Principals and the Political Economy of Environmental Enactment

Abstract

Using Weick’s notion of environmental enactment as a sensitizing concept, this study explores how principals enact and structure the internal and external environment of the school. By examining what in the environment captures the attention of principals and why, an incipient theory of the environmental attention-structure is offered. The critical-incident technique, a grounded approach to theory building, generated 77 incidents of prolonged interaction with the environment among 18 principals. Findings suggest that the environmental attention-structure of the principals is driven by concerns for the potential accumulation and loss of legitimacy capital. Principals describe their cognitive processes for deliberating, weighing, and assessing the environmental entities and events in terms of gains or losses of legitimacy. Public choice theory, a variant of political economy theory, provides a useful lens for making sense of these processes.