The school principal and the development of social capital in primary schools: the formative years

ABSTRACT

Focusing on primary school principals’ espoused strategies for developing social capital over their early years in the principal’s office, we show that investing in social capital was a core challenge during their formative years. Based on our analysis of data from a longitudinal study of 35 new principals, we argue that school principals made sense of the social capital challenge in two ways: First, developing their own relationships with key stakeholders such as teachers, parents, and students. Second, working to build and improve relationships among stakeholders, both within and among stakeholder groups (e.g. among teachers, between teachers and students). Further, we argue that school principals reported using a combination of three strategies to address their sense of the social capital challenge – being present by being visible and accessible to stakeholders; building infrastructure to cultivate relations with, within, and among stakeholders; and channeling relationships both with, within, and among stakeholder groups by focusing the nature and/or content of these interactions. Our analysis systematically attends to, the resource(s) that principals hoped to access through their social capital building efforts, the strategies they employed, and the stakeholders they implicated in their efforts.

KEYWORDS:

• Principals
• teachers
• social capital
• professional development
• infrastructure
• relationships

Acknowledgements

Work on this paper was supported by the Principal Policy and Practice Study at Northwestern University, funded by a research grant from the Spencer Foundation (Grant # 200900092). We acknowledge the work of the research team in collecting and analysing the data. https://sites.northwestern.edu/principalpolicyandpractice/. All opinions and conclusions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of any funding agency.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 See Hoy and Tschannen-Moran 1999.

2 Whether principals were compared to a predecessor held in high regard or one who was blamed for problematic school conditions and relationships, they had to contend with the school community’s expectations as they worked to build social capital (Gouldner 1956).

3 Educational infrastructure refers to the coordinated resources, roles, and organizational structures designed by schools and school systems to support teachers’ practice and enable instructional improvement, as well as the norms, values, and belief systems that sustain this work (Cohen, Spillane, and Peurach 2018; Peurach and Neumerski 2015).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Spencer Foundation [grant number 200900092].