Featured Section: THE DISCOURSE ON SCHOOL ORGANIZATION AND ADAPTABILITY

Generally speaking, there are two sources of insight into school organization and adaptability: the prescriptive discourse of educational administration , and the theoretical discourse of the multidisciplinary field of organization analysis . The field of educational administration is grounded in the notion of scientific management , an extremely narrow view that presupposes that organizations are rational and that organizational change is a rational-technical process (Burrell & Morgan, 1979; Scott, 1981). Although scientific management is a purely functionalist approach for organizing and managing industrial firms, it was applied to schools and other social organizations during the social efficiency movement at the turn of the century (Callahan, 1962; Haber, 1964), and has remained the grounding formulation of educational administration ever since.34

The theoretical discourse of organization analysis is grounded in the social disciplines and thus, in principle, provides a much broader range of perspectives on organization and change. Ultimately, however, the theories produced in the field of organization analysis are shaped by the various modes of theorizing or paradigms that have been available to and, more important, historically favored by social scientists (Burrell & Morgan, 1979).35 Because functionalism has been the favored mode of theorizing in the social sciences, the theoretical discourse on organization, like the prescriptive discourse of educational administration, has been dominated by the functionalist paradigm, and thus by the presupposition of organizational rationality (Burrell & Morgan, 1979). However, over the past thirty years, the same revolutionary developments in the social disciplines that were noted previously have produced a number of new theories of organization that are grounded in other modes of social theorizing that had been underutilized in organizational research.36