School-Level Bureaucrats: How High School Counselors Inhabit the Conflicting Logics of Their Work

Abstract

Through three years of training, school counselors build a professional identity based on providing social-emotional, academic, and postsecondary guidance to students. But school counselors face conflict in meeting these expectations in a bureaucratic environment that asks them to prioritize efficiency when meeting with students rather than building one-on-one relationships. I draw from interviews with high school counselors and school personnel and a year of observations to study the institutional logics that govern their work and use inhabited institutional theory to study how time scarcity shaped how counselors interpreted these conflicting macro-level logics in their micro-level interactions. The counselors in this study developed patterns of practice that helped them manage this conflict, negotiating but eventually settling with nonideal strategies in the best way they could with the resources made available to them. Efforts to reject the efficiency model were met with pushback from school leaders and unintended consequences for counselors and students alike. The conflict inherent in their work left little room for the mental health or postsecondary counseling they expect and are trained to provide.

Neither Elite nor Grassroots Networks: Educational Change Through Mid-Level Bureaucrats

“…After reading through the transcripts, the PI and PM created a codebook with "parent codes" on the positive and negative consequences of the Alumni Associates program, the use of networks for change, the experience of being in a government bureaucracy, and organizational changes experienced by Catalyst. Similar to other research, we (PI and PM) started a first round of coding focused on parent codes (Blake 2023;Saldana 2011). Afterwards, three research assistants performed the second round of coding with codes underneath the parent code.…”

Building Schools & Communities that Prevent Suicide: The Final Report of the Social Worlds & Youth Well-Being Study, Western Slope, Colorado

“…While school mental health workers embraced suicide prevention, school counselors in particular experienced barriers to doing this work well. These barriers have also been established by prior research (Blake 2020(Blake , 2023Fox and Harding 2005). Namely, school counselors have many diverse obligations that include course scheduling, college applications, testing, recess duty (for middle schools), substitute teaching (when necessary), and beyond.…”

Organizational Theory in Education: Seven Perspectives

“…Logics can be related to specific institutions-i.e., market, state, religious, family logics-or specific fields-i.e., care vs. science logics (Dunn & Jones, 2010;Lounsbury et al, 2021). Empirical research in education has highlighted that schools are places with conflicting institutional logics of bureaucracy and professions (Blake, 2023), and that they try to reconcile these competing logics (Diehl, 2019). Such conflicting logics and ways of thinking about problems may also influence different strategies of action for school improvement (Trinidad, 2024).…”