Teachers' collective and individual resistance towards organizational development

Transcription

1 Stream 19: Teachers' working life Teachers' collective and individual resistance towards organizational development Tove Håpnes and Lisbeth Øyum SINTEF Technology and Society E mail: tove.hapnes@sintef.no, Lisbeth.oyum@sintef.no Abstract This paper explores how teachers develop collective and individual resistance strategies to avoid committing themselves to participate in organizational development processes in their workplace. The analyses are based on an ongoing action research project involving six upper secondary schools in Norway. In the discussion we use theories of collective resistance, discussing resistance as distance and resistance as persistence, and where the relationship between self-management, control and resistance in work organizations is explored. Our findings are worrying within the context of school authorities' aim of developing learning school organizations as we argue that teachers have internalized individual practices of teaching leading to resistance against developing collective knowledge sharing and responsibility. This challenge is intensified by the fact that we observe the same individual tendencies among school management in their struggle to develop modern management teams and employee involvement. We conclude by arguing that the school system in Norway is underdeveloped when it comes to teachers perceptions of being a member and an employee of a work place. This lack of commitment among individual teachers and groups of teachers is not only a critical challenge in terms of developing innovative and high-skilled performance as educators, but it also in many ways go against work legislation and social-partnership agreements. Introduction From the Norwegian school authorities much emphasis has been put on expressing the need for schools' ability to take on organizational learning (Argyris and Schön, 1996, Senge 1990). This concept, combined with Hattie's (2009) conclusion on the importance of teachers' relational skills as to produce effective learning for the student, has dominated the public- and sectorial debate on school effectiveness in Norway for the last few years. As part of this orientation, the concept of school-driven competence development has also emerged, and serves as a contrast to the long-lasting tradition among Norwegian teachers to take individual university part-time courses to increase their formal competence. This practice of individual up-skilling has increased the teacher's flexibility in terms of which courses to teach, as well as annual wage. However, more and more local school authorities now reduce the amount of money each school can support for individual up-skilling, in favor of canalizing financial resources into school-driven organizational development. One area of exception, though, is the growing attention on school management, and hence the amount of Universities offering master degrees and bachelor programs within school management is substantial. Nevertheless, 1

2 it seems reasonable to argue that the school sector in Norway is facing a shift of paradigm when it comes to efforts of future organizational development, one from individual- to collective orientation. However, the question on how to build organizational learning capacity into the schools has to a very limited degree involved other theories than pedagogical oriented perspectives provided by educational academics specialized into the Norwegian school context. Consequently, the very notion of organizational learning has become a mixture of emphasizing practices like classroom-management, educational quality assessments, and pedagogical school management, and not, however, on the organizational perspectives on collective work practices, work environment, management- teacher collaboration and organizational change capacity. Within this context, this paper explores on an ongoing action research project (Greenwood and Levin 1998, Bradbury Huang 2010) taking place in seven upper secondary schools in Norway. The project was initiated by the local school authorities as to support school management, teachers and local shop stewards with practical and pragmatic knowledge on how to accomplish and nurture collective processes of organizational learning. The project is innovative as well as atypical for the educational sector in Norway due to its attention on organizational- and management theories originating from Norwegian work-life research, and hence not from school research. In order to understand the characteristics of responses we have observed among school managers and teachers alike due to this change of paradigm, we explore on theories of resistance. This choice is not only to explain observed behaviors, but to offer a requisite preceding theory of organizational change to school management practitioners living in the midst of public demands for changing teachers' perception of what it takes to change collective practices. Struggling to meet the collective orientation - theories on resistance Within anglo-american literature there exist two different theoretical orientations on resistance as organizational phenomenon, "collective resistance" as inspired by Braverman (1998) and "individual resistance" as a response to demands for discipline and self-discipline as outlined by Collinson and Ackroyd (Collingson & Ackroyd 2005, Collinson 2003). The latter is in turn heavily motivated by a Foucaultian understanding of the relationship between power and individual response and -behavior, emphasizing in particular employees' responses to demands of disciplining- and self-adjusting behavior through processes and creative actions signaling a lack of acceptance and subjective meaning (Knights & Willmott 2011, Fleming & Sewell 2002). This creative dimension of resistance is of particular relevance when trying to understand discursive practices which express resistance as distance, as well as espoused and present resistance, resistance as persistence (Fleming & Sewell 2002, Fleming & Spicer 2003, Collinson 1994). Although this orientation has been criticized for being too micro-oriented, it is a perspective of resistance which makes perfect sensse within the observed behavior of teachers and school management in our action research project. Here we have observed teachers' collective resistance toward getting involved in organizational inquiry and 2

3 management-labor dialogue due to perceiving this as being subjected to power in relation to school authorities and school management. And further, we have observed individual management resistance among members in the school management team due to finding it difficult to defend managerial decisions in fear of being rejected as a member of the teachers' community of practice (Brown and Duguid 1991). However, as to understand the formation and strength of the phenomenon of collective resistance in an organization, the work of the Norwegian work sociologist Sverre Lysgaard is unique. His study at a paper-mill in the mid-fifties identified how the blue-collar workers agreed on a set of behavior and understandings aimed at keeping distance to the company and management as an adversary partner. This phenomenon of agreed-upon behavior, Lysgaard called "the workers' collective" (Lysgaard 1961). Although it is an informal organization, the purpose of the workers' collective is very clear: to protect the workers from the capitalistic system' insatiable demand for productivity. Thus, the collective is functional and rests on a normative commitment as the strength of the collective require every worker's participation. As a result of this commitment, each worker's need for security, social support and loyalty is ensured. Consequently, solidarity is the building block of the collective. The growth of a workers' collective is most likely to occur in work places where there are considerable discrepancies between perceptions of working conditions or productivity aims between management on the one hand, and workers on the other. Within such a collective, the employees will have to balance two different sets of expectations: fulfilling managements' expectations of performing work in accordance with formal job descriptions on the one hand, what Lysgaard (1961) denotes "the technical and economic system", and behaving in line with the normative demands of the workers' collective on the other. In the discussion following the outline of the action research project of school development, we will draw on these theories of resistance as to understand the challenges of introducing organizational inquiry into school organizations. Our argument is that teachers' involvement and participation will be crucial as to change the social norms defining the teachers' collective, requiring a collaborative approach between school management and the teachers' union as to institutionalize organizational learning. Research method The ongoing action research project which data and arguments for this paper are derived from was launched in The initiative was ours, and based on more than a decade's research on participatory change processes undertaken by management-labor collaboration in industrial enterprises. Following the public debate over challenges in Norwegian schools, and the introduction of the concept organizational learning as a form of mantra, we found it striking that no reference was made to the collective dimensions of schools as communities of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991). Rather, the perspective was on the competence of the individual teacher, the curriculum, and class-room management. At the same time, in the region where this project takes place, the school authorities have signed a 3

4 partnership agreement with the university as to offer management courses for those holding school management positions. As several managers have attended these courses, the regional sectorial discourse has gradually changed into an increased awareness for school management not only as a matter of pedagogical qualifications but also as a practice requiring generic knowledge within the organizational- and work life sciences. Within this context our initiative towards the school authorities on designing an action research process aimed at developing schools' collective learning capacities, were fully approved of. Based on our prior work-life research within the Scandinavian tradition of industrial democracy (Levin et al 2012, Øyum et al 2010, Ravn and Øyum 2008) our empirical and theoretical approach in the project was firstly to improve teachers' practices of taking collective responsibility for organizational level learning, and secondly to better school managements' knowledge on how to use teachers' participation and involvement as a strategy for organizational change. This approach was also an attempt to go to the nerve of organizational learning as a concept (Argyris and Schön 1996): the importance of understanding the school not only as individual teachers educating groups of students, but also as a daily collective working-place for teachers, and hence a working-place consisting of defensive routines which require organizational inquiry as to reach a higher level learning capacity. Thus, we aimed at "decomposing" organizational learning not to be merely a goal and statement launched by national Norwegian school authorities, but to be developed as a practice of inquiry and organizational development taking place on each school. Within this context of the project as an effort of increasing the organizational learning capacity in the participating schools, two design criteria were set up in the action research approach: Firstly, the problem statement and area for organizational improvement had to take the uniqueness of each school as the point of departure. A standardized project goal setting was hence not meaningful, and each school had to formulate their unique aim and focus for taking part in the project. Secondly, due to this school-uniqueness, the projects had to be organized in a way where we as action researchers had to facilitate each individual school in their process of inquiry, and from this we required a commitment from the school management to use the time and effort needed as to generate processes of inquiry. Discussion So far, four schools have accomplished a two-year process of organizational inquiry, while two schools have recently started. When comparing the processes, four features have been common. Firstly, the school management groups used the first couple of months to reach a shared understanding of what to focus on. For all, the choice of focus was decided on based on a mixture of the results from the previous working-condition survey and organizational challenges as seen from a managerial point of view. Secondly, from this initial phase, management's focus was validated and eventually refocused by setting up dialogues with the teachers and the labor union to involve and commit the employees to partake in a collective process of organizational inquiry. Thirdly, teachers' involvement have subsequently taken place either as joining smaller reflection groups as to reflect on practices which need to improve (i.e. exchange of experiences on teaching, classes, or collaboration across professions, or reflecting on what kind of management practices and behavior the teachers 4

5 need as to perform and grow as professional knowledge workers) or as action teams initiating strategic development processes (i.e. involving teachers and students alike in formulating guiding criteria for the schools learning environment and how to behave as to promote effective learning for the students, or redesign role descriptions for team coordinators or other middle-management positions). Finally, except for one school, the shop stewards' have not been capable of taking an active social partnership role in the organizational activities. In line with our previous research we argued strongly for the need to involve the union as a collaborative strategic partner for both management and the employees (Ravn and Øyum 2008). However, none of the shop stewards, except for one, had any prior experience in taking this role, and the teachers' union had no policy supporting such a role either. Hence they ended up participating in the same manner as the other teachers, and not as a teacher representative. The action research project was named "school development trough employee-driven innovation", indicating a focus on teachers' participation and involvement in developing the school as a better place for students' learning and teachers' working. And as outlined in the previous section, dialogue groups and action teams were useful ways of involvement aimed at starting up a practice of organizational inquiry in a sector where this is an unfamiliar way of working on a collective level. We did not, however, manage to generate the level of organizational inquiry and commitment to school development as we initially wanted. This lesson goes for both the school management teams, among the teachers as a collective of employees, and in the encounter between management and teachers. Although the quality of this difficulty was unique to each school, a mutual finding is that collective resistance unfolded. We found a lack of perceiving their professional or managerial exercise as a practice shaped by the organizational context by which it is part. Instead, we found that the internalization of individual practices was strong, as was the unwillingness to explore the possible gains from collaborative oriented processes of school development. Among the teachers as a collective, there were two related arguments for not wanting to commit themselves to participating too strongly in dialogue groups or inquiry teams aimed at developing a practice for inquiring into collective work- and teaching practices. The most frequent argument was that "we must be protected from having to spend time on activities not directly related to teaching or student tutoring". The strength of teachers' feeling of a vocation to be a teacher was very dominant, and served as a resistance strategy in our attempts to involve them into reflections on developing their work place. What they implicitly said was that they were not concerned about their work place, only their individual teaching. This resistance can be explained by the second argument for non-commitment into organizational inquiry, namely that effective teaching depends on the skillfulness of the teacher. Within such a simplified understanding of Hattie's (2009) argument, the teacher's skillfulness is perceived only as individual learning decoupled from collective practices of knowledge development as demonstrated by learning theorists like Argyris and Schön (1996), Lave and Wenger (1991) and Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995). An alternative to this individualistic perspective of learning, and one which this action research projects rested on, was to understand a school as a collective oriented work 5

6 organization. Within such a context, being part of a collective orientation of social support, skill upgrading, and reflection on practice across professional norms would provide the teachers with a working environment generating a teaching practice of continuous development and innovation, which eventually would be for the benefit of the students. Organizational inquiry and learning (Argyris and Schön 1996) would then be realized due to a preferred collective practice of knowledge transfer, involvement in inquiry processes, and collaboration. Although we state that teachers' social responsibility of teaching students was used as an implicit excuse for not involving themselves into work-place development, we will argue that this is a norm reproduced by school management. During our facilitation of the management teams in this project, it is striking to find that school management is oriented toward the daily running of the school, and not on strategic organizational development. Processes of strengthening the management team, involving staff into reflections on what branches of study to go for in the future, and reducing unhealthy working conditions are given non-priority in favor of organizing supply-teachers, dealing with parents, keeping the budget, organizing exams, and informing staff on school-authority decisions. Although the management is aware that they need to priority strategic work, they have insufficient knowledge and experience on how to do so, not to mention lack of time. However, the growth of courses and degrees in school management in Norway the last 5-7 years indicate that the role and position of school management is in an era of change. This change is one from emphasizing teaching and pedagogy toward change management and collective learning. Further, included in this perspective on management is labor-management collaboration, requiring teachers and their labor unions to collaborate with school management in developing more collective oriented work- and learning systems. Conclusions From our action research project, which aimed at developing the collective practice of organizational inquiry among teachers and school managers in upper secondary schools, we find two varieties of individual and collective resistance. The first is that of individual- versus collective meanings of work. To the teachers, teaching is an "in-situ" practice relying on the individual teacher's professional and relational skills. Attempts to involve then into collective reflection on how to develop and nurture collective norms of inquiring into school development, is understood as a kind of mistrust to their individual practice. We believe this understanding is rooted in their professional training, where all emphasis is put on the encounter with the students, not with the work-place system where they will perform their craft. Hence, the students and the social duty of educating future generations, are shoved in front of them as an argument for not to scrutinize or reveal their practice within a social system of colleagues and managers. The other dimension causing resistance among teachers and school management alike is that between daily running of the school on the one hand, and strategic development on the other. Among school management we met the argument that they don't have the time necessary to set up participatory strategic development processes involving the teaching staff. Another strong argument was that there is difficult, or even irrelevant to act strategically, as 6

7 financial school authority support, and the question on what lines of courses to offer, all depend on the number of youths applying to attend this particular school. Hence, we found that they nearly considered themselves victimized of the year. We are running the action research project for two more years. A key approach for us will be that of involving them into processes motivating for inquiry into collective practices, and set up dialogues on the issues of how collective norms will support individual practices in the class room. References Argyris, C. and Schön, D.A (1996): Organizational learning II theory, method and practice. US: Addison Wesley. Braverman, H. (1998): Labor and monopoly capital: The degradation of work in the twentieth century. NYU Press, Brown, J.S and Duguid, P. (1991): Organizational Learning and Communities-of-Practice: Toward a Unified View of Working, Learning, and Innovation. Organization Science. Volume 2 Issue 1, May 1991, pp Collinson, D. (1994). 'Strategies of Resistance: Power, Knowledge and Subjectivity in the Workplace', in Jeremier, J. M.; Knights, D. & Nord, W. R. (eds.) Resistance and Power in Organization, London, Routledge. pp Collinson, D. (2003): Identities and Insecurities: Selves at Work, Organization, 10(3), Collinson, D. & Ackroyd, S. (2005). Resistance, Misbehavior, and Dissent, in S. Ackroyd, R. Batt, P. Thompson & P. S. Tolbert (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Work and Organization, Oxford University Press, pp Fleming, P. & Sewell, G. (2002). Looking for the good soldier, Svejk: Alternative modalities of Resistance in the contemporary workplace, in Sociology 36(4), Greenwood, D.J and Levin, M (1998): Introduction to Action Research. Social research for social change. US: SAGE Publications Hattie, J. (2009): Visible learning. A synthesis of over 800 meta-analysis relating to achievement, Routledge. Huang, H. Bradbury (2010): What is good action research?: Why the resurgent interest? Action research 2010, 8:93 Knights, D. & Willmott, H. (2011): Organizational analysis. Essential Readings, Hampshire, Cengage Learning EMEA. 7

8 Lave, J and Wenber, E. (1991): Situated Learning: Legitimiate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Lysgaard, S. (1961): Arbeiderkollektivet, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Nonaka, I. and Takeuchi, H (1995): The Knowledge-creating Company. Oxford University Press. Ravn, J.E. og Øyum, L. (2008): Renegotiating Union Identities: Bringing salaried staff into industrial relations. Paper presented at Insightful Encounters Regional Development and Practice-Based Learning, Conference on Regional Development and Innovation Processes, March 5th-7th, 2008, Porvoo Borgå, Finland. Senge, P (1990): The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization.US: Doubleday 8