This is a study of teachers' experiences in organizations. In particular, this study explores the experiences that prompted Black male teachers to consider a career in teaching, the organizational conditions that influenced their workplace experiences, and the organizational dynamics that affected these teachers' decisions to stay or leave their current schools or the profession. Drawing on interviews from 27 Black male teachers across fourteen schools in Boston Public Schools, this study found that an early experience teaching influenced participants' decisions to enter the teaching profession. Findings from this study also suggest that the number of Black men on a school's faculty influenced participants' workplace experiences. Participants who were the only Black men on the faculty, or whom I describe as "Loners," faced greater challenges in navigating the organization when compared to participants in schools with many more Black male teachers, or "Groupers." Moreover, there was a relationship between the reasons participants cited for leaving, participants' actual decisions to stay or leave, and organizational characteristics. Loners stayed. Groupers moved to other schools and some left teaching altogether. Loners cited the school's overall working conditions as their reason for staying, while Groupers described administrative leadership as their reason for leaving. This dissertation builds on the nascent literature that explores how organizational conditions, characteristics, and dynamics in schools affect the pathways into the profession, experiences, and retention of Black male teachers.

This study, a multisite qualitative case study, examines the responses of three institutions of higher education to normative disruption of the gender binary. Normative disruption, or the challenging of the social status quo, occurs when power structures in society are pushed back against. Central to this study is the use of open systems theory, which positions higher education as a subsystem of American society, and therefore responsive to changes in the environment external of the institution. This study investigates how, if at all, these case sites employed Gender Inclusive Housing (GIH) policies as an institutional response to changes in how gender was conceptualized on their campus. Specifically, this study addresses: 1. how changes in societal norms around the gender binary influence colleges and universities, 2. in what ways institutions respond to such changes, 3. what ways institutions reestablish organizational homeostasis around an expanded concept of gender, and 4. how institutional characteristics influence decision-making responses. Out of the findings of this study emerged the Model of Normative Disruption, a mechanism that can be utilized to understand institutional decision-making responses to normative disruption. The findings of this study suggest: 1. various societal and institutional factors influence the ways in which normative disruption manifests at a college or university, 2. institutional characteristics and culture impact all responses to normative disruption, and can either support or hinder change, 3. GIH is one mechanism of responding to normative disruption, but, depending on institutional characteristics, may not be sufficient enough change to reestablish organizational homeostasis, and 4. if the institutional culture is not an amenable environment to such changes, organizational homeostasis is difficult to reestablish. This study concludes with implications for theory, research, and practice. Importantly, I suggest that GIH policies might serve as an opportunity for administrators to begin the necessary conversations of understanding the myriad cisgenderist policies, practices, and culture that exist within systems of higher education.

Higher education in the United States has experienced a revolution over the past half-century, with more students of color and low-income students attending college than ever before. This compositional change has emerged in parallel with an exponential expansion of the higher education sector, both in its size and variety. As a result, racially-diverse and less-resourced students attending public and for-profit commuter colleges, rather than white, high-resource students attending private residential colleges, comprise today’s “new majority” of college enrollees. Yet despite new majority students' increase in college attendance, many such students arrive at college underprepared to succeed and the colleges they attend are ill-prepared to receive them. This dissertation investigates the tensions produced by the expansion and diversification of the higher education sector in the United States, analyzing how organizational characteristics and practices, shaped by institutional and cultural arrangements (e.g. normative accountability and race- or class-based discrimination), impact inequality in individual outcomes by race and socioeconomic status. The empirical context for this work is a large, urban, public university system that I refer to as, “Metropolitan University,” which includes 11 baccalaureate-granting colleges that share many structural and compositional similarities with the colleges attended by the majority of enrollees in the United States. Using a combination of longitudinal administrative records, longitudinal interview data, and information from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), together with core insights from the literatures in stratification, organizations, and the sociology of culture, this dissertation shows that higher education organizations independently play an appreciable role in producing inequality in students' bachelor's degree (BA) completion outcomes. I arrive at this core finding through three papers that draw on distinct data sources, analytical strategies, and theoretical lenses to evaluate BA completion outcomes in the Metropolitan University context. In the first paper, I argue that the rise of accountability standards in higher education unintentionally has obscured the role of colleges and universities in producing unequal student outcomes. Using longitudinal administrative data and fixed-effects estimation strategies, I show that statistical measures that isolate the independent effects of colleges on student outcomes often yield very different understandings of effectiveness than measures required by federal agencies or produced by the popular press. Once I employ more appropriate statistical strategies, I find unexpected variation in college effects across the university system as well as heterogeneous effects given students’ racial background, family income, and transfer-in status. In the second paper, I show that academic factors such as students' success in passing initial “gateway” coursework and the field of study trajectories colleges shape correlate strongly with college effectiveness and provide an initial explanation of differences in college performance. Yet longitudinal interview data collected at three colleges within the system during one academic year, allow me to identify other explanatory mechanisms. Specifically, in the third paper, I examine interactions between students’ belief systems concerning the meaning and value of higher education, the symbolic boundaries they create to separate themselves from dropouts, and their socio-academic experiences during the first year of college. Belief-boundary interactions contribute to students’ discrepant outcomes, though not as powerfully as students' field of study pathways and the support they receive from college advisors. Together, these three papers work to connect micro-, meso-, and macro- levels of analysis, illustrating the extent of individual and group-based inequality in higher education while also acknowledging and interrogating the organizational and institutional structures that produce it.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Sociology, December 2003. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2001. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [157]-172). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2001. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [157]-172). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D. in Political Science)--Vanderbilt University, 2003. / Title from PDF title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

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Organisational research in English-speaking countries has long been focused on two main areas. Studies on micro-level have been concerned with the socio-psychological explanation of organisational phenomena, mostly on the level of the individual and groups. Macro-level studies have been concerned with structure for the explanation of organisational phenomena. Macro-level theories have mostly bracketed the individual, and neglected the psychological component or regarded the individual as an actor playing roles. Only recently has the study of organisations been extended to attempt a meso-level analysis of organisational phenomena (Rousseau 1991, 1995). These meso-level attempts have, in the eyes of the author, run into explanatory problems. These problems are mainly due to the 'new' approach being based principally on existing macro-and micro-level theory, merely marrying the two approaches and thus inheriting the apparent difficulties of the existing theory to account for the individual. Althusser and Levi-Strauss are prominent representatives of both micro-and macro-level theory. This author agrees with the notion that organisational research benefits from a meso-level approach to organisational theory. It is in the light of this approach that the author turned to a widely unknown source of theory (in the English-speaking countries) to address the existing explanatory problems in organisational research and contribute so to the field. The underlying fundamental belief of the author is that any institution can be more successfully understood in the sociological context that defines the institution. Introducing the metaphor of 'social resonance' and linking it to the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu, especially the notion of agents and fields, the author attempts to cross-fertilise the academic fields of sociological research in mainland Europe (namely France and Germany with their strong philosophical tradition) with the academic fields of organisational research in the English-speaking countries (namely Britain and the US). This thesis will discuss the organisational research literature and social theory, introduce Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice, develop the metaphor of 'social resonance', and test the new construct in an empirical research setting. The main objective of this study is thus to explore the value of Bourdieu's theory of practice for the explanation of organisational phenomena, and to operationalise it in the metaphor of 'social resonance'. To this end, a research framework has been developed which is explained in more detail in this report.