AECT Handbook of Research

Table of Contents

6: Toward a Sociology of Educational Technology
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6.1 Introduction
6.2 Sociology and its Concerns
6.3 Sociological Studies of Education and Technology
6.4 The Sociology of Groups
6.5 Educational Technology as Social Movement
6.6 A Note on Sociological Method
6.7 Toward a Sociology of Educational Technology
6.8 Conclusion: Educational Technology is About Work In Schools
References
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6.2 SOCIOLOGY AND ITS CONCERNS

6.2.1 A Concern for Collective Action

In the United States, most writing about education has had a distinctly psychological tone. This is in contrast with what is the case in certain other developed countries, especially England and western Europe, where there is a much stronger tradition of thinking about education, not merely as a matter of concern for the individual but also as a general social phenomenon, a matter of interest for the state and polity. Accordingly, it is appropriate that we review here briefly the principal focus of sociology as a field, and describe how it may be related to another field that in America has been studied almost exclusively through the disciplinary lenses of psychology.

Sociology as a discipline appeared during the 19th century in response to serious changes in the existing social structure. The industrial revolution had wrought large shifts in relationships among individuals, and especially in the relationships among different social groups. Marx's interest in class antagonisms, Weber's focus on social and political structure under conditions of change, Durkheim's investigations of the sense of "anomie" (alienation) seen as prevalent in the new social order--all these concerns were born of the shifts that were felt especially strongly as Western social life changed under the impact of the industrial revolution.

The questions of how individuals define their lives together, and how those definitions, once set in place and commonly accepted, constrain individuals' actions and life courses, formed the basis of early sociological inquiry. In many ways, these are the same questions that continue to interest sociologists today. What determines how and why humans organize themselves and their actions in particular ways? What effects do those organizations have on thought and action? And what limitations might those organizations impose on human action?

If psychology focuses on the individual, the internal processes of cognition and motives for action that individuals experience, then sociology focuses most of all on the ways people interact as members of organizations or groups, how they form new groups, and how their status as members of one or another group affects how they live and work. The "strong claim" of sociologists might be put simply as "settings have plans for us." That is, the social and organizational contexts of actions may be more important in explaining what people do than their individual motivations and internal states. How this general concern for collective action plays out is explored below in relation to each of three topics of general concern here: organizations, groups, and social change.

6.2.1.1. Sociology of Organizations. Schools and other educational enterprises are easily thought of as organizations, groups of people intentionally brought together to accomplish some specific purpose. Education as a social institution has existed in various forms over historical time, but only in the last 150 years or so has it come to have a distinctive and nearly universal organizational form. Earlier societies had ways to ensure that young people were provided with appropriate cultural values (enculturation), with specific forms of behavior and outlooks that would allow them to function successfully in a given society (socialization), and with training needed to earn a living (observation and participation, formal apprenticeship, or formal schooling). But only recently have we come to think of education as necessarily a social institution characterized by specific organizational forms (schools, teachers, curricula, standards, laws, procedures for moving from one part of the system to another, etc.).

The emphasis here on education as a social organization leads us to three related subquestions that we will consider in more detail later. These include: (1) How does the fact that the specific organizational structure of schools is usually bureaucratic in form affect what goes on (and can go on) there, and how does educational technology enter into these relationships? (2) How are social roles defined in schools, and how does educational technology affect the definition of those roles? (3) How does the organizational structure of schools change, and how does educational technology interact with those processes of organizational change? Each of these questions will be introduced briefly here and treated in more depth in following sections.

6.2.1.1.1. Organizations and Bureaucracy. The particulars of school organizational structure are a matter of interest, for schools and universities have most frequently been organized as bureaucracies. That is, they develop well-defined sets of procedures for processing students, for dealing with teachers and other staff, and for addressing the public. These procedures deal with who is to be allowed to participate (rules for qualification, admission, assignment, and so forth), what will happen to them while they are part of the system (curricular standards, textbook selection policies, rules for teacher certification, student conduct, etc.), how the system will define that its work has been completed (requirements for receiving credit, graduation requirements, tests, etc.), as well as with how the system itself is to be run (administrator credentialing, governance structures, procedures for financial transactions within schools, relations among various parts of the system--accreditation, state vs. local vs. federal responsibility, etc.). Additional procedures may deal with such issues as how the public may participate in the life of the institution, how disputes are to be resolved, and how rewards and punishments are to be decided on and distributed (Bidwell, 1965). Educational organizations are thus participating in the continuing transition from what German sociologists called gemeinschaft to gesellschaft, from an earlier economic and social milieu defined by close familial bonds, personal relationships, and a small and caring community, to a milieu defined by ties to impersonal groups and large, bureaucratic organizations.

While bureaucratic forms of organization are not necessarily bad (and indeed were seen in the past century as a desirable antidote to personalized, corrupt, arbitrary social forms), the current popular image of bureaucracy is exceedingly negative. The disciplined and impersonal qualities of the bureaucrat, admired in the last century, are now frequently seen as ossified, irrelevant, a barrier to needed change.

A significant question may therefore be: What are the conditions that encourage bureaucratic systems, especially in education, to become more flexible, more responsive? And since educational technology is often portrayed as a solution to the problems of bureaucracy, we need to ask about the evidence regarding technology and its impact on bureaucracies.

6.2.1.1.2. Organizations and Social Roles. To understand how organizations work, we need to understand not only the formal structure of the organization, the "organization chart." We also need to see the independent "life" of the organization as expressed and felt through such mechanisms as social and organizational roles. Roles have long been a staple of sociological study, but they are often misunderstood. A role is not merely a set of responsibilities that one person (say, a manager or administrator) in a social setting defines for another person (e.g., a worker, perhaps a teacher). Rather, it is better thought of as a set of interconnected expectations that participants in a given social setting have for their own and others' behaviors. Teachers expect students to act in certain ways; principals expect teachers to do thus and so; and teachers have similar expectations of principals. Roles, then, are best conceived of as "emergent properties" of social systems: They appear not in isolation but rather when people gather together and try to accomplish something together. Entire systems of social analysis (such as that proposed by George Herbert Mead [ 1934] under the rubric "symbolic interactionism") have been built on this basic set of ideas.

Educational institutions are the site for an extensive set of social roles, including those of teacher, student/pupil, administrator, staff professional, parent, future or present employer, and community member. Especially significant are the ways in which the role of the teacher may be affected by the introduction of educational technology into a school, or the formal or informal redefinition of job responsibilities following such introduction. How educational roles are defined and redefined, how new roles come into existence, and how educational technology may affect those processes, then, are all legitimate subjects for our attention here.

6.2.1.1.3. Organizations and Organizational Change. A further question of interest to sociologists is bow organizations change. New organizations are constantly coming into being, old ones disappear, and existing ones change their form and functions. How this happens, what models or metaphors best describe these processes, and how organizations seek to ensure their success through time have all been studied extensively in sociology. There have been numerous investigations of innovation in organizations, as well as of innovation strategies, barriers to change, and so forth.

In education, these issues have been of special concern, for the persistent image of educational institutions has been one of unresponsive bureaucracies. Specific studies of educational innovation are therefore of interest to us here, with particular reference to how educational technology may interact with these processes.

6.2.1.2. Sociology of Groups. Our second major rubric involves groups, group membership, and the significance of group membership for an individual's life chances. Sociologists study all manner of groups: formal and informal,groups of affiliation (which one joins voluntarily) and ascription (which one is a member of by virtue of birth, position, class), and so on. The latter kinds of groups, in which one's membership is not a matter of one's own choosing, have been of special interest to sociologists in this century. This interest has been especially strong since social barriers of race, gender, and class are no longer seen as immutable but rather as legitimate topics for state concern. As the focus of sociologists on mechanisms of social change has grown over the past decades, so has their interest in defining how group membership affects the life chances of individuals, and in prescribing what steps institutions (government, schools, etc.) might take to lessen the negative impact of ascriptive membership on individuals' futures.

Current discussion of education has often focused on the success of the system in enabling individuals to transcend the boundaries imposed by race, gender, and class (see also 9.5). The pioneering work by James Coleman in the 1960s (Coleman, 1966) on race and educational outcomes was critical to changing how Americans thought about integration of schools. Work by Carol Gilligan (Gilligan, Lyons & Hamner, 1990) and others starting in the 1980s on the fate of women in education has led to a new awareness of the gender nonneutrality of many schooling practices (see 9.5.4, 10.4). The continuing importance of class is a topic of interest for a number of sociologists and social critics who frequently view the schooling system more as a mechanism for social reproduction than for social change (Apple, 1988; Giroux, 1981; Spring, 1989). These issues are of major importance to how we think about education in a changing democracy, and so we need to ask how educational technology may either contribute to the problems themselves or to their solution.

6.2.1.3. Sociology of Social Change and Social Movements. A third large concern of sociologists has been the issue of social stability and social change. The question has been addressed variously since the days of Karl Marx, whose vision posited the inevitability of a radical reconstruction of society based on scientific "laws" of historical and economic development, class identification, and class conflict via newly mobilized social movements. Social change is of no less importance to those who seek not to change but to preserve the social order. Talcott Parsons, an American sociologist of the middle of this century, is perhaps unjustly criticized for being a conservative, but he discussed in detail how particular social forms and institutions could be viewed as performing a function of "pattern maintenance" (Parsons, 1949, 195 1).

Current concerns about social change are perhaps less apocalyptic today than they were for Marx, but in some quarters are viewed as no less critical. In particular, educational institutions are increasingly seen as one of the few places where society can exert leverage to bring about desired changes in the social and economic order. Present fears about "global economic competitiveness" are a good case in point. It is clear that for many policyrnakers, the primary task of schools in the current economic environment ought to be to produce an educated citizenry capable of competing with other nations. But other voices in education stress the importance of the educational system in conserving social values, passing on traditions. A variety of social movements have emerged in support of both these positions. Both positions contain a kernel that is essentially ideological--a set of assumptions, values, and positions as regards the individual and society. These ideologies are typically implicit and thus rarely are articulated openly. Nonetheless, identifying them is especially important to a deeper understanding of the questions involved.

It is reasonable for us to ask how sociologists have viewed social change, what indicators are seen as being most reliable in predicting how social change may take place, and what role social movements (organized groups in support of particular changes) may have in bringing change about. If education is to be viewed as a primary engine for such change, and if educational technology is seen by some as a principal part of that engine, then we need to understand how and why such changes may take place, and what role technology may rightly be expected to play. This raises in turn the issue of educational technology as a social and political movement itself and of its place vis-à-vis other organizations in the general sphere of education. The ideological underpinnings of technology in education are also important to consider. The values and assumptions of both supporters and critics of technology's use in education bear careful inspection if we are to see clearly the possible place for educational technology.

The following section offers a detailed look at the sociology of organizations, the sociology of school organization and of organizational roles, and the influences of educational technology on that organization. Historical studies of the impact of technology on organizational structures are also considered to provide a different perspective on how organizations change.


Updated October 14, 2003
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