A Twenty-First Century leader … must continually undertake two operations simultaneously. He or she must have split vision, at once looking outward toward the larger society and inward toward the operation of the organization itself – Guthrie & Schuerman, 2010

and the internal legal stakeholders

Students

Staff Parents

Business Governance

Finance

State v. Non-State State: judicial & quasi-judicial decisions, legislation & policy Non-State: multi-institutional social environment ? (Armstrong & Bernstein 2006; Edelman, Leachman & McAdam 2010)

State v. Non-State

Legal Legitimacy

• Resource transaction between school & State.

• “Organizations that wish to acquire to perception of legitimacy must follow the standards of practice articulated in the relevant legislation, regardless of whether those standards are appropriate of effective.” (McQuarrie et al, 2013)

• Social legitimacy – questions of school reputation, judged by current and potential internal stakeholders, based on information from external stakeholders.

Change Agents

• Incremental shifts v. transformative shocks.

• “I think the worst thing for the State was the drowning of the young fellow up in the North West … The flow on effect is that you just tighten up every Guideline, and make sure everybody knows. The impact throughout the Department was massive” (DoE manager, 2015)

Two way influence

“Organizations have a two-way interaction with the legal and regulatory environment…

There is the argument that organizations are in an effort to manage the environment according to their interests, which is based on the resource dependency theory”

(See Aldrich and Pfeffer, 1970; Kirksbesoglu, 2011)

The pleader & the leader

‘Bounded Rationality’:

• limited information

• limited cognitive capacity

• limited time

(Simon, 1982)

(The MFT)

School Principals and Legal Knowledge

The Lawyer

The Principal

The Colleagues

Mostly non-routine Mostly routine

Issues:

• Legal vulnerability

• Boundary spanning function

Minigures by LEGO 2015;

North Springfield Primary School by my clever

nephew Jonathan Trimble, 2015;

Simpsons characters by Matt Groening, THE

SIMPSONS & 2015 Twentieth Century Fox Film

Corporation;

“School Days, School Days”. Music by Gus Edwards, lyrics by Will Cobb. Edison Records, 1907.

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