Exploring organisational culture and power in private-run Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) institutions in China

In the last two decades, increasing numbers of private ECEC institutions have been established in China. However, the quality of these institutions have been criticised. To address this problem and to find out how organisational cultures were constructed in ECEC settings in China, I carried out research in two private ECEC schools which shared the same cultural framework. Three dimensions for deciphering organisational cultures were used as the conceptual framework of this study: three levels of culture as a structural view, along with the notion of power and the notion of small culture as two non-structural views. This conceptual framework offers a new critical approach, to fill the gap between structural and interpretive views for deciphering organisational cultures. Furthermore, it offers the flexibility for exploring the relationship between power, agency and structure, and the role of personal trajectories in constructing small cultures, especially when related to broader contexts. The findings from the study suggest four types of cultural devices were used to create a formal organisational cultural framework: organisational physical structures and decorations, rules, traditions and cultural activities. Additionally, the roles of the main stakeholders including senior management teams and teachers were identified, as the final decision-makers at school, department and classroom level. The multiple roles of parents were discovered, to be customers, allies of schools, as well as practitioners alongside teachers in the classroom. The three external factors that influenced the main stakeholders in constructing organisational cultures were: national curriculum reform, policy change from one-child to two-child, and Confucianism and Collectivism ideologies. The findings of this study provide insights for policy makers of and in ECECs as well as the practitioners in educational settings in terms of how cultures are constructed in ECECs and how these affect the ways in which ECECs work.