School Organizational Culture and Leadership: Theoretical Trends and New Analytical Proposals

Abstract

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.

1. Introduction

Far from being theoretically and empirically exhausted, the issue of organizational culture is now one of the fundamental pillars for understanding how schools promote equity, inclusion and democracy. The global movement to rationalize school networks, the establishment of school clusters in certain countries and the expansion of the principles of new public management have contributed to recentring analysis on the cultural and symbolic dimensions of the school, demanding new, more pluralistic perspectives, less bound by compartmentalized and one-dimensional views. While over recent decades we have witnessed a broadening of theoretical and methodological approaches, we have also seen the adoption of the term “organizational culture”, driven by international political agendas. This tends to be interpreted as a simple variable, beholden to other agendas: management and leadership, success, learning, school dropout rates, and results. This managerialist-inspired turn has generated extensive international research, including comparative studies, giving the field a strong impetus [1,2]. However, the popularity of this managerialist viewpoint has not prevented the development of critical and reflexive approaches, which instead focus on studying the process by which culture is constructed in the school setting, and unpacking the relationships of power and domination that exist in the most varied of school environments. The issue of organizational culture in schools stems from the meeting of these two areas, one more focused on the practise of management, the other on understanding these practices. The fact that most studies on school culture lie at the intersection of several loan-taken disciplines in the field of education, weakened the heuristic capacity of the concept, as stated by Lumby and Foskett [3] (p. 450): “As such, our thesis is that the use of the concept of culture is somewhat impoverished in the field of education and particularly in educational leadership”.

On the whole, the trajectory of research into organizational culture in schools has been characterized by phases of expansion (1970s and 80s), consolidation (1990s), stabilization (turn of the century) and, more recently, a resurgence, both in terms of interest in the subject and the heuristic scope of the most recent studies. This development broadly reflects the research trends seen in organizational literature—e.g., [1,4,5,6,7,8], which mainly relates to business and management. However, an analysis more focused on the educational sphere shows how this context can contribute to the construction of original theoretical and conceptual frameworks, better suited to understanding the sociology of the school. The political and organizational specificities of schools, such as, for example, the degree of political–administrative centralization (more or less autonomy), the governance model (more or less collegial), the organizational configuration (nongrouped school or grouped school), among other aspects, challenge the analysis of organizational culture and its relationship with leadership processes. Unlike the company, school presents a multiscalar mode of organization, which goes beyond its physical and national borders, and thus implies a consideration of several levels in the process of cultural construction. More than a monolithic variable that can be manipulated, culture in a school context is procedural and dynamic, resulting from the combination of several internal and external factors [1].

Throughout this text we seek to discuss critically some dominant conceptions of organizational culture, reflecting on their effects on the way we look at school culture and leadership processes. The identification of the theoretical limits and potentialities inherent to the main lines of research developed in the last decades led to the construction of a multidimensional model of analysis of organizational culture, having as reference the specificities of the school context.

2. Materials and Methods

This article presents a brief overview of some of the broad theoretical trends, identifying avenue of research and theoretical options. Rather than attempting to provide a comprehensive theoretical survey, listing the countless theories, perspectives and concepts that impact organizational culture, this paper aims to identify the major lines of research and theoretical perspectives shaping research in this subfield. For this purpose, an analysis of a diversified range of international publications was conducted on the subject of organizational culture, covering the various periods of development of this issue (emergence, expansion, stabilization and consolidation). Among the numerous publications, the analysis of three types of works was privileged: (i) books and/or compilations resulting from long-term investigations by authors from different contexts; (ii) books by authors who have dedicated a large part of their academic career to the study of the theme; (iii) articles published in prestigious scientific journals. This theoretical mapping allowed the identification of general trends, but also some inherent dilemmas, contradictions and tensions. It also seeks to reflect on the potential of a contextualised approach to culture and leadership, inspired by the Portuguese education system, which has been tested in the empirical study of concrete educational realities. This exercise in constructing an analytical model appropriate for studying schools (and not cribbed from the world of business) has become increasingly complex, as methodological and empirical démarches clash with the theoretical premises themselves, necessitating their reinvention and adaptation. We therefore aim to discuss the heuristic potential of a theoretical proposal for the study of organizational culture and leadership in the school setting, in the hope that this reflexion will enrich the field of school administration. This theoretical–conceptual proposal incorporates some of the most expressive theoretical contributions of organizational culture, as well as insights from various empirical investigations conducted in school organizations.

Conceptual in nature, the present article presents results that are fundamentally derived from an extensive approach to the scientific literature, which allowed us to identify some of the main lines of research that currently mark the study of organizational culture. This analytical and reflective incursion constituted the basis and scaffolding for the construction of an analytical model of organizational culture in school contexts, presented in the discussion.

3. Results

3.1. A Globalizing and Elastic Topic

Exploring the rich existing literature on organizational culture, it is striking how intensely, regularly and systematically this subject has been tackled over the last four decades. The 1980s and 1990s were, without question, a milestone for the field, seeing the publication of key texts that laid the foundations for its study. Although not related to the educational sphere, the works of Smircich [9,10] and Schein [11], as well as the anthologies edited by Frost, Moore, Louis, Lundberg and Martin [12,13] and books by Alvesson and Martin [14,15,16,17], represent the maximum expression of this period of intense scholarship. Relating directly to educational contexts, the works of Hargreaves, Deal and Kennedy, Westoby, Conway, Bates, Erickson, Prosser [18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28] are just some of many in-depth studies of organizational culture in schools.

The wealth of literature accumulated over time, underpinned by different theoretical and methodological paradigms, reveals the extent to which this issue brings together differing perspectives, focuses and concepts, contributing to its globalizing and, at times, all-encompassing, nature. Globalizing, because to understand culture, we must delve into the deepest realms of social behaviour (values, ideologies, beliefs). It is therefore necessary to bring together several perspectives, in order to encompass and interpret the multiple dimensions that make up the culture of an organization. All-encompassing, because in its efforts to represent the “pluralistic whole”, its extensible and elastic nature can become an omnipresent formula when studying any aspect of school life. While this elasticity stimulates new theoretical insights, it also gives rise to hybrid approaches, emerging from the constant shifting between perspectives and scales of analysis.

These two properties help us understand the nature, scope, and ambitions of certain scientific works, as well as their limitations and heuristic potential.

3.2. An Intermittent and Reactive Topic

Despite frequent scientific publications on organizational culture, the issue is particularly susceptible to political and media agendas. While within the academic sphere and social sciences, progressive research continues to push the boundaries of our knowledge of the field, the public visibility of this research and its prevailing focuses is patchy, steered by the political agendas of the day. Regarding schools, it is possible to identify peaks and troughs in research at different points in history [29]. In some countries, including Portugal, these correlate directly with three education policy focuses: (i) the rationalization of school networks and the emergence of organizational groupings, such as school clusters; (ii) the strengthening of leadership; (iii) reinforcement of accountability policies, in particular the pressure to produce results [1]. However, this recent resurgence in culture-orientated approaches appears to be more all-encompassing than globalizing in nature, as it is mainly concerned with exploring the impact (of policies and concrete measures), rather than a holistic and contextualised understanding of processes by which symbols are constructed. As an illustration, we consider the impact of these three policies focuses on the emergence of culture-orientated approaches in reference to the Portuguese education sphere, which has much in common with other European countries, as well as Latin America, India and Africa.

In certain countries, the process of rationalizing the school network and the formation of different types of school grouping (school clusters and interorganizational networks) [30,31] was met with opposition and resistance from institutions and associations (schools, unions, parents’ associations, student associations, local authorities). Cultural and symbolic arguments are often invoked as evidence of the unsuitability of the instrumental, managerialist standpoints inherent to these policy focuses. Initially, prior to and during the formation of school clusters, the different organizational cultures existing within the member schools are considered to be a barrier to the ability to forge a single, coherent identity. Later, once this new organizational configuration has been implemented, the focus shifts to consider the impact of this policy on the reconstruction of the organizational cultures present. Meanwhile, by valuing the capacity of school clusters to construct a shared identity, based on integrative principles and values, external school inspection programmes imply that culture is a variable that can be politically managed and manipulated, through processes of leadership. This link between leadership and culture is a good illustration of the continuing influence of the mainstream line of research on culture-orientated approaches, e.g., [32,33,34,35], despite the growing prominence of alternative perspectives that explore the inherently multidimensional nature of this issue, e.g., [1,2,3,36,37,38,39,40].

The strengthening of the autonomy of schools in various European countries, Portugal in particular, has also renewed interest in the study of leadership from a cultural perspective. Research on various leadership styles has proliferated, with a clear focus on finding the perfect formula, or “one best way”, culture being viewed as one variable at play in the promotion of “best practice”. Its status as a “nomadic” variable (one minute dependent, the next independent), at the service of leadership structures gives it a prominent position thematically, but not heuristically, as it does not fuel an interrogation of the process by which culture is constructed in organizational contexts.

Finally, countless domestic, European and market-led approaches focusing on the production of results—external inspection of schools, an increase in nationwide examinations, digital monitoring, implementation of frameworks for excellence, publication of rankings, the growth of the private tutoring market—have reignited interest in cultural dimensions, by placing the impact of the school on academic achievement at the centre of the debate. Though a shift toward uniformization in terms of curriculums, assessment and pedagogy tends to erase cultural diversity, recent sociological research demonstrates the extent to which the organization of a school can make a difference to the learning processes and academic trajectory of young students [41,42,43].

These three examples are intended to illustrate the contexts in which culture-orientated organizational approaches are employed in the political sphere, in school management, or as a subject of research, with a view to furthering our understanding of their theoretical and conceptual applications and the heuristic potential of certain approaches. As Alvesson, Karreman and Ybema [6] noted, in studies of organizational culture published over the last decade, a managerialist understanding of culture, which is viewed as a tool kit serving organizational identity, appears to dominate.

3.3. An Interdisciplinary Topic

Intrinsically interdisciplinary, the study of organizational culture draws on various disciplinary fields and traditions; sociology, psychology, anthropology, history, economics, management studies and education sciences, to name just a few of the areas that have most strongly influenced its theoretical framework. However, despite the plurality of approaches, a disconnect between theoretical and methodological knowledge persists, as clearly visible in the design of studies, the language used and the dominant viewpoints, and, consequently, in the nature of the obtained results [44].

This disconnect between disciplines has also been noted in the field of educational administration, though here it takes a different form. Occupying the crossroads of several disciplines, education naturally has multiple theoretical and methodological frames of reference, giving it its unique identity. However, in studies of culture within the school setting, two distinct groups of approaches emerge, essentially aligned with specific disciplinary traditions. On the one hand, some adhere to a managerialist view, inspired by business studies, which focuses on the analysis of cause-and-effect relationships. Others, meanwhile, attempt to construct contextualized analytical models, embracing an in-depth understanding of educational realities. While the former (managerialist) approaches transpose models designed for analysing businesses into the school setting, favoring a functionalist and normative approach, e.g., [19,20,45,46,47], the latter (critical) approaches reflect on cultural phenomena, seeking a holistic and contextualized understanding, e.g., [1,3,8,21,24,27,48].

Identifying these two theoretical movements by undertaking a survey of international publications on organizational culture in schools [29] enables us to clearly unpack the principal characteristics of the studies carried out and their disciplinary affiliations, in addition to conflicts between the theoretical and methodological paradigms adopted. This exercise is fundamental to understanding their scope and the limitations of their results, as the starting assumptions and guiding objectives of these studies are almost always derived from fundamentally different ideologies. To illustrate this, it is worth considering a key area of culture-orientated approaches—processes of change—to demonstrate the extent to which differing starting assumptions can lead to different analyses. On the one hand, authors that view culture as a variable (something that an organization has) aim to demonstrate how that culture can be changed and managed as desired, the leader being a driver of this change. On the other, proponents of a perspective based on historical temporality view culture as a long-term process (something that the organization is), influenced by multiple internal and external factors. Both perspectives adhere to narrow disciplinary fields, making it difficult to establish the productive dialogue and interdisciplinary connections fundamental to the advancement of knowledge in this subfield of research.

3.4. Pluralistic Expressions of Culture and Leadership

In parallel to understanding the process by which culture is constructed, it is important to clarify the form culture takes within schools, in other words, the extent to which it is shared by the various stakeholders. Again, there is no consensus on this in the literature [1,44]. According to managerialist viewpoints, culture is limited to symbolic patterns, essentially shared, and accepted, by the stakeholders. Ambiguity and opposition are therefore considered “anomalies” and deviations, requiring organizational realignment. On the other hand, according to critical schools of thought, elements of culture (values, beliefs, ideologies, etc.) must be considered in terms of the extent to which they are shared, situated along a continuum representing the varying degrees of cultural cohesion between the stakeholders. Figure 1 seeks to illustrate this view by identifying three types of culture that exist within organizations, according to the level on which they operate and the degree to which they are shared: integrating culture, when the objectives and values of the organization are collectively shared and internalized to a high degree; differentiating culture, when a culture is only shared by a specific group, and various subcultures are likely to exist within the same organizational context; and finally, fragmenting culture, where culture is shared to a minimal extent, often operating on an individual level [13,16,17].

The core question is not ascertaining whether an organization has a culture, in the strict sense of the word used in the integration perspective, but rather identifying the different expressions of culture within a specific organizational context, understanding the multiple processes that govern its construction, and its true impact in terms of the development of policies, practices and the results achieved by the school. From an analytical point of view, different forms of cultural expression can be found within a single organization, although their level of influence may vary significantly.

3.4.1. The Appeal of the Integration Perspective: Visionary and Charismatic Leadership?

The integration perspective came to the fore internationally in the 1970s, particularly in the field of management. The belief that a “strong” culture, based on shared values and objectives, promotes greater organizational efficiency motivated countless researchers to search for the “magic formula” that would provide better results.

The core constituent of culture had, therefore, been discovered: a high level of consensus, consistency and clarity in the organization’s objectives, which could be expressed through values, formal practices (written rules and regulations), informal practices (unwritten rules, decision-making processes), stories and rituals, and interior architecture and design, and many other dimensions. The idea that a positive and cohesive culture fosters organizational efficiency quickly spread as a management tool in the organizational sphere. The field of education was no exception, with multiple studies aiming to prove the relationship between a culture of integration in the school and high levels of academic achievement. The internalization of this ideology of integration is reflected in the political and regulatory agenda (through the introduction of school inspection systems focused on “strong” results, leaders and cultures), as well as management and pedagogy (with the development of increasingly performative leadership styles and teaching methods), and research (with a focus on cultural “best practice”). In light of this perspective, leadership assumes a central role in the development of an inclusive culture. The visionary and charismatic leader is considered a kind of “prophet” and “hero” [50], who inspires and facilitates consensus and integration.

However, the vision of a single, uniform culture, which permeates the entire organization from top to bottom, is questionable, particularly in the context of a centrally administered education system. Does it make sense to attempt to forge an integrated culture that simultaneously reflects school culture and the grassroots culture of the various stakeholders? Several studies in the field of education management have shone a light on inconsistencies between the system (political and regulatory level) and the stakeholder (practical level), in different fields and from different theoretical and methodological standpoints [51]. It is therefore understood that this perspective reflects only part the phenomenon of culture, which must not be mistaken for the sole official version of an organization’s culture [16,17,44]. This leads us to the concept that Alvesson and Sveningsson [52] (p. 119) call “hyperculture”—the idea of a homogenous culture manufactured by the mass media and managers, a sort of fantasy culture, disconnected from the practical reality.

3.4.2. The Realism of the Differentiation Perspective: Competitive and Performative Leadership?

The differentiation perspective, on the other hand, considers that consensus and clarity only exist within subcultures, and that the ambiguities only exist in the gaps between them, or, in the words of Martin, Frost and O’Neill [44] (p. 731), “subcultures are like islands of clarity in a sea of ambiguity”. This promotes a deeper understanding of culture, accounting for the differences between groups, the dissonance and fractures that crisscross the various horizontal and vertical levels of the organization. Several studies use the differentiation approach to explore the influence of hierarchies, power relations, and tensions and conflicts between subcultures on organizational culture. Unlike the integration perspective, this approach considers the influence of external factors on the construction of subcultures, in an attempt to understand the origins of cultural subgroups within the organization.

When applied to the educational setting, this differentiation approach highlights the pluralistic and composite nature of school organization, stimulating an exploration of the disconnect between formal structure (macro- and mesolevel) and action (microlevel), fundamental to understanding the everyday dynamics of schools and their processes of innovation and change. More recently, the reconfiguration of schools into groupings (school clusters) has brought this viewpoint to the fore, by revealing the extent to which different cultures prevail in schools belonging to the same group. Within the same organizational sphere, different cultural loci coexist. These can be schools (management units in the group), specific groups of teachers, groups of young people/students, or other stakeholders in the school. In light of this perspective, leadership processes can be plural, as they emerge from the subcultures and power relations that characterize the school. In the context of school clusters, for example, intermediate leaders can be assumed as counter-powers or as agents of distributed leadership [53]. In the context of the Portuguese reality, as well as in many other countries, several studies point to the emergence of competitive leadership profiles, or the new entrepreneurial leader, as a reflection of accountability policies [54,55].

Although this theoretical perspective opens the door to understanding cultural differences, conflicts and divides, it does not enable the interpretation of cultural expressions that fall outside its scope of analysis. This space is occupied by fragmentation approaches to culture.

3.4.3. The Radicalism of the Fragmentation Perspective: Scattered and Uncertain Leadership?

Grounded in the same factors (degree of cultural consistency, clarity, and consensus), the fragmentation perspective defends the notion of complexity, reflected in confused, disconnected and contradictory interpretations. Ambiguity and ephemerality are considered the essence of culture, and a lack of clarity and consistency its hallmark. This view asserts that relationships between stakeholders are always transitory and confined to specific issues, and are replaced cyclically, making culture a kind of jungle. “In such an ephemeral environment, culture is no longer a clearing in a jungle of meaninglessness. Now, culture is the jungle itself.” [44] (p. 732). On the other hand, by viewing change as a constant process triggered by multiple forces beyond the control of the stakeholder, and power in the organization’s hierarchy as diffuse, it tends to foreground the emergence of phenomena of alienation, apathy and confusion. Therefore, on the continuum presented in Figure 1, this viewpoint represents the lowest degree of cultural sharing, limited to the individual sphere.

School organization is still rarely analysed in these terms, although certain studies use this perspective in conjunction with others. The study of cultural disconnects requires observation on a smaller (micro-) scale, in order to unpack the multiple meanings stakeholders attribute to educational processes, and, on an even more focussed level, capture the irreconcilable contradictions between these meanings and actual practice. From a methodological point of view, this approach requires us to look from the inside out, focusing on the varying individual positions of stakeholders in the school, themselves the result of highly varied experiences of socialization. This analytical reversal (from the inside out, from the individual to the organization) can teach us a great deal about the position of individual stakeholders in relation to the school, pedagogy, management and leadership. However, by focusing on individuals, this viewpoint loses its sense of the scale of the phenomenon, missing events and expressions that are only visible on other planes or levels.

In light of this perspective, leadership processes tend to be informal and dispersed throughout the organization, often not coinciding with management positions [53]. This type of fragmenting cultures, in which the cult of individualism prevails, tend to induce self-leadership processes, which makes it difficult to develop more democratic and participatory leadership profiles.

4. Discussion

4.1. An Analytical Model for Understanding Culture in the School Setting

In the belief that the tenets of the critical movement have greater heuristic potential for understanding the dynamics of schools, this paper proposes an analytical model capable of drawing on some of the virtues inherent to this topic (its globalizing and interdisciplinary nature), while avoiding some of its potential shortcomings and political appropriation (its reactive and intermitted nature).

Schools possess political, pedagogical and cultural characteristics that distinguish them from other contexts [29]. These specificities pose new challenges to theories inspired in other organizational contexts (companies, for example), highlighting their risks and weaknesses in the understanding of school culture. The position of schools within a centralized administration, highly reliant on external guidelines, as is the case in some European countries, to a great extent determines their educational objectives. Meanwhile, the rationalization of the school network and the emergence of new organizational configurations, such as school clusters, further complicates the structure and modus operandi of schools. The fact that the operational centre is not the same as the decision-making centre, which is outside the school, makes this organization significantly different to other social organizations. Consequently, to study the symbolic and cultural dimensions of school organization, we cannot simply transpose theories and outlooks inspired by other contexts. Instead, while not discarded, these models must be recontextualised and recreated based on the unique organizational characteristics of the school.

It is assumed that the different social and cultural contexts condition school dynamics and leadership processes. School leaders occupy an intermediate place in the school system, situated between the macrolevel (educational policies) and the microlevel (classroom), which brings them to a central position as active actors in the interpretation and recreation of specific dynamics [2]. In this sense, leadership is strongly conditioned by the different faces of school culture, even though these can also condition leadership through management strategies that are more-or-less democratic.

4.1.1. A Multilevel Approach

Taking into account the web of relationships and (inter)dependencies that shape the organization of school, we propose an approach to culture based on three scales, each corresponding to a different level: (i) the macroscale, focusing on domestic and international political agendas, as well as the local professional and sociopolitical context; (ii); the mesoscale, focusing on how these are translated into the school setting; and (iii) the microscale, looking at processes of social interaction. Viewing the mesolevel (individual schools) as the midpoint connecting rationales that come from outside (Ministry of Education, professional associations and unions, families, the local community) and inside (management and leadership, teachers, nonteaching staff, students), it is possible to consider the multiple factors that contribute to the process of constructing the school culture.

The multilevel approach fosters a multidimensional outlook consistent with a dynamic, interpretative and interactive understanding of culture. It is based on the belief that culture is constructed and reconstructed over long periods of time, by various interweaving factors in the everyday life of school. The values, beliefs and ideologies shared by the actors—or basic assumptions, in the sense that the term is used by Schein [11]—lay the foundations of its culture, creating a character that is simultaneously singular and plural within each organization. Since organizational culture is influenced by multiple factors, it is essential to identify its various faces.

The aim of this section was to shine a light on the way in which organizational culture is constructed in schools, based on the core assumption that it is produced in multiple contexts, both internal and external to the school, while also considering its degree of formality (see

Table 1. Levels for considering school culture.

Degree of Formality	Analytical Levels	Place of Production
Formal Structure Informal Action	School culture	Outside School Inside school
	School organizational culture
	Sociocommunity culture
	Organizational culture in schools

). Through this exercise, we have identified four levels of culture, which coexist in schools in extremely varied forms.

The four faces of culture may present differing levels of depth depending on the characteristics of the individual institution and its social and cultural context. For example, the age and size of the school/grouping, the stability of the teaching staff, and the social context in which it exists significantly influence the configuration of the different faces of culture. The tree is a good metaphor for this structure, as it enables us to visualise the different parts that contribute to the whole, from the deepest and least visible part (the roots), to the most visible, surface layer (the branches and their interaction with the surrounding environment). Similarly, the organizational culture of a school results from the combination of layers that overlap over time. Some are deeper and more entrenched (organizational culture in schools). These support and shape the intermediate levels (school organizational culture), while other, more visible levels reflect the structural factors that impact upon the everyday life of the school (school culture and sociocommunity culture). As in a tree, the section that is visible above ground (trunk, branches, foliage) reflects a set of conditioning factors that anchor it and support its development over the long term (roots and stems). To use this analogy, the way legal guidelines are implemented by school management, the school environment, the layout of spaces and professional relations are shaped by the cultural roots that each individual school organization has laid down, over the course of its history, which represent the patterns of interaction school stakeholders consider appropriate and acceptable.

The inherently multidimensional nature of cultural phenomena is incompatible with analytical models with fixed and monolithic starting assumptions. On the contrary, research into various school organizations, conducted as part of master’s dissertations, PhD theses and group projects, has given rise to new analytical approaches, which are incorporated into this model in an effort to enhance its heuristic validity.

4.1.2. The Various Faces of Culture and Leadership

Figure 2 graphically depicts the processes involved in the construction of culture in the school setting along two axes. The horizontal axis relates to location (internal or external to the school), while the vertical axis relates to degree of formality (from more formal to less formal). These two axes intersect in space and time, dividing the simple diagram into four cultural spheres. However, these are not impermeable; on the contrary, the boundaries between them are fluid and transitory, reflecting the inherently dynamic nature of cultural processes, which are always unfinished.

It is based on the principle that a multilevel distributed framework with three dimensions (macro, meso and micro) exposes the different faces of culture, which, though extremely complex, take a different form in each school. By exploring these faces it was possible distinguish between four theoretical categories—school culture, sociocommunity culture, organizational culture in schools and school organizational culture, helping overcome the surfeit of terminology that persists in the scientific community [56,57], due to the fact that “[…] Culture is inevitably a slippery notion” [28] (p. 437). As the different cultural faces are associated with processes of leadership, an attempt is then made to express this relationship.

• Face 1: School culture and faceless leadership

Scenario 1—school culture, resulting from the influence of external, formal factors, harks back to the origins of the school as an institution. Within a centralised administration (as exists in many European countries), the prescriptive influence of the center exerts a homogenizing effect on the school system by creating operational standards in institutions which, in time, entrench an identity that becomes confused with the educational project itself [58]. Historically imposed school culture reflects the dominant ways of thinking and doing education, materialized in its physical and architectural configuration and, more clearly still, in its political, pedagogical, and curricular approach. Although it appears fixed in time, school culture does, in fact, undergo change, according to the sociohistorical context and the influence of certain elements of education policy [59]. Today, one of the hallmarks of school culture is the focus on producing results, which exerts a homogenizing effect in terms of organizational, curricular and pedagogical (re)arrangements. The presence of this cultural dynamic tends to foster a reverential leadership style, deferential to external guidelines and addicted to the daily exercise of reporting statistics. The disruptive impact of the internet, particularly the use of digital platforms as monitoring tools [60], has altered and conditioned professional practices and educational priorities. In conceptual terms, this is a heteroleadership (managed externally), a faceless leadership, simply replicating directives from a central government or the conditions imposed by the community. In political contexts strongly marked by competitive logics and standardized evaluation, which impose a “technocratic and autocratic vision for education in the name of accountability, expressed through benchmarking approaches like the PISA survey but also marketizationand privatization inspired by neo-liberal ideologies” [2] (p. 4), leaderships are pressured to adopt a more performative style [53,54].

• Face 2: Sociocommunity culture and fragmented leadership

In this second scenario, culture tends to reflect the influences of the social milieu in which it exists, be this via local regulations or the pressures exerted by market forces, in the widest possible sense. At a time when certain countries are devolving more state functions to local authorities, a new sphere of influence on school life emerges. It is closer to home, but also more fragmented and diffuse in terms of its control mechanisms. Schools are subject to two sets of regulations—from central government and the local authority —with no guarantee of cohesion between the various initiatives. Faced with input from two sides (central and local government), the boundaries of school become much more vulnerable to local dynamics, reacting to their influence by asserting an organizational identity that acts as a “protective shield” against potential institutional threats. In this context, schools are obliged to assimilate local development priorities. They do so in different ways: by (re)aligning their educational project with the priorities of the local authority, by reinforcing their social standing within the community in response to local competition or by asserting their own unique culture in an effort to maintain and reinforce their existing educational project.

The influence of local grassroots structures on the functional dynamics of school organization highlights the importance of sociocommunity culture, buoyed by social activities and local networks specific to the time and place. Existing within this cluster of activities and connected to local patterns of interaction, school develops and adjusts its action strategies, and is likely to adopt a fragmented, transitory and contingent leadership style [53], permeable to political and social change. For example, in urban territories, where the school network is diverse and competitive, leaders may adopt more competitive strategies, aimed at attracting the best students and promoting the school’s image in the community, or they may assume a proximity profile, reinforcing ties and strengthening relationships with families, with a view to developing inclusive education.

• Face 3: School organizational culture and negotiated leadership

However, schools do not simply replicate external guidelines—they recreate and reinvent their culture every day, in a constant dialectic between the external and the internal, between the imposed and the desired, between norm and action. Therefore, organizational structures can vary between schools, due to the different ways in which they interpret and implement legal guidelines. Though institutions may, in formal terms, possess similar management structures, this does not mean that their dynamics, configurations and modes of operation are the same.

On the contrary, when viewed from the inside (internal factors) school organizational culture is essentially pluralistic, in two ways: (i) interschool, as each school develops its own unique culture, which differentiates it from other schools; (ii) intraschool, because the culture of each school is, itself, pluralistic, comprising of different expressions of culture—integrated, differentiated and fragmented [13,15,16,17]. In the course of action and over time, School organizational culture emerges as school leaders oblige stakeholders to act in a manner coherent with external guidelines. This assimilation is not always straightforward or unanimous and can result in organizational arrangements and ways of thinking and doing education that are specific to each school. The school’s mission, reflected in its educational project, the criteria for class selection, the assessment methods, the dominant teaching styles, and the organization of time and spaces are just a few cultural aspects that differ between each institution. These manifestations (verbal, visual, symbolic and behavioural) reflect a near-universally shared set of assumptions [11], in other words, the beliefs, ideologies and values considered valid in a given institution.

This third face of culture leads to a more interpretative analysis of school life, focusing on the way stakeholders internalize norms and how these confer meaning upon their everyday actions, particularly in settings characterized by countless social and professional constraints. Lahire’s theory [61,62] on the formation of individual dispositions and variations is an important theoretical and methodological resource when considering this cultural layer and the next in depth. According to this perspective, leaders tend to adopt more hybrid styles, resulting from the constant negotiation required due to the multiple stakeholders that inhabit the educational sphere.

• Face 4: Organizational culture in schools and distinctive leadership styles

The final section of the diagram—organizational culture in schools—concerns the impact of deep-seated cultural fixity on certain institutions. This more self-contained and context-specific perspective reveals the extent to which certain symbolic and cultural dimensions can endure over time, dictating patterns of behaviour and shaping individual and collective rationales of work. This face of culture represents the deepest and most concealed layer. However, it also exerts the strongest influence on the life of the organization, as it represents a unique identity, forged in the long term. It is over time that symbols are constructed, that the opportunity to interact, share and/or contest values and worldviews exists, and above all, that the cultural codes accepted by the stakeholders become entrenched. Indeed, time is a structural and structuring condition of school culture. As such, the age of an institution is a fundamental aspect of the development of its culture, a factor that reveals the extent of (and potential for) the consolidation, differentiation or fragmentation of school identity. Given that different (consolidating, differentiating or fragmentating) cultural expressions are likely to exist within a single organization, it is worth asking whether one of these is dominant. This helps the researcher to determine the “grammar” of the rules, traditions and modus operandi that have prevailed over time, becoming fixed historical norms that resist change. These unchanging structural factors shape the identity of the institution, and permeate its values, beliefs and ideologies which, despite successive educational reforms and the resulting structural changes, tend to persist in time, becoming the compasses that guide collective action and the regulatory axes of leadership [41]. In this sense, organizational culture in schools not only conditions leadership processes—primarily because they are part of the culture itself—but also strongly influences the student’s experience of socialization, in terms of the everyday internalization of ways of thinking, feeling and acting.

The evolutionary trajectory of an organization therefore forms the narrative arc of its culture. The origins and nature of this culture lie in the way stakeholders have historically responded to various political agendas, creating and recreating their own benchmarks for action which, independently of external constraints and internal leadership, over time become fixed “symbols” to be preserved. Resulting from different sociohistorical processes, this cultural redoubt takes a distinct form in each school, and can exert an influence on processes of leadership, particularly the definition of the school mission. Shaped by their surroundings, leaders tend to carry this cultural ethos forward, often becoming its most visible expression. In other words, rather than simply replicating external guidelines, the role of leaders is to self-regulate, seeking a balance between external constraints and the specific internal characteristics of the school. This function as a cultural mediator results in distinctive and unique leadership profiles that do not fall neatly within the typologies described in prescriptive literature.

5. Conclusions–A Contextualised Approach to Culture and Leadership: Potential and Challenges

In this article, we try to provide an overview of theoretical debates about organizational culture and its relationship with school leadership processes. In a sense, we intend to show that “To a great extent, how we think about leadership depends on how we theorize organizations and their institutional environments” [54] (p. 84).

The unique nature of schools as organizations presents a clear challenge to the theoretical and conceptual models of organizational culture designed in reference to business. Rather than simply uncritically transposing models from one field to the other, we must test other ways of adapting them to the reality of the school, even though a heuristic exercise of this type is neither straightforward nor definitive. Viewing organizational culture as a globalizing, elastic, interdisciplinary and multilevel issue, this article seeks to offer an analytical model or a multilevel distributed framework that encompasses different levels of observation to reflect the multidimensional nature of the subject.

The mega- and macrolevel relates to the analysis of domestic and international education policy guidelines, which have pressured education systems to internalize a school culture driven by the production of excellent results. Faced with this transnational ideology, constantly reinforced by the profusion of international comparison tools and pressure from families and local communities themselves (sociocommunity culture), education systems react reflexively, adopting heteroregulation and self-regulation mechanisms increasingly focused on the production of measurable results, underpinned by standardised assessment mechanisms [1,2].

On the mesolevel of analysis, attention is focused on the organization of schools themselves, as they represent the real-life context in which the processes of teaching and learning occur. Having undergone significant change in the last decade, the school of today, already complex in and of itself, has become yet more complex on various fronts, (dis)integrating into groupings, paradoxically led by a single Director. As several comparative studies have shown, the current complexity of educational systems requires a holistic approach that portrays educational culture and leadership in a systemic and integrated way: “such complexity is not to be factored out as error but to be engaged as fundamental to explanation of educational leadership” [2] (p. xi). It is on the basis of these new intricate, composite organizational structures and their multilateral relationships (local government, business, charities, families), that we must understand how school organizational culture is constructed and how it manifests itself.

On the microanalytical level, there is a need to study stakeholders, in order to understand their views and values with regard to educational processes. How do teachers, students and families view life at school? What ideas about school, its leadership and teachers do they share? On this level, there is a particular need to understand the different ways in which individuals internalize values and their implications for development of attitudes to school. The values, customs and beliefs historically embedded in the organization form the deepest layer of culture (organizational culture in schools).

By basing our analysis around these three levels—macro (structure), meso (context) and micro (agency)—it is possible to escape the essentialist and homogenising approach to culture, and its empirical isolation. On the other hand, this exercise in “coming and going” between levels tests our capacity to overcome supposed hierarchies of intelligibility in the reality observed, which often lead to linear understandings of causality between factors.

Though the multidimensional approach provides an overview of the phenomenon, in practice it is not without its limitations and theoretical and conceptual dilemmas. On the contrary, to produce knowledge by combining different levels, we must constantly manage tensions and contradictions, both when designing the methodology, and when analysing and interpreting data. The different perspectives from which reality is viewed cannot always be reconciled and may even contradict one another. That is not to say that one level is automatically more worthwhile than the other, but that when faced with the reality on the on the ground, we are automatically faced with differing perspectives, with varying degrees of complexity. That is to say, analysing school culture from the integration, differentiation or fragmentation perspective will yield completely different results.

As a closing remark, I wish to stress that one of the challenges of the multilevel approach lies in the ability to resist the temptation to, explicitly or implicitly, impose a more legitimate definition of culture, thus monopolizing the process of knowledge creation. It could even be argued that once this epistemological obstacle has been surmounted, it could help develop the intellectual flexibility essential to the art of linking structural dimensions and cyclical dimensions, both relevant to the understanding of organizational culture. Traversing different scales and levels of analysis, it is clear that the outcomes produced cannot immediately be compared or accumulated. Due to the different theoretical and methodological approaches used, the subject of study (in this case, organizational culture) is transformed and distorted by these varying focuses. Consequently, the idea of relativism and knowledge discovery takes precedence over the belief in the centrality of certain forms of knowledge and the reification of their processes and methods.