Democratic Dilemmas: Joint Work, Education Politics, and Community

4 The Democracy-Bureaucracy Face-off

When faced with changed environmental conditions, some organizations persist in traditional ways of behaving and others will adopt new ways of behaving. When criticized, some organizations hunker down and others conduct a searching self-examination.1 DIFFERENCES IN ORGANIZATIONAL structure, culture, and leadership in Highland and Mid Valley created important contextual conditions for joint work. In my three years studying these districts—examining their policies and programs, getting to know central office leaders, and closely following the progress of a sample of schools—I found consistent differences in everyday district matters such as personnel procedures, division of labor, rules, attitudes toward data, and the extent of delegation. These reinforcing features had a surprisingly strong influence on democratic efforts: at times directly affecting the process and at other times affecting the power imbalances and institutional clashes previously discussed. Accordingly, one cannot fully understand the dynamics of power or institutional understandings without a clear picture of the organizational setting in which collaboration unfolded. Until now, the book has focused primarily on the collaborative endeavors and participants. In this chapter I step back to examine the broader anatomy of each district, exposing a sharp contrast between a bureaucratically entrenched organization and a more entrepreneurial, learning-centered organization. I illustrate the ways in which bureaucratic features conflicted with democratic intent and conclude by examining what enabled one district to behave less bureaucratically than the other. ORGANIZATIONAL FORMS AND DEMOCRACY In broad definitional terms, both districts were bureaucracies—well known as hierarchical systems with fixed divisions of labor, levels of graded authority 101 FOUR The Democracy-Bureaucracy Face-off (lower offices are supervised by higher ones), management that presupposes expert training, and sets of rules that govern official decisions.2 In bureaucracies , jurisdictional areas are clearly specified (activities are fixed as “official duties”), and rules governing decisions and actions are said to be stable, exhaustive, and easily able to be learned.3 Thought to be technically superior to church and state, bureaucracies were designed to increase the predictability and fairness of government action by “applying general rules to specific cases.”4 By having specialized jobs with rules for behavior, managers or heads of bureaucracies could be more confident that front-line employees would act in particular cases in ways that the manager would have acted had she been in the employees’ positions. The regularity of rules and exercise of authority also was intended to promote greater equality and justice. While bureaucracies were initially developed to promote democracy and equity, this very organizational model appears to be a potential obstacle to democratic practice. Recall that deliberative democratic ideals call for decision making based on reason not power, a sense of reciprocity and equal voice, publicity of reasons, and accountability to all who are bound by the decisions at hand. As the Mid Valley case illustrates, the features of a bureaucratically entrenched organization—rigid adherence to rules and hierarchy, enforcement of order and uniformity over learning, and centralization of control at the top—appear to conflict with these democratic ideals and might hinder efforts to promote widespread involvement in an egalitarian process of deliberation. Conversely, the Highland case suggests that a more entrepreneurial organization5 that interprets rules with flexibility, organizes work based on talent and skill, promotes learning over control, and distributes leadership complements the democratic aims of joint work and might facilitate its enactment. The remainder of this chapter examines this “democracy-bureaucracy” face-off, demonstrating the divergent influences of Mid Valley and Highland ’s organizational structure, culture, and leadership on deliberations and actions. As these sections illustrate, everyday district matters had enormous effects on the democratic endeavors. ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE: RIGID VERSUS FLEXIBLE The formal organization, rules, and procedures of the two districts differed in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, rendering Mid Valley a more rigid bureaucracy and Highland more flexible and entrepreneurial. Great contrasts emerged in personnel procedures, division of labor, resource acquisition/allocation, and general rules of the two districts. In the aggregate, they produced an environment conducive to joint work in Highland yet hostile to similar efforts in Mid Valley. DEMOCRATIC DILEMMAS 102 Personnel Procedures While both districts worked with their local bargaining units to determine personnel policies, the nature of these policies varied significantly. First, Highland and Mid Valley differed in the ways they promoted staff. In Mid Valley , all central office administrators followed a similar trajectory: having worked for years as teachers, then principals in district schools, before...