But back to the car.
Note the references into the institutional environment
can be even more decoupled from the actual content and performance of the car.
Why not just show an ad of a car moving along, and there in the back seat,
beautiful back seat, is Sting, right?
Wouldn't I want what Sting, the exemplary Englishman, wouldn't I want what he likes?
So lots of advertising does things like this.
Their ads have more to do with appealing to a rational myth or a shared
public opinion or sentiment than the actual product itself or its performance.
And if they do mention performance, it's via awards and
rationalizing agents, not details of performance.
Now, of course, you can find out such information if you go to the websites and
find the specs of each car or whatever.
But we still frequently consider the products by their impression of fit with
some section of the institutional environment or
some kind of shared opinion or belief held out there.
In many regards, Mary Metz's article on Real School gives you a really clear
example of rationalized myths using the case of educational organizations.
In her paper, she describes how educational organizations
symbolically code their structures to resemble beliefs about real school
that are held in the institutional environment.
She thinks this is why American high schools all look the same on the surface
in spite of really being different internally.
They look the same and
plod along in spite of having differences in content and output.
Huge inequities across schools
in spite of them having these structure similarities across them.
Now, Metz describes symbolic coding as arising when organizations adopt a common
script.
And the script is like that of a play.
And educational organizations play the part of a real school in that play.
So these organizations engage in rituals or ceremonial performances,
by looking their part in the play when interacting with the environment.
And this is where real schools have buildings, classrooms, desks and chairs.
They have age graded student roles, undifferentiated teacher roles,
department chairs, principals, and various other staff.
They have differentiated core subjects, whose scope and sequence are recognizable
to colleges and employers, and across each of these schools.
They have familiar technologies, like lessons, many of the same tasks,
whether they're lecture, recitation, seat work.
They use textbooks, computers and blackboards.
They have coded time into school days, school weeks, quarters,
semesters and school years, right, different notions of time.
And they use many of the same symbols of ranking and completion like grades,
test scores, and credentials.
Many of which are used as ritual classifications in other external
organizations that rely on them, that's how they secure resources and legitimacy.
So all of these features are typifications that we recognize and
expect a school to have.
We take them for granted and we place confidence in them as being normal and
rational without much inspection of their efficacy.
So in short, educational organizations put on a play, or
the appearance of real school in spite of some kids failing in reality.
And the script serves symbolic purposes more than technical ones.
Now, the same can be said of universities and their development.
Over the last 100 years or
more, universities are growing increasingly common in societies and
their forms are isomorphic, such that a new university will quickly adopt courses,
subject matters, departments, credentialed employees, and so on.
They'll have many ceremonial features of the leading universities.
So they adopt these rationalized myths of what a good university should be.
And university structures have grown increasingly complex over time as they try
to appeal to different segments of the institutional environment,
to seem legitimate to those different segments.
So consider what new universities look like.
Like Qatar university, do they adopt dramatic shifts in
ceremonial features, or do they mirror what exemplary universities look like?
So how are rationalized myths sustained if they aren't efficient or optimal?
It's a good question.
The formal structure of many organizations is adopted like a sacred ritual.
I mean, rituals are like marriage rights.
People adopt a range of appearances, they go through a series of scripted actions so
they resemble these roles of husband and wife.
And they transform into such an embodiment through that ritual, right?
We begin to believe them as such.
They've transitioned the role.
And when we say an organization reflects ritual classifications,
we mean it displays appearances so as to embody a ratified
organizational identity that we consider legitimate in the environment.
To maintain the ritual and the plausibility of legitimacy,
the organization presumes a chain of confidences and
adopts an assortment of face-saving efforts to preserve this kind of myth.
Here are a few face-saving efforts used to preserve these myths.
The first is avoidance.
It's maximized when units are segmented, so interaction across them is minimized.
In this manner, one unit can't see into another and
question their contents or their performance.
The second is discretion.
Discretion is maximized when inspection is minimized and
participants are cloaked in professional credentialed authority.
By placing trust in teachers, we give them discretion, and
we let their profession act as rationalizing agents.