School Organisation (RLE Edu L)

The internal organisation of the school touches on many areas of contemporary debate. Is there such a thing as a 'good school'? Are large urban comprehensives necessarily impersonal? Are the charges of indiscipline, conflict and declining standards in modern schools based on a failure to understand schools as institutions? At the time this book was first published sociological analysis had neglected to consider schools as organisational entities, preferring to see them as either the sites for negotiated encounters between teachers and pupils or else as agencies of class reproduction. The author redresses this imbalance and by relating the various literatures on the school to the constitutive patterns of its internal organisation he demonstrates the need for a more intensive sociological study of this embattled institution.

William Tyler

Part 1: Introduction: School Organisation and the Sociological Perspective. 1. School Structure: Metaphors and Models. 2. Sociological Approaches to School Structure Part 2: The School as Complex Organisation 3. The School As A Social System - Unfolding the Functionalist Model. 4. The School as Bureaucracy. Part 3: Post-Weberian Modes of School Organisation 5. Environment, Tast and Structure: The Contingency Model of School Organisation. 6. Loosely Coupled Schools? Part 4: School Organisation and the 'Interaction Order'. 7. Pupils, Teachers and Schools. 8. Patterns of Deviance: Adaptation and Anomie. Part 5: The Structuralist Perspective. 9. Structuralist Sociologies of the School: Bernstein and Foucault. 10. The Constitution of the School. Part 6: Conclusion: The Sociological Perspective and Organisational Practice. 11. Towards Reconstruction: Organisationl, Policy and Critique. 12. Summary and Conclusions.