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Within current educational management literature, it could be argued that the cultural perspective that is generally articulated is one in which the social context of education policy, school culture and educational management is almost entirely overlooked (Angus, 1996). The emphasis is typically on individual school ‘leaders’ and an internally constructed organizational culture in which principals are expected to become manipulators of culture and belief. School principals, in this literature, and in current government policy in many countries, are expected to construct or impose corporate control within their institutions in the increasingly decentralized organizational form that is considered necessary for organizational efficiency and, most importantly, market success and legitimacy in the increasingly complex post-industrial society (Parker, 1992). My general argument is that this perspective misconceives culture as an internal aspect of organizations that may be manipulated by management in order to enhance organizational commitment and efficiency (Caldwell & Spinks, 1993, 1998; Deal & Peterson, 1999).

The sociology of education has various traditions which examine the connections between education, culture, and inequality. Two of these traditions, symbolic interactionism and critical theory, tend to ignore each other. This paper creates a dialogue between these traditions by applying symbolic interactionist (SI) and radical interactionist (RSI) sensibilities to an important study for resistance theory, Paul Willis’ classic ethnography Learning to Labor (1977). The SI reading of Learning to Labor emphasizes the importance of group interactions and the creation of meaning, while the RSI reading highlights how domination unfolds in social interaction. We argue that SI and RSI have much to offer Learning to Labor, as these readings can avoid some of the critiques commonly leveled on the book regarding the linkage between theory and data, structure and agency, and the book’s conceptualization of culture. Likewise, we argue that the data in Learning to Labor have much to offer SI and RSI, as the material provides grist to further understand the role of symbols in domination while identifying escalating dominance encounters that create a set of patterned interactions that we describe as a “grinding” social order.

The paper examines two race-based intervention programs, focusing on the distinction between models of intervention based on targeted and indiscriminate (i.e., normative) college-going cultures. We unpack the concept of the “college-going culture” – defined as a set of expectations and norms that socialize students to view themselves as college-bound – and add nuance to it by illustrating how racial/cultural community and school environments, respectively, act as spheres of influence. Findings are based on semi-structured interviews with 46 alums of two effective, race-based intervention programs. Within one program, participants experienced culturally relevant programming but felt excluded from the college-going culture of the wider school environment. In the other program, students were included in the larger college-going culture of the school, but often felt culturally isolated. Participants’ narratives provide insight into the strengths and pitfalls of both intervention programs, and the paper concludes with a diagram outlining elements essential in optimal college-going cultures.

Dramatic economic, political, and societal changes at local, national, and global levels, along with commitments to achieve Education for All (EFA) and Millennium Development Goals (UNESCO, 2000), are prompting national education leaders around the world to restructure and reenvision their education systems (OECD, 2008; Olson, 2008). Decentralization is one of the key structural changes governments are using to promote greater efficiency and to increase local participation in education related to decision making, finances, and accountability in schools. As the Ministry of Education (MOE) of the Sultanate of Oman makes the shift to a decentralized structure, it recognizes that its school administrators require new leadership skills in order to make the necessary changes. Implementing decentralization requires a shift in principals' work and thus their professional identity. “By building the leadership capacity of principals as leaders at the school level, (Oman's) MOE officials hope to strengthen the principals' ability to implement school reforms for the 21st century” (Seward International, Inc., 2008, p. 6).

The No Child Left Behind Act (2002) and Race to the Top (2009) led to the highest rate of standardized-state testing in the history of the United States of America. As a result, the Every Student Succeeds Act (2015) aims to reevaluate standardized-state testing. Previous research has assessed its impact on schools, educators, and students; yet, youth’s voices are almost absent. Therefore, this qualitative analysis examines how youth of color perceive and experience standardized-state testing.

Seventy-three youth participated in a semistructured interview during the summer of 2015. The sample consists of 34 girls and 39 boys, 13–18 years of age, of African American, Latino/a, Jamaican American, multiracial/ethnic, and other descent. It includes 6–12th graders who attended 61 inter-district and intra-district schools during the 2014–2015 academic year in a Northeastern metropolitan area in the United States that is undergoing a racial/ethnic integration reform.

Youth experienced testing overload under conflicting adult authorities and within an academically stratified peer culture on an ever-shifting policy terrain. While the parent-adult authority remained in the periphery, the state-adult authority intrusively interrupted the teacher-student power dynamics and the disempowered teacher-adult authority held youth accountable through the “attentiveness” rhetoric. However, youth’s perspectives and lived experiences varied across grade levels, school modalities, and school-geographical locations.

In this adult-dominated society, the market approach to education reform ultimately placed the burden of teacher and school evaluation on youth. Most importantly, youth received variegated messages from their conflicting adult authorities that threatened their academic journeys.

Often new principals approach their first appointments with a high expectation to make their mark by introducing changes that would lead to school improvement. However, these expectations may be void of thoughts of how an inherited school culture may weigh on their emotions and upset their notions about principalship on a daily basis. Emerging from a multiple case study research design, in which a critical incident technique was the main source of data on new principals’ emotional experiences, the findings show that the new principals experienced predominantly negative emotions and wounding, often linked to pre-formed expectations of school members. Also, influenced by a need to protect their leadership authority, they selected which emotions to disclose versus which to suppress. These findings as drawn from a broader study conducted in Trinidad and Tobago imply a need for training and continuing professional development that would support aspirant and practising principals’ emotion regulation.

Numerous Chinese management studies have demonstrated significant differences between Chinese and Western management. This exploratory paper investigates the impact of Chinese culture and Western traditions on China's contemporary school leaders' views of leadership and management, particularly in the areas of relationship building, delegation, and promotion. Data were drawn from questionnaires completed by school leaders and individual interviews with principals from different parts of China. The findings indicate that the differences between Chinese and Western management practices in Chinese schools are not static and should not be over-stressed. To different extents, the respondent school leaders of China were affected by both Chinese and Western values and practices in school leadership and management. Specifically, they were more influenced by Chinese culture in the areas of school management and organization and by Western values and practices in the areas of relationship building, staff performance, and promotion. Their leadership and management preferences were also influenced by other factors, including gender, domestic politics, and development.

Purpose – Recent research on the gender culture and femininity of adolescent girls found that girls construct their gender identity in various ways that are intertwined with race, ethnicity, social class, and sexual orientation. However, these existing studies focused on either general schoolgirls (see Ali, S. (2003). To be a girl: Culture and class in schools. Gender and Education, 15(3), 269–283; Bettie (2003); Weiler, J. D. (2000). Codes and contradictions: Race, gender identity and schooling. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press; Renold, E. (2005). Girls, boys and junior sexualities: Exploring children's gender and sexual relations in the primary school. London: Routledge) or delinquent girls in a gang (see Miller, J. (1998). Gender and victimization risk among young women in gangs. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 35, 429–453; Miller (2001); Joe-Laidler & Hunt (2001); Schalet, A., Hunt, G., & Joe-Laidler, K. (2003). Respectability and autonomy: The articulation and meaning of sexuality among the girls in the gang. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 32, 108–143; Messerschmidt (1995); Messerschmidt, J. W. (1997). Crime as structured action: Gender, race, class, and crime in the making. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage), and only a few studies paid attention to girls who showed overt oppositional behaviors at school.

Methods – The research uses qualitative methods and explores the gender identity of two adolescent girls in a junior high school in Taiwan, who are regarded as problem or “bad” girls by the school faculty.

Results – The two girls both manifested “ladette” culture (Jackson, 2006). On the one hand, they showed masculine behaviors such as fighting, troublemaking, disobeying school regulations, and using drugs and alcohol. On the other hand, they deliberately emphasized their femininity and sexual maturity in the way they dressed, talked, and behaved.

Children and youth of color in White and adult-dominated societies confront racism and adultism that shapes their peer cultures. Yet, the “new” sociology of childhood lacks the theory and methodology to explore racialized peer cultures. Thus, this chapter aims to sharpen its research tools. Theoretically, this chapter draws from Technologies of the Self (Foucault, 1988) and Critical Race Theory (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012) to enhance Valentine’s (1997) “adult-youth binary” and Corsaro’s (2015) “interpretive reproduction.” Methodologically, it combines the “doing research with children” approach (Greig, Taylor, & MacKay, 2013) with Critical Race Methodology (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) to do research with youth of color. These enhanced research tools are then used to explore how boys and girls of color (n = 150), 9- to 17-year olds, experience peer culture in suburban schools, under police surveillance, and on social media. In the field, interviewers navigated their adult privilege and racial/ethnic positionalities in relation to that of participants and the racial dynamic in the research setting, ultimately aiming to co-create a safe space for counter-storytelling. As a result, this chapter captured how White-dominated peer cultures used racial microaggressions against youth of color in suburban schools, boy peer cultures navigated racialized policing, and online-offline peer cultures curtailed protective and controlling racialized adult surveillance. Theoretically, the racially enhanced interpretive reproduction and adult-youth binary exposed the adultism-racism intersection that shapes youth peer cultures. Methodologically, counter-storytelling revealed the painful realities that youth of color face and that those with adult and/or White privilege would rather ignore.

The internationalization of education introduces notable cross-cultural challenges and benefits for consideration by scholars of comparative and international education. When teachers move overseas to work, they become sojourners, “between-society culture travelers” (Ward et al., 2005, p. 6). Living and working between cultures offers a substantial set of both challenges and opportunities. Acculturation theory (Sam & Berry, 2006) was initially understood as culture shock (Oberg, 1960), an occupational malady. Acculturation theory seeks to explain adaptation processes and has mostly examined sojourners whose intent is to permanently adapt to a new culture. Educators who are sojourners require temporary states of adaptation. This chapter narrates a subset of a qualitative study examining educator acculturation from an asset orientation to explore what benefits acculturation offers to sojourning educators who work in international schools overseas. Findings include that even highly stressful episodes of culture shock can manifest in long-term benefits, such as the development of personal and professional resilience and self-leadership strategies, as well as the reflective curating of one’s personal and professional identity, which may include the development of an interstitial identity. These benefits serve to increase educators’ cultural competencies, to prepare educators for supporting sojourning students who are acculturating, and to prepare educators for smoother acculturation experiences afterwards.