Instantiated Recoupling in Principals' Enactment of Teacher Evaluations: Emotion Work and New Forms of Ceremonial Conformity in Educational Institutions

Abstract

As accountability policies have proliferated and evolved in a number of organizational fields, recent scholarship in organizational sociology has paid close attention to the ways that accountability has forced tight coupling in a variety of organizations. Fewer recent studies examine efforts at ceremonial conformity that organizations may use to buffer internal practices from institutional pressures, or how organizations and their actors might attempt to engage in ceremonial conformity under newer accountability regimes. In this article, we examine how school principals enact state-mandated teacher evaluation policies with their teachers. To manage teachers' stress caused by the evaluations, we find that principals often allow, and at times enable, teachers to put on a “dog and pony show” during formal evaluations, a performance that aligns with district instructional policies but deviates from their common everyday practices. We argue that this is a novel form of ceremonial conformity that we call instantiated recoupling.