Search

Various changes in the spheres of education policy and school management over recent decades have sparked a renewed interest in the issue of school culture and its potential to understand processes of leadership and academic performance. What are the contributions and potentialities of organizational culture for understanding school organizations and their leadership processes? This article has two goals: (i) to identify trends and theoretical particularities inherent to the major approaches to organizational culture, focusing on research carried out in the school setting; (ii) to debate the heuristic usefulness of a theoretical proposal for studying organizational culture in the school setting. The article presents a multidimensional analysis of school organizational culture, considering political, social and educational factors, aiming to capture the unique nature of school cultures and their links to processes of leadership and management. By linking these to different leadership perspectives, this model may inspire further comparative study of educational management in an international context. This approach demonstrates the need to tailor models for analysing organizational culture to the school environment, to achieve a deeper and more solid understanding of school life and leadership and management phenomena.

The mechanisms of academic distinction of the best students, such as the Honours Boards of Excellence and Value, emerge in Portuguese state schools as important institutional management strategies for promoting the school image and attracting the best students. This is what the authors propose to discuss, and that they identify as being a new form of accountability--the "educational marketing accountability." In other words, at the theoretical level, this article intends to explore the relationship between the results obtained by students, the promotion of academic excellence and a new form of accountability in the Portuguese non-higher education system. The empirical focus was the analysis of the institutional marketing strategies of management adopted by the head teachers and their impact on the school choice by the students. The authors used data from a questionnaire applied to students from four secondary schools who were asked to complete, interviews with head teachers and content analysis of documents from most Portuguese schools with academic distinction rituals. The research confirms the obsessive centrality of academic results in the daily management of schools; simultaneously, the distinction of the best students is an institutional marketing strategy that influences the choice of school, projects a desired social image and further reinforces the performance and leadership style of the head teachers.

Copyright of Education Policy Analysis Archives / Archivos Analíticos de Políticas Educativas / Arquivos Analíticos de Políticas Educativas is the property of Educational Policy Analysis Archives & Education Review and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Educational management is an expanding scientific field that has been attracting ever more social and political visibility and it has been the object of a considerable amount of research. In the Portuguese context, over the past two decades there has been a sharp movement to create post-graduate courses, increase individual and collective research and the number of scientific publications. The growing centrality assumed by the sociological approaches of educational organisations, associated with a vast collection of scientific research and publications, promoted a meta-analysis of a considerable amount of work produced in this area. For this analysis we selected 92 dissertations all presented within the context of the pioneering Masters course, and the oldest course in the country on educational management - Masters in Education Sciences, specialising in Educational Management, offered by the University of Minho. Of the main trends identified, the most important were: i) synchronization between the political agenda, professional experience and the interests of research; ii) use of a certain theoretical pluralism, mobilizing two or more models of organizational analysis; iii) the use of a largely qualitative methodology, tending towards the case study method; iv) mobilizing a meso-approach to school organization, seeking to coordinate micro and macro analytical levels. On a more substantive plan, this study has contributed to discussions on some dilemmas and agendas that, in our opinion, are involved in constructing the object of educational management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Lusofona de Educacao is the property of Universidade Lusofona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, CEIEF and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)