‘Taking root and growing wings’: on the concept of glocality from the perspectives of school principals in Israel

ABSTRACT

Recent discussions of glocalisation call for acknowledging the role of agents of glocalisation. School principals, by holding a mid-level position that is increasingly evaluated by global standards and yet acutely responsive to community-level capacity, both formulate glocality and practise it. By recording the role perception of school principals in Israel, we propose a novel outlook on glocality. From the perspective of these agents of glocalisation, we (1) redefine glocality as a matter of orientation and (2) extract a typology of the practice of glocalisation. First, based on school principals’ understanding of what accounts for global and local, we show that while they all report that their work requires the integration of international testing standards, ministerial policies, and the needs and preferences of pupils, parents and teachers, they differ in their orientations, or inclinations, towards what they regard as global or local. Second, we show that such orientations are associated with a particular type of glocality: School principals with strong orientations towards the global also express a sense of hybrid glocality, whereas school principals with strong orientations towards the local also express a sense of strategic glocality.

KEYWORDS:

• Glocality
• role perception
• glocal orientation
• glocal sense of practice
• school principals
• Israel

Acknowledgements

The authors thank John W. Meyer and Julia Resnik, as well as the two anonymous reviewers, for their most helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Our sample of school principals closely matches the share in each of the two tracks: 84% of school principals interviewed are from the Jewish-state-secular track and 16% are from the Jewish-state-religious track.

2. This is recognised as STEM, even if the acronym stands for the tertiary education subjects of science, technology, engineering and maths.

3. While all school principals discuss curricular matters, 46% of school principals do not speak of curricula in global–local terms.

4. These global and local views are clustered into categories of content (STEM and English vs. Judaism and Israeli culture/history), pedagogy (21^st-century skills vs. literacy), and space (the world, the environment, Israel and the city vs. my school and my community).

5. Focusing on the responses of individuals who experience multiple and even competing logics, Pache and Santos (2013b) ‘move beyond the simplistic resistance/compliance response dichotomy.’ Their meta-analysis suggests multiple options for responses in the juncture between three levels of adherence to existing and newly introduced logics (novice, familiar, and identified) and five types of responses to this logic competition (ignore, comply, defy, compartmentalise, and combine; see Table 2, p. 28).

6. Investigating non-profit organisations, Skelcher and Smith (2015) distinguish between five types of hybridity among logics. These are segmented (‘functions oriented to different logics are compartmentalized within the organization’), segregated (‘functions oriented to different logics are compartmentalized into separate but associated organizations'), assimilated (‘the core logic adopts some of the practices of a new logic’), blended (‘synergistic incorporation of elements of existing logics into new and contextually specific logic’), and blocked (‘organizational dysfunction to resolve tension between competing logics’; see Table 2, p. 440). Another set of categorisations of hybridity in organisations highlights temporal hybridity. Pieterse (2001) differentiates between new hybridity and existing or old hybridity, and Christensen and Lægreid (2011), in studying public administration agencies, differentiate between hybridity before and after the New Public Management mode. This time-dependent categorisation is irrelevant to our analysis and conclusions because our data only concerns contemporary role perception.

7. This is the main institute in Israel that is responsible for the training and mentorship of school principals.

Additional information

Funding

This research is generously supported by grant awarded to the first author by The Leonard Davis Institute for International Studies.