The purpose of this study was to describe the informal communications network or "grapevine" among school principals. The investigators interviewed all elementary, secondary, and special school principals in a suburban school district in the midwest. Based on the responses of these principals to questions about the ways they informally interacted with peers and others in the district, the researchers identified "clan-like" informal grouping patterns among elementary principals and "guild-like" informal grouping patterns among other principals as well as other informal channels of communication. The principals' grapevine structure seemed to reflect patterns of occupational socialization of school principals and informal boundary spanning processes, processes viewed as latent yet relatively functional aspects of educational organization.

Explores the relationships between teacher perceptions of the structural coupling in their schools and their perceptions of school robustness and effectiveness in a research study of 73 participating schools. Pearson product‐moment correlations of mean scores from each school produced significant relationships, suggesting that teacher perceptions of relatively tight coupling of goal direction/vision and work supervision structures, and relatively loose coupling of manipulative control structures, are associated with their positive perceptions of school robustness and effectiveness as well as student achievement and attendance.

This article reports a significant positive relationship between teachers’ perceptions of organizational health and the relative robustness of their school vision. Subsequent regression analysis indicated that academic emphasis and institutional integrity were the school health themes that characterized the overall association with robust school vision.

Viewing school principals as street‐level bureaucrats, creative insubordination is the implementation of policies and programmes at the school level in a way that fits the principal′s values, philosophy, and goals. Focuses on school principals′ use of creative insubordination in relationships with the central office, their professional beliefs about discretion, perceptions of role conflict, and their locus of control. Creative insubordination was most frequent among veteran principals who value on‐the‐job competence over completion of degrees and certificates and are thought to be instructional leaders by central office supervisors. Social protection from negative sanctions from central office seemed to be associated with principals′ ability to show that their insubordination was justifiable in terms of the needs of their school, teachers or students.

Positive interpersonal relations among students, teachers and administrators that help the school meet the demands of its environment have been described as organizational health. When schools operate in ways that regularly result in student and teacher empathy and involvement, they can be considered relatively robust organizations. This study employed a sample of 38 junior high and middle schools to test a hypothesis predicting a significant positive relationship between school health and robustness. Multiple regression analysis tended to support this hypothesis, suggesting a positive association between teachers’ perceptions of organizational health and environmental robustness. However, only one school health measure, teachers’ perceptions of a healthy school‐level emphasis on the academic success of their students, made a significant and separate contribution to the overall relationship between school health and robustness. Apparently, when schools are healthy and robust, academic emphasis is a predominant organizational theme.