Building institutional capacity: more accountability than autonomy?
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of the paper is to explore the strategies schools use to build capacity in English secondary schools where they operate under strong pressures to improve continuously and failure to do so carries severe penalties.
Design/methodology/approach
The approach involved in-depth case studies of six schools that utilized multiple sources of evidence. These include policy documents, interviews with multiple actors and observations of key management meetings.
Findings
Findings suggest travelling strategies used by schools, but these are implemented with varying intensity, hybridity and creativity. The common travelling strategies re-contextualized in organizational fields are data workmanship, multi-level monitoring, and performance development. For participating schools, successfully replicating these three pillars through identity cloning, an attempt to establish institutional identities identical to that of the “performing schools”, helps lift schools in different contexts.
Originality/value
There has been ample discussion on organizational capacity building, but the evidence on the actual strategies schools use is thin. This paper contributes to knowledge generation and understanding by providing as complete a picture as possible of the strategies schools use while remaining skeptical regarding the long-term consequences of short term “gains”.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This research was carried out while both authors were employed at the University of Cambridge. The authors are indebted to the University of Cambridge for financially supporting the study on which this article reports. Other members of the research team were Peter Gronn, Joanne Waterhouse and Ross McLellan.
Citation
Mertkan, S. and Sugrue, C. (2014), "Building institutional capacity: more accountability than autonomy?", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 27 No. 2, pp. 331-343. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOCM-07-2013-0142
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2014, Emerald Group Publishing Limited