The Myth Incarnate: Recoupling Processes, Turmoil, and Inhabited Institutions in an Urban Elementary School (original) (raw)
This paper uses data from a two-year ethnography of “Costen Elementary School” to demystify a phenomenon that teachers, in their own nomenclature, called “turmoil.” Though turmoil feels chaotic to those who experience it, I argue that it is socially organized. To resolve this seeming irony, I integrate and expand literatures on organizations and schools, as well as social psychology and “disorganization.” The data indicate that turmoil has two components. First, it involves epistemic distress, that is, a displacement of meaning, certainty, and expectations that temporarily renders life unintelligible. Second, it involves a set of interactive responses through which people adjust to their epistemic distress by developing new, partisan meanings that define emergent battle lines. I use the ethnographic data to inductively theorize the four-part organization of turmoil: (1) turmoil is primed by changes in the extra-local context in which the setting exists. At Costen this change involved the emergence of accountability policies that competed with systems of autonomy. (2) Turmoil is sparked by disruptions to the immediate local order, which creates epistemic distress. At Costen, these disruptions included efforts by a new principal to make a tighter connection between accountability policies and everyday practices at the school. (3) Turmoil is enabled by authority relations that facilitate disruptions, for example the rational-legal authority of principals to enforce policy. (4) Turmoil is socially constructed by informal symbolic power relations that define how people respond to their epistemic distress.