Even though schools are nonadaptable structures, their status as public organizations means that they must respond to public demands for change. From the institutionalization perspective, schools deal with this problem by using their outer machine bureaucracy structure to deflect change demands. That is, they relieve pressure for change by signaling the environment that a change has occurred, thereby creating the illusion that they have changed when, in fact, they remain largely the same (Meyer, 1979; Rowan, 1980; Zucker, 1981). One way that school organizations signal change is by building symbols and ceremonies of change into their outer machine bureaucracy structure, which, of course, is decoupled from the actual work. Another important signal of change is the ritual or decoupled subunit. Not only are the two structures of schools decoupled, but the various units (classrooms and programs) are decoupled from one another as well. As we know from the configuration perspective, this is possible because specialization and professionalization create precisely this sort of loosely coupled interdependency within the organization. As such, schools can respond to pressure for change by simply adding on separate classrooms or programs — that is, by creating new specializations — to deal with the change demand. This response acts to buffer the organization from the change demand because these subunits are decoupled from the rest of the organization, thus making any substantive reorganization of activity unnecessary (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Zucker, 1981).
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