William Tyler

’Loosely Coupled’ Schools: a structuralist critique

Abstract The ascendant model of the school in the specialist administrative and organisational literature is the ‘loosely coupled’ system. There are, however, ambiguities in the way this model has been applied, whether as a research tool or as a theoretical device to mark out institutions such as hospitals, schools and prisons where the elements of functional analysis (goals, technology, structure) have no predictive interdependence. The irony that a model which derives from biological and cybernetic thinking should become a tool of demystification of orthodox functional theory is interesting in itself and perhaps points to a major conceptual weakness in its formulation and application. It is argued that ambiguities in the model can be addressed by a structuralist approach which distinguishes the surface features of looseness from the more determining patterns of the inter‐relationship between rules and rituals within either the institutional or the technical ‘core’ of school organisation.

Complexity and Control: the organisational background of credentialism

Abstract Sociologists of education have until very recently ignored the role of organisational processes in generating the demand for qualified personnel, preferring instead to explain any ‘inflation’ of the value of credentials in terms of either class strategies of social reproduction or as the outcome of positional competition within the labour market. In recent years, however, neo‐Weberian theorists have tried to redress this imbalance by pointing to the importance of contextual features of organisation (such as size and national prominence) as predictors of educational demand, while neo‐Marxist historians of the firm have examined the role played by credentials within the control processes of the capitalist enterprise. As a preliminary to more extensive investigation, a path analysis was carried out using the data from the original Aston study which tested one possible causal model of the organisational processes behind the level of specialist qualifications found in a sample of firms and public inst...