaar et al.'s assertion that they use the SD to clarify, ‘whether decisions need to be made and what that decision might consist of’ (Weick, 2001 in Vlaar et al., 2006: 1623). A considerable number of respondents at the trustee level referred to the SDs as a means of clarifying the future strategy of the organisation as well as controlling standards. Interestingly, a number of participants used the SDs as a metonym for the organisation, for example, ‘at the moment, the provision of anything… [is done by] clusters, they call them improvement clusters. That's okay, providing you have the skills and the abilities within that cluster. (TBM-Chair)’. In this case, the Chair of Trustees is referring to cluster boards, which often sit between trustee boards and local boards in MATs, which are geographically widely dispersed (Figure 1). There were considerably more TBMs that referred to the ability to revise SDs than did LBMs: this is perhaps unsurprising, as many LBMs felt that they were not able to engage in such discussions, as this power was wholly left to trustees (this is discussed in more detail in the section on Editing and Triggering). Trustees used the SD to reduce the apparent complexity of the organisation. This supports Putnam and Cooren (2004), in creating a discourse of coherence around the organisation, what Putnam and Cooren (2004: 324) term, ‘the recursive property of texts,’ to constitute an organisation. In this way, the texts represent not only the ‘here and now’, but also the ‘there and then’. The SDs is used by trustees to indicate the present state of the organisation as well as looking at the ways that the SD – a metonym for the organization – may change in the future. In doing so, there is evidence that they also act as a cognitive constraint on sensemaking. This is discussed in relation to priming in the section which follows.

Articulation, deliberation, and reflection

Weick (2001) argues that bringing together ideas and organisational goals on paper prompts actors to think more deeply and deliberate beyond what he terms to be ‘general understandings’. Goffman (1974: 345), argues that such documents have the capacity to ‘break an actor's frame of understanding, ‘ but that this can only be achieved under certain circumstances, depending on how involved the individual feels, with the particular focus of the document. SDs would seem to be an ideal site for the deliberation and reflection on organisational structures, strategy, and decision-making. But previous research on strategy making in organisational collaborations, indicates that organisations that collaborate often become bound up in their own issues, with little concern for the whole (Huxham and Vangen, 2013). There is evidence that TBMs use the schemes to articulate how they want the MAT to function, but little clarity is provided in relation to actual roles, as this TBM Chair points out: ‘everyone takes on these models, but I think theyneeds development. It's almost like saying the board delegates its responsibilities, but it doesn't give them any clarity about what my role is then (TBM Chair). This study echoes our previous findings, that SDs are linked to deliberation about the future of the trust and its strategy; however, this is purely confined to TBM; being all, but absent at LBM level (Baxter and Floyd, 2019).

In summary, only 35% of respondents indicated that SDs were used in formalisation in relation to deliberation or reflection, and of those, all were members of trustee boards, rather than LBMs. Furthermore, a number of TBMs indicated that the hierarchy outlined and reinforced by the documents, actively discourages LBMs from involvement in such discussions.

Editing: Internalisation of particular understandings, and triggering embodiment of institutional ways of seeing the organisation

In many ways, internalisation of particular understandings and triggering or embodiment of institutional ways of seeing the organisation, have in their roots, similar gestation, both intrinsically linked to power (Baxter, 2016). As the previous sections in this article point out, it is not necessary to read and discuss the SD to be influenced by it and its common language of understandings, assuming symbolic power and creating discourses that align with this symbolism (Bourdieu, 1991). It was not clear from this investigation, how many local boards read their SDs, but what emerged is that a number of respondents at the local and trustee levels have internalised particular understandings, as a result of discourses emerging from narratives around delegated powers. For example, one LBM states: ‘I saw a document, I think it more or less sets out trustee work, I know my role is similar to the last one [as BM in a single school]’ (LBM).

Several respondents at the local level implied that although they were aware of the organisation as a whole, they still primarily saw their function in terms of their particular school, resisting other interpretations; this was particularly true when discussing values and ethos statement:

‘They [the SDs] tell us to promote the values of the trust, but we have those values, I mean, we have them already we’ve always had them’. (LBM)

This article does not compare the responses of schools that were mandated to enter a MAT by the DfE and those that willingly converted. While this would be an interesting line for further inquiry, it is out of scope for this study. However, there is some evidence that some participants entered a trust with very little knowledge of the powers that their school board would have; for example, this individual reports: ‘I don't think we are governors any more, we are advisers… we spread the trust ethos to our school’ (LBM). This LBM board member continued by stating that they thought at first, they would have more powers, but on reflection, was content to leave the trustees to make decisions.

Those who had become trustees, having formerly served on single school boards, did report a sense of loss of contact with school communities; this has been explored in more depth in an earlier study (Baxer and Floyd, 2019).

The narratives reflect that these elements of sensemaking are linked strongly to identity formation in relation to governance roles: participants frequently referred to their duties in relation to SDs, and their perceived amount of power or lack of it; as this respondent illustrates: ‘We aren't governors anymore, we are advisers, we also help to spread the trust ethos to the school (LBM).’ They also display what Abolafia (2010: 349) terms ‘selective retention’ – collective negotiation of policy choice which fits the emerging organisational narrative. This is particularly evident in relation to TBMs who draw from central policy documents produced by the government to justify their own roles in relation to SDs. In some cases, this results in a quasi-paternalistic view of LBMs, as this statement illustrates:

‘Capacity issues are about, for me, it's about returning to the knowledge and skills bit and giving them[local boards] as much as we can, helping them as much as we can- guiding them’ (TBM).

On the whole, examples of instances of editing and triggering appeared in 72% of participant narratives. This would appear to support the SD as a tool for both. However, as the discussion above has revealed, a more nuanced understanding of this, based on schema and also incorporating an identity perspective, may offer a more insightful view of these elements.

Reducing bias, judgement, and inconsistencies

The final category in this study relates to the capacity of SDs to reduce individual biases by confronting assumptions and revising them in light of new information. Although we treat this as a separate category, it is evident from the discussions above that this element permeates all other categories. It is also useful to examine it separately: as already mentioned, existing schema may be very powerful for those who have been working in single school contexts, and the need to be able to adapt and craft understandings for the new context is vital to achieve organisational coherence (Vaara, 2003). In relation to the participants in this study, 82% of the narratives reflected that they do use SDs to resolve inconsistencies, and by offering a visual pictorial image of the MAT and actors’ roles within it, SDs to some extent prompt revisions to some existing schema. In relation to TBMs, they create the ‘logics of appropriateness’ that Ostrom et al. (1991) refer to in their book on organisational politics: that is, they act to create organisational narratives that enhance legitimacy and storify, and thereby, enhance organisational legitimacy. However, as mentioned earlier, SDs are adaptive and change according to the circumstances of the MAT. This means that actors at all levels must adapt and change their understandings as the SDs evolve. This may well account for the considerable amount of ambiguity and uncertainty within the narratives, particularly at the LBM level.

SDs as formalisation tools in collaborative organisations: Practical contributions

The article provides two contributions. First, it elucidates that inter MAT relationships not only entail issues of coordination, control, and legitimacy, but also problems of understanding, originating from the differences between cooperating parties, and from the ambiguity and uncertainty that tend to prevail in the early stages of interorganisational cooperation. This description of cooperative endeavours conforms to Weick’s (2001) accounts of complex, ambiguous events, and it complements more conventional perspectives on interorganisational governance prevailing in the literature by challenging the assumption that participants in these relationships have clear images of their partners, the relationships in which they are engaged and the contexts in which these are embedded. Second, it capitalises on Weick’s (2001) contributions in this area to develop a richer and more comprehensive notion of the relationship between formalisation, sensemaking, and problems of understanding than has hitherto been available in the literature on MATs. In particular, the article argues that whilst SDs are used in various ways in the sensemaking process, the ways in which they are used differ according to who in the organisation is employing their use. This research has shown that while they are valuable in reducing bias and resolving inconsistency and editing previous understandings, this sample reflects that this is very often a top-down activity. In terms of their power to aid organisational sensemaking, we conclude that again, although they go some way to resolving inconsistencies within organisational understandings, they are more useful as tools for central teams who wish to impose particular understandings and power hierarchies on organisations within the collaboration. This finding implies that while formalisation documents are very useful, collaborations need to be aware that they close down as well as open up discussion and may cause resentment and concomitant, lack of trust among partners within the MAT, contributing negatively to their long-term sustainability.