Unequal Neighbourhoods, Unequal Schools: Organisational Habitus in Deprived and Privileged Local Contexts [1st ed. 2020] 978-3-658-27590-7, 978-3-658-27591-4

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages I-XI
Unequal Neighbourhoods, Unequal Schools? Organisational Neighbourhood Inequality and the Question of Organisational Habitus and Organisational Practices (Julia Nast)....Pages 13-23
Neighbourhoods, Schools and Inequality: Shifting the Focus (Julia Nast)....Pages 25-68
A Theoretical Perspective: Localised Fields, Organisational Habitus and Organisational Practices (Julia Nast)....Pages 69-90
Setting the Scene: Neighbourhoods, Data and Methodology (Julia Nast)....Pages 91-107
How Neighbourhoods Shape Schools-as-Fields: Social, Symbolic, and Administrative Differences (Julia Nast)....Pages 109-162
How Educational Professionals Adapt: Localised Organisational Habitus and Organisational Practices (Julia Nast)....Pages 163-231
Organisational Neighbourhood Inequality and What to Do About It (Julia Nast)....Pages 233-247
Back Matter ....Pages 249-292

Citation preview

Julia Nast

Unequal Neighbourhoods, Unequal Schools Organisational Habitus in Deprived and Privileged Local Contexts

Unequal Neighbourhoods, Unequal Schools

Julia Nast

Unequal Neighbourhoods, Unequal Schools Organisational Habitus in Deprived and Privileged Local Contexts

Julia Nast Berlin, Germany Dissertation an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Kultur-, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät, 2017

ISBN 978-3-658-27590-7 ISBN 978-3-658-27591-4  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-27591-4 Springer VS © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer VS imprint is published by the registered company Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH part of Springer Nature. The registered company address is: Abraham-Lincoln-Str. 46, 65189 Wiesbaden, Germany

Acknowledgements I am grateful to a lot of people, who have made this project possible and provided me with inspiring insights and invaluable support. First, I want to thank my supervisor Talja Blokland (Humboldt University) for encouraging me to start this project, for fruitful discussions and for her guidance throughout this process. I am also indebted to my second supervisor Tim Butler (King’s College London) for support, helpful advice, and for generously commenting on the final draft. I have benefited from comments, feedback and conversations with numerous people during the last years. I especially want to thank Phil Kasinitz, John Mollenkopf, Christine Hentschel, Nihad El-Kayed, Anna Erika Hägglund, Carlotta Giustozzi, Sol Gamsu, Tarik Abou-Chadi, Lukas Zidella, and my fellow graduate students at Berlin Graduate School of Social Sciences, at City University of New York, at King’s College London as well as everybody involved in the NYLON group and in the urban sociology PhD colloquium at Humboldt University. I thank the Berlin Graduate School of Social Sciences for financial aid and constant support as well as the International Office at Humboldt and King’s. I am grateful to Deutsche Kinder- und Jugendstiftung for granting additional free time during the final period of writing-up. Probably most of all, I am indebted to the people, who made my fieldwork possible, who took me along, and who were so generous with their time during their busy work schedules. It was an incredible experience to get to know your work and I am deeply grateful for the honesty, the insights and wisdom that all of you shared. Last but not least, I want to thank my family and friends. I am deeply grateful for your reassurance, patience, and inspiration.

Table of Contents 1

Unequal Neighbourhoods, Unequal Schools? Organisational Neighbourhood Inequality and the Question of Organisational Habitus and Organisational Practices .................................................... 13

1.1

Shifting the Focus: Organisational Neighbourhood Inequality .................. 14

1.2

Bringing Organisations and Neighbourhood Together: Localised Organisational Habitus and Organisational Practices ............................... 17

1.3

Research Questions and Methodology ...................................................... 19

1.4

Structure of the Book ................................................................................ 21

2

Neighbourhoods, Schools and Inequality: Shifting the Focus .............. 25

2.1

Urban Inequality as Neighbourhood Effects .............................................. 26 The Limited Focus on Organisational Mechanisms ................................... 32 From Neighbourhood Effects to Organisational Neighbourhood Inequality ......................................................................... 44

2.2 Organisations from an Urban Research Perspective ................................... 46 Quantity of Organisations in Poor Neighbourhoods .................................. 48 Quality of Organisations in Poor Neighbourhoods .................................... 50 2.3

Neighbourhoods, Schools, and Inequality ................................................. 52 Schools in Urban Research: Outside the School Gates .............................. 52 Research into School Composition: Social Mix and Inequality ................. 55 School Effects and Neighbourhood Effects ............................................... 62

2.4

Summing Up: Organisational Neighbourhood Inequality ......................... 67

VIII

3

Table of Contents

A Theoretical Perspective: Localised Fields, Organisational Habitus and Organisational Practices .................................................... 69

3.1 Organisations as Open Systems: New Institutionalism and Two Problems ...................................................................................... 70 Agency in Organisational Structures.......................................................... 73 The Irrelevance of Local Neighbourhoods? ............................................... 75 Bringing Agency and Neighbourhood Context Back In ............................ 78 3.2 Organisations-as-Fields, Organisational Habitus and Organisational Practices ...................................................................................................... 78 Organisational Habitus and Organisational Practices ................................ 79 Organisations-as-Fields: A Localised Approach to NewInstitutional Organisations ......................................................................... 85 3.3

Localised Organisational Habitus and Practices: Understanding Organisational Neighbourhood Inequality ................................................. 89

4

Setting the Scene: Neighbourhoods, Data and Methodology ............... 91

4.1

The Sites: Entering the Field...................................................................... 91 Cross-Square .............................................................................................. 91 Roseville .................................................................................................... 93

4.2

Case Selection: Why these Neighbourhoods and Schools? ....................... 94 Neighbourhoods: Choosing Cross-Square and Roseville........................... 96 Schools: Comparing Roseville Primary School and Cross-Square Primary School .................................................................... 97

4.3 Methods ...................................................................................................... 99 Organisational Ethnography and Shadowing ............................................. 99

Table of Contents

IX

Interview Approach.................................................................................. 103 4.4

Coding and Analysis of Data ................................................................... 106

5

How Neighbourhoods Shape Schools-as-Fields: Social, Symbolic, and Administrative Differences ........................................... 109

5.1 Neighbourhoods as Social Units: Parents, Power Positions, and Institutional Pressures ........................................................................ 111 Powerful Parents, Powerful Teachers?..................................................... 112 Social Inequality, Institutional Pressures and the Question of the Meritocratic Myth .................................................................................... 125 5.2

A Neighbourhood’s Symbolic Meaning as Institutional Pressure ........... 133 Cross-Square: A Neighbourhood’s Meaning as Symbolic Violence ....... 135 Roseville: A Neighbourhood’s Meaning as Symbolic Valorisation ........ 139

5.3

Neighbourhoods as Administrative Units: Projects, Cooperation, and Institutional Embeddedness .............................................................. 143 Cross-Square: Additional Workload, Institutional Pressures, and Types of Cooperation ........................................................................ 144 Roseville: Different Workload, Different Institutional Pressures, and the Role of Parents ............................................................................ 151

5.4

Schools as Localised Fields and Neighbourhood Inequality ................... 160

6

How Educational Professionals Adapt: Localised Organisational Habitus and Organisational Practices .................................................. 163

6.1

Emotional Practices: Coming to Terms with Inequality .......................... 164 If I’ve Learned One Thing or: “You Can’t Save All the Children in this Neighbourhood” ............................................................................ 165

X

Table of Contents

Supporting Them All or Why it is All Right to Stay in Paradise ............. 174 6.2 What to Do and What Not to Do: Between Autonomy and Control ......... 182 Parents’ Role in Organisational Habitus of Teachers: The Little Voice Inside Your Head ........................................................................... 182 Parents’ Role in Organisational Habitus of Teachers: Who Knows Best? .................................................................................... 188 Autonomy and Space to Manoeuvre: Educational Practices and Parental Control................................................................................. 194 6.3

Naming Problems and Finding Solutions ................................................ 209 Localised Organisational Habitus: Defining Social or Individual Problems ................................................................................. 209 Localised Organisational Practices: Finding Solutions ............................ 220

6.4 Localised Organisational Habitus and Organisational Practices: Analysing Neighbourhood Inequality ....................................................... 228

7

Organisational Neighbourhood Inequality and What to Do About It ................................................................................................... 233

7.1

A New Focus: Organisations as Places of Urban Inequality ................... 233

7.2

From Neighbourhood Effects to Neighbourhood Inequality ................... 234

7.3

A Theoretical Perspective: Localised Fields, Organisational Habitus, and Organisational Practices .................................................................... 235

7.4

How Do Neighbourhoods Impact Organisational Practices? ................... 236 The Localisation of Organisations-as-Fields ............................................ 237 The Localisation of Organisational Habitus and Practices ....................... 239

7.5 What is Next? ........................................................................................... 243

Table of Contents

XI

Some Limitations - How to Further Develop the Arguments of this Research ................................................................................................... 244 A Research Agenda for Organisational Neighbourhood Inequality ......... 245 Some Practical Consequences: Educational Policy and Practices............ 246 Appendix: Interview Guides .......................................................................... 249

References ....................................................................................................... 257

1

Unequal Neighbourhoods, Unequal Schools? Organisational Neighbourhood Inequality and the Question of Organisational Habitus and Organisational Practices

Speaking to parents of young children in Berlin, as in many other cities, can be an intriguing introduction to parents’ struggle for the right school and – especially in catchment-based systems – the right neighbourhood. Some parents move, others buy property in the right catchment area, and others turn to informal strategies, such as fake addresses, to ensure that their children gain access to their school of choice. Some speak quite openly about the neighbourhoods they want to avoid; others invest heavily in the school in their ‘bad’ neighbourhood to assure a ‘safe’ school experience for their children (Cucchiara and Horvat 2009; Raveaud and Zanten 2007; Reay et al. 2008; Reay et al. 2007). Looking at how (middle-class) parents negotiate the city by avoiding specific neighbourhoods and their organisations reveals how space and the (re)production of social inequality are intertwined (T. Butler 2003; T. Butler and Robson 2003). Parenting is a process of social reproduction in which urban spaces and their organisations seem to have become increasingly important. Urban scholars, however, have largely reacted to this reality by looking at the competition for access to ‘good’ schools and by questioning how these competitive practices shape the city through their intensification of socio-spatial segregation. Yet, the fact that (middle-class) parents avoid specific neighbourhoods and their organisations also – and maybe more importantly – reveals that some groups in the city increasingly assume that public resources and provisions vary by neighbourhood. While this is not to say that parents are always right in their estimations of school quality, it is nevertheless surprising that urban sociology seems to have little to say about the question of whether public organisations work differently in different neighbourhood contexts.

© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 J. Nast, Unequal Neighbourhoods, Unequal Schools, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-27591-4_1

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1. Unequal Neighbourhoods, Unequal Schools?

While we see an increasing tendency toward segregation between primary schools in often stigmatised, poor, “super-diverse” (Vertovec 2007) neighbourhoods and in privileged, usually white, middle-class neighbourhoods (for Berlin, see e.g. Fincke and Lange 2012), even in cities with still active local welfare systems, there has been little empirical or theoretical work completed on the relation between neighbourhood context, local organisations, and inequality. To fill this gap, this book explores how neighbourhoods shape public organisations. Do unequal neighbourhoods result in unequal schools? And if so, how do such forms of organisational neighbourhood inequality come about? Here, it is important to understand ‘neighbourhood’ as a broader concept. As I will show, neighbourhoods are important as social units built up through incidental connections (economic, lifestyle, status and the like) (Chaskin 1997, 522; Hunter 1979, 271), as places with symbolic meaning and “collective sentiment” (Galster 1986, 243), and as administrative units that structure political interventions and state programmes (Galster 1986, 243; Hunter 1979, 277f.).

1.1 Shifting the Focus: Organisational Neighbourhood Inequality

Urban studies have thus far barely focused on organisational neighbourhood inequality. The theoretical and methodological traditions in which questions of inequality between neighbourhoods have generally been posed do not consider organisations as playing a central role. Instead, the question of neighbourhood inequality has been conceptualised using the idea of neighbourhood effects, which argues that where people live impacts their life chances. The mechanisms producing such effects have been located mostly on the private, inter-residential level: Poor people in poor neighbourhoods ‘do less well’ in response to their isolated networks and lack of social capital, their deviant culture, and their inability to organise collectively (Jencks and Mayer 1990; W.J. Wilson 1987; Sampson, Morenoff, and Gannon-Rowley 2002; Sampson, Morenoff, and Earls 1999).

1.1 Shifting the Focus: Organisational Neighbourhood Inequality

15

This book, however, argues that it is crucial to focus on organisational neighbourhood inequality. Inequality and poverty cannot be understood by simply analysing local processes between residents; rather, they are shaped by social, economic, and political dynamics beyond the neighbourhood (McQuarrie and Marwell 2009: 255; Zukin 1980; Allard and Small 2013). Emphasizing the meso-level of organisations allows for a conceptualisation of how institutional pressures, such as new policies or other regulations, play out and interact with the local level to (re)produce or challenge social inequality (Marwell 2004; McRoberts 2003; Small 2004). Moreover, through organisations, individuals access resources and services not only as a side effect of knowing ‘the right’ people (a focus suggested in the social capital literature), but as a right that they have as citizens. It is through public organisations that the state and its citizens interact and public resources are distributed. If such processes vary locally, questions arise on the role of the state in structural urban inequality, which a focus on private relations is unable to reveal. Moreover, such a perspective allows us to go beyond the question of how (middleclass) residents choose specific neighbourhoods, or if social mix will bring resources to deprived residential areas. Instead it encourages questions about how concentrated poverty (and ethnicity) is dealt with by public organisations and how these forms of organising inequality become relevant for its reproduction. Finally, the question of organisational urban inequality becomes more pressing when considering recent changes in cities, such as severe funding cuts (Huber and Stephens 2004), processes of privatization (Kazepov 2010), restructuring of public management according to economic principles (Peetz, Lohr, and Hilbrich 2010) and of local provisions of welfare services, such as in the case of project-based financing of such services through non-profit organisations (Allard 2009; Eliasoph 2011; Marwell 2004). While dealing with inequality from an organisational standpoint has thus changed dramatically and has increasingly targeted the local level, the role of urban organisational inequality remains surprisingly understudied (Allard and Small 2013). In addition to the lack of theoretical focus on organisations and their role in local inequalities, there is also a need to think differently about how we can conceptualise and measure neighbourhood inequality methodologically. In this book, I suggest a shift in perspective not only towards organisations but also towards processes of neighbourhood inequality instead of neighbourhood effects. Much of the

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1. Unequal Neighbourhoods, Unequal Schools?

literature on neighbourhoods and inequality has assumed that inequality can be understood as a distinct effect of living in a neighbourhood beyond the individual characteristics, provoking research question such as: “[Do] poor children living in overwhelmingly poor neighbourhoods find it harder to escape poverty than poor children living in more affluent neighbourhoods?” (Mayer and Jencks 1989, 1441) This problem has been studied with increasingly sophisticated methods such as by employing experimental designs, as in the Moving to Opportunity experiments in the United States (Small and Feldman 2012). In asking such questions, however, the literature suggests a counterfactual logic of causal effect: the poor neighbourhood becomes the treatment and the question focuses on what would have happened if the population had not received it. As a result, in this perspective, neighbourhoods only have an effect to the extent that life chances of poor people would be different if they were to live in more affluent neighbourhoods. This perspective is problematic for several reasons. First, it suggests that the counterfactual, namely the affluent neighbourhood, is the ‘neutral’ position. Affluent neighbourhoods become the ‘not-poor’ setting that helps to estimate the effects of poor neighbourhoods. Yet, poor people living in affluent neighbourhoods might simply face different problems than poor people in poor neighbourhoods. As Bourdieu has suggested, a specific form of capital might be needed to “unlock” the advantages that a neighbourhood theoretically provides (Bourdieu 1999, 127). Imagine, for example, a poor family facing substandard health services in their poor neighbourhood, but discrimination and fee-based services in the affluent one. Even if the comparison between the two neighbourhoods does not reveal a measurable effect, this does not mean that poor health services have no effect. Even if statistics might not reveal neighbourhood effects, conceptualised differently, neighbourhoods might nevertheless have an effect on the reproduction of inequality. In this book, I suggest thinking about neighbourhood inequality not as a collection of effects that become visible through the comparison of similar groups in poor and affluent settings. Instead, I am interested in comparing how rich and poor neighbourhoods are of importance for reproducing the social positions of their already (dis)advantaged residents. The focus is less on individual outcomes in different settings than on what different neighbourhood contexts provide and through

1.2 Bringing Organisations and Neighbourhood Together:

17

which mechanisms these provisions come about. Empirically, this approach leads away from a focus on outcomes and indicators toward a qualitative focus on daily understandings and practices in neighbourhood organisations. In doing so, it is possible to explore how neighbourhood conditions add to existing (dis)advantages by comparing how different groups benefit from their neighbourhoods (or not) and in which ways. Organisations are an excellent starting point for this approach since local public organisations distribute resources and act as mediators between state and neighbourhood. As such, they should provide services of similar quality to all neighbourhoods. If that is not the case, organisational neighbourhood inequalities develop. Exploring these forms of organisational neighbourhood inequality, requires a theoretical perspective that captures the ways in which neighbourhoods and organisations interact with one another and, potentially, produce diverging local practices.

1.2 Bringing Organisations and Neighbourhood Together: Localised Organisational Habitus and Organisational Practices

The question of how neighbourhoods shape organisations has been little explored, both theoretically and empirically. If research on neighbourhood inequality has included organisations at all, it has done so in ways that are not helpful for conceptualising the question of diverging local organisational practices. This body of literature often understands organisations mainly as sites where the ‘real’ object of interest can be observed: From a Chicago School perspective, organisations are sites where the creation of social order, interactions between residents and the formation of community can be studied (McQuarrie and Marwell 2009, 253f.). For New Urban Sociologists, organisations are places in which dynamics of capitalism, such as oppression, emancipation, and institutional transformation, become visible (McQuarrie and Marwell 2009, 254f.). In both traditions, organisations are treated not as research objects per se, but as “derivative of other, more important social processes” (McQuarrie and Marwell 2009, 254). While some studies have

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1. Unequal Neighbourhoods, Unequal Schools?

asked – following the so-called resources approach – if organisations in deprived neighbourhoods vary in quality or quantity (Ellen and M. Turner 1997, 837), the discussion has often remained on a rather superficial level. There has been little empirical research in this area, and the question of diverging organisational practices specifically has mostly been ignored. Moreover, also within organisational studies, the relationship between local neighbourhoods and organisational practices has become less and less central. While old-institutionalists have analysed how power dynamics within the surrounding community impact organisations (DiMaggio and W. Powell 1991, 13; see also McQuarrie and Marwell 2009, 260), more recent organisational theorists following a new-institutionalist perspective have rejected the role of local neighbourhoods. Instead, they have argued for the importance of broader organisational fields and institutional pressures beyond the local neighbourhood, such as cultural expectations or public policy, to understanding organisations and their practices. The question of how local neighbourhoods and organisations interact and the consequences engendered by these interactions has thus remained underexplored not only in urban studies, but also in organisational studies. Moreover, both traditions have limited their interests to specific aspects of neighbourhoods, such as the neighbourhood as a community. However, to conceptualise how neighbourhoods shape organisations, other dimensions of neighbourhoods must be taken into account, such as their symbolic implications and their meaning as administrative units, at which policy and programmes are directed. In this broader understanding, how can we conceptualise the ways in which neighbourhoods shape organisations, their practices and – in turn – the life chances of the people relying on them? I propose a combination of a Bourdieusian approach to organisations and new-institutionalist theory: I will understand organisations as fields (Emirbayer and V. Johnson 2008) and develop a concept of organisational habitus and organisational practices. Conceptualising organisations as fields opens up the possibility for analysing how they are structured by different factors: both by their internal objective power relations and thus by local social compositions as highlighted by Bourdieu (1991; also Emirbayer and V. Johnson 2008), and by external institutional pressures,

1.3 Research Questions and Methodology

19

such as state regulations, programmes, cultural expectations and organisations’ position in broader organisational fields as pointed out by new-institutionalist perspectives (DiMaggio and W. Powell 1991; DiMaggio and W. Powell 1983; Meyer and Rowan 1977). The main argument of this book is thus that local neighbourhoods as social, symbolic, and administrative units shape organisations by structuring the interplay between local conditions and institutional pressures. Following Bourdieu (e.g. 2000, 11) the resulting local field-constellations have important consequences as they shape the organisational habitus and organisational practices of professionals working in such organisations – a process that I describe as the development of a localised organisational habitus and corresponding practices.

1.3 Research Questions and Methodology

Following this line of argumentation, this book asks: How do neighbourhoods shape the organisational habitus and the organisational practices of professionals within local organisations and what are the consequences thereof for the reproduction of inequality? In detail, it addresses the following questions: How do different neighbourhood contexts shape organisations-as-fields? How does this impact the organisational habitus and the organisational practices of professionals working within these organisations? And what do these different practices suggest about the reproduction of inequality in local organisations? Empirically, this thesis draws on ethnographic observations and interview data from two organisational case studies in two neighbourhoods in Berlin, Germany. It compares two schools that are similar in size, have multi-grade classrooms and according systems of teaching, as well as (optional) after-school supervision – but vary in regard to their local context: one in a deprived, “super-diverse” (Vertovec 2007) neighbourhood and the other in an affluent, mostly white, neighbourhood.

20

1. Unequal Neighbourhoods, Unequal Schools?

The focus here is on primary schools, as – in contrast to high schools – they draw children from their immediate local environments. Moreover, primary schools prepare children for the first crucial sorting phase in the German education system – namely which type of secondary school they are allowed to continue studying1 in – and often provide extra-curricular activities, which are important to understanding the development of young people beyond the limited perspective of academic success. The primary school in the deprived, “super-diverse” (Vertovec 2007), neighbourhood is located in Cross-Square,2 one of Berlin’s inner-city neighbourhoods. As data from the Senate Department for Urban Development and the Environment in Berlin demonstrates, Cross-Square has a much higher than average level of unemployment (at the time of this study: 14.4%-18.8% versus 9.4%) and 57% to 74% of individuals younger than 15 receive additional state financial support, which can be understood as an indicator of child poverty (Berlin average: 36.4%) (Häussermann et al. 2011, 9). These metrics are also reflected in Cross-Square’s primary school: Over 90% of pupils qualify for free school supplies (the German equivalent to free school lunches) and approximately 90% do not speak German as their first language. Many of the more highly educated parents residing in this neighbourhood – often native-German speaking parents without an immigrant background – purposely avoid this school, for example by moving to different neighbourhoods or by engaging in creative ways to manipulate the catchment-system. The school in the privileged neighbourhood is located in Roseville, a typical white middle-class neighbourhood with a more suburban feel. According to data from the Senate Department for Urban Development and the Environment, Roseville is 1

2

While differences exist between states (‘Bundesländer’), the German educational system generally sorts students into different school types after primary school (usually starting at grade 5, in Berlin at grade 7), based on their perceived ‘ability.’ The different tracks lead to different school leaving certificates, which determine access to academic education or vocational training. Several states have attempted to reform this system, making it easier to switch by implementing secondary schools that offer different tracks within one school (in Berlin for example the integrated secondary school (‘Integrierte Sekundarschule’) or the comprehensive school (Gesamtschule)). Nevertheless, in Berlin, as in most states, the ‘Gymnasium’, an academic secondary school, is still seen by many parents as the preferable path to university. Neighbourhoods and schools were anonymized throughout this book.

1.4 Structure of the Book

21

one of Berlin’s privileged neighbourhoods: Unemployment is much lower than average (at the time of the study: 3.3% to 9.4%); many families in the neighbourhood do not live in rented apartments but rather own single-family homes; and additional public support for children younger than 15 is lower than the Berlin average (at the time of the study: 7.7% to 36.4%) (Häussermann et al. 2011, 9). In the school in Roseville, only 2% of the children qualify for free school supplies and 7% do not speak German as their first language. Most of these children come from highly educated families and only few are early learners of German. Many of the parents in Roseville prefer to send their children to this primary school: Demand regularly exceeds the school’s capacity as parents from outside of the catchment area also apply for admission. To gather rich data, in each of the two schools, I conducted five to six months of (participant) observation, on average three days per week, completing approximately 870 hours of fieldwork. During this ethnographic work, I shadowed teachers, talked informally with school staff and parents, and observed interactions between teachers, social workers, principals and parents. In addition, I also conducted semi-structured interviews with parents and teachers from within the organisation as well as with a smaller sample from outside the organisations (52 interviews in total).

1.4 Structure of the Book

The book is organised as follows: Chapter 2 examines the as of yet understudied organisational perspective in urban studies, critiques existing understandings of neighbourhood inequality as neighbourhood effects, and develops an alternative perspective. It looks in detail at the work that has been done on neighbourhood effects and on urban organisations, as well as at the literature on schools. While most of the literature thus far has focused on the effects of different forms of interactions in neighbourhoods, schools, and

22

1. Unequal Neighbourhoods, Unequal Schools?

other organisations, the question of how organisations and their practices are shaped by neighbourhood contexts remains understudied. Chapter 3 then develops the theoretical concept of localised organisational habitus and organisational practices in an attempt to fill the gap theorized in Chapter 2. To conceptualise how neighbourhoods and organisations interact, I combine the new-institutionalist interest in organisations as shaped by institutional pressures with Bourdieusian ideas of organisations-as-fields (Emirbayer and V. Johnson 2008) and habitus. If we understand organisations-as-fields, the habitus of the professionals working within it is shaped by the objective structures of an organisation, which – as this book argues – vary by neighbourhood context. Chapter 4 describes the empirical basis of the thesis in more detail and introduces the research questions, research sites, and sampling strategies. Based on this empirical material, the concept of a localised organisational habitus and organisational practices is developed empirically in the subsequent chapters. Chapter 5 analyses how organisations-as-fields are shaped differently depending on their local neighbourhood; I describe this differentiation as the localisation of the organisational field. Three crucial forces linked to the neighbourhood are identified: First, neighbourhoods as social units impact schools by structuring their social composition, which introduces different objective power positions in organisations-as-fields and with it different forms of parental control. Moreover, the social composition of a school brings latent antagonisms to the field, as institutionalised understandings of what schools must achieve to be legitimate are fulfilled to different degrees, depending on a school’s structural conditions. Second, neighbourhoods as symbolic entities position schools in a citywide field of education. In so doing, the neighbourhood shapes the field, through forms of symbolic violence. Finally, neighbourhoods as administrative units structure the institutional embeddedness of (public) organisations: Depending on the local context, schools face different regulations, programmes, and funding schemes, which also shape daily understandings of the educational professionals who work there. In sum, these factors produce localised organisations.

1.4 Structure of the Book

23

Chapter 6, then, analyses the effect of these processes of localisation for the organisational habitus and organisational practices of professionals within the schools and links those back to questions of inequality. This chapter explores how educational professionals, such as teachers, teaching assistants or social workers, develop localised perspectives and engage in diverging emotional practices, follow different conceptions of what they can or cannot do in teaching and engaging with children, and define different types of problems and different solutions for similar incidents – depending on the neighbourhood context. For example, teachers might suggest that children with behavioural problems be tested for giftedness in the privileged neighbourhood, whereas teachers in the deprived neighbourhood faced with a similar situation might call the child welfare agency or the police. All of this adds to the already unequal conditions faced by children growing up in different neighbourhood contexts. Finally, Chapter 7 concludes with a discussion of how the concept of localised organisational habitus and organisational practice can be developed further and what it means theoretically and practically for organisational and urban theory as well as for practices of urban education.

2

Neighbourhoods, Schools and Inequality: Shifting the Focus

What does the existing literature on neighbourhoods, urban organisations, and schools tell us about the ways in which neighbourhoods shape organisations – and thus potentially reinforce neighbourhood inequality? As we will see, urban studies have thus far scarcely considered these issues, due to the theoretical and methodological conceptualisation of neighbourhood inequality as a question of ‘neighbourhood effects.’ Here, the focus is often on the measurement of effects, while the mechanisms that bring these effects about are blackboxed or reduced to inter-residential rather than to organisational processes. Similarly, the literature on urban organisations and their role in neighbourhood inequality has little to say about diverging organisational practices. Rather, organisations have been studied as “role players in a broader argument” (McQuarrie and Marwell 2009, 255) about social order and community or about the reproduction of capitalistic orders. While scholars working with a ‘resources approach’ have indeed argued that organisations in deprived neighbourhoods might vary in quality or quantity (Ellen and M. Turner 1997, 837), the question of how diverging organisational practices come about in different neighbourhood contexts is rarely posed. Finally, the literature on schools seldom focuses on the ways in which neighbourhoods shape local educational organisations. Rather, research has looked at how space structures access to ‘good’ schools or how different social compositions impact students’ learning processes. Similar to the literature on neighbourhood effects, the mechanisms behind these processes are often blackboxed or focus on inter-pupil relations rather than on the effects of local neighbourhoods more broadly.

© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 J. Nast, Unequal Neighbourhoods, Unequal Schools, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-27591-4_2

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2. Neighbourhoods, Schools and Inequality: Shifting the Focus

In response, this chapter – in introducing the existing literature on neighbourhoods, urban organisations and schools – suggests shifting the focus on neighbourhoods’ role in the production of inequality in two ways: First, by including an explicit interest in organisations, and second, by analysing the effect of diverging organisational practices between neighbourhoods rather than neighbourhood effects on individual outcomes.

2.1 Urban Inequality as Neighbourhood Effects

Within the debate on urban inequality, the concept of neighbourhood effects has been central, namely the notion that an individual’s place of residence impacts his or her chances in life. While often criticised (see e.g. Bauder 2002) this idea is nonetheless held dear within urban research. After introducing studies that have researched such neighbourhood effects, I identify two main gaps in the literature: First, the lack of focus on those mechanisms that explain how neighbourhood effects come about (here I emphasize the lack of research on the role of organisations, which forms the main focus of this book); and second, the ways in which the conceptualisation of neighbourhood inequality as neighbourhood effects has limited the scope of perspectives in the research on neighbourhood inequality. Despite recent work from the Global South (e.g. Parks, Dodoo, and Ayernor 2014), most of the research on neighbourhood effects has thus far been conducted in North European and Anglo-American contexts. As a result, the following literature review is also limited to that perspective. The question of how neighbourhoods relate to urban inequality has been of crucial importance to urban sociology from its inception. Beginning with the early days of the Chicago School, urban sociologists have already analysed the impact of a neighbourhood’s social structure on processes of social control or on the transmission of social norms, as well as questioned how geographical and social distance interact (Park and Burgess 1925; Zorbaugh 1929; Burgess 1928; Shaw and McKay

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1942; see also Sampson 2008). The concept of ‘neighbourhood effects’ in its current formulation stems from William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged (1987). Wilson suggested that since the 1970s manufacturing and low-skilled jobs vanished from inner-city neighbourhoods, while simultaneously, middle-class and working-class African-Americans were for the first time able to relocate to higherincome neighbourhoods with the advent of affirmative action and fair(er) housing laws (Small and Newman 2001, 23; W.J. Wilson 1987). These shifts created a concentration of poverty in inner-city neighbourhoods. According to Wilson, this affected the life chances of (African-American) poor people in such neighbourhoods beyond their individual characteristics by isolating them from the role models, job networks, and other resources of middle-class residents. Wilson thus conceptualised neighbourhood inequality as an effect that engenders additional disadvantages beyond individual characteristics. This understanding has strongly shaped the debate on urban inequality, resulting in many studies aimed at quantifying the effects of neighbourhoods on individual outcomes. Yet, methodologically, it is extremely challenging to prove that – all else being equal – it is less disadvantageous to be poor in a mixed-income area than in a high-poverty one. To prove such an effect, one would have to take advantage of longitudinal data and account for potential non-linear effects (see e.g. Duncan, Connell, and Klebanov 1997; Tienda 1991; also Galster 2012). However, most problematic from a research perspective is the fact that individuals are not randomly distributed across neighbourhoods, and that neighbourhood effects might be biased by unobserved characteristics correlated to neighbourhood choice. A common example is the fact that parents with a low educational background are also more likely to live in poor neighbourhoods, and that their children are also more likely to be disadvantaged in school. If parental educational status is not controlled for, the results will overestimate the neighbourhood effect on educational outcomes. Such issues of self-selection can introduce an omitted variable bias and generally cast doubt on the robustness of neighbourhood effect models. Nevertheless, several studies have tried to quantify the effect of disadvantaged neighbourhoods on individual life chances. Many of these studies were conducted in the United States. Here, research has mostly focused on neighbourhood effects on teenagers – in terms of educational

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attainment and school drop-out rates (e.g. Brooks-Gunn et al. 1993; Crane 1991; Duncan 1994; D. Harding 2003), employment (e.g. Case and Katz 1991; D.S. Massey, Gross, and Eggers 1991), sexual activity and pregnancy (Brewster 1994; Brooks-Gunn et al. 1993; Evans, Oates, and Schwab 1992), as well as crime and deviance (Bellair and Mcnulty 2005; Glaeser, Sacerdote, and Scheinkman 1996; Sampson, Morenoff, and Raudenbush 2005). A few studies have also focused on young children. Brooks-Gunn et al. (1997a; 1997b) demonstrate that neighbourhoods can predict children’s development, and that this effect is most distinct during early childhood and late adolescence. Similarly, studies have shown that young children’s cognitive (Chase-Lansdale and Gordon 1996; Sharkey and Elwert 2011; Duncan, Connell, and Klebanov 1997; Klebanov et al. 1998) as well as behavioural and emotional outcomes can be affected by their place of residence (Chase-Lansdale and Gordon 1996; Duncan, Brooks-Gunn, and Klebanov 1994; Oliver et al. 2007). For adults, the focus has mostly been on physical and mental health (Almgren et al. 1998; Cutrona et al. 2000; M. Elliott 2000; Ross 2000) as well as on employment; some studies investigate the spatial mismatch hypothesis, namely the idea that African-Americans in the inner-city are isolated from jobs due to the suburbanisation of industries and employment (Kain 1992; Holzer 1991; J. Elliott 1999). Rosenbaum and Popkin (1991) show that, in comparison to families with similar backgrounds who stayed in the inner city, low-income AfricanAmerican families who moved from public housing to the suburbs were more likely to find work (see Durlauf 2004, 222 for methodological critique). Some studies have employed advanced methods – such as instrumental variables (Cutler and Glaeser 1997; Duncan, Connell, and Klebanov 1997; Evans, Oates, and Schwab 1992) or randomized experiments – to identify to what extent neighbourhood truly has an impact on individual outcomes (more than unobserved characteristics and selection bias) (e.g. Rosenbaum and Popkin 1991; Spencer et al. 1997). In the Moving to Opportunity Experiment (MTO), families were randomly assigned to groups that received housing vouchers for various neighbourhoods with varying poverty rates (Katz, Kling, and Liebman 2001, 609f.). While this experiment was meant to end many of the methodological debates surrounding neighbourhood effect studies, new ones quickly arose, centring on the strength of the intervention, on who actually took part, or on where to MTO movers moved (ClampetǦLundquist and D.S. Massey 2008; Ludwig et al. 2008; Sampson 2008).

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The results of MTO do not show any significant impact on “work, earnings, or other economic outcomes for adults” (Sanbonmatsu et al. 2011, xv; Ludwig et al. 2008, 144f.; Katz, Kling, and Liebman 2001). However, the results indicate that movers experienced improvements in housing and neighbourhood environment (Sanbonmatsu et al. 2011, xv) and had more social ties with relatively more affluent people (Sanbonmatsu et al. 2011, xvi). This resulted in improvements in mental and physical health, including lower rates of psychological distress, major depression, extreme obesity and diabetes (Sanbonmatsu et al. 2011, xvii). For young people, the results for the most part did not indicate any measurable difference in health outcomes between the control and treatment group (Sanbonmatsu et al. 2011, xvii). Overall, the statistically significant effects of moving on risky and criminal behaviour were minor. The same was true for potential effects on educational outcomes; in terms of school quality, MTO results show mixed effects (Sanbonmatsu et al. 2011, xxx), possibly due to the fact that most children in MTO “were still attending majority-minority, overwhelmingly low-income public schools” (Sanbonmatsu et al. 2011, xxxi). In Europe, research on neighbourhood effects emerged slightly later than in the United States. As, generally-speaking, segregation is less distinct and state intervention is stronger there, neighbourhoods are expected to be of lesser importance than in the United States (Farwick 2012, 389; Nieszery 2008, 118). A large amount of the research has been conducted in the United Kingdom. McCulloch (2001) investigates the association between social deprivation in electoral wards and individual outcomes on several variables, based on data from the British Household Panel (1991-1998). He finds that the association between individual and neighbourhood deprivation is “largely, if not entirely, accounted for by individual and household characteristics” (McCulloch 2001, 667) and thus can be explained as a compositional rather than as a neighbourhood effect. However, men seem to suffer additionally from their place of residence (McCulloch 2001, 667, 682). Based on the British Household Panel, Buck (2001, 2251) finds a significant association between neighbourhood and individual social exclusion even after controlling for multiple individual characteristics. However, he warns against taking these findings “at face value” (Buck 2001, 2272): first, the effects are not very large; second, there are methodological problems, such as selection and omitted

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variable bias. Bolster et al. (2007), on the contrary, find only little evidence of a negative neighbourhood effect on residents’ social mobility considering micro neighbourhoods3 in Britain and residents’ income growth over one, five and ten years. Similarly, van Ham and Manley (2010) suggest, based on the Scottish Longitudinal Study, that neighbourhood effects are most likely caused by selection effects rather than by causation – and, as such, do not exist. In the Netherlands, Musted, Ostendorf, and De Vos (2003) find that social neighbourhood composition barely influences the social mobility of households that receive welfare benefits, but is of importance for households in a stronger economic position. Van der Klaauw and van Ours (2003) find that, for welfare recipients in Rotterdam, the individual transition rates from welfare to work are impacted by neighbourhood. This effect is, however, conditional and only applies to young Dutch welfare recipients (van der Klaauw and van Ours 2003, 957, 961). Some results also exist for Belgium. Dujardin, Selod, and Thomas (2008, 89) show that neighbourhood can significantly increase a young person’s probability of being unemployed. They analyse the sensitivity of these neighbourhood effects to the presence of observed and unobserved parental covariates and find their results to be quite robust (Dujardin, Selod, and Thomas 2008, 109). Neighbourhood effects have also been extensively researched in Sweden. Musterd and R. Andersson (2006) analyse the association between individual social mobility and the social composition of neighbourhoods based on longitudinal data (1991-1999). Even when controlling for individual and household characteristics, they find that neighbourhoods have a “moderate yet clear impact on the employment prospects of unemployed individuals” (Musterd and R. Andersson 2006, 120f.; see also Musterd and R. Andersson 2005). However, they also warn against the problem of unobserved heterogeneity (Musterd and R. Andersson 2006, 138). A study by Eva Andersson (2004), based on longitudinal data from three Swedish municipalities, also finds that a neighbourhood’s socio-demographic and physical context has an effect on eventual socio-economic success in the form of education, occupational status, and income. Again, potential self-selection might be an issue. 3

Local data that is more likely to correspond to people’s everyday understandings of their neighbourhood than specific wards or census tracts.

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(E. Andersson 2004, 642, 648) In contrast to these findings, Brännström’s counterfactual approach of matched sampling shows that neighbourhood poverty during adolescence has no effect on a wide range of individual outcomes (Brännström 2004, 2515, 2516). Galster, R. Andersson and Musterd (2010, 2915) analyse the effect on individual earnings of the mixture of low-, middle-, and high-income males in a neighbourhood based on longitudinal data (1991-1999). Innovatively, they take into account that neighbourhood effects could vary across gender, age, number of children, employment status, and income (Galster, R. Andersson, and Musterd 2010, 2915, 2935f.). Moreover, to avoid selection bias, they use an intertemporal differences specification of an econometric model controlling for unobserved, time-invariant individual characteristics. They do find that specific groups are affected differently by different social neighbourhood compositions, with stronger effects for parents and individuals who do not work full-time (Galster, R. Andersson, and Musterd 2010, 2915; see also Galster et al. 2008). In France, Dujardin and Goffette-Nagot (2005, 2, 4) used an instrumental variable approach to demonstrate that living in a deprived neighbourhood has a significant effect on a resident’s probability of being unemployed. Gobillon and Selod (2007) analyse the impact of residential segregation and insufficient physical access to employment opportunities on individual transitions out of unemployment in the Paris region. Using very fine-grained spatial scales and panel data, they also apply a sensitivity analysis to deal with potential endogeneity. They uncover a relatively robust negative effect of segregation on finding a job. (Gobillon and Selod 2007) While there is a lively interest in neighbourhood effects in Germany (Nieszery 2008, 119), empirical findings have thus far been limited and are often less advanced methodologically (Farwick 2012, 289). For the cities of Bremen and Bielefeld, Farwick (2001) shows, based on longitudinal data, that the duration of periods of poverty increases significantly with the intensification of poverty levels in a given neighbourhood (Farwick 2012, 390; Farwick 2001, 123ff.; see also Nieszery 2008, 122). However, again, there is a problem of selection bias and omitted variable bias. For adolescent problem behaviours and serious juvenile offending, Oberwittler (2004; 2007; 2011) finds a small yet significant neighbourhood effect, based on a cross-sectional survey for Cologne and the city of Freiburg in Breisgau. Using a multi-level approach, he suggests that neighbourhood effects

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depend on young people’s spatial orientation and the locality of peer networks (Oberwittler 2004). Yet, due to the limitations of cross-sectional data, results must be interpreted with due caution (Oberwittler 2007, 38; Oberwittler 2004, 228). The majority of neighbourhood effect studies thus indicate that “neighbourhoods do matter” (Ellen and M. Turner 1997, 834) – at least to some extent. However, neighbourhood effects prove to be much smaller than individual or family characteristics (Ellen and M. Turner 1997, 834f., 848). Moreover, and crucial for the argument here, the lion’s share of research has dealt with questions of measurement issues. Researchers have been pushed to focus on “methodological problems of using neighborhoods to explain individual variation” (Small and Newman 2001, 25) rather than to further conceptualise the mechanisms linking neighbourhoods and residents’ life chances (also Nieszery 2008, 110). Thus, conceptualised differently, neighbourhoods might be of greater importance for life chances than studies have thus far revealed.

The Limited Focus on Organisational Mechanisms

What, then, do we know about the mechanisms of how neighbourhoods affect their residents? While the existing literature provides “little insight into the causal mechanisms though which neighbourhood environment influences (…) life chances” (Ellen and M. Turner 1997, 854; see also Brännström 2004, 2516; Durlauf 2004, 2218; Small and Feldman 2012; Small and Newman 2001, 34f.), several theoretical propositions have nonetheless been made. Yet, they have not all become equally prominent, nor has there been much empirical research completed on concrete mechanisms (Galster 2012; Sampson, Morenoff, and GannonRowley 2002; Small and Newman 2001, 30; Jencks and Mayer 1990). As we will see, especially the question of how organisations might be of importance for neighbourhood inequality has been under-conceptualised. Rather, attempts to explain neighbourhood effects mechanisms have mostly focused on individuals and their interactions (Marwell 2007, 2,3). As Allard and Small (2013, 10) have stated,

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“the extensive literature on neighborhood effects […] has centered primarily on individuals, their social relations, their socioeconomic outcomes, and their selection into neighborhoods; it has offered comparatively little on how local organizations operate, structure neighborhood conditions, mediate the impact of macrolevel factors, or affect the well-being of individuals.” The following section introduces the mechanisms and processes suggested in the literature: first, by considering research that locates the mechanisms that mediate neighbourhood effects on an individual level; second, by introducing theories that focus on collective processes between residents; and finally, by presenting theories that point to neighbourhood effects on the neighbourhood level.

Individualistic Mechanisms: Constraints on Social Capital and Relative Deprivation Many of the most prominent conceptualisations of neighbourhood effect mechanisms locate them on the level of the individual. It is assumed that neighbourhoods hinder or foster both a resident’s individual networking activities, and the types of resources accessible through these networks. From this perspective, scholars argue that disadvantaged neighbourhoods do not allow poor residents to meet better-off neighbours and profit from their resources. This is closely linked to the concept of social capital, namely “the ability of actors to secure benefits by virtue of membership in social networks or other social structures” (Portes 1998, 6). Living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods is understood as isolating poor residents from the powerful networks of the resource-rich middleclass, including information on job opportunities (Small 2006, 275; Small and Newman 2001, 33; Ellen and M. Turner 1997, 840; W.J. Wilson 1987). Others have suggested a ‘linguistic isolation model.’ While increasingly controversial, this model suggests that the socialisation in poor segregated African-American neighbourhoods might insulate children from contact with Standard American English, resulting in stigmatisation in school or on the job market. (D.S. Massey and Denton 1993; Labov and Harris 1986 cited after Small and Newman 2001)

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Tigges, Browne, and Grenn (1998) find that neighbourhood poverty does indeed significantly increase social isolation, as well as decreasing residents’ access to resources. Similarly, Friedrichs and Blasius (2000) show that in four deprived neighbourhoods in Cologne, Germany, the mean number of contacts decreases with an increasing density in welfare recipients. Other studies underline that residents do sustain contacts in poor neighbourhoods, but that, conversely, these often provide mutual support rather than resources that might foster social mobility (Curley 2008; Van Eijk 2010; Pinkster 2007). As these networks are typically homogenous in terms of social status, they are rarely able to link residents to social capital that could help them to “get ahead” (de Souza Briggs 1997, 178) by providing useful resources to improve one’s opportunities, such as information about jobs. This theoretical perspective on neighbourhood effects is often linked to the politics of residential mix (see Lees 2008 for a critique). The argument is straightforward: If poor people in deprived neighbourhoods are excluded from networks offering access to important resources, living in mixed neighbourhoods will help them to overcome this exclusion. The mixed neighbourhood approach thus assumes that geographical proximity will simultaneously create mixed networks. However, there is little empirical evidence for this. Having resource-rich and resource-poor individuals living side-by-side seems insufficient for building social networks that overcome class divides (Blokland 2008a; Blokland 2003; T. Butler 2003; Cummings, DiPasquale, and Kahn 2002; Van Eijk 2010; Lees 2008). While the MTO experiment finds that moving did increase “connections of adults to other people who were employed full-time or had completed college,” these were hardly strong ties (Popkin, Harris, and Cunningham 2002, 62; see also ClampetǦ Lundquist 2004). Furthermore, even when networks do develop, a distinction must nonetheless be made: a tie within a network is not the same as access to resources. Processes inherent to resource accessibility through networks are highly contextspecific (Blokland 2008a; Nast and Blokland 2014; Van Eijk 2010) and local neighbourhood contacts are not necessarily transferable to job networks, especially within class-crossing relationships (R. Atkinson and Kintrea 2001, 2288f.).

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Collective Mechanisms: Cultural Approaches and Models of Collective Efficacy Other approaches – categorized here as ‘collective mechanisms’ – argue that neighbourhood effects develop through processes between residents, in reference to cultural ‘deviance’ or questions of collective efficacy. Cultural approaches suggest that residents’ ‘deviant’ culture in poor neighbourhoods makes the emergence of neighbourhood effects plausible. The collective socialisation model (Jencks and Mayer 1990) is a prominent form of this approach, which argues that children are socialised collectively through their observation of the adults in their neighbourhoods (W.J. Wilson 1987). If no one they know is successful and can act as role model, children learn not to envision upward mobility for themselves (Jencks and Mayer 1990, 114f.; Small and Newman 2001, 33). Instead of internalising, for example, the importance of working hard, children observe behaviours that are described in this approach (in a rather problematic linguistic register) as “ghetto-specific,” such as crime, hustling, or dropping out of school. Later in life, they are encouraged to emulate these lifestyles (Brooks-Gunn et al. 1993; Jarrett 1997, 277; Jencks and Mayer 1990; W.J. Wilson 1987). As it is assumed that “children learn a lot about what behaviours are ‘normal’ or ‘acceptable’ from the adults they encounter in the community” (Ellen and M. Turner 1997, 838), inner-city neighbourhoods are seen as lacking middle-class residents that can act as conventional role models. Pinkster (2007) argues, based on qualitative data from the Dutch city of The Hague, that deviant working norms are transferred in deprived neighbourhoods. Crane (1991, 1233) shows that the share of high social status residents in a neighbourhood has a stronger effect on variables such as school drop-out rates than does the actual level of neighbourhood deprivation (Friedrichs 2013, 20). Some have interpreted this as evidence of collective socialisation in neighbourhoods (Friedrichs 2013, 20). While the socialisation model is intertwined with childhood and adolescence, it has also been applied to adults. Friedrichs and Blasius (2000) have analysed the relationship between attitudes towards deviant behaviour and a neighbourhood’s socioeconomic status. They find that the individual acceptance of deviant behaviour increases with a higher proportion of welfare recipients in a neighbourhood. (see also Nieszery 2008, 121) R. Atkinson and Kitera (2001, 2288), however, highlight that these assumptions are not sustained by their data. In their study, criminality is far from

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being understood as ‘normal’ by residents. Overall, as we will see in more detail later, these socialisation approaches come with problematic and simplifying conceptualisations of culture and run the risk of culturalising poverty, while also underestimating structural factors. The so-called epidemic model conceptualises similar processes to the socialisation model, but on the peer level. It assumes that ‘bad’ behaviour is contagious: When a majority of children in a neighbourhood engage in certain behaviours, other children will be socialised into behaving similarly (Small and Newman 2001, 33). At the foundation of this argument lies the idea that “values and behaviour of young people are shaped or influenced by their peers – for better or for worse” (Ellen and M. Turner 1997, 839). High rates of teenage pregnancy in poor neighbourhoods have, for example, been explained through “street” cultural codes, in which sexual activity enhances a teenage girl’s reputation among peers (Anderson 1999). As with the collective socialisation model, poverty is conceptualised as a pathology, or even as an ‘epidemic,’ to be explained by the cultural deviance of poor children rather than by the structural conditions under which these children grow up. The epidemic approach thus blames the victim rather than furthering our understanding of the processes which reproduce this inequality. Another approach that deals with culture, yet from a different perspective, is the oppositional culture model. This approach argues that African-American residents in poor, segregated neighbourhoods develop a culture opposed to mainstream norms and values (D.S. Massey and Denton 1993; based on Ogbu's work on schools, e.g. Ogbu 2003). In contrast to the models above, however, it is not simply that urban poverty stems from cultural difference, but that these differences are “directly and self-consciously opposed to the norms and values of the white middle-class” (Small and Newman 2001, 36) as a “pride-instilling defence mechanism in the face of continuing racism” (Paulle 2013, 15). Whereas the collective socialisation model sees children as passive recipients of a deviant ‘ghetto culture,’ this approach highlights the agency of children and young people in these processes. As mentioned previously, these cultural approaches have not remained unchallenged. Scholars have criticised them for ‘blaming the victim,’ since they imply that individuals could avoid being poor if they would change their “culture of poverty” (Lewis 1975). While William Julius Wilson argued that he did not intend

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to explain neighbourhood effects in an over-simplified and reductive way, the focus on cultural explanations nevertheless runs the risk of underestimating structural factors, while stigmatising and culturalising poverty (Bauder 2002; see also Nieszery 2008, 112f.). Moreover, such approaches ignore that part of what makes ostensibly ‘deviant’ cultures powerful is the discrimination against them, since this discrimination ultimately hinders access to ‘mainstream’ society (A. Harding and Blokland 2014; Small, D. J. Harding, and Lamont 2010). In addition, such approaches often apply a somewhat oversimplified conceptualisation of culture. The literature on inner-city culture, for example, often does not concretely address in which ways ‘underclass’ culture differs from ‘mainstream’ or middle-class culture(s). A strict dichotomy between middle-class/inner-city culture not only runs the risk of repeating stereotypes, but is empirically oversimplified as there are heterogeneous, contradictory, and unsystematic ‘inner city’ and ‘middle-class’ cultures (Small and Newman 2001, 37; Newman 1999; Duneier 1992; Dodson 1998; Petterson 1997). The assumption of “a single dominant set of norms” (Jencks and Mayer 1990, 114) in each neighbourhood is conceptually unfounded and carries with it problematic connotations. Moreover, cultural approaches often incorporate unrealistic assumptions about how much time people spend in their neighbourhoods and how values and attitudes develop (Small and Newman 2001, 34; Wellman 1999). Beyond these cultural approaches, another research stream relies heavily on interresidential relations to explain neighbourhood effects: the collective efficacy approach. This line of thinking has mostly focused on questions of safety, the prevention of crime, and social control in deprived neighbourhoods (Sampson, Morenoff, and Gannon-Rowley 2002, 458). Within this perspective, networks and ties between residents are crucial to understanding why specific neighbourhoods are more or less efficient in ‘fighting’ crime. To explore this issue, scholars have measured the density of ties between residents (Sampson, Morenoff, and GannonRowley 2002, 457; Morenoff, Sampson, and Raudenbush 2001; Rountree and Warner 1999; D. S. Elliott et al. 1996; Veysey and Messner 1999), as well as the frequency of interactions and patterns of neighbouring (Bellair 1997; Bellair 2000; Warner and Rountree 1997; Sampson, Morenoff, and Gannon-Rowley 2002, 457). Moreover, they have analysed residents’ mutual trust and shared expectations, as these structure residents’ willingness to intervene and thus transform social ties

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into collective efficacy – a “linkage of mutual trust and the shared willingness to intervene for the public good” (Sampson, Morenoff, and Gannon-Rowley 2002, 457, also Bellair 2000; D.S. Elliott et al. 1996; Markowitz et al. 2001; Sampson and Raudenbush 1999; Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls 1997; Sampson and Groves 1989; Veysey and Messner 1999). To explain neighbourhood effects, scholars in this tradition argue that poor neighbourhoods tend to possess less collective efficacy than middle-class neighbourhoods and thus have higher crime rates (Small and Newman 2001, 34). Yet, qualitative studies cast some doubt on portions of the collective efficacy thesis, as questions of who is to be controlled and by whom are often more complex than advertised. Pattillo-McCoy (1999) finds that internal networks within neighbourhoods do not always lead to lower crime rates, as crime does not enter the community ‘from outside,’ but is interconnected with it in complicated ways. Particularly under conditions of structural economic exclusion, drug dealers in poor neighbourhoods are often not simply criminals, but also neighbours, children, cousins, or grandchildren (Small and Newman 2001, 34; Blokland 2008b).

Beyond Collective Mechanisms: Neighbourhood-Level Mechanisms As we have seen, a main focus of the literature on mechanisms driving neighbourhood effects has been on residents, their networks, and their ‘deviant’ culture and norms. Such endogenous perspectives, which assume that neighbourhood effects arise out of the behaviour of residents themselves, have been widely adopted (Permentier, Ham, and Bolt 2007, 200). This “dominance of the socialization idea” (Musterd and R. Andersson 2006, 122f.) reveals a striking lack of theoretical and empirical interest in the more structural differences between poor and rich neighbourhoods (see also Nieszery 2008, 112f.). Nevertheless, some mechanisms have also been hypothesized on the neighbourhood level. While less dominant in the debate, these approaches pay much more attention to the city as a whole, to the different meanings of neighbourhoods, to

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the state, and to the provision of services. In the following, four groups of neighbourhood effects that do not focus on residents will be discussed: political neighbourhood effects, infrastructural neighbourhood effects, symbolical neighbourhood effects, and service models. In particular the final category is central to the theoretical question of this book, but has received the least empirical attention. Political neighbourhood effects have only been mentioned on the periphery of the debate on neighbourhood effects. Here, the question is posed whether deprived neighbourhoods might be less politically represented than better-off areas. Scholars have argued that the recognition of residents’ needs and preferences in the political process could depend on their ability to organise politically and to put pressure on local administrations. To do so, residents need cultural and social capital (Bourdieu 1986), both of which scholars assume to be underrepresented in deprived neighbourhoods. Moreover, many residents in deprived neighbourhoods are structurally excluded from formal political participation due to their citizenship status; voter turnout is often low. However, Häussermann and Wurtzbacher find – by comparing deprived and privileged neighbourhoods in four cities in Germany – that privileged and deprived neighbourhoods do not differ in their political influence: both are little represented (Häussermann and Wurtzbacher 2012, 176f.). Yet, residents in privileged neighbourhoods can make themselves heard if they wish, while deprived neighbourhoods generally have to rely on the administration to consider their needs and to compensate for their lower self-representation (Häussermann and Wurtzbacher 2012, 179). The study by Häussermann and Wurtzbacher (2012, 179f.) indicates that administrations in German cities do often perform this balancing function for deprived neighbourhoods. For the United States, D.S. Massey and Denton (1993) argue that it is hard to find political alliances across racial lines. As racial neighbourhood segregation remains strong (see also Zorbaugh already in 1929), it is harder to attract badly-needed public resources for schools, playgrounds and business investments in segregated deprived neighbourhoods. (Small and Newman 2001, 33f.) Slightly more attention than to political neighbourhood effects has been paid to questions of infrastructural mechanisms and physical location. Some scholars have suggested that the mixture of residential and commercial land use, the quality of housing, the distribution of public spaces as well as public transportation might

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play a role in how neighbourhood effects come about (Sampson, Morenoff, and Gannon-Rowley 2002, 458; Sampson and Raudenbush 1999; Friedrichs 2013; Janßen 2004; Ellen and M. Turner 1997, 842). Others have more explicitly focused on the question of a neighbourhood’s location within the city: “the most straightforward impact of neighbourhood is physical proximity and accessibility to economic opportunites“ (Ellen and M. Turner 1997, 842). Known as the spatial mismatch hypothesis (Kain 1992), as already discussed above, this hypothesis argues that job opportunities are not evenly distributed across a city, and that as such, individuals can be isolated from job opportunities by where they live (Musterd and R. Andersson 2006, 123). Especially for the United States, Kain (1992) has argued that job opportunities have increasingly shifted from the city to the suburbs, making job searches in inner-city neighbourhoods more inefficient as information about job vacancies decreases with distance (e.g. if wanted signs are used as a recruitment method). Moreover, the further away a job opportunity, the lower the wages, as cost and transportation time need to be taken into account. (Brueckner and Zenou 2003; Brueckner and Martin 1997; Coulson, Laing, and Wang 2001; Ihlanfeldt and Sjoquist 1991; Ihlanfeldt and Sjoquist 1990; S.C. Turner 1997; Wasmer and Zenou 2002) This is especially the case for poor neighbourhoods at the outskirt of the city, which tend to lack decent public transportation (Gobillon and Selod 2007). Another important mechanism is the symbolic dimension of neighbourhoods, wherein the image or reputation of a neighbourhood is seen as source of discrimination. Permentier, van Ham, and Bolt (2008) find that for the Dutch city of Utrecht, the perceived social status of a neighbourhood’s residents has a much greater impact on an area’s reputation than its actual physical characteristics. Moreover, if the social status of a neighbourhood is high, residents and non-residents agree more often in their assessment of the neighbourhood than if the status of a neighbourhood is low, in which case residents evaluate their neighbourhood more positively than non-residents. Residents are often aware of the external negative images of their neighbourhoods. Friedrichs and Blasius (2000, 51) show that, in Cologne, Germany, residents in deprived neighbourhoods expect friends and acquaintances to see their neighbourhood more negatively than they do themselves. The evaluation of strangers is expected to be even more negative than those of friends and acquaintances (Farwick 2012, 394; see R. Atkinson and Kintrea

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2001 for similar findings). Some have suggested that self-identification with deprived neighbourhoods can then result in further feelings of deprivation, of being ‘excluded’ from ‘mainstream’ society, and can have a negative impact on residents’ self-esteem (Dorsch, Kapphan, and Siebert 2002, 25; Wacquant 1993; M. Taylor 1998; Dean and Hastings 2000). Simultaneously, the anticipation of a negative image can foster the desire to distance oneself from a neighbourhood, by (for example) stigmatising other residents (Farwick 2001, 170; Permentier, Ham, and Bolt 2007). Wacquant (1993) argues that a neighbourhood’s negative reputation disincentivizes individuals from organising themselves around the issues of the neighbourhood. Similarly, Blokland (2008b) finds that residents refuse to get involved in their neighbourhood, as this would implicate them in becoming part of a stigmatised ‘community.’ The need to disassociate from a neighbourhood’s bad reputation can thus undermine social organisation (also Brodsky 1996) and the ability to fight for resources politically. Mazanti and Pløger (2003), on the contrary, show that, for Copenhagen, a negative neighbourhood reputation can also function as an impulse for participation and for fighting against a negative stigma (see also Permentier, Ham, and Bolt 2007, 208). Another strategy deployed by residents in order to deal with neighbourhood stigma is to differentiate within the neighbourhood, by categorizing other residents as morally inferior or superior (Hastings 2004; Wacquant 1993) or by classifying sub-neighbourhoods, blocks, or apartment levels into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ parts of the neighbourhood (Permentier, Ham, and Bolt 2007, 210). Negative neighbourhood images can also become important if they influence how residents are perceived outside of the neighbourhood. Important examples here are postal code discrimination and redlining practices that exist in the United States, but also in Germany and the Netherlands (Aalbers 2005). Redlining is a practice wherein specific addresses are used to assess risk, thereby making cell phone contracts or mortgages unavailable for residents in specific neighbourhoods. The labour market is another classical example of how neighbourhood stigma can impact life chances. Asking residents themselves, R. Atkinson and Kintrea (2001, 2290) find that a substantial part of the residents in deprived neighbourhoods see the reputation of their area as problematic for getting a job. However, for the German city of Hannover, Janßen (2004) finds that gatekeepers see candidates’ place of residence as only of limited importance.

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Finally, a further mechanism – which introduces an organisational perspective and is thus crucial for the argument presented here – has been formulated in the literature: the service model of neighbourhood effects. Jencks and Mayer (1990, 115) argue, for example, that “adults from outside the community who work in schools, police force and other neighbourhood institutions” will provide worse services in deprived neighbourhoods. Generally, service models focus on the availability and the quality of services that are delivered on the neighbourhood level such as in schools, medical services or preschool and after school programmes (Ellen and M. Turner 1997, 837f.; Musterd and R. Andersson 2006, 123). However, there are only a few empirical studies that consider these processes in greater detail (Leventhal and Brooks-Gunn 2000, 322; Sampson, Morenoff, and GannonRowley 2002, 458). The studies that do exist have mostly been conducted in the field of urban organisations and will be reviewed below. Before this, however, it is necessary to highlight why a focus on organisations is indeed crucial for an understanding of urban inequality.

Why Organisational Neighbourhood Inequality Matters Although organisations’ role in neighbourhood effects has been little explored, an organisational perspective is of increasing importance for several reasons. First, many of the neighbourhood studies mentioned above are rooted in a Chicago school perspective, and – accordingly – interpret social (dis)integration as a local process. Yet, inequality and poverty cannot be understood as exclusively local, since they are also shaped by social, economic, and political dynamics beyond the neighbourhood (McQuarrie and Marwell 2009, 255). One way of conceptualising these processes is through the meso-level of organisational actions that mediate between system levels, such as the state, and everyday life in the neighbourhood (McQuarrie and Marwell 2009, 256). Organisational sociologists working within an urban perspective have thus argued that it is crucial to conceptualise organisations more thoroughly in order to understand inequality in today’s cities. Second, public organisations provide an access to resource that – in contrast to private relations – does not depend on knowing the ‘right’ people but is granted to

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all citizens or residents of a country (or city). It is through public organisations that the state and citizens interact and public resources are distributed. If such processes vary locally, it poses questions about the role of the state in structural urban inequality that are obfuscated by a focus on private relations. Moreover, an organisational approach allows for a perspective that moves beyond questions of how (middle-class) residents choose specific neighbourhoods or whether social mix will bring resources to deprived residential areas, by interrogating how organisations react to concentrated poverty and how these forms of organising inequality become relevant to its reproduction. Third, organisational urban inequality has become a more pressing concern recently, as most European welfare states have severely cut funding (Huber and Stephens 2004), restructured public administration according to economic principles (Peetz, Lohr, and Hilbrich 2010), shifted towards a more local provision of welfare services, and instituted project-based systems of providing and financing such services through non-profit organisations (Marwell 2004; Allard 2008; Allard 2009; Eliasoph 2011). Some have described these changes as neoliberal (Harvey 2005; Wacquant 2009; Peck and Tickell 2002) or as a revanchist regime: “a reaction against the basic assumption of liberal urban policy, namely that government bears some responsibility for ensuring a decent minimum level of daily life for everyone” (Smith 1998, 1; cited in Blokland 2012, 490). Wacquant (2009) has conceptualised neo-liberalisation as a state project, in which a new form of statehood emerges to deal with new social questions, the generalisation of insecure wage work, and its impact on the urban proletariat (Wacquant 2009, 13; see also Peck 2001). State priorities have shifted from a focus on the protective to an emphasis on the disciplinary: Resources are transferred from the social to the penal wing of the state, and social and penal policies become more and more interrelated (Wacquant 2009, 13, 35). Others have been more circumspect in interpreting recent changes in social policy. Moreover, it can be questioned how well such concepts are transferable to the European context. Yet, also in Europe, most scholars agree that at least some elements of the above described changes in social policy have occurred, although some argue that the emerging picture is more nuanced than the one proposed by Wacquant (see e.g. Kazepov 2010). Nonetheless, little attention has been paid thus far to the extent to which these changes play out on a

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neighbourhood level, and to their consequences for (organisational) neighbourhood inequality.

From Neighbourhood Effects to Organisational Neighbourhood Inequality

Beyond the above discussed lack of theoretical interest in the role of organisations in urban inequality, there is also a problem in the way in which neighbourhood inequality has been conceptualised. This book suggests to shift our perspective on how neighbourhoods matter for inequality, not only in terms of organisations, but also in terms of a different conceptualisation – namely: neighbourhood inequality instead of neighbourhood effects. While prominent in the debate, the neighbourhood effect perspective is problematic as it forces an analysis of the role of neighbourhoods in terms of counterfactual effects net individual characteristics. Speaking of neighbourhood effects, the central question becomes, as famously put by Mayer and Jencks (1989, 1441): Do “poor children living in overwhelmingly poor neighbourhoods find it harder to escape poverty than poor children living in more affluent neighbourhoods”? In short: Would the identical poor person do better in an affluent instead of in a poor neighbourhood? This kind of question suggests a counterfactual logic of causal effect, which defines a treatment (here: poor neighbourhood) in order to ask: What would have happened if a population had not received this treatment? Yet, in the current debate ‘not receiving the treatment’ de facto implies ‘living in an affluent neighbourhood.’ In so doing, the literature suggests that neighbourhoods only affect residents to the extent that the life chances of poor people would change if they would live in more affluent neighbourhoods. It is clearly problematic to understand the impact of neighbourhoods on inequality in such a limited way. For one, the affluent neighbourhood thereby becomes the seemingly neutral setting from which the effect of poor neighbourhoods is estimated. Yet, poor people living in affluent neighbourhoods might simply face different problems than those in a poor neighbourhood. As Bourdieu suggests, a specific form of capital might be

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necessary to “unlock” the advantages that a neighbourhood theoretically provides (Bourdieu 1999, 127). Several qualitative studies have shown that the “high social costs less advantaged individuals pay as they experience racial and class discrimination and isolation in economically heterogeneous areas may outweigh the sum of the other environmental advantages” (O. D. Johnson 2008, 242; see also Hamilton 1968; Rosenbaum, Kulieke, and Rubinowitz 1988; Wells and Crain 1997). A poor family might have to deal with high crime rates and poor health services in their disadvantaged neighbourhood; living in a more middle-class area, however, might come with more costly equivalent services. Although, in comparison, there might not be a measurable improvement in such a family’s outcome, this does not mean that living with crime and poor health services has no effect. But we might not be able to measure these effects, since the affluent neighbourhood is not simply the counterfactual to the poor neighbourhood, but comes with its own mechanisms. Thus, even if neighbourhood effects might not be apparent by comparing the outcomes of similar groups in different neighbourhood settings, neighbourhoods might nevertheless matter for the reproduction of social inequality – especially within neighbourhood organisations. Rather than thinking about inequality in terms of neighbourhood effects, this book suggests focussing on neighbourhood inequality in a broader sense. While the neighbourhood effect perspective suggests that we can infer what neighbourhoods provide by comparing the outcomes of similar (poor) people subject to different neighbourhood ‘treatments,’ a perspective of neighbourhood inequality explicitly analyses what resources privileged neighbourhoods make available for better-off individuals in comparison to those that disadvantaged neighbourhoods provide for poor individuals. Even if poor residents do not do better in rich neighbourhoods, the concentration of wealth and poverty might nevertheless have an effect of perpetuating social (dis)advantage if service provision differs between neighbourhoods. Youth programmes in poor neighbourhoods might encourage young people to enrol in practical job training rather than to apply for university, whereas similar programmes in privileged neighbourhoods might offer advice for college applications. If children steal something in a school in a better-off neighbourhood, teachers might advise children and parents to see a counsellor, whereas in a poor school, they might rather call the police. None of these actions is inherently ‘caused’ by

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the neighbourhood, but neighbourhoods can become places in which specific routines are institutionalised, with varying effects for the children growing up there. The extent to which such “spatial profits” (Bourdieu 1999, 126f.; also Blokland et al. 2016) are transferrable when poor people move to better-off neighbourhoods can then also be explicitly researched as a second step. Empirically, this approach moves away from a focus on outcomes and indicators and requires a qualitative approach focused on daily understandings and practices in neighbourhoods and neighbourhood organisations. By comparing what different groups ‘get out’ of their neighbourhoods, we can explore, illustrate, and make plausible how neighbourhood conditions can add to already present (dis)advantages. Local public organisations are an excellent starting point for this perspective, since they distribute public resources and mediate between neighbourhoods and the state – and should provide social services of similar quality to all neighbourhoods. Analysing how service provision differs in deprived and privileged neighbourhoods, thus allows for a conceptualisation of the mechanisms through which neighbourhood inequality comes about in practice. What, then, do studies that have focused on urban organisations tell us about such processes? In the following section, the research examining organisations from an urban studies perspective is summarized.

2.2 Organisations from an Urban Research Perspective

Several studies have explicitly looked at the relation between neighbourhoods and organisations. However, they have done so in ways that are only of limited benefit in understanding how organisational practices vary between different neighbourhood contexts. First of all, within urban studies, organisations are often treated as an expression of specific neighbourhood dynamics rather than as something to be analysed in

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their own right. Theories about how organisations are shaped by field effects, inter-organisational networks, or the need for legitimacy (see Chapter 3, also McQuarrie and Marwell 2009, 254), for example, are often neglected. Instead, organisations are mainly seen as locations in which the ‘real’ object of analysis can be observed. What constitutes this ‘real’ object depends on the theoretical orientation. Within a Chicago School urban sociology, organisations are places in which micro-level processes take place, and where community, group norms, social order and inter-residential networks are built, expressed, and reproduced (McQuarrie and Marwell 2009, 250f.). Organisations become “empty shells within which neighbourhood interaction takes place” (McQuarrie and Marwell 2009, 254). “New Urban Sociologists” (Castells 1979; Harvey 1973; Zukin 1980), on the other hand, are interested in organisations as a form of capitalism expressing itself (spatially) (McQuarrie and Marwell 2009, 251). Urban political economists treat organisations as “determined by either the needs of class conflict or the needs of capital accumulation” (McQuarrie and Marwell 2009, 254). Accordingly, organisations become tools of either emancipation or oppression (see also Merrifield 2002; Sites 2003), and are seen as resulting from the systemic need for capital accumulation or state legitimacy (Harvey 1978; Peck 2001). In both perspectives, organisations are not analysed as objects unto themselves, or as productive elements of social life, but as “role players in a broader argument” (McQuarrie and Marwell 2009, 255). Organisational perspectives, following the so-called resources approach within neighbourhood effect studies, provide slightly more insights into how service provision might vary locally. Here, as seen previously, it is suggested that private, non-profit, or public organisations, such as childcare centres, preschools, and healthcare facilities, differ in accessibility and quality between neighbourhoods (Small and Stark 2005, 1015; Galster 2012; Gestring and Janßen 2002, 155; Janßen 2004, 27f.). However, few studies have systematically analysed how quality standards, as well as the mere availability of organisations, fluctuate between neighbourhoods (Small and Stark 2005, 1016), or how these differences come about. Those few studies that have been conducted are summarised in the following sections.

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Quantity of Organisations in Poor Neighbourhoods

In terms of quantity, Wilson argued as early as 1987 that poor neighbourhoods are deprived of organisations such as schools, churches, and day-cares (W.J. Wilson 1987; Brooks-Gunn, Duncan, and Aber 1997b). Within this line of thought, it is assumed that organisations disappear when there are few middle-class families to support them (Small and Stark 2005; W.J. Wilson 1987). Despite being present in the debate on neighbourhood effects, the hypothesis that poor neighbourhoods are devoid of local organisations has rarely been tested (Small and Stark 2005, 1014). Exceptions include a study by Coulton, Korbin, and Su (1996), which examined caregivers of young children and included an investigation of the facilities, such as supermarkets and childcare centres, available to them in their neighbourhoods. Caregivers in low-risk neighbourhoods report significantly higher availability than those in high-risk neighbourhoods, which might be biased since the study measured perceptions rather than the objective availability of specific organisations. Moreover, Fuller and Liang (1996) estimate the supply of childcare centres by geographic location in Massachusetts with mixed results: While the supply is higher in postal codes where more residents relied on welfare, it is lower in the poorest five percent of postal codes as well as in postal codes with high concentrations of single parents. Similarly, Siegel and Loman (1991, 28) show for Illinois that postal codes with the highest concentration of low-income families are less likely to have childcare centres in comparison to other areas. For Massachusetts, Queralt and Witte (1998, 40) report similar findings using tract-level data: supply of full-day childcare centres is significantly lower in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. While these findings are based on state-level data or on suburban cities, Small and Stark report different trends for New York City. Here, the probability of finding a childcare centre is highest in the poorest tracts (Small and Stark 2005, 1023). They also find that this tendency fluctuates according to the source of the centre’s funding: while privately-funded centres are less accessible, publicly-funded centres are more likely to be available in poor neighbourhoods (Small and Stark 2005). They argue that this points to an important gap in the argument on institutional depriva-

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tion, since it relies on a market orientation, which interprets all geographical distributions as the result of ecological competition for space and resources. The presence of neighbourhood organisations is thereby explained by market forces, such as the presence of middle-class residents who are able to sustain these organisations. This perspective ignores an important force – the role of the state in shaping the distribution of resources in cities. As Logan and Molotch (1987) have argued, state regulatory practices (such as growth control or urban renewal plans) shape, constrain and complicate the operation of the market on the neighbourhood level (Small and Stark 2005, 1033). This points to the fact that the existence, form, and quantity of organisations is highly context dependent. Accordingly, some have argued that the effects of public service differences between neighbourhoods should be less severe in Western European countries, where welfare states often provide compensatory services to disadvantaged neighbourhoods (M. Powell and Boyne 2001). Allard (2009; 2008) has added a further mechanism shaping the urban distribution of organisations and services. To systematically compare the availability of social services, Allard calculates a service accessibility score which reflects a census tract’s access to social services, weighted for poor residents within three miles to control for demand (Allard 2008, 29). He finds an evident mismatch: “On average, census tracts with high or extremely high poverty rates – those with the greatest demand or need for assistance – have access to about 30% fewer service providers than the average residential tract in each city” (Allard 2008, 29). In contrast to Small’s argument that the state in conjunction with the market shapes the availability of services, or Wilson’s that it is a purely market-based phenomenon, Allard argues that the privatization of many social services, now provided by nonprofit organisations, makes service availability more dependent on the residential decisions of NGOs – which might again be shaped by the market. Allard elaborates that agencies often experience difficulties in finding office space in highpoverty areas; moreover, location choice is also influenced by an organisation’s need to access sources of government revenue, fee-based income, or private support, which might push it to locate outside of high-poverty areas.

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In summation, findings on the mere presence of organisations in different neighbourhood contexts are inconclusive. Now, what do we know about the quality of the organisations that are present?

Quality of Organisations in Poor Neighbourhoods

The notion that service quality might also differ between neighbourhoods has been part of the service model from the beginning. Jencks and Mayer (1990) suggested that neighbourhood organisations might treat people differently depending on local context (Small and Newman 2001, 33): Primary schools in affluent neighbourhoods might find it easier to recruit excellent teachers or the police might follow a zero-tolerance approach in poor neighbourhoods increasing the probability of a child acquiring a criminal record (Jencks and Mayer 1990, 115). These questions have become ever more relevant with the increasing international tendency toward privatisation in education as well as in other areas. Quality of service provision might therefore not only be bound to specific neighbourhoods, but access to service might also be increasingly limited to those who can both afford to live in specific neighbourhoods and access the right kind of private organisations there. While this has long been an established trend in the United States and the United Kingdom, such tendencies are also becoming prevalent in continental Europe (Ball and Youdell 2007; for Germany see e.g. Wrase and Helbig 2016). Yet, even before considering the differences between the private sector and the state, information about quality differences within public organisations in distinct neighbourhoods is somewhat limited. Qualitative studies have shown that organisations in deprived neighbourhoods do provide residents with important resources, which might be seen, in a broader sense, as a way of providing ‘quality.’ Delgado (1997) demonstrates that small businesses, such as beauty parlours, can link clients to health-related information, services, and free goods. McRoberts (2003) explores how urban African-American churches can also provide resources, such as information on jobs, medical care, and education, (in part) through their ties to

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other organisations. Small (2009b) shows how childcare centres in New York City provide clients with many kinds of resources for themselves and their children: information (e.g. safety education, child health information, school system information), direct services (such as free meals, healthcare, speech therapy for children, and legal aid), and other resources, such as scholarships or employment (Small 2006). However, these studies often do not compare how such services and the availability of resources more generally differ between deprived and privileged neighbourhoods. An exception is Small (2009b), who compares the number of referral ties (i.e. directors refer parents to other organisations) and collaborative ties (brokering services for other organisations) between childcare centres in varying neighbourhood contexts. Small ultimately argues that deprived neighbourhoods are often better prepared to support poor parents and to link them to useful resources. Yet, the exact number of referral and collaborative ties might not be the only crucial measure of inequality in service provision. While Small supplies an outcome of organisational practices (the number of referral or collaborative ties), there is little focus on the actual organisational practices themselves. Questions such as who is referred through such ties, or what kind of referrals are seen as relevant, require further attention. While most studies have thus not focused on how different organisational practices develop in different neighbourhood contexts, there are some exceptions. Bauder (2001) for example, analyses neighbourhoods’ role in organisational routines by looking at the case of community-based organisations that provide career and education-related services to young people in poor neighbourhoods. He shows how organisational practices often reflect stereotypes about the neighbourhoods in which they are active. Based on such stereotypes, organisations develop strategies for counselling young people that respond to their – often stigmatising – cultural interpretations of the neighbourhood context. Through this process “neighborhood effects become self-fulfilling prophecies” (Bauder 2001, 605). In Bauder’s analysis, the ways in which neighbourhoods have an impact on organisations is however limited to symbolic effects. In contrast, this book will further develop our understanding of the broader relationship between organisational practices and local context by conceptualising neighbourhoods not only as symbolic entities but also

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as social and administrative units that encompass specific social compositions as well as specific policy interventions, programmes, and funding schemes.

2.3 Neighbourhoods, Schools, and Inequality

As we have seen, the literature on neighbourhood effects is limited in its ability to explain the role of organisations in neighbourhood inequality. Similarly, the literature on urban organisations has not sufficiently focused on how organisational practices differ between neighbourhoods. As the focus here is on primary schools as central organisations in the conceptualisation of neighbourhood inequality, let us turn to the literature that has explicitly focused on schools and neighbourhoods. Three streams can be isolated: First, research on the relationship between neighbourhoods and schools with a view to how neighbourhoods structure access to schools, and in turn, how school quality shapes segregation and the local real estate market; second, research on the role of social composition in schools, which often correlates with the social composition of the surrounding neighbourhood; finally, studies that have explicitly tried to disentangle neighbourhood and school effects in order to establish the dominance of one of the other context.

Schools in Urban Research: Outside the School Gates

Beginning in the 1960s, geographical studies have analysed how schools and other educational organisations are distributed within cities, demonstrating that the availability of certain school types varies by neighbourhood and can impact students’ access and educational attainment (Geipel 1965; Meusburger 1998, 291ff.; Freytag and Jahnke 2015b, 111; Freytag, Jahnke, and Kramer 2015, 57). Gramberg (1998) has shown for Amsterdam that the highest (academic) tracks of

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secondary school are more likely to be found in better-off neighbourhoods, and that better-off neighbourhoods have more – and often also more exclusive – primary schools (such as international schools) (see also Sykes and Musterd, 2011: 1309). There has also been a renewed interest recently in the role of education in today’s cities (T. Butler and Hamnett 2007; Thiem 2009, 154; Holloway et al. 2010; Talyor 2009). However, most of this research has also stayed ‘outside the school gates’ by focusing on access to schools in different neighbourhoods rather than on the organisational practices within such organisations. Within this literature, geographies of education focus on the question of how education-provision and space interact in times of neo-liberal restructuring. Research has highlighted the competition for access to ‘good’ schools and how it shapes the city by intensifying socio-spatial segregation. In Berlin and other cities in Europe, the relation between space and access to schools is often straightforward. Schools that are perceived as ‘good’ or ‘popular’ are often located in areas with a privileged social composition; access to such schools is structured by place of residence as assignment to schools is mostly organised by means of catchment areas (van Zanten 2005, 158; Noreisch 2007). While systems of choice – theoretically – could change this relationship and enable access to ‘popular’ schools for all children, when introduced such systems have engendered paradoxical effects. While parental choices have always influenced educational segregation, educational quasi-markets have increased such divisions (Warrington 2005, 799). Butler and Hamnett show that, in London, parental choice is actually rather limited within a system that only provides a limited number of places deemed acceptable by (middle-class) parents. To allocate access to these ‘popular’ schools ‘distance from school’ becomes the most important means of getting in, even in choice-based systems. Thus, while choice was thought to improve access to education, it has in reality limited it to those who are able to compete on the housing market. (T. Butler and Hamnett 2011b, 35) This situation has resulted in the growing importance of education access in middle-class parents’ decisions of where to live (T. Butler and Hamnett 2011a, 36f.; T. Butler and Hamnett 2011b). Affluent parents can buy into middle-class areas that provide the ‘highest-performing’ schools, thereby pushing housing prices significantly higher in neighbourhoods with popular schools

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(Cheshire and Sheppard 2004; Gibbons and Machin 2006; Freytag and Jahnke 2015b, 111).4 A different line of research has investigated how parents that cannot or refuse to move assure that their children can nonetheless access socially homogenous schools that they perceive as ‘good’ – either by going private, by bypassing allocation regulations (e.g. by means of fake addresses), or by segregating their children within a school (e.g. through special tracks or the usage of social networks) (T. Butler 2003; T. Butler and Hamnett 2011b; Raveaud and Zanten 2007, 121; Noreisch 2007; Reinoso 2008). In Berlin, Germany, Noreisch (2007, 1307f.) shows that parental choice is deployed even in systems that do not officially allow for it, while parents’ values and how they personally interpret the rules are essential to the employed strategies.

While this literature provides interesting insights into middle-class parents’ school choices and the consequences for neighbourhoods, it remains limited by staying ‘outside the gate’ thereby accepting (as we will see in more detail in the next section) the quantitatively well-established relationship between a school’s social composition and pupils’ educational attainment (see e.g. Webber and T. Butler 2007). However, this viewpoint veils the degree to which specific social compositions do not per se create good or bad schools, but how the effect of a certain social composition within the student body is inherently linked to organisation’s reaction to it. The question is thus not only why middle-class parents decide to avoid specific schools and what would change if they sent their children to the local school, but also how schools adapt to their neighbourhood surroundings and how this adaptation might increase inequality beyond the choices made by middleclass parents. This also shifts the focus away from the behaviour of middle-class parents toward a critical analysis of what public organisations structurally require to provide services of similar quality, independent of the local context.

4

Others have shown that, historically, not only middle-class families have moved for the ‘right’ school, but also schools have established themselves in areas that help them to maintain and reinforce a prestigious position within the “field” of schools (Gamsu 2016).

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Research into School Composition: Social Mix and Inequality

Research focussing on school composition might also be useful for understanding how neighbourhoods can impact schools and their practices. Since the Coleman report (Coleman et al. 1966), scholars have discussed the effect of the social composition of student bodies on school performance. While this literature does not focus on neighbourhoods per se, the social composition of schools is generally seen as linked to its surrounding neighbourhoods. As Sykes and Musterd (2011, 1308) state, “neighbourhoods play a role in sorting students into schools and in conditioning families’ school choices, and thus in informing the composition of local schools and their internal school processes.” Within the debate on the role of social compositions in students’ educational attainment, a similar discussion unfolds as in the research on neighbourhood effects. While students generally perform better in high socioeconomic status (SES) schools, the question arises as to whether the SES of peer students has a separate effect beyond the individual characteristics of students, and thus if segregation by social status widens the achievement gap between high and low SES students (van Ewijk and Sleegers 2010, 135). Despite the numerous studies conducted, there is still no consensus on this question (Thrupp, Lauder, and Robinson 2002, 484). There is substantial variation in the findings, ranging from no effect to strong peer group effects (van Ewijk and Sleegers 2010, 135). The effect of school composition has been measured on college attendance (Michael 1961; R. Turner 1964; A. Wilson 1959; Crain 1971; see also Jencks and Mayer 1990), on high school graduation rates (Bryk and Driscoll 1988; see also Jencks and Mayer 1990), school drop-out rates (Evans, Oates, and Schwab 1992), and on delinquency (Jencks and Mayer 1990). While it is almost impossible to provide an all-encompassing overview of this literature, the selection of studies presented in the following should demonstrate the range of findings and approaches. Caldas and Bankston (1997, 269) analyse the relationship between the socioeconomic status of peers and individual academic achievement, while controlling for several of students’ socio-demographic characteristics. Using OLS regression, they find that the social status of peers has a significant and substantive indepen-

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dent effect on the academic achievement of individual students. They conclude that attending school with classmates who come from higher SES backgrounds seems to have a positive effect on individual achievement, independent of a student’s own SES background, race, and other factors (Caldas and Bankston 1997, 274f.). Using a 1997 census of eighth-grade achievement in Chile, McEwan also studies the effect of peer groups on student achievement. He takes the problem of endogeneity into account by including school fixed effects that control for unobserved family and student characteristics. McEwan finds that the overall average of maternal education in the peer group is an important determinant of individual achievement, although it is subject to diminishing marginal returns. (McEwan 2003, 131) Opdenakker et al. (2002) analyse the effect of secondary schools, teachers, and classes on mathematics achievement in Flanders at the end of the second year of secondary education using a multi-level analyses. They find an important effect of group composition with regard to SES, as well as to the intellectual composition at the class-level, even after controlling for teachers’ differences and learning climate. (Opdenakker et al. 2002, 399f., 421) Other studies, however, have not found similar effects. Using multi-level modelling, Bondi (1991) analyses the effect of socio-economic composition on the reading attainment of primary school children in a Scottish education authority at ages 7 to 8 and 11 to 12. While she finds significant variation between primary schools in the performance of children from similar backgrounds, these do not seem to relate to the socio-economic composition of the school (Bondi 1991, 203, 213). Similarly, while Hutchison (2003, 25, 38) finds a composition effect of mean score and of pupil turnover on reading skills for students in the South-East of England, there is only a considerably weaker (if any) effect of free school meals – a measurement of a school’s SES. Accordingly, some have argued that the school composition effect is more an artefact of statistical procedures than a relevant effect of its own (Nash 2003). This critique points to the fact that – similar to neighbourhood effects research – studies on the social composition of schools are plagued by methodological issues. Van Ewijk and Sleegers (2010) argue that many of the variations in findings can be explained by the types of samples used, by the ways in which social background is operationalised, and by the kinds of estimation models employed (van Ewijk

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and Sleegers 2010, 135). Here, similar to the research on neighbourhood effects, questions of endogeneity and omitted-variable bias present serious challenges for measuring the effect of a school’s social composition (van Ewijk and Sleegers 2010, 139; also Harker and Tymms 2004; Nash 2003). While the discussion has mostly focused on establishing the existence of school composition effects, less attention has been paid to the question of how these effects come about. In this sense, the school composition research again resembles the research on neighbourhood effects. As van Ewijk and Sleegers state (2010: 135): “few studies have tried to investigate the channels through which peer group composition would affect achievement. Most studies treat the effect as a “black box”.” Nonetheless, several mechanisms have been proposed, although few studies have explicitly looked at these processes.

Peer Group Processes Within the debate on school composition, the most prominent mechanisms are peer group processes. From the beginning, the Coleman report (Coleman et al. 1966) suggested that school compositional effects were caused by peer group effects (Thrupp, Lauder, and Robinson 2002, 484). Similar to research on neighbourhood effects, the notion that students have an impact on each other has been more prominent than a focus on organisational effects. Different pathways have been suggested. One strand of the literature argues that peer groups shape the atmosphere, beliefs and habits towards school, and also create different forms of social pressure to ‘perform’ in school. Some authors argue that the average SES may effect students’ willingness to ““shine” on school-related criteria” (Harker and Tymms 2004, 179) rather than to engage in “subverting the school regime” (Harker and Tymms 2004, 179f.; Bankston and Caldas 1996; Brown and Steinberg 1990; Ornstein and Levine 1990; Reyes and Jason 1993; see also Caldas and Bankston 1997, 270). This is similar to the ‘epidemic’ model in the neighbourhood effect literature, suggesting that behaviour and aspirations will “rub off on other students” (Kahlenberg 2003, 54) as will a “culture of anti-

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achievement” (Kahlenberg 2003, 54; see also Thrupp 1999, 33). Others have argued that there are direct learning processes between students that make fellow students important for individual achievement (Thrupp 1999, 33). In more integrated settings, poor pupils can “tap into [...] knowledge that middle-class children take for granted: knowledge gained from visits to the library, to the museum, or from travel” (Kahlenberg 2003, 50). Finally, another strand of the literature focuses on psychological processes of being positioned within a group. This approach indicates that students from low SES backgrounds will be better adjusted and develop a more positive self-concept if they visit schools with other children from lower SES backgrounds. This has been called the ‘frog pond’ effect as well as the ‘big-fish-little-pond effect.’ The basic assumption is that an individual perceives his or her own educational attainment differently depending on the level of achievement of others around him or her. A student’s attainment will then be affected by his or her relative position within a group, “with individuals of a given potential attainment faring better if they are near the top of their group” (Hutchison 2003, 27; also Burstein 1980; Davis 1966; Baumert, Stanat, and Watermann 2006, 102). However, over the last 20 years, it has been argued that the original hypothesis about school compositional effects needs to be extended, as social composition “can have a far wider effect on school organization and performance than originally conceived” (Thrupp, Lauder, and Robinson 2002, 484). While the origin of the social composition hypothesis focused on peer group processes, other hypotheses about the potential link between social composition and achievement have been formulated since then.

Instructional and Teaching Effects Teachers and their reactions towards specific social compositions have increasingly become the centre of attention in the literature. Some have argued that the quality of teachers differs between schools, as schools in privileged contexts have an easier time recruiting the most qualified teachers. While obviously dependant

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on the system by which teachers are allocated to their schools, certain results do point in this direction. Opdenakker et al. (2002, 399f, 423), for example, in their analysis of the effects of secondary schools, teachers, and classes on mathematics achievement of students in Flanders, show that differences in recruitment between schools as well as between classes can explain part of the variance in student mathematic achievement. Others have shown, for the United States, that teaching vacancies are harder to fill in high-poverty schools and that teachers in these schools more often lack the appropriate licensing and experience, and often score less well on teacher exams (Kahlenberg 2003, 67; Thrupp 1999, 36). Others have argued that teachers, at first, do not differ in their qualification, but adapt their expectations and their commitment to the student population at hand. Here, an interaction between the types of students and a teacher’s morale and commitment is hypothesised, resulting in higher expectations in middle-class schools (Harker and Tymms 2004, 180; Kahlenberg 2003, 72). It is important to take these processes into account, since in both public and academic debates, teachers often appear as “self-enclosed, thing-like substances that simply are either strong or weak” (Paulle 2013, 167), with too little focus on the processes that actually shape how “teachers (fail to) become highly skilled” (Paulle 2013, 167). Another argument focuses on the actual activity of teaching. Here, it is suggested that teachers adjust their teaching styles to the kind of students in their classrooms (Harker and Tymms 2004; van Ewijk and Sleegers 2010, 135). This is partly due to the fact that students can actively construct diverging classroom practices and thereby influence what is taught (Thrupp 1999, 35). While some have argued that such processes can be linked to the social status of students (Jones 1991; see also Thrupp 1999, 35), McFarland (2001) and Paulle (2013, 168) emphasize that it is not enough to assume that specific socio-economic (or racial) backgrounds explain disruptive classroom behaviour. Rather, there is a mutual relationship between student behaviour and teachers’ actions. McFarland, focussing on symbolic interactions, argues that teachers need to provide social opportunities for students to engage in disruptive behaviour. (McFarland 2001) While disciplinary aspects of

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classroom practices might differ between schools with diverging social compositions, social background of the student body is certainly not the only explanation. Moreover, teachers might adapt their instructional practices to the mean ability of their student population, resulting in dramatic differences in the curricula between schools with mostly poor or mostly privileged students. A student might then learn more or less depending on the level of the other students around her. (Burstein 1980) In poor schools, high-level courses are offered less often, the curriculum is watered down to less complexity and teaching styles focus more on memorization than on problem-solving thinking (Kahlenberg 2003, 73; Thrupp 1999, 35). How exactly these processes take place and why teachers adapt their practices to their student population is, however, rarely theorised or empirically researched.

Parents Another pathway to explaining social composition effects is a focus on the parents. Here, the assumption is that middle-class schools will, for several reasons, profit from greater parental support (Opdenakker et al. 2002). First, middle-class parents are expected to be more involved in homework-help and in signalling the importance of school to their children (Kahlenberg 2003, 63). Second, when parents volunteer in classrooms, this can free up teachers’ time and thus raise the average achievement of all children (Kahlenberg 2003, 63). Third, it is presumed that parents with a higher socio-economic status will insist on high standards, a challenging curriculum, and highly-qualified teachers (Kahlenberg 2003, 64). Finally, middle-class parents are more likely to ensure adequate financial resources for a school, e.g. by supplementing school budgets through private fundraising (Kahlenberg 2003, 65). However, to what extend these expectations are justified has been little researched. Studies on the role of middle-class residents in deprived neighbourhoods force some of the above assumptions to appear very optimistic (see e.g. T. Butler 2003; Reay et al. 2007; Van Eijk 2010).

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Organisational and Management Processes Finally, some have argued that student educational attainment might also be impacted by their school’s organisational and management processes. These processes in effect support the instructional work of teachers by making schools run smoothly and safely: “These processes might be seen to include the work schools do when monitoring truancy, addressing the ‘social welfare’ needs of ‘at risk’ students, organizing meetings and assemblies, maintaining buildings and resources, raising money, recruiting staff and promoting themselves in the marketplace.” (Thrupp 1999, 37) While the above mechanisms have been proposed theoretically, little research has attempted to investigate them directly. An important exception is Thrupp’s work, which qualitatively analyses how the social composition effect might come about. To do so, he compares the experiences of students with matching socio-economic backgrounds and prior attainment and orientations in secondary schools with different social compositions (Thrupp 1999, 45). He finds that almost all of the suggested mechanisms can be observed: In middle-class schools, students from lower socio-economic backgrounds were exposed to peers who brought a wider range of experience relevant to the curriculum, had higher levels of prior attainment, experienced more school success, had higher academic goals and aspirations, and attended school more regularly. Moreover, fellow students tended to be less involved in ‘alienated’ student subcultures, and there was less violence and conflict. (Thrupp 1999, 9, 123) Beyond such peer group processes, instructional processes also differed e.g. a more academic school programme, a wider range of extracurricular activities, more demanding texts, more engaged classes, more demanding assessment and reporting, as well as better access to expensive video or computer resources (Thrupp 1999, 123f.). Also, teachers tended to be better qualified and more motivated (Thrupp 1999, 9). Finally, middle-class schools also differed in their organisational and management processes and had more efficient daily routines, were less pressured in their discipline systems and, in general, had fewer management issues, such as student and staffing problems, and more financial resources (Thrupp 1999, 124). Thrupp summarises his findings as supporting but at the same time extending reference group explanations for a social composition effect: “The school mix effect seems best understood as the cumulative outcome

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of numerous smaller effects resulting from differences in each of these areas among the schools, all of which were related in turn to their intake characteristics” (Thrupp 1999, 123).

As we have seen, the literature on social composition effects on student attainment shares many of the limitations of the literature on neighbourhood effects: By far, the greatest focus has been on the methodological challenge of establishing the very existence of such an effect. Moreover, the mechanisms that have been proposed often only look at reference group processes between students, or are simply presumed and not directly researched. While Thrupp’s work is clearly an exception, his work is positioned within educational social composition research and thus does not consider how neighbourhoods affect school processes beyond the mere shaping of (social) compositions. Moreover, his work follows the idea of effects, by questioning whether students with similar socio-economic background might do better in middle-class rather than in poor schools. However, as argued above, if we think about organisational neighbourhood inequality rather than about neighbourhood or school effects, a better understanding of how rich and poor neighbourhoods as localities can become important for reproducing, and thus increasing, the (dis)advantage for their already advantaged or disadvantaged residents becomes possible. Even if poor students might not do better in rich schools, the concentration of wealth might be of importance for perpetuating social (dis)advantage.

School Effects and Neighbourhood Effects

While school effect research does not traditionally deal directly with neighbourhoods, neighbourhood effect studies and school effect studies have recently begun to interconnect. Some studies have thus explicitly looked at the relation between both settings. These studies, however, aim to analyse which context has stronger

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effects on student achievement, rather than to understand how neighbourhoods might have an impact on organisational practices in schools. The question becomes, whether the neighbourhood effect on student attainment is actually a school effect, and whether independent neighbourhood effects exist, and if so, then which effect is potentially more important. Findings have been divergent and partly inconclusive. Some have found that the neighbourhood indeed has an additional explanatory effect on student attainment. For instance, for the United States, Ainsworth (2002) shows that tenth graders’ performance in mathematics as well as time spent on homework is affected by neighbourhood characteristics, an effect only partial mediated through school factors. Similarly, Pong and Hao (2007) show for a nationally representative sample of 17000 secondary pupils in the United States that the interplay of school and neighbourhood is complicated. While they find that for non-immigrant students, the neighbourhood effect is completely mediated by the school, the association between school attainment and neighbourhood conditions remains significant for young people with an immigrant background, even after controlling for school factors. In Sweden, E. Andersson and Subramanian (2006) find that neighbourhood characteristics related to socioeconomic resources and demographic developments have an effect on individual educational outcomes. For Germany, Helbig (2010) shows, based on the case of Berlin, that neighbourhoods do matter, even if school context is taken into account. Based on data on the competency development of elementary students between fourth and sixth grades, Helbig argues that deprived neighbourhoods do not show an additional negative effect, but that living in privileged neighbourhoods favours student development independently of individual characteristics. Yet, Helbig also points out that the social composition indicators at the individual, school, and neighbourhood level are not coherent, which reduces the reliability of these findings. (Helbig 2010, 656) Other studies highlight that neighbourhood effects disappear once school contexts are considered, thus suggesting that neighbourhood effects are actually school effects. Sykes and Musterd analyse the effect of neighbourhood contexts and schools simultaneously, based on a longitudinal dataset of 9897 secondary school students in the Netherlands. To do so, they employ cross-classified models that estimate

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the influence of each context while controlling for the other respective context. (Sykes and Musterd 2011, 1316) They find that neighbourhood characteristics no longer significantly impact student achievement once the school context, as well as a set of individual and family background variables, are taken into account. This indicates that schools are a pathway through which neighbourhood effects might be transmitted. (Sykes and Musterd 2011, 1307) Similarly, Kauppinen (2008, 379) finds that, in Helsinki, Finland, the impact of the neighbourhood on future educational choices (academic vs. vocational tracks) is largely mediated by the social composition of the school. Once both contexts, school and neighbourhood, are included in the model, schools prove to be of greater importance (Kauppinen 2008, 387). Kauppinen concludes that the neighbourhood’s “main role is selecting the pupils to the school” (2008, 382). Similarly, in Sweden, Brännström (2008, 473) finds that if school and neighbourhood effects are analysed simultaneously, the between-neighbourhood variability in students’ outcomes is greatly reduced. He concludes that school characteristics matter much more than neighbourhood settings. Similar to what we have seen in the literature on neighbourhood and school composition effects, the mechanisms by which neighbourhoods and schools interact have mostly been black-boxed within the debate. However, if mechanisms are taken into account, it has mostly been suggested that similar peer processes will take place at the neighbourhood as well as at the school level. Kauppinen (2008, 380), for example, argues that “many of the suggested mechanisms linking characteristics of the neighbourhoods population to educational outcomes of young people could at least partly take place in schools” – namely processes of ‘contagion’ or socialisation (see Brännström 2008; Helbig 2010 for similar arguments; Mayer and Jencks 1989). Others have argued that neighbourhoods and schools are not entrenched contexts for all students: if children do not go to school where they live, school and neighbourhood context could have diverging effects (Sykes and Musterd 2011, 1311). Some have suggested that neighbourhoods might impact school processes through processes of ‘intergenerational closure’ at the residential level. Coleman (1988, S107) has argued that close networks between parents outside of school will help to monitor and guide behaviour and thus to establish effective norms in school as well. In any case, in all these arguments, neighbourhoods impact schools by effecting students’ norms through peer group effects.

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Surprisingly little attention has been paid to the question of how neighbourhoods might have effects for schools through other pathways than peer group effects. Hardly any research has looked at how neighbourhoods might influence what organisations provide rather than on what children ‘do to each other.’ An exception is the work of Lupton, who explicitly asks how neighbourhoods impact school practices. Building on the work of Thrupp (1999), she argues that not all deprived contexts will have similar effects on schools. Therefore, she does not compare schools in deprived and privileged neighbourhoods, but schools in different disadvantaged contexts. Two of her sample schools are inner-city schools, which are located in very deprived areas of mixed ethnicity; the other two schools lie outside of urban centres with mostly white populations and lower levels of deprivation (Lupton 2004, 7). Lupton’s work is based on qualitative interviews with professionals and head teachers in schools, local education authority representatives, and unstructured observations, as well as an analysis of general data on the schools’ socio-economic surroundings (Lupton 2005, 592f.). While Lupton is interested in differences within the ostensibly homogenous group of schools in deprived neighbourhoods, she also highlights similarities. In all contexts, teachers describe their schools as different to schools in less deprived neighbourhoods (Lupton 2004, 8). Teachers highlight the additional learning needs of their pupils and the pressures that come with it (Lupton 2005, 595; Lupton 2004, 8). Moreover, teachers describe how material poverty can interfere with the curriculum, such as when pupils do not bring basic equipment to school (Lupton 2005, 595; Lupton 2004, 9). Most importantly, however, the interviewed educational professionals see their schools as a “charged emotional environment” with many children, who are “anxious, traumatised, unhappy, jealous, angry or vulnerable” (Lupton 2004, 9). As students share emotions with teachers, this creates more intense teacher/students relationships that are described as “mothering” or “social work” (Lupton 2004, 10). At the same time, these emotionally charged environments create additional tasks, such as contacting parents about emotional problems or completing paperwork (Lupton 2004, 10). Moreover, teachers are “regularly dealing with situations of drama, tears, or conflict in which it was difficult to find the right response, and hard not to feel attacked personally nor drawn in too closely” (Lupton 2004, 11). Finally, professionals note the low attendance, student participation, and parental involvement as problematic (Lupton 2005, 595; Lupton 2004, 11).

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This state of affairs can be summarized by what Lupton describes as the “unpredictable school” (Lupton 2005, 595; Lupton 2004, 12). Lupton argues that this unpredictable work environment also impacts organisational processes in schools, beginning with its implications for staff recruitment. Schools in deprived contexts have trouble finding qualified teachers, not only because of the additional demands placed on teachers in poor schools, but also because of the perceived underperformance of these organisations. (Lupton 2005, 596) Moreover, teachers’ performances suffer in poor neighbourhoods as they find it hard to maintain high expectations and focused learning environments (Lupton 2005, 597). This is intensified by the additional demands placed on teachers’ time as they deal with the consequences of poverty, for example by finding solutions for behavioural problems, reinforcing the rules, and providing counselling for students. (Lupton 2005, 597) The same is true for the administrative staff. Working time is taken away from financial management or school improvement in order to focus on students’ welfare issues or disciplinary incidents. (Lupton 2005, 599) Beyond this additional unpredictable workload, senior management must also complete tasks that do not exist in schools in more affluent neighbourhoods, such as the management of attendance workers, grant writing, and working together with other (state) agencies (Lupton 2005, 599). Yet, Lupton’s main argument is that deprived areas can have different – more or less favourable – implications for schools (Lupton 2006, 6): “although all the schools were in disadvantaged areas, some were in areas that might be seen as being more pro school than others. In fact, […] the mixed ethnic inner city areas, appeared to offer an environment that was more conducive to running a teaching and learning organization than the less disadvantaged areas, which were predominantly white and outside major conurbations.” (Lupton 2004, 18-19) These effects of local contexts interact with the institutional and market conditions in the area and also with the agency of professionals working in the school (Lupton 2004, 26). While Lupton is thus in theory interested in a similar question than the one raised by this book, her focus is slightly different, as she is trying to understand how a similar context of deprivation can have different effects on school quality. Nevertheless, she also tries to draw conclusions about differences between schools in deprived and less deprived contexts. This is, however, problematic, as the analysis

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of schools in privileged neighbourhoods is not based on empirical data, but on the ways in which teachers from disadvantaged contexts imagine working in a privileged school. Moreover, the way in which Lupton conceptualises the impact of different neighbourhoods on schools mostly focuses on student characteristics. Thus, neighbourhoods are only important in shaping students’ attitudes and the social (SES and ethnic) composition within the school. Yet, to better understand the different ways in which neighbourhoods and schools interact, our approach must be broadened to include functions of neighbourhoods that go beyond shaping the composition of students.

Overall, then, the literature on school and neighbourhood effects is only of limited value for an understanding of organisational neighbourhood inequality. First of all, the main focus has generally been on the impact of neighbourhoods on standardised educational outcomes, with less interest in the question of mechanisms. Second, the proposed mechanisms as well as most of the research have focused on the importance of neighbourhoods for creating specific social compositions within schools, and on concomitant peer group effects. Different pathways through which neighbourhoods might have an impact on organisations and their practices have thus far remained underdeveloped.

2.4 Summing Up: Organisational Neighbourhood Inequality

As we have seen, the existing literature is only of limited help to conceptualise organisational neighbourhood inequality. First, the literature on neighbourhood effects forces an understanding of neighbourhood inequality mainly as effects that become visible only in the comparison of similar groups in different neighbourhood contexts. Moreover, the interest in the mechanisms that bring these effects about is often limited; the main focus is generally on inter-residential mechanisms, while the role of organisations is neglected. Second, even the research with an

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explicit focus on urban organisations has mostly looked at the quantity and quality of organisations per se, ignoring how different practices (and thus qualities) come about in the interplay of neighbourhood and organisation. Finally, in the literature focused on schools, we find similar tendencies: Interest in mechanisms is limited; neighbourhoods are mostly of interest as social units that sort students into schools and thus ‘create’ specific social compositions; and the discussed mechanisms are generally on the level of peer group. To better understand organisational neighbourhood inequality, the focus of the debate must be shifted in two ways: By explicitly emphasizing organisations and, in doing so, by introducing a broader understanding of neighbourhood inequality. Instead of focussing on the individual outcomes of poor people in affluent compared to poor neighbourhoods, the main question becomes what different neighbourhoods provide. Neighbourhood inequality then becomes visible by comparing what kinds of “spatial profits” (Bourdieu 1999, 126f.; also Blokland et al. 2016) rich and poor neighbourhoods provide for reproducing the (dis)advantaged position of their (dis)advantaged residents. Bringing this neighbourhood inequality perspective to organisations, then, allows for an analysis of how neighbourhoods can become places in which different organisational practices are institutionally supported – and thus create different degrees of organisational (dis)advantages. In order to answer this question, a conceptualisation of how neighbourhoods structure organisational practices is necessary. By combining new-institutional organisational theory with a Bourdieusian approach of field, habitus, and practices, the following chapter moves beyond the existing literature in order to sketch out such a conceptualisation.

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A Theoretical Perspective: Localised Fields, Organisational Habitus and Organisational Practices

How can we capture the processes through which neighbourhoods – as social, symbolic and administrative units – shape organisational practices in a theoretical manner? Since, as discussed previously, the literature on neighbourhood effects, organisations and schools within urban studies is only of limited assistance, I turn to approaches within organisational theory to develop a theoretical perspective here. In order to better thematise the effect of neighbourhoods on organisational practices, sociological new-institutional theories turn out to be extremely helpful, as they analyse how broader structures and processes beyond the organisation impact on its workings. However, as I discuss in the following, new-institutional theory has two specific limitations for understanding how local neighbourhoods impact organisational practices. First, while new-institutional theory has focused on how the ‘outside’ penetrates organisations, it has explicitly rejected the idea that this ‘outside’ might be characterized by an organisation’s local neighbourhood, locating the relevant environments instead in other organisations or in institutional pressures (which new-institutionalists understand as taken-for-granted scripts, rules, cultural expectations or legal regulations). Moreover, new-institutional theory does not help us to grasp in greater detail how ‘the outside’ – be it institutional pressures or local neighbourhoods – establishes and reproduces itself or is challenged within an organisation. Most notably, there has been no explicit discussion of how actors within organisations and institutions impact each other.

© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 J. Nast, Unequal Neighbourhoods, Unequal Schools, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-27591-4_3

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To combat these limitations, I combine sociological new-institutional theory with a Bourdieusian understanding of ‘organisations-as-fields,’ habitus and practices. In so doing, the concepts of localised organisational habitus and localised practices are developed to analyse how local neighbourhoods as social, symbolic, and administrative units are important for people working in organisations – for their understanding of their roles, their taken-for-granted dispositions and for their practices. While this chapter lays out this book’s theoretical perspective, the empirical chapters that follow develop the concept of a localised organisational habitus and localised organisational practices in detail, based on the empirical case studies.

3.1 Organisations as Open Systems: New Institutionalism and Two Problems

Sociological new-institutional theories belong to a strand of organisational studies that define organisations as open systems. As of the mid-1970s, researchers began to look beyond the internal structures of organisations (Handel 2003, 225), which had been the dominant frame of explanation up to that point, by reflecting on the fact that organisations are not isolated islands that formulate their working procedures merely through an assessment of their inherent organisational needs, missions or goals (Blau 1970; Barley and Tolbert 1997, 93). Rather, scholars moved toward the idea of organisations as open systems, which reveals how the environment surrounding an organisation – such as other organisations – has an important impact on it, insofar as these other elements “constitute, influence, and penetrate” (Scott 2004, 5) a given organisation. Within organisational theory, this insight resulted in the development of a myriad of approaches, including contingency theory, resource dependency theory, network theory and organisational ecology (Scott 2004, 5f.). Of those following an open system approach, sociological newinstitutional theories are especially useful here, as this approach allows for the conceptualisation of how different neighbourhood dimensions, especially the

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symbolic and administrative meaning of a given neighbourhood, shape organisations. Sociological new-institutionalists explore the impact of institutions on organisations. While institutions and organisations are often used interchangeably in everyday speech, in a new-institutional approach institutions are understood as broader cultural and political contexts (Frumkin and Galaskiewicz 2004, 283; DiMaggio and W. Powell 1991) that get institutionalised, as they shape the modes of cognition, taken-for-granted scripts, rules, or schemas of actors within the organisation and, thus organisational practices as well. DiMaggio and Powell (1991, 13) have argued that institutions “penetrate the organization, creating the lenses through which actors view the world and the very categories of structure, action, and thought” (DiMaggio and W. Powell 1991, 13). To give an example: In the context of schools, institutions include federal and state curricula, laws governing schooling, other organisations that cooperate with schools, and the external expectations of what schools must provide in order to maintain their legitimacy as ‘educators of children.’ New-institutionalists’ accounts thus emphasise the importance of institutions as “shared systems of rules” (DiMaggio and W. Powell 1991, 11) that shape similar organisations in similar ways (DiMaggio and W. Powell 1991, 13; Meyer and Rowan 1977; W. Powell and DiMaggio 1991; Scott 1995). Significantly, these adaptions to institutional pressures do not depend on the actual effectivity for the organisation and its on-going work activities (Woodward 1958; Blau 1970; see also Barley and Tolbert 1997, 93). Meyer and Rowan (1977) argue, for example, that organisations depend on the incorporation of institutions – such as external practices and procedures which are understood as rational tools for organisational work within society – to increase their legitimacy and thus their chances of survival. The formal structures of many organisations thus mirror “the myths of their institutional environments instead of the demand of their work activities” (Meyer and Rowan 1977, 341). If external institutional pressures come into conflict with organisational aims of efficiency, organisations rely on forms of decoupling, in which symbolic changes are introduced, but are isolated from actual on-going work practices (Meyer and Rowan 1977, 355f.; Coburn 2004, 211). A school can, for example, be very active in a

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project fostering an appreciation of multilingualism without changing any of the actual work routines outside the project. Others have suggested that institutions indeed do introduce change to organisational practices. DiMaggio and W. Powell (1983) argue that organisations in the same field, such as different schools, are exposed to similar institutional pressures “that make organisations more similar” (DiMaggio and W. Powell 1983, 147). They describe this similarity as institutional isomorphism, of which they distinguish three forms: coercive, mimetic, and normative. The first, coercive isomorphism, results from political influence and the pressures of legitimacy and cultural expectations, which collectively push organisations in certain directions – towards affirmative actions or processes of state-led standardised reporting mechanisms, for example. Mimetic isomorphism stems from processes in which organisations ‘copy’ solutions to organisational problems from other organisations. Finally, normative isomorphism is associated with professionalisation. Professionals are involved in networks and learn at training institutions such as universities. There, they absorb common normative rules about professional behaviour, which are diffused through professional networks and ultimately make the organisations they eventually work for very similar. (DiMaggio and W. Powell 1983, 150f.) To what extent institutional pressures are decoupled or result in actual changes in organisational practices is then an empirical question (Meier 2009; Hasse and Krücken 2005, 27; Mevissen and Böttcher 2011). New-institutional theory adds to a conceptualisation of how neighbourhoods shape organisational practices as it forces an understanding of organisations not as closed-off systems but as fundamentally impacted by the contexts which surround them – potentially including the local neighbourhood. Moreover, new-institutionalists argue that broader cultural and political institutions shape organisations, which allows for a conceptualisation of neighbourhoods not only as social units, as in neighbourhood effects studies, but also as symbolic and administrative units, that actively structure institutional pressures, such as the image of a neighbourhood or neighbourhood-based policies. Finally, such a perspective understands organisational practices not simply as rational adaptions to organisational needs but as deeply social processes.

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These insights come with two theoretical problems however for an approach that seeks to grasp the meaning of local neighbourhoods for organisations. First, while new-institutionalist theories are well-equipped to analyse outside institutional pressures, they often show no explicit theoretical interest in how such institutional forms are implemented within the organisation. If institutions shape organisational practices, then they must also be enacted, reproduced – and possibly challenged – at the actor level. To fully deploy the analytical potential of the new-institutional agenda in order to analyse unequal organisational practices, the link between the micro- and macro-level must be addressed more carefully. Second, while newinstitutionalists’ perspectives have highlighted the importance of institutions for organisations, local neighbourhoods are rejected as a category of analysis. It is the aim of this book, to show that one cannot be understood without the other, and that local neighbourhoods are crucial to understanding the institutional forces that effectively shape organisations. I address both of these theoretical limitations in the following.

Agency in Organisational Structures

New-institutional theory highlights how organisational structures and working routines are impacted by broader social and cultural institutions (Coburn 2004, 212). Within that process, there is an implicit argument about individuals, who, enclosed in institutionalised “rules, beliefs, and taken-for-granted assumptions” (Barley and Tolbert 1997, 93), act according to these institutional pressures. While it is generally understood that institutions are “formed, reproduced, and modified through an interplay of action and structure” (Barley and Tolbert 1997, 94), newinstitutional approaches often seem to give precedence to structural embeddedness, while being less focused on questions of agency (DiMaggio and W. Powell 1991, 12). Although scholars such as Zucker (e.g. 1977) and Meyer and

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Rowan (1977) still argued, based on P.L. Berger and Luckmann (1967), that institutions need to be generated and perpetuated in interactions (Barley and Tolbert 1997, 94), this interest has increasingly declined since then. Moreover, even though “institutional research initially claimed that organizational structures are socially constructed, […] [they have not] directly investigated the process by which structures emerge from, or influence, action” (Barley and Tolbert 1997, 96). Accordingly, new-institutional approaches lack a theoretical understanding of how institutions might act as constraints on the action of individuals and how simultaneously these institutions are modified within an organisation (Barley and Tolbert 1997, 94). As such, the process of institutionalisation remains somewhat undertheorized. As DiMaggio and W. Powell (1991, 25) note: The “link between microand macro levels of analysis has not received much explicit attention from practitioners of new institutionalism.” Partly, this has been ‘solved’ by the basic assumption that actors and their interests are themselves the product of institutional pressures (Seo and Creed 2002, 223) as “individual preferences and such basic categories of thought as the self, social action, the state, and citizenship are shaped by institutional forces” (DiMaggio and W. Powell 1991, 3). However, this creates ‘over socialized’ actors, and assumes that individuals passively create culturallyproduced cognitive conformity, while ignoring actors’ agency (Florian 2008, 132; DiMaggio 1988; Zucker 1988; W. Powell 1991; Hirsch and Lounsbury 1997). Instead of focussing on the process of institutionalisation within organisations, the interest of new-institutionalists has increasingly shifted towards an understanding of institutions as “exogenous to organizational action” (Barley and Tolbert 1997, 95; Meyer and Scott 1983; Scott and Meyer 1994; J. R. Sutton et al. 1994). This has often resulted in research programmes that focus on institutional conformity while isolating the institution from the people that are actually complying with it (DiMaggio and W. Powell 1983; see also Seo and Creed 2002, 222). Hirsch and Lounsbury (1997) have suggested that part of the problem can be located in the effort to distinguish new-institutionalism from older approaches (W. Powell and DiMaggio 1991). In turning away from the old-institutionalists’ agenda, questions of action and agency have increasingly shifted out of focus. An emphasis on structures, Hirsch and Lounsbury (1997, 410) argue, also leads new-

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institutionalists to overlook variation within organisations, that nonetheless exists despite conformism to institutional pressures, as well as the “struggles over resources and ideas between key actors in particular organisations” (Hirsch and Lounsbury 1997, 410). Moreover, the lack of interest in agency creates a theoretical paradox: If organisations simply comply with institutional pressures, how do institutions come about in the first place and how do they ever change (Florian 2008, 132; DiMaggio 1988; DiMaggio and W. Powell 1991, 27; Jepperson 1991; Hirsch and Lounsbury 1997)? Within the debate on new-institutionalism, concepts such as ‘ideas’ and ‘discourse’ have more recently been suggested as a means of addressing this problem. Discursive institutionalism argues, for example, that institutions do indeed provide the context within which ideas and discursive interactions emerge, but that actors also possess “foreground discursive abilities (people’s ability to think and speak outside the institutions in which they continue to act)” (Schmidt 2008, 315, also 314). As agents are able to “talk about institutions as objects at a distance” (Schmidt 2008, 316), and thus – through this discursive practice – reflect upon them, institutions can change.

The Irrelevance of Local Neighbourhoods?

From an urban perspective – and especially for the thrust of this book – the question of agency is not the only limitation of sociological new-institutional theory. Similarly problematic is the fact that scholars in this tradition give importance to organisational environments that are explicitly not located at a local neighbourhood level (McQuarrie and Marwell 2009, 259). From such a vantage point, local neighbourhoods become irrelevant and organisations are understood as shaped less by their locality than by their embeddedness in broader institutional pressures and in the fields of other organisations.

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In contrast, old institutionalists, such as Selznick (1949), Gouldner (1954) or Dalton (1959), still argued that an organisation’s community – understood as the local neighbourhood – was of importance to grasp the informal norms and values of an organisation (McQuarrie and Marwell 2009, 260). From this perspective, local communities shape organisations through the multiple loyalties expressed by the individuals working in these organisations, as well as through “inter organisational treaties hammered out in face-to-face interactions” (DiMaggio and W. Powell 1991, 13). Organisations were thus often analysed through a focus on interests and actors’ intentions. New-institutionalists, in contrast, as we have seen above, were more interested in non-local institutional pressures, such as broader cultural expectations, political frames, and the demands of other organisations. Arum, for example, has argued that research has increasingly confirmed that schools are not simply impacted by the demographic and cultural traits of their local communities, but also by the school’s institutional embeddedness (Arum 2000, 339; Barr, Dreeben, and Wiratchai 1983; Bidwell and Kasarda 1985; Gamoran and Dreeben 1986): “In short, defining school communities in ecological terms at the neighborhood-level misses the extent to which school practices are shaped by larger sets of institutional forces” (Arum 2000, 400). Since, for example, teachers do not necessarily live in the same neighbourhood that they work in, Arum argues that they are much more impacted by institutions, including broader cultural understandings of their role as professionals, than by neighbourhood norms or values (Arum 2000, 441). From this perspective, institutions such as state regulations, professional associations, training organisations, market competition, the legal climate, and political regulations become much more important than the local neighbourhood for understanding organisations (Arum 2000, 395f., 399; Meyer 1994; DiMaggio and W. Powell 1983; DiMaggio and W. Powell 1991; Kirst and Wirt 1997; Meyer, Scott, and Strang 1987; Chubb and Moe 1990; McQuarrie and Marwell 2009, 259). There is, however, an assumption in such new-institutional approaches, as put forward by Arum (2000), that institutions – such as culturally defined understandings of professionalism – will function in the same ways whichever the local context in which they are implemented. This assumption only makes sense if one understands – as new-institutional theory often does – institutions as something coming

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from the outside, while neglecting to conceptualise how these same institutions are implemented and enacted within a specific organisation. Yet, it is likely that institutionalised professional understandings are shaped and enacted differently depending on the local neighbourhood context. That being said, it is not enough to understand – as old-institutional theory does – local neighbourhoods simply as a community (Blokland 2003). One might even argue that new-institutionalists focused so little on local neighbourhoods in response to this limited neighbourhood conceptualisation of old-institutionalists. By understanding neighbourhoods not simply as containers in which communities develop, but as socially constructed places with symbolic and political meaning, then neighbourhoods can in themselves be understood as institutions that shape organisational routines, professional understandings and cognitive frames. This perspective comes into view when, as means of characterising their working conditions, teachers refer to the location of their school in a social hotspot (sozialem Brennpunkt)5 – rather than to a new curriculum (while both are certainly of importance). To sum up, it is clearly crucial to take institutional pressures, “composed of cultural elements, that is taken-for-granted beliefs and widely promulgated rules that serve as templates for organizing” (DiMaggio and W. Powell 1991, 27f.) into account. Yet, as this book argues it is similarly crucial to consider how such institutions are implemented differently, depending on an organisation’s local neighbourhood. Moreover, an organisation’s immediate neighbourhood can in and of itself be understood not only as community, but as a composition of cultural elements and understandings that can get institutionalised in organisations.

5

Sozialer Brennpunkt is an important frame to describe deprived neighbourhoods in the German discourse.

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Bringing Agency and Neighbourhood Context Back In

To make use of new-institutional theory for understanding organisational neighbourhood inequality, more context sensitivity to the new-institutional agenda is necessary. Such an approach must allow for the conceptualisation of how institutions have different effects depending on the specific organisation in which they are implemented. Furthermore, we need a theoretical basis for understanding how institutions are implemented within organisations and how actors and structures come together to produce specific practices. As argued above, a stronger focus on agency will in and of itself lead to a more context-specific understanding of institutional mechanisms. In order to develop an approach which evinces a greater sensitivity to the local contexts in which organisations are embedded, and which can provide a theory of action through which the processes of institutionalisation are more explicitly conceptualised, this book turns to Bourdieu. As new-institutional scholars have argued themselves (DiMaggio and W. Powell 1991, 25f.; see also Florian 2008, 134; Seo and Creed 2002, 223), the concept of ‘habitus’ can offer a powerful way to link processes of institutionalisation within an organisation to broader institutional pressures.

3.2 Organisations-as-Fields, Organisational Habitus and Organisational Practices

In the following, I will show how exactly a Bourdieusian perspective can help to overcome the above limitations within new-institutional theory. Firstly, Bourdieu’s conception of ‘habitus’ helps us to link agency and structure to better understand how institutions shape organisations by impacting the actors working in those organisations (see also Florian 2008; DiMaggio and W. Powell 1991,

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26f.). Thus far, new-institutional scholars have only drawn selectively or abstractly from Bourdieu, despite the fact that his ideas have been “widely embraced by new institutionalists,” and that ‘habitus’ and ‘field’ are considered “particularly consistent with the general new institutional vision” (Hirsch and Lounsbury 1997, 413). Filling this gap, I adapt the concept of habitus to organisations in order to develop an understanding of organisational habitus and organisational practice. The main argument is that a focus on the organisational habitus allows for an analysis of how professionals adapt to the structural conditions of their organisations and embody institutional pressures. Moreover, this understanding of organisational habitus and organisational practices must be integrated into Bourdieu’s concept of fields, in order to understand how institutional pressures work differently for organisations in different local neighbourhoods.

Organisational Habitus and Organisational Practices

How exactly can Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and practice help us to develop a better understanding of agency and structure within the framework of new-institutional theory? What can the concept of organisational habitus (and practices) add to an analysis of organisational neighbourhood inequality? While habitus is one of Bourdieu’s most widely-used concepts, it has rarely been applied to either organisational theory or empirical research on organisations (Emirbayer and V. Johnson 2008, 1, 4; Dobbin 2008, 58). Yet, as early as 1991, DiMaggio and W. Powell (1991, 25f.) suggested that the concept of habitus offers a powerful way for organisational theory to link micro- and macro level processes. For Bourdieu, habitus are “classificatory schemes […] [that] make distinctions between what is good and what is bad, between what is right and what is wrong, between what is distinguished and what is vulgar, and so forth” (Bourdieu 1998, 8). These relatively stable principles of judgement and practices are generated by

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one’s “social position” (Bourdieu 1998, 6) in the social space and thus, more generally, “by an actor’s early life experiences” which can however be “modified to a greater or lesser degree later in life” (Emirbayer and V. Johnson 2008, 4). The habitus is thus shaped by the economic and cultural conditions within which it is acquired – namely the social fields and their objective structures of capital distribution (Bourdieu 1998, 6f.; Emirbayer and V. Johnson 2008, 4). Those individuals who are in proximity within a social field thus experience similar conditions and are therefore likely to hold similar dispositions, worldviews, and taken-for-granted assumptions (Mendoza, Kuntz, and J.B. Berger 2012, 559f.). The habitus is developed in relation to specific fields and to an individual’s capital and is carried forth “as a guide to practice” (Emirbayer and V. Johnson 2008, 4) for the future. Habitus can therefore be understood as a mechanism “linking individual action and the macro-structural settings within which future action is taken” (Emirbayer and V. Johnson 2008, 4). The habitus is embodied: “it is a socialized body, […] a body which has incorporated the immanent structures of a world” (Bourdieu 1998, 81) and can be characterized as “a feel for the [social] game” (Bourdieu 1998, 80). Habitus thus becomes a mechanism that adapts practice to social structures and thus contributes to the simultaneous reproduction of those structures (H.-P. Müller 2002, 164). Before discussing how this habitus concept can be employed for organisational analysis in greater detail, and question whether it is appropriate to transpose it from the ‘social field’ onto a concrete existing organisation, I want to address a more general critique; namely, the criticism that habitus as an analytical tool has been excessively used (Reay 2004) and is too deterministic, thus falling back “into exactly the kind of objectivism Bourdieu refutes” (King 2000, 418; see also Schatzki 1997; Brubaker 1985; Jenkins 1982; Lamont and Lareau 1988). King (2000) has argued that the entire concept of the habitus is at odds with other parts of Bourdieu’s theory, where he is much more willing to conceptualise social agents as “virtuosos” (Bourdieu 1977, 79) rather than as individuals dominated by abstract social principles. Actors “know the scripts so well that they can elaborate and improvise upon the themes which it provides and in the light of the relations with others” (King 2000, 419). King argues that Bourdieu does include more flexibility in the concept of the habitus, specifically in its connection to the field: “[The] connection of the habitus to the field, which allows for a degree of inter-

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subjective struggle and change, provides a richer and more convincing account of social life” (King 2000, 425). Others have argued that the critique of habitus as being too deterministic is itself too superficial as “it turns on whether there is “enough” or “not enough” emphasis on change – degree of emphasis being notoriously hard to measure” (Martin 2003, 24). Harker, for example, has suggested that the habitus should not be seen as a determining mechanism that links structure and practice but rather as an mediating concept that is in itself “no more ‘fixed’ than the practices which it helps to structure” (Harker 1984, 120). As Sulkunen argues, “The habitus is constantly being formed in the daily practices of individual subjects […] and while it is a structured system of meanings it does not follow any mechanistic formal or ‘algebraic’ logic” (Sulkunen 1982, 109–10). From this perspective, using the concept of habitus indicates a desire to bring structure and its effect on practices together, while not assuming that structure will invariably mechanically produce the same responses and while acknowledging that structure is in and of itself the product of practices. Bringing this idea to the question of how actors in organisations are impacted by structures, we need to ask: Can habitus also be formed in organisations? Can habitus help conceptualise how institutions are subjectively incorporated and thus become social practice within organisations? Some studies in the sociology of education have put forward such an approach, namely the idea of an organisational or – as others have called it – ‘institutional’ habitus (McDonough 1997; Reay 1998a; Reay, David, and Ball 2001). In these studies, organisational/institutional habitus is used to characterise a whole school, its ethos, structure and self-conception, and to show how these habitus are dependent on the individual school’s class composition (W. Atkinson 2011, 332). The concept was developed out of a dissatisfaction with Bourdieu’s explanation of the reproduction of educational inequality, in which not enough attention is given to the characteristics of specific schools. Rather, homogenous social classes enter a homogenous educational system in which dominant social classes and their cultural capital are advantaged – while specific schools remain unstudied (McDonough 1997, 107). To make up for this, McDonough (1997) develops the concept of an ‘organizational habitus,’ in which each organisation has its own predispositions, taken-for-granted expectations and schemes of perception (W. Atkinson 2011, 333). The concept has been taken up

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in a slightly different manner as ‘institutional habitus’ by Reay (1998a; 1998b). Reay uses the concept to highlight differences between schools in curriculum offered, teaching practices, what children bring to the classroom, and teachers’ expectation, prejudices and biases (Reay 1998a, 67, 98; 1998b, 524-525). Again, these dispositions are adaptions to the social class composition of the students enrolled. In more detail, Reay has used the institutional habitus together with David and Ball (Reay, David and Ball 2001) to explore its role in higher education and university choice (W. Atkinson 2011, 334f.). These conceptualisations have, however, been criticised and imply several theoretical issues, both in terms of the specific questions asked in this book but also for a Bourdieusian framework more generally. W. Atkinson (2011, 336ff.) identifies three main theoretical problems in conceptualising the observed differences between individual schools as ‘habitus’: Firstly, in the above-mentioned conceptualisations of the institutional/organisational habitus, the relationship between habitus and practices is often confused, insofar as practices are characterised as “‘aspects’” of the habitus “when they would in fact be products of it” (W. Atkinson 2011, 337). Moreover, the concept of an institutional/organisational habitus (McDonough 1997; Reay 1998a; Reay, David, and Ball 2001) shifts between two conceptualisations: on the one hand, it reflects the disposition of the entity of the organisation; on the other hand, it seems to be a social structure that shapes the habitus of its students. This, however, ignores the basic premise of the habitus and its development, namely the way in which it is formed in relation to fields rather than to other habitus. Secondly, within these conceptions, the notion of habitus is transcended to the collective level in an anthropomorphic manner (W. Atkinson 2011, 336). A school, as a supra-individual entity, “[does not have] ‘experiences’, ‘perceives’, ‘has assumptions’, is ‘dispositioned’ towards anything or, indeed, acts” (W. Atkinson 2011, 337). Only individuals are capable of such actions and the habitus is ultimately an individual property, which is also indicated by its status as corporeal (W. Atkinson 2011, 337). While Bourdieu indeed develops the notion of class habitus (which has been used to justify the development of an organisational/institutional habitus), these are conceptualised very differently. In many of the accounts of the organisational/institutional habitus, the school becomes an agent with its own habitus: “Yet the class habitus as Bourdieu talks about it is a completely different beast – it is not an actor or agent, but merely a

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label for describing the family resemblances between individuals situated in a certain section of social space” (W. Atkinson 2011, 338). Such an understanding of institutional/organisational habitus is then problematic in an additional way, as it conceptualises the school as a unit and thus renders heterogeneity or conflict within it invisible (W. Atkinson 2011, 338). These theoretical problems can be avoided by understanding organisational habitus as put forward in this book. I understand organisational habitus to be located in the individual, namely in the professionals working within specific organisations. The aim of this book is then to understand how different kinds of organisational habitus – the dispositions and taken-for-granted assumptions of professionals – come about and are shaped in relation to organisations as social structures. As such, we need to understand organisations as fields – a critical notion which has remained little discussed in the concepts of organisational/institutional habitus thus far, but will be elaborated on in detail below. Furthermore, an understanding of organisational habitus as something that individuals develop after working within the structures of an organisation allows for the possibility of internal heterogeneity and conflict, while still maintaining that similar objective conditions in the field – comparable to the class habitus – will likely produce (at least to some degree) similar dispositions within those people working in the same organisation. There are two further differentiations to be made about how organisational habitus is used in this book. First, McDonough (1997) and Reay, David, and Ball (2001) only focus on the composition of social class within a school, and its effect on organisational habitus. This, as argued by new-institutionalists, ignores the fact that organisations are not simply closed-off systems or exclusively shaped by their local ‘community.’ Such a perspective cannot address the crucial question of whether different external institutional pressures (e.g. specific political programmes or interventions) have differing effects on organisations that diverge in their social composition. Moreover, the exclusive focus on the composition of social class does not allow for an analysis of impact of the surrounding neighbourhood beyond its – admittedly – central role of structuring class composition through its location and catchment area. The importance of neighbourhoods not only as social, but also as symbolic and administrative units, can thus not be as-

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sessed through this lens. Furthermore, existing conceptualisations of organisational/institutional habitus have focused on its possible effect on pupils, rather than on the theoretical challenge of conceptualising the production of different forms of organisational habitus and organisational practices. However, even in the understanding of organisational habitus as put forward here, the question remains whether it is adequate at all to use the concept as described, or if habitus in a Bourdieusian understanding is something more fundamental, less changeable, and linked to the specific history of one’s upbringing in a specific place in the social space. Can the concept of habitus really be used for an analysis of the more flexible process of adapting one’s professional understandings, takenfor-granted assumptions and thus practices to an organisational context? Analysing the scholarly field, Bourdieu himself began to make use of the habitus in more flexible ways. Namely, he argued that there is a “specific habitus, or, more precisely, a sense of the game,” which is incorporated accordingly to the specific logic of the field (Bourdieu 2000, 11). This “specific habitus” is thus a “conversion of the original habitus” (Bourdieu 2000, 11). Again, this idea of a specific habitus requires an understanding of habitus not as static but as changing and flexible (Meisenhelder 1997). Since “the field, as a structured space, tends to structure the habitus” (Bourdieu 1988, 784), differences in the field might thus also introduce changes in the habitus – and organisations might thus also have the ability to instil dispositions “that do not trace back to early family socialization” (Swartz 2008, 48). Certain empirical organisational studies seem to point in this direction: Within higher education for example, Mendoza, Kuntz, and J. B. Berger (2012, 561) show that faculty members develop similar “professional habitus” as departments with “similar levels of material and symbolic resources tend to shape constituent faculty members in similar ways” (Mendoza, Kuntz, and J.B. Berger 2012, 561). In effect, faculty members from the same departments exhibit shared views that reflect their habitus according to their contextual circumstances (Mendoza, Kuntz, and J. B. Berger 2012, 576). Unlike Mendoza, Kuntz, and J. B. Berger (2012), this book uses the term organisational habitus, rather than professional habitus, in order to highlight that the concept does not draw specifically from the idea of professionals developing shared understandings in relation to their professional field (although

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they do that as well). Instead, I am interested in the process of habitus formation in concrete organisations in different neighbourhood contexts. The term organisational habitus emphasises the habitus’ relation to the organisation, its position and structure much more clearly than does professional habitus. In a similar vein, Vaughan (2002) has also put forward the concept of an organisational habitus: She shows based on several empirical case studies how taken-for-granted assumptions that inform practical action not only develop out of social class-based experiences in the social field but also in organisations (Vaughan 2002, 34; Emirbayer and V. Johnson 2008, 29) as “the habitus is modified to fit the immediate local setting” (Vaughan 2008, 75). The concept of an organisational habitus thus elucidates how professionals within an organisation adapt to their working conditions and develop corresponding practices. This concept also allows to rethink the process of institutionalisation, as theorised by the new-institutionalists, with a stronger focus on the micro-level. Organisational habitus and organisational practices develop in relation to the structural conditions of the organisation, which are themselves structured by institutional pressures. By the adaption of the organisational habitus to the organisation, professionals constantly reproduce the objective structures of the field. Institutions, thus, are twofold: on the one hand, they are objectified social practices and thus the social structures within the field; on the other hand, institutions are subjectively incorporated into the habitus and its dispositions. (Florian 2008, 146f.) Institutions – as taken-for-granted assumptions, schemes and worldviews – then develop in a cyclic relation between habitus, practice, and field and can be seen as a specific form of social practice (Florian 2008, 148).

Organisations-as-Fields: A Localised Approach to New-Institutional Organisations

The idea of organisations-as-fields (Emirbayer and V. Johnson 2008) becomes crucial here to conceptualise how organisations that shape the organisational

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habitus and organisational practices of professionals are themselves structured – including, potentially, by their local neighbourhood. As argued above, to understand how organisations get structured, it is necessary to analyse them in a way that is open to local, context-specific, structures – something new-institutional theory has not sufficiently considered. At the same time, it is essential not to fall back on the idea of organisations as closed-off systems. Rather, we need a concept that allows for an understanding of organisations as open systems shaped by both institutional pressures beyond the organisation and by the specific context conditions of a specific organisation. In the following, I will suggest that an understanding of organisations-as-fields (Emirbayer and V. Johnson 2008) in a Bourdieusian tradition in combination with new-institutionalists insights can provide exactly such an approach. The local neighbourhood, as we will see, is of importance here, as it structures the interplay between internal organisational structures and institutional pressures. Depending on the neighbourhood, organisations provide different field-constellations in which professionals develop diverging organisational habitus and organisational practices. To grasp the concept of organisations-as-fields, it is important to first assess what a field is and how it relates to organisations. Following Bourdieu, a field is a network of objective relations between different positions, objectively defined by the distribution and forms of capitals (H.-P. Müller 2002, 167). Such fields are hierarchically structured as agents occupy dominant and subordinate positions within it, based on the volume of resources they possess in relation to the other actors in the field (Naidoo 2004, 458). Within these fields of social positions, “struggles or manoeuvres take place over resources, stakes and access” (Bourdieu 1990; cited in Everett 2002, 60). Importantly, however, these manoeuvres – also referred to as “position taking” (Bourdieu 1993, 35) – are inseparable from the objective positions occupied by the actors or organisations (Naidoo 2004, 459) and it is only within these limits that struggles can occur. If we bring this concept of fields to organisations and conceptualise them as organisations-as-fields, organisations are no longer seen as unified actors (Swartz 2008, 49): “If we enter the ‘black box’ that is the firm [or organization], we find not individuals, but, once again, a structure – that of the firm [or organization] as

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a field” (Bourdieu 2005, 205; cited in Emirbayer and V. Johnson 2008: 22). From a Bourdieusian perspective, an organisation can thus not simply be understood as a unified actor or through the interactions among individuals within it. In contrast to interactionist approaches, organisational structures here are not ‘produced’ autonomously by the actors within an organisation, but in relation to the objective power structures at play (Emirbayer and V. Johnson 2008, 22). The objective power relations and thus the structure of the field, again, are defined “by the continuous distribution of the specific capital possessed, at the given moment, by various agents […] operative in the field” (Bourdieu 1991, 6). Moreover, organisations-as-fields are also positioned in relation to other organisations in so-called organisational fields. Schools do not work in isolation from other schools and must position themselves in relation to each other, by competing for students and possibly also funding. Organisational fields, thus, are fields of objective social power relations in which position-taking and struggles over resources take place. (Florian 2008, 133f; Bourdieu 1977; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1996) In a Bourdieusian understanding of organisational fields, “any field […] must be conceptualized as a configuration of relationships not between the concrete entities themselves – e.g., the specific organizations at hand – but rather, between the nodes those entities happen to occupy within the given network or configuration” (Emirbayer and V. Johnson 2008, 6). It is thus not the concrete relationship or interaction between two (or more) organisations but their relational position towards each other within the objective power relations of the field that is crucial here (Emirbayer and V. Johnson 2008, 8). Taking these objective power relations into account helps to see that the effect of institutional pressures might differ depending on the position of an organisation within the field: “New position-takings become possible within organizational fields – but possible only for some and under highly delimited conditions” (Emirbayer and V. Johnson 2008, 16). Organisations can thus engage in positiontaking or forms of mimic isomorphism, such as the copying of organisational models from other organisations, but are always limited by their position in the field

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of objective relations (Emirbayer and V. Johnson 2008, 15). Schools’ friends’ associations6 might have different effects in elite schools than in schools with numerous children from poor families. What works in one organisation can be unfeasible in another, depending on its position within the field. Moreover, similar institutional pressures might have different effects: Depending on the objective power relations within an organisation, organisations might be more or less able to resist or actively attract specific kinds of institutional pressures, such as funding programmes or targeted state regulations. Bringing Bourdieu and new-institutionalist theory together thus has the advantage of simultaneously taking into account that organisations are shaped by contextspecific structures of objective power relations and by broader institutional pressures. Bourdieu’s approach allows for the contextualisation of the important insights of new-institutional theory. Through the lens of the field concept, it becomes apparent that institutional pressures encounter very different conditions in different organisations, depending on the objective power relations within, as well as between, organisations. In return, an organisation can thus be conceptualised as a specific field-constellation, characterized by its own interplay between institutionalised pressures and the objective power structures within, as well as between, organisations. This understanding of organisations-as-fields, finally, also allows for an account of how local neighbourhoods might shape these field-constellations. Neighbourhoods, as we shall see, are vital here, as they structure how these different aspects come together: as social units, neighbourhoods are important for social composition and thus the objective power relations within organisations; as symbolic entities, neighbourhoods structure institutional pressures, such as cultural assumptions; as administrative units, they are imperative for state regulations, additional programmes and policy interventions that are directed at organisations in specific neighbourhood contexts. Accordingly, the constellations of organisations-as-fields vary by neighbourhood – and can thus be understood as localised.

6

Charities generally made up of parents and sometimes teachers, with aims such as: raising additional funds for the school of their child, providing facilities and equipment, improving the live and experiences of children attending the school, fostering good relationships between parents and staff.

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3.3 Localised Organisational Habitus and Practices: Understanding Organisational Neighbourhood Inequality

To conclude, combining a new-institutional organisational perspective with the Bourdieusian concepts of field, habitus, and practices is helpful for the conceptualisation of how neighbourhoods shape organisations. New-institutional theory highlights that organisations are not closed-off systems, but are importantly impacted by institutional pressures beyond the organisation. New institutionalists have analysed the importance of legitimacy, cultural expectations, and political and legal institutional pressures in order to understand organisational forms. In doing so, they have however narrowed in on the similarities between organisations, highlighting uniform organisational reactions to institutional pressures. Through a Bourdieusian field concept, it is possible to re-contextualise these insights. Conceptualising organisations-as-fields, it becomes apparent that institutional pressures encounter very different conditions depending on the objective power positions within an organisation as well as its relation to other organisations. Organisations can thus be best understood as specific field-constellations, in which institutionalised pressures, the objective power structures within the organisation, as well as its position within a field of organisations interact. Bringing the concept of organisational habitus and organisational practices to this understanding of organisations thus also allows for the conceptualisation of how these different field-constellations actually result in organisational practices that can reinforce urban inequality. As such, Bourdieu provides a theoretical framework for bringing the macro and micro levels of organisational analysis closer together. This allows posing questions of agency, power, and struggle, that seemed somewhat neglected in new-institutional approaches (Hirsch and Lounsbury 1997). Moreover, using the concept of an organisational habitus, we can rethink what new-institutionalists have described as institutionalisation: Such practices are subjectively inscribed in the actors, but at the same time produce the objective structures that shape the habitus. (Florian 2008, 146f.) As Bourdieu put it: “An institution […] is complete and fully viable only if it is durably objectified not only in things, that is, in the logic […] of a particular field, but also in the

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bodies, in durable dispositions to recognize and comply with the demand immanent in the field” (Bourdieu 1990, 58). As we shall see, the local neighbourhood as a social, symbolic, and administrative unit is of importance here, as it functions as a ‘hinge’ that structures the interplay of institutionalised pressures and objective power relations within as well as between organisations, resulting in specific local field-constellations that differ by neighbourhood. Neighbourhoods function in such a way by structuring a school’s social composition, by positioning the school in a field of schools, by channelling specific political and administrative institutional pressures, as well as by structuring the cultural expectations and questions of legitimacy directed at the organisation. The neighbourhood thus localises organisations as local conditions are constantly inscribed into the organisation-as-field. Accordingly, the organisational habitus and organisational practices of professionals working in such localised organisations also vary by neighbourhood – with important consequences for organisational neighbourhood inequality. The following chapters explore empirically how organisations-as-fields are localised by their neighbourhoods and what this means for the organisational habitus and practices of the professionals who work there. Highlighting this process of localisation and its consequences for localised forms of organisational habitus and organisational practices enables us to think about neighbourhood inequality beyond the limited scope of neighbourhood effects. Rather, it is possible to analyse how neighbourhoods become places in which different organisational practices and service provisions are institutionally supported – and thus create organisational neighbourhood inequality.

4

Setting the Scene: Neighbourhoods, Data and Methodology

In order to empirically research the ways in which organisations-as-fields are localised by their neighbourhood contexts and how this localisation impacts organisational habitus and organisational practices (and thus adds to organisational neighbourhood inequality) this book compares two primary schools and their service provision in two contrasting neighbourhoods. In the following, the schools and research sites, the methodological approach, and the data collection and analysis are introduced.

4.1 The Sites: Entering the Field

To situate the research in this book, we must begin by zooming into the two neighbourhoods and their primary schools, starting with my first encounter with the research site.

Cross-Square

Arriving in the afternoon at the subway station closest to Cross-Square’s primary school, I exit into a lively, urban, and “super-diverse” (Vertovec 2007) neighbourhood. The main street is bustling with pedestrians and many of the shops

© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 J. Nast, Unequal Neighbourhoods, Unequal Schools, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-27591-4_4

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carry Turkish and Arabic names. People are sitting on the street in front of the numerous bakeries and shops, drinking coffee; a group of men are sitting on the park benches nearby, drinking beer – something some residents seem unhappy to see. Also, drug use in public spaces is an issue in Cross-Square. I pass a community centre that offers workshops and other activities for children, including those who attend Cross-Square’s primary school. Walking towards the school, I see some signs of gentrification, such as new coffee spots in which organic coffee is sold. Cross-Square’s primary school is located in a red brick building in the Wilhelminian style, typical for schools in Berlin. I cross the schoolyard where students are playing and parents are waiting to pick up their children. I enter the school building, hurrying to make it to my appointment with the principal in time. Entering the main corridor of the school, it smells of linoleum. Finally I see a sign indicating where to find the principal’s office. When I arrive, however, the office is closed and the principal’s door is also locked. Seemingly the principal has forgotten about our appointment. I sit down at a bench in front of her office and wait. Several children pass by, laugh, hustle by, and say hi. I can hear a teacher somewhere nearby scream at the children. Looking around, I see children’s drawings on different topics – the result of a project the school was involved in, as I will learn later on. Finally, E. Holstein, the school principal, hurries down the corridor, and arrives, slightly out of breath. She is in her early 50s, with blond hair and a friendly welcoming smile. She wears sneakers and a colourful top – and she is stressed out. She explains that there had been a project meeting in the morning and a complex discussion with the teachers’ union, and now she had to phone a family that did not want to send their daughter on a school trip, despite the importance for children in the neighbourhood to have experiences outside of it. During our talk, we agree that I will begin my fieldwork by shadowing her. The principal sees no need to actively inform parents about my presence, even though I will also sit in on class time. She argues this will rather confuse the parents and we agree to discuss this again at a later date. After our talk, she keeps running – she is already late for her next appointment with the organisation in charge of the after-school clubs in Cross-Square’s primary school.

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Roseville

After a thirty-minute subway ride from my downtown neighbourhood, I arrive at Roseville’s train station – and in a different world. The exit of the station opens onto a small square with shops selling clothes, flowers, and food, and the branch of an organic supermarket chain. Most products seem to be good quality and quite expensive. An ice cream parlour advertises organic ice cream and now, in the early afternoon, numerous – mostly white – mothers with prams sit in front of a nearby café drinking cappuccinos. Beyond the square, the streets quickly become residential – and quiet. I pass by picturesque houses with large gardens and cars parked in the driveway. Children play outside; there is almost no traffic. The neighbourhood is green, has a suburban feel, and signals – despite the occasional smaller and less expensive apartments and houses included in the catchment area of the school – a certain degree of privilege. The principal of Roseville’s primary school had invited me to the school’s summer fête but I am still surprised when I enter the schoolyard. Several old brick stone houses surround the yard where the summer party is under way, populated by children and adults who match the neighbourhood: women in cashmere sweaters, men in suits; others in brand name jeans and fashionable sweaters. There are several booths at which parents sell homemade marmalade, cakes and other food, or offer games for the children. At one booth, the parents are selling Caipirinhas with fresh lime juice. Every year, an organic supermarket donates the limes, as the principal will tell me later, laughing. All booths have the same design, red and white, and there is a band playing. The whole event feels like a professionally organised farmers’ market rather than a school fête. I look around and quickly locate the principal, with whom I have telephoned several times in recent weeks. In contrast to the experience at CrossSquare, the principal has not only been reliable and easy to reach before our meeting, but also remembers who I am and what I am here for. The principal, P. Deuft, is a small woman in her 40s. She has dark brown hair, is dressed in jeans, a dark blue pullover, and a vest, and looks self-assured and neatly turned out. Later, I will learn that she had previously been the vice-principal of a school in a similar neighbourhood and thus sees herself as ‘experienced’ in working with ‘this kind of clientele.’ Before we enter the school to discuss the coming months, she tells me, proudly, that parents organised the whole summer fête themselves. In contrast to

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Cross-Square, my presence in school, she explains, needs to be agreed on by the official board where teachers and parents take decisions for the school, the ‘school conference.’ Moreover, she explains that I need to be registered as an intern so that I have an official status for the sake of the school’s insurance policy. When we return to the schoolyard, she waves me goodbye and easily jumps into the next conversations with a group of parents. Many important elements, which will be explored in detail in the following chapters, were already visible during these first encounters with the research sites: the role of parents, who take care of tasks such as the summer party; the importance of additional projects and outside partners to manage everyday routines; the effect of different symbolic meanings inherent to neighbourhoods and schools. These components result, as we shall see, in localised organisations that shape the organisational habitus of professionals in different ways. In effect, different practices for following official standards, meeting appointments, or treating children and adults, develop – with consequences for neighbourhood inequality more broadly.

4.2 Case Selection: Why these Neighbourhoods and Schools?

To answer my research question, I relied on a comparative case-study design that allowed for an in depth understanding of how neighbourhood contexts shape organisations-as-fields as well as the formation of organisational habitus and the development of localised practices of the professionals working therein. The aim of the comparative case study was not to test theories but rather to develop a theoretical model for the impact of neighbourhoods on organisational inequality; this book thus seeks to develop rather than to test theory. Such a research design raises questions about the generalisation of the ensuing findings and about the appropriate selection of cases. Small (2009a) argues that it

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is unhelpful to rely too heavily on statistical models for case selection within qualitatively oriented case-study research. While researchers are sometimes advised to select ‘average’ cases to ensure (as far as possible) an element of generalizability, Small (2009a: 15f.) cautions that selecting ‘average’ cases can never meet the criterion of representativeness: “a sample is considered representative if the analyses made using the sampling units produce results similar to those that would be obtained had the entire population been analysed” (Frankfort-Nachmias and Nachmias 2000, 167). To develop different lines of inquiry (Small 2009a, 18), the idea of the extended case study method is helpful which has been put forward by the Manchester and the Berkley school. Following Mitchell (1983, 188), Small suggests that researchers focus on uncovering processes and distinguishes between “statistical inference” and “logical inference” (Small 2009a, 21f.). From a case study of an average poor neighbourhood where public cocaine usage was observed, we cannot infer that this is the case in all average poor neighbourhoods. This, only statistical inference can do. However, we can infer about processes in the form of logical inferences: “When X occurs, whether Y will follow depends on W” (Small 2009a, 23). Obviously, this hypothesis would require further testing. If case studies do allow for generalising processes in this sense, how does one select cases accordingly? I relied on two different traditions here. Firstly, I engaged with the idea of the extended case study as put forward by Burawoy (1998), who argues that researchers should analyse a particular social situation in relation to the social forces impacting it (Small 2009a, 19). The aim is thus to “locate life in its extra-local and historical context” (Burawoy 1998, 4) and to look for the “macro foundation for micro processes” (Small 2009a, 20). In this research project, the external forces of interest are the two different neighbourhood contexts and the broader institutional pressures that come with them. To understand the impact of these external forces for processes within organisations, I relied on the well-established method of “sampling for range” (Small 2009a, 13; Weiss 1995, 22f.). I combined this with the most-similar case design technique. I thus attempted to sample cases which were as similar as possible – while every assumed similarity is likely to be reconstructed during the research process (Ragin 1997) – but differed with regard to their contextual embeddedness. To do so, I compared two primary schools that were as similar as possible in neighbourhood settings that were as different as possible.

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Neighbourhoods: Choosing Cross-Square and Roseville

For the research in this book, the aim was to understand the impact of an organisation’s neighbourhood context for organisational practices. To do so, I chose two cases that were located in contrasting neighbourhood settings. As we saw previously, Cross-Square is an extremely diverse neighbourhood in West Berlin’s inner-city. Official data from the Berlin Senate Department for Urban Development and the Environment shows that the local neighbourhoods that surround Cross-Square’s primary school have a low to very low status (see Häussermann et al. 2011, 9). Cross-Square has a much higher level of unemployment than average (14.4-18.8% compared to the Berlin average of 9.4%), and 57% to 74% of people under 15 years of age receive additional state support (Berlin average: 36.4%), a common indicator for child poverty. (Häussermann et al. 2011, 9) Due to these social indicators, Cross-Square was also selected for a neighbourhood management program financed by the joint programme of the federal government and the federal states ‘Districts with special development needs – Socially integrative city.’ Roseville, in contrast, is a typical white middle-class neighbourhood with a more suburban feel. Roseville is one of West Berlin’s most privileged neighbourhoods at the outskirts of the city: According to data from the Berlin Senate Department for Urban Development and the Environment unemployment is much lower than average (3.3% compared to the Berlin average of 9.4%) and public support for children younger than 15 is far below average (7.7%, Berlin average: 36.4%). (Häussermann et al. 2011, 9) Many families in the neighbourhood do not live in apartments but own single-family homes. This research thus compares the organisational effects of an under-privileged, extremely diverse, neighbourhood with those of an affluent, mostly white, neighbourhood in Berlin. One could argue that it would have been more helpful to focus on the social or the diversity dimension, by comparing, for example, deprived and privileged neighbourhoods each with high ethnic diversity. However, my goal was not to analyse the effects of a neighbourhood’s social status or diversity as isolated

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factors, or to investigate if one of the two is decisive. Rather, I would argue that the combination of diversity and social status present a typical constellation in Berlin. The idea of intersectionality (Walby, Armstrong, and Strid 2012) is important here: It is not the effect of singular categories but rather the interplay between different indicators that positions individuals – but also neighbourhoods – in the city-wide hierarchy of the geographical field. Analysing the effect of a ‘maximum’ privileged and a ‘maximum’ deprived neighbourhood on local organisations requires an approach that connects rather than isolated diversity and social status. To look at neighbourhoods in Berlin is useful, since it is a city in which social polarization, gentrification and distinction have become increasingly visible. Accordingly, it is a good case study for the effect of such processes on organisational service provision – and neighbourhood inequality. Simultaneously, Berlin’s primary schools remain mostly publicly funded, so local differences do not correlate with the differences between private or public schools. Moreover, school choice in Berlin is generally still structured by means of catchment areas, although parents can occasionally choose between different primary schools within their neighbourhood. This is important, as the aim of this book is to understand how neighbourhoods impact on local organisations – meaning organisations that mainly draw their clientele from the surrounding neighbourhood.

Schools: Comparing Roseville Primary School and Cross-Square Primary School

Why, then, are primary schools an appropriate type of organisation to unpack organisational neighbourhood inequality? Two aspects are of interest here: primary schools draw children mainly from their direct local environments by means of the catchment area system. Accordingly, the relationship between neighbourhood and organisation is much closer than for secondary schools (where choice is less

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geographically defined) and thus can be analysed in greater detail. Moreover, primary schools prepare children for the first crucial sorting phase in the German education system – namely which type of secondary school they will subsequently be allowed to attend7 – and often also provide extra-curricular activities, which are important to understanding the development of young people beyond the limited perspective of academic success. Primary schools are thus an ideal type of organisation through which to analyse the effects of different neighbourhood constellations on social mobility, insofar as they have an impact on a child’s eventual schooling choices, as well as for broader questions of children’s habitus and identity formation, e.g. through the quality of extra-curricular activities. In line with the research design, I sought out primary schools that were as similar as possible except for their local context. The two case-study schools were similar in size (approximately 500 pupils,8 although the Cross-Square school had slightly more students); they provided – at least during the research timeframe – multigrade level instruction and cooperated with an agency to organise reliable and free after-school supervision until 1:30 pm that could be extended by the parents through further pay-for modules9. Beyond these similarities, the differing neighbourhood conditions are, of course, visible within the two schools and as such form part of the analysis. In Cross7

8

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While differences exist between states (‘Bundesländer’), the German educational system generally sorts students into different school types after primary school (usually starting at grade 5, in Berlin at grade 7), based on their perceived ‘ability.’ The different tracks lead to different school leaving certificates, which determine access to academic education or vocational training. Several states have attempted to reform this system, making it easier to switch by implementing secondary schools that offer different tracks within one school (in Berlin for example the integrated secondary school (‘Integrierte Sekundarschule’) or the comprehensive school (Gesamtschule)). Nevertheless, in Berlin, as in most states, the ‘Gymnasium’, an academic secondary school, is still seen by many parents as the preferable path to university. The comparability is slightly skewed here, since specific social characteristics of the student body in a school (in particular the high number of second language learners) means that certain schools are allocated a higher number of teachers than other schools with a similar number of students enrolled. Thus, the number of teachers is higher in Cross-Square than in Roseville. While the German school day used to finish depending on the individual classes of students between 1:00 or 2:00pm, this has changed recently. Nowadays, schools often offer full-time education, meaning that extracurricular activities, study hours for homework, and lunch are provided at school.

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Square’s primary school, over 90% of the pupils qualify for free school supplies (the German equivalent to free school meals) and approximately 90% do not speak German as their first language. University-educated parents, often native-German speakers without an immigrant background that reside in this neighbourhood purposely avoid the school with few exceptions. In the Roseville school, only 2% of the children qualify for free school supplies. Approximately 7% do not speak German as their first language, but mostly come from highly educated families and only few are early learners of German. Many of the parents in Roseville prefer to send their children to this primary school: Demand regularly exceeds the school’s capacity.

4.3 Methods

Organisational Ethnography and Shadowing

To get a better understanding of the localisation of the field and of professionals’ organisational habitus and organisational practices, it is necessary to gain access to the ‘underside’ of organisational work, “the hidden, informal arrangements by which organisational life is constituted in practice” (Morrill and Fine 1997, 426). Organisational ethnography is employed here to develop a deeper and more nuanced understanding of organisations and the people working within them. Ethnography can help to understand how individuals within an organisation make sense of their social worlds and what kind of categorisations, taken-for-granted assumptions, and conceptions they employ to do so. (Morrill and Fine 1997, 437f.) Moreover, ethnographic work allows for the identification of meaningful differences between what people say about their daily tasks and how they should be conducted and how they go about doing them in the reality. Over the course of July 2012 to June 2013, I conducted five to six months of (participant) observation at each primary school in Roseville and Cross-Square, on

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average three days per week, completing approximately 870 hours of fieldwork. As part of this approach, I ‘shadowed’ ten educational professionals in each school for two to three weeks per person. These ten were mostly teachers, but also included social workers, educational professionals working for the agency organising the after-school supervision, and the principals of the respective schools. Shadowing is a technique where the researcher closely follows a member of an organisation throughout his or her day: “When the person being shadowed goes to another department, the researcher follows them. When they have a project meeting or meet with a customer, the researcher sits in. If they have coffee with friends who are colleagues from another site, the researcher goes too. The researcher ‘shadows’ the target individual from the moment they begin their working day until they leave for home.” (McDonald 2005, 456) This method provides access to an individual’s direct experiences and thus to conscious and unconscious, as well as official and unofficial, procedures within an organisation (McDonald 2005). In order to select the educational professionals to be shadowed, I again relied on a sampling for range (Weiss 1995). During my time in the field, it became increasingly clear which informal categories subdivided professionals within the schools, such as older and younger teachers, highly engaged colleagues or teachers who were more withdrawn. I tried to capture as many constellations as possible in my sample. During my observations, professionals firstly needed to adjust to being shadowed and sometimes worried: “Are you bored?” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, January 7, 2013), if they were simply doing their work without explaining much. After a time, however, most professionals adjusted to the situation and began to include me in their professional practices – often by asking me for support, especially during lessons – which was extremely helpful to build rapport and trust. It also allowed me to experience rather than to simply hear about the pressures, decisions, and practices that the educational professionals encountered every day. While my support in the classroom may have impacted the professional practices that I observed, this would have similarly been the case for all the professionals I shadowed; since differences between neighbourhoods remained, this impact is unlikely to have been problematic.

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While shadowing and at other occasions, I took field notes – either on paper or into my mobile phone, which was, especially in the teachers’ lounge, less irritating to the professionals gathered there than taking notes on paper. In an attempt to observe as many different contexts in the school as possible, I often spent time in the teachers’ lounge, in the offices of the principal and the vice-principal; I sat in on classroom instructions, PTA and individual meetings with parents, faculty meetings, school trips, swimming lessons and community meetings. Three of the professionals that I shadowed and whom we will meet quite regularly in the following chapters are introduced in a bit more detail here:

A. Hellwig A. Hellwig, now in her 50s, has worked in Cross-Square for many years. She is rather short and robust, with eccentric glasses and short tousled grey hair. She smiles a lot and is generally charming and very likeable. She is a very involved teacher who often works long hours, and as such was one of the first professionals whom I got to know better. A. Hellwig lives with her partner, who often points out that other teachers do not work as much. She shares a great deal about her private life – with me but also with children and parents who call her at home to discuss personal matters. She is emotionally open, and occasionally participates in activities with the children during her private time, such as going to a museum with them during the summer holiday. She often speaks about former students with whom she is still in contact; the social development of her students is crucial to her. For A. Hellwig, school is not – or at a minimum, not only – about learning and grades. Parents appreciate her and often point out that they are lucky to have her as a teacher. A. Hellwig enjoys her social standing in the school and describes herself as self-confident, although she is easily offended by critical comments. Moreover, she vehemently defends the school against critique and negative perceptions – sometimes making it hard to speak openly about potential problems. A. Hellwig feels that she in the right place at Cross-Square: “I love it here.”

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B. Speicher B. Speicher is a tall, slender, woman in her 60s. She is extroverted and does not care about the rules much. She sees herself more as an artist than as a primary school teacher. Parallel to her career as ‘free-spirited’ teacher, she has always been engaged in the cultural scene in Berlin. Before coming to Roseville, she worked in a neighbourhood similar to Cross-Square, and wanted to change society and the world. Her experiences at her previous school and neighbourhood still shape her professional identity and she often comments on the differences to Roseville or explains her behaviour with reference to her professional past. In so doing, she sometimes glorifies the ‘rough times’ in a ‘bad’ neighbourhood, such as when she explains, smiling, that “If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, April 30, 2013) Nevertheless, she is somewhat relieved to now be working in a different environment. She remembers how much frustration she and her colleagues endured working in a neighbourhood similar to Cross-Square. She explains: “Sometimes it felt like filling a bucket with water over and over again even though the bucket has a hole” (Roseville’s primary school, Teacher’s Interview 21, Interview Notes). In Roseville, parents sometimes complain about B. Speicher’s ‘impulsive behaviour’ – something she attributes to her previous work experiences. That being said, since she also offers numerous of cultural activities to her students, which parents see as a net positive, their complaints never escalate.

U. Schmidts In contrast to B. Speicher, U. Schmidts has spent almost her entire professional life in Roseville – with the exception of a brief episode during her teacher training. When she had her own children, she moved with her family to Roseville, where she enjoys living and working. Her children are now adults and continue to live in the neighbourhood: her daughter has had children of her own who will soon be enrolled in Roseville’s primary school. U. Schmidts is in her 50s, a petite woman. She wears sporty dresses, and physical education is one of the subjects she teaches. Within her family as well, sports and exercise play an important role. The same is

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true of her work: While U. Schmidts clearly has a fulfilling private life, she also regularly works on the weekend to prepare her lessons. U. Schmidts is a very friendly teacher, who often smiles. She is well-liked by both the children and the parents and is respected by the principal and the vice-principal of the school. She is clearly focussed on the children’s achievements and worries more about their academic progress than about their social development, or about the existence of social inequality and its effect on children’s educational trajectory. Most of the parents are happy to have their children work with such a teacher, who prepares them well, gives clear instructions, and makes sure that most of the children achieve solid results.

Interview Approach

In addition to the ethnographic work, teachers and parents were also interviewed more systematically. In total, fifty-two semi-structured in-depth interviews (Weiss 1995) were conducted, both with teachers (twenty-seven interviews10) and parents (twenty-five interviews 11) from within Roseville’s and Cross-Square’s primary schools as well as with a smaller sample from other schools (in total ten of the fifty-two interviews). The second sample of interviewees in different contexts functioned as a control against school specific effects, which are likelier to occur in single case studies. Within Roseville’s and Cross-Squares primary schools, the principle of sampling for range was again employed (Weiss 1995). For teachers, variation was introduced to the sample based on age, previous work experience, and internal categorisations of colleagues, as shall be explained in Chapter 6. For parents, a similar procedure was employed; categorisations of parents, that were observable within the field, were used for the sampling process. Moreover, I specifically asked key 10 11

Six in Cross-Square, eleven in Roseville, ten in other schools. Twelve in Cross-Square, thirteen in Roseville.

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players, such as the leader of the parents’ organisation, for interviews. In addition, teachers were asked for reference to parents; in some cases all parents of a class were invited to take part in the study, e.g. though mailing lists or at PTA meetings. However, I also differentiated between middle-class, working-class, and poor families in my choice of interview partners. Following Lareau and Hovrat (1999, 40) and Erikson and Goldthorpe (1992, 38), I define parents as working-class if at least one parent graduated from secondary school (or is a dropout) and is steadily employed as an unskilled, semiskilled, or skilled manual worker, including lowerlevel white-collar work such as sales and service provision. Stefanie and Markus, both in their 40s, are an example of this group of parents: Together with their four children, who all attended Cross-Square’s primary school, they live in CrossSquare. Both of them were born in Germany and completed secondary school. Stefanie is employed in a pharmacy as a salesperson; her husband works seasonally as a gardener. Poor families were defined as those who depended upon welfare to meet their basic needs: Forty-two year old Hanna, for example, was born in Germany, trained as dental assistant but has been unemployed for some time. Her partner finished secondary school in Italy, and works as an occasional handyman. The family has two children and lives on welfare. The group of middle-class parents has become more difficult to define, given changing occupational structures as well as labour market and income divisions (Devine et al. 2005). Nevertheless, following Lareau and Hovrat (1999, 40) I define middle-class families as those in which at least one parent has a college degree and is employed in a professional or managerial position. A typical example here is Marlene, her husband, and their two children, who live in Roseville where they recently bought a house. Marlene, in her mid-40s, was born in Germany, has an academic degree in economics and works as a freelance journalist. She keeps her working hours low in order to care for the children. Her husband works as a journalist full-time. The family has a comfortable income and is happy in Roseville, among many like-minded families. Yet, as the cultural capital of individual parents is crucial in school contexts (Lareau 1987), I also considered parents with lower income or less prestigious jobs as middle-class as long as one parent finished university. Cross-Square also has a small number of such parents with high cultural

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capital who nonetheless lack the economic capital to move to a ‘better’ neighbourhood. A typical example here are Erika and Jonas, both in their early 40s, who live in Cross-Square, were both born in Germany and have university degrees. They both work as environmental engineers, but only on a part-time basis to allow for time with their two children, thereby sacrificing a higher income. This set-up is feasible, in part, because their rent in Cross-Square is relatively low. They enjoy living in the neighbourhood even though certain friends and their own parents are very critical of their choice of residence, especially in light of the neighbourhood’s primary school. In all groups, individuals with an immigrant background are classified in line with the Federal Statistical Office’s definition, which refers to “all persons who have immigrated into the territory of today’s Federal Republic of Germany after 1949, and of all foreigners born in Germany and all persons born in Germany who have at least one parent who immigrated into the country or was born as a foreigner in Germany” (Schönwälder et al. 2016, 34). For the research and sampling process, I conceptualized my interviewees as cases (Small 2009a, 24), aiming not for statistical representativeness but for a sequential process in which each further case “provides an increasingly accurate understanding of the question at hand” (Small 2009a, 24f.), and as such impacts the selection process and questions for the next interview. The interviews with parents were mostly held at their homes, whereas most teachers were interviewed on the school grounds. Interviews lasted between 20 and 100 minutes. The interviews with teachers covered the following topics: work biography, clientele of the school, day-to-day work, their relations with parents, changes to working conditions, as well as their professional identity. With parents, the interviews focused on the academic trajectory of their children, everyday experiences in school and with other parents, their treatment by the school and any support they receive from the school, and how they define their own role in the education of their children as well as in the school. In addition, parents were asked about their perspectives on the neighbourhood. Moreover, all interviewees were

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asked demographic questions, such as age, educational background, the neighbourhood they live in, as well as the number of children in their household, and family income. (see appendix for interview guides) Especially for the interviews with parents, some limitations must be pointed out. In the interviews, parents’ personal accounts are likely too positive. As I asked teachers to refer parents to me, this might have resulted in a bias towards parents that teachers had a friendly relationship with. However, even if all parents of a class were informed of my interview request, a bias might still have been maintained since parents had often observed me in conversation with teachers in the school, may have suspected that I was employed by the school or that I would tell teachers about the content of the interview. Moreover, there might as well be a more pervasive interviewer effect, especially in Cross-Square, linked to my name and appearance, as I was probably coded as someone middle-class without migration background by most parents. In general, however, the combination of ethnographic observation and interviews was very productive: Interviews provided an opportunity to document ‘official’ beliefs, which, especially in schools, often diverge from actual practices. The ethnographic work added to the analysis of the informal and unofficial components of teachers’ workdays and parents’ experiences.

4.4 Coding and Analysis of Data

The interviews were fully transcribed. As a first step, the interviews and field notes were analysed through a case-focused analysis. All material from each school/neighbourhood context was analysed separately. To do so, an issue-focused analysis was conducted by coding specific topics, narratives or issues across the entirety of the material. After a phase of open coding limited to a subset of interviews and field notes within each case, a coding list was developed according to

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which all other interviews and field notes were coded using Atlas.ti. In a second step, the analysis of the two cases was compared, contrasted, and integrated (Weiss 1995, 153ff., 167ff.)

5

How Neighbourhoods Shape Schools-as-Fields: Social, Symbolic, and Administrative Differences

Thus far, I have argued that to understand neighbourhood inequality one should focus much more on organisations than on so-called neighbourhood effects, which often come with assumptions about neighbourhoods as containers, in which isolated residents form ‘deviant’ cultures and fail to organise collectively. A focus on organisational practices in diverging neighbourhood contexts is crucial here. Organisations might adapt to their neighbourhood contexts and add to existing local inequalities. The question, thus, becomes how neighbourhoods structure organisational practices. While new-institutionalists have argued that professionals develop similar normative rules about professional behaviour through their training in similar institutions (DiMaggio and W. Powell 1983, 152f.), so-called normative isomorphism, the main argument of this book is that these professional practices nevertheless differ by neighbourhood. From a theoretical perspective, it was suggested in Chapter 3 that these processes can be captured through the concepts of localised fields, organisational habitus, and organisational practices. As organisational habitus and organisational practices of professionals are shaped within organisations, we first need to ask: Do schools-as-fields get structured differently in different neighbourhood contexts? As argued in Chapter 3, the notion of field allows for an analysis of how organisations are impacted by different constellations of institutionalised pressures and by the objective power relations within, as well as between, organisations, which ultimately create specific field-constellations. As a first step, this chapter empirically analyses how these field-constellations vary by local neighbourhood as context-specific conditions interact with institutional pressures to produce localised fields. Neighbourhoods, as we shall see,

© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 J. Nast, Unequal Neighbourhoods, Unequal Schools, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-27591-4_5

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function as a ‘hinge’ that structures these interrelations. I use the term localisation to highlight the dynamic character of this process, in which the local is continuously inscribed into the organisation-as-field. Moreover, this perspective complicates public debates that often suggest that the problem is really that ‘bad’ teachers are assigned to ‘bad’ neighbourhoods whereas ‘good’ teachers teach in middleclass schools. While selection biases might be in play, it seems unproductive to understand teachers as essentially good or bad, while ignoring the structural conditions under which their professional skills develop (Paulle 2013, 167). In this chapter, I will argue that schools-as-fields are localised in three ways: First, neighbourhoods as social units impact schools by structuring the social composition of children and parents, which introduces different objective power positions within schools-as-fields and with it different forms of (more or less subtle) parental control. Moreover, the social composition of a school brings latent antagonisms to the field, as institutionalised understandings of what schools are expected to achieve to be legitimate come into contact with structural conditions that allow for the fulfilment of these expectations to different degrees. Second, neighbourhoods come with symbolic meanings that position schools in a citywide field of education. In so doing, the neighbourhood as a symbolic entity shapes the field, through forms of symbolic violence for example. Finally, the neighbourhood as administrative unit structures the institutional embeddedness of schools – depending on the local context, schools face different regulations, programmes, and funding schemes, which also shape daily understandings, attention, and attentiveness of the professionals working therein. This highlights the need to think about neighbourhoods in broader terms than as containers and to take their multi-dimensional character into account, which the literature on neighbourhood effects has thus far often ignored. A context-sensitive new-institutional perspective is helpful to do so. In the following, I address each shaping factor and highlight how together they produce localised organisations that provide very different structures in which educational professionals develop their skills, as we will see in Chapter 6. In part, the distinction between field-constellations and the formation of habitus and practices within it is not clear-cut as characteristics of the field can best be illustrated in how professionals speak about

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it. However, the main focus in this chapter is on the process through which neighbourhoods shape schools-as-fields rather than on what this means for teachers’ organisational habitus and practices.

5.1 Neighbourhoods as Social Units: Parents, Power Positions, and Institutional Pressures

A central difference between schools in privileged and deprived neighbourhoods is their social composition. While studies have shown that social (and ethnic) segregation within schools is often higher than within a given neighbourhood (see Fincke and Lange 2012 for Berlin; see Johnston et al. 2006 for the UK), there is a clear relationship between a neighbourhood’s social composition and that of its schools – especially but not only in catchment-based systems such as that in Berlin. Neighbourhoods thus structure the social composition of their schools to a certain extent. As of yet, however, scholars have paid little attention to how this social composition structures and thus localises schools-as-fields. Instead, the extant literature has tried to make sense of the effects of different social compositions by focussing mostly on the behaviour and learning attitudes of children and on the different teaching conditions they create for teachers (see Chapter 2). Others have highlighted that family-school relations differ depending on the school’s social composition (Lareau 1987; Vincent 1996; Horvat, Weininger, and Lareau 2003). Scholars have shown that social class, especially the cultural capital of parents, impacts parental involvement and its perception (Crozier 2000; Lareau 1987, 81). The same is true for parents’ social capital: Horvat, Weininger and Lareau (2003, 320, 327, 331) highlight how the structure and the resources available through parental networks vary dramatically by social class, making them more or less useful for interventions at school. In sum, middleclass parents hold schools and teachers accountable more often and question how the school organises their children’s education; working-class parents are more

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likely to “trust” “the professionals” (Crozier 2000). Partly, these findings have resulted in an idealised understanding of middle-class parents as being better positioned to make schools effective by ridding “the school of bad teachers” (Kahlenberg 2003, 62). While these accounts provide us with important insights on how involvement varies between middle-class and working-class parents, the main focus is often on how this advantages middle-class children vis-à-vis the school. Less attention has been paid to teachers and to how the social composition of a school produces very different structural contexts, in which professionals work, more generally. In the following, I want to fill this gap. Two aspects are of importance here: First, while previous research has largely focused on parents’ actual interventions and its effect for specific children, I argue that parents – depending on their power position – also shape the field more broadly by enacting their expectations as institutional pressures and thus implementing subtle forms of control. Second, social inequality also shapes the field by introducing latent conflicts into the field that challenge the meritocratic myth of public schooling. All in all, the social composition that comes with the neighbourhood as social unit decisively shapes schools-as-fields, localises them, and ultimately creates different structures in which teachers come to position themselves.

Powerful Parents, Powerful Teachers?

Depending on the neighbourhood, children and their parents often possess different forms of capital which shape their objective positions within schools-as-field. As Bourdieu (2000, 183) argues, a field – in this case the school – is characterised by a network of objective relations. These objective relations are not defined by the actual networks between parents and teachers in the school, but, as we saw in Chapter 3, by the capital resources that actors possess in relation to other actors in the field. Through these objective relations, fields are hierarchically structured

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and actors occupy objective dominant or subordinate positions within it. (Naidoo 2004, 458) The position of the teachers thus cannot be understood per se: In deprived neighbourhoods, the education, knowledge and economic capital of the parents is usually below those of the teachers, while parents in privileged neighbourhoods often possess higher levels of education, more knowledge of the system and greater economic capital than the teachers.12 These different social positions, then, have important consequences for the kinds of institutional pressures that parents are able to ‘activate,’ shaping the school-as-field.

Roseville: Institutional Pressures in a Field of Powerful Parents Structurally, parents in Roseville are powerful actors. Most parents bring high amounts of cultural, economic and social capital (Bourdieu 1986) to the schoolas-field. Their power position, however, operates in subtle instead of overt ways. If asked, parents in Roseville generally describe their relationship to the school and its teachers as positive. Interactions are friendly; and parents are often very supportive of the school. As Heike, a middle-class mother in her mid-40s, explains during an interview in her sunny backyard: “All the neighbours said we should be happy that we can send our children here, [that we are part of the catchment area of Roseville primary school]” (Parent Interview 16, #00:04:07-9#). That being said, in Roseville, parents also underline that they have an explicit understanding of their expectations of the school. These expectations are focused on ‘high quality,’ understood in the somewhat limited sense that the school guarantees that the children will be well-prepared for secondary school, and, more specifically, for ‘Gymnasium’13, the track which allows students to attend university directly. As many parents explain:

12

13

This highlights the problematic nature of those claims that posit that if working-class or lower-class parents would only be more involved in their child’s education, schools would immediately change for the better. Such claims ignore the structural opportunities wherein certain parents are more able to influence teachers, schools, and the resources their children receive. While differences exist between states (‘Bundesländer’), the German educational system generally sorts students into different school types after primary school (usually starting at grade 5, in Berlin at grade 7), based on their perceived ‘ability.’ The different tracks lead to

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“Well, there is some pressure, in this neighbourhood, there is only one school type that parents aim for [meaning: Gymnasium], let’s put it this way.” (Parent Interview 20, #00:33:12-1#) “I guess, the expectation is quite high – [parents expect] that everybody in the school will do as best as they can!” (Parent Interview 17, #00:27:09-5#) “Most parents expect that things in the school will be 100% – and if things just work on an 80% level, well, then this upsets parents.” (Parent Interview 15, #00:10:26-5#) These parental expectations can be understood as institutional pressures shaping the school-as-field. Parents constantly implement their expectations in the field by reminding teachers of their demands, which they do with different levels of intensity. If parents are concerned, for example, by the grading process, the cancellation of classes, or a particular teaching style, their first reaction is often to be more physically present at the school, thereby signalling that they are observant of what is going on. Parents might sit in on lessons, for example, if they are worried about the atmosphere in class. Brigitte, an energetic prosecutor, recalls: “[We had this situation in the classroom, where some of the boys were quite wild], and […] then parents discussed, is it possible that it is simply too noisy in the classroom [for the children to concentrate]; and then we decided one of us parents should sit in [to see what was happening during the lessons], and I thought, ok, I have time, I’ll do it.” (Parent Interview 17, #00:39:24-3#, #00:39:25-5#, #00:39:29-0#) Similarly, during PTA meetings, parents would openly ask about the rates of sick leave of certain teachers or critically comment on cancelled lessons, as this anecdote reveals:

different school leaving certificates, which determine access to academic education or vocational training. Several states have attempted to reform this system, making it easier to switch by implementing secondary schools that offer different tracks within one school (in Berlin for example the integrated secondary school (‘Integrierte Sekundarschule’) or the comprehensive school (Gesamtschule)). Nevertheless, in Berlin, as in most states, the ‘Gymnasium’, an academic secondary school, is still seen by many parents as the preferable path to university.

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One father raises his hand. He is in his early 40s, wearing jeans and a white shirt […]. He states, “Well, I do have a question about the math lessons. Over the last few weeks, those were cancelled quite often, and I would like to know why, and how this is going to be substituted in the future!” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, Mai 15, 2013) A slightly more intense parental reminder is the option to regularly initiate meetings with the teachers to discuss perceived problems; as a father, working as a lawyer, explains: “There was this one teachers, S. Pluft […], and it was a bit problematic, her class management, her teaching style, and the children weren’t happy […] and, really, a lot of parents complained, […] and parent representtatives met with her often [to talk about the situation and the problems that parents and children saw].” (Parent Interview 21, #00:03:57-1#, #00:04:22-1#, #00:04:53-7#) Clearly acknowledging that parental expectations result in the monitoring of the educational professionals’ actions, Brigitte summarises the situation as follows: “I guess it is pretty exhausting for teachers here , because, yes, everybody […] supports the school and so on […], but I think very often, even with trivial things, parents always comment on it, or look into it further and inquire […] so parents have very high expectations of the school and what the school has to provide.” (Parent Interview 17, #00:25:44-1#) However, if being more present in the school does not bring about the desired result, parents can also escalate the situation. Due to the parents’ position in the field and their cultural, social, and economic capital, they are able to force the school into complying with their wishes, making their expectations of what the school should provide a very powerful institutional pressure: C. Scherk, the vice-principal and I are making our way to the principal’s office. Two blond women, wearing cashmere jumpers, are waiting in front of the office. […] C. Scherk passes by and greets them quickly. I can feel her pushing me towards the door and I wonder if she is trying to avoid these mothers. But one of the women speaks up. She tells C. Scherk

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that they would like to discuss the grading procedure in German. Many of the children had disappointing results, and the parents found the grading process somewhat suspect. C. Scherk smiles, but explains that they would have to discuss this another time. We enter the office and behind the closed door, she explains that she does not want these mothers to look at the school’s grading rules. Once they get ahold of it, they will complain about every single test. A few days later, however, C. Scherk tells me that ‘the parents’ have now officially complained to the local authority. They were unhappy with how the school dealt with their questions and P. Deuft, the school principal, was advised to make the grading more transparent. (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, January 11, 2013) This anecdote reveals how parents can make sure that their own expectations are institutionalised also by ‘activating’ external institutional regulations in order to influence the school-as-field. In signalling to the local school authority, for example, they introduce a form of coercive isomorphism (DiMaggio and W. Powell 1983: 150f.) to the field that would not have been present otherwise, which once again highlights the need to conceptualise the role of institutional pressures together with local context to understand how schools-as-fields are localised. In Roseville, parents know how to ‘play’ the game and can make use of their position to pressure the school. Actors’ ability to involve themselves in such “struggles or manoeuvres […] over resources, stakes and access” (Bourdieu 1990; cited in Everett 2002, 60) depends heavily on their position within the field. Parents are themselves quite aware that specific resources are needed to deal with the school, as Heike, a middle-class stay-at-home mother, explains: “I think we have to make sure to push our requests in a way that it is heard by the school; […] here it is helpful to find parents, personalities, who know how to gain recognition […], off the top of my head, I’m thinking of lawyers , because, just by their occupation, they are always right […] and they know the law, if you are lucky, and this is very useful and good support for us other parents.” (Parent Interview 16, #00:31:17-8#, #00:32:20-5#, #00:32:58-1#) Interestingly, parental struggles and manoeuvres do not exclusively take place within the realm of accepted and legally-safeguarded standards of parental involvement. Rather, parents also use their resources in informal ways (AlSayyed

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2004, 10; Roy 2005) – by attempting to manoeuvre around formal regulations, or by negotiating ‘special deals.’ While the concept of informality was developed within the context of the global South, this “organizational logic” (AlSayyed 2004, 10; also Roy 2005, 148; AlSayyed and Roy 2004) can also be found in the practices of privileged parents in the global North. Here, it brings to light the far side of the school-as-field, as parents negotiate the “ever-shifting […] relationship between the legal and illegal, legitimate and illegitimate, authorized and unauthorized” (Roy 2011, 233). A common example is the dealing of involvement for favours: I’m in the principal’s office when a mother, in her 40s, long blond hair, expensive clothes, enters the room. She is one of the mothers who are very involved in the school and she comes in with a mission. Her daughter will be enrolled in the school this year and the mother wants her to attend the class of one of the two most popular first-year teachers– even though officially parents cannot demand specific teachers […] P. Deuft smiles and explains: “I can’t satisfy the wishes of all parents.” The mother smiles back and insists “but some parents are more involved in and supportive of the school than others.” “We will see,” responds P. Deuft. Both women smile. After the mother has left the room, the principal sighs: “I knew she wanted something the moment she came in!” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, January 24, 2013) In the end, P. Deuft decides not to give in to the mother’s demand – at least not in full. Her daughter is assigned to one of the other very popular female teachers. This situation nonetheless indicates how parents interpret their own position, and how they are comfortable in making use of their capital to shape the field – and the practices of the professionals within it – to their advantage.

To sum up, in Roseville, the parents’ powerful position in the school goes beyond the actual control of specific situations (such as when parents are unhappy with teachers), as Lareau has put forward (Lareau 1987; Horvat, Weininger, and Lareau 2003). Parents do not exclusively intervene when something ‘goes wrong’ – although they do that too. Their presence means more than that: In a subtler way, parental beliefs of what schools are expected to provide can be understood as an

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institutional pressure. In Roseville, parents constantly implement their expectations in their daily practices and are in a sufficiently powerful position to pressure the school to comply with their wishes. They do so in formal as well as in informal areas of the school-as-field and use external institutional forces, such as the local authority, to pressure the school. This does not mean that parents in Roseville always ‘get their way,’ but they do shape the school-as-field by constantly reminding teachers, the principal and other educational professionals that, in theory, they could organise and thus position themselves in opposition to the school. This creates much more subtle forms of control, which go beyond the idea of middle-class parents ‘ridding’ the school of ‘bad’ teachers. Parents localise the school-as-field in such a way that they do not have to actually control teachers all the time. Rather, they structure the field by making sure that they are implicitly present in teachers’ assumptions and daily understanding of their work, as we will see in Chapter 6.

Cross-Square: Institutional Pressures in a Field of Powerful Teachers The situation in Cross-Square’s primary school is profoundly different: Parents are less successful in shaping the school-as-field through the implementation of their expectations as institutional pressures. Due to their social position within the school-as-field, the ability of Cross-Square parents to successfully involve themselves in controlling, pressuring or challenging the school is limited. As stated before, parents’ struggles over resources and access, their “position takings” (Bourdieu 1993, 35), are inseparable from their objective positions in the field. Parents in Cross-Square thus have to find other ways of assuring their child’s wellbeing in school. Working-class or poor parents with or without an immigrant background should therefore not be conceptualised as passive or lacking agency – as the public debate in Germany often suggests – but “as people with limited options between which they can choose” (Warrington 2005, 802), in their interactions with public organisations. However, parents’ position in the field has important consequences for how the school-as-field gets shaped in Cross-Square. As parents are, from a structural standpoint, not in a position to challenge the school as parents in Roseville, they often highlight their own role in their children’s education rather than demand that the school or a specific teacher perform

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differently. As several parents in Cross-Square explain – if your family “is all right” and is “working hard,” the school does not really matter: “It’s not the school, it is the family and the child – that’s what’s important!” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, November 2, 2012); “It all depends on the student, you know, and on a decent upbringing” (Parent Interview 4, #00:18:186#). Moreover, in an attempt to work against “the very bad reputation of our CrossSquare” (Parent Interview 2, #00:55:53-9#), many parents wanted to highlight that the school was actually better than often assumed. Seeing the school as bad is understood by these parents as a confirmation of the ethnic and social stereotype held by (middle-class) people from outside of Cross-Square. Constructing the school as ‘good’ becomes an important way of challenging this stereotype. Skeggs (2004) has argued that working-class women are well aware of the judgments of ‘the dominant’ and use respectability to establish symbolic value (McNay 2004, 175ff.). To do so, it is important not to complain about the school; respectability is attained through the individualising narrative of ‘it is all about your family’ instead of by giving voice to problems and questions of quality and standards. To discuss structural problems is sometimes even understood as an insult, as this anecdote reveals: I am at a PTA meeting, at which teachers explain the German school system to parents, who are more comfortable in Turkish than in German. The meeting takes place in the assembly hall, which is huge and chilly. 25 people have shown up, filling some, but not all of the rows of chairs that are facing the teachers’ table. The discussion goes on in Turkish, which unfortunately I can’t follow. However, I recognize that there are tensions. Several parents raise their voice, a mother almost screams, other parents laugh, and a father next to me frowns. […] After the presentation, two mothers explain what had happened. A grandmother had said that the school was ‘bad’ and a ‘ghetto school’ and that she was really unhappy to send her grandchildren here. Other parents reacted very angrily and shocked. One of the mothers explains: “It’s disgusting, how can she say such a thing about our neighbourhood and our school?” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, November 1, 2012)

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This hesitation to raise problems can make it hard for parents to find support for their concerns. Moreover, teachers often support an individualising view, pushing parents to ‘take responsibility.’ As Zehra, a working-class mother with migrant background from Turkey, who works as a doctor’s assistant, recounts: “The teacher explained, it depends on the parents, we need to work with the school and support the school and then everyone can make it!” (Author’s field notes, CrossSquare primary school, November 1, 2012). While the image of ‘this is a bad school’ is challenged here (at least verbally) (Skeggs 1997), this comes at the price of individualising the structural inequalities present as well as the school’s responsibility. Moreover, parents are often very aware that moving to a neighbourhood with supposedly ‘better’ schools is simply not an option for them since better-off neighbourhoods would be problematic in other ways. As these two mothers explain: “Well, I’m sure, if we lived in Roseville, or Bergland, or a similar neighbourhood, they would have fewer difficulties with German, sure, […] but – hm – I guess they would have other problems – as a child from CrossSquare in Roseville, you know, people would look down on them ‘where are you from?’ – […] and I think that would be worse than not speaking German perfectly.” (Parent Interview 2, #00:20:50-5#, #00:22:21-8#) “I think in Roseville, […] parents have higher expectations, well, teachers are under more pressure, parents in Roseville, they are lawyers or doctors, they know better than parents around here, where most parents are on welfare. Here, parents think, ‘ah, they learn ABC, that’s ok, that suffices,’ but in Roseville parents know what the curriculum is and what children need to learn. And thus, teachers probably do more, and children learn better. […] But I would not like to send my child there, it would be, as a parent, I’m only a doctor’s assistant, you know…” (Parent Interview 2, #00:47:39-1#, #00:48:03-8#) Accordingly, most parents must assure successful and safe school experiences in the neighbourhood in which they already live. To do so, many parents invest heavily in displaying how ‘supportive’ they are of the school, and in presenting themselves as ‘good’ families – something that might be best understood as a form of

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“moral capital” (Valverde 1994) that becomes especially salient for parents’ positioning in the field when economic and dominant forms of cultural capital are less accessible. For example, parents will state their satisfaction with the school in front of the teachers: “We are lucky [that our child is in her class]” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, August 27, 2012); “we need to be grateful” (Parent Interview 6, #00:24:24-1#). Others give presents to teachers on the last day of school, prepare food for various occasions, or bring additional useful materials to school, such as patches or a science experiment involving a volcano that one mother bought for little money at a dollar store. A prominent location for signalling ‘good parenting’ and ‘support for teachers’ was the PTA meeting. As A. Hellwig, the teacher we met in Chapter 4, explains laughing: “The point of the PTA? That parents can signal that they are interested. That’s the point.” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, August 28, 2012) This also demonstrates the difference in social positions of parents between the two schools: While teachers in Roseville are often slightly afraid of PTA meetings, since they must justify their teaching practices there, in Cross-Square, the PTA meeting is the place where parents have to show that they ‘care’ and are indeed ‘good’ parents. In Cross-Square, parents often do not have any alternative other than to comply with the expectations of the school – rather than the other way around. As Ecrin, a working-class mother, explains as we sit in her kitchen: “I had to learn this, too. It is hard to accept, that someone else tells you, that your child is not perfect, that your child makes mistakes and has weaknesses. That’s hard. But if you resist, well, that’s not good for you and not for your child either. Sometimes it is better to say: ‘ok, they are well-educated people, they know’ […] They can be wrong, maybe they don’t like your child, but you need to really ask yourself, ‘these people have experience and knowledge, what is going on, what do we do wrong?’” (Parent Interview 6, #00:31:44-9#) The fact that some parents highlight their own role in the educational process does not however mean that the parents are never unhappy with the school, or that they never feel discriminated against or that they never complain that the school is treating them or their children poorly.

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Yet, even if parents are very unhappy with the situation in the school, they are often not successful in pushing for change. Due to the parents’ less dominant forms of cultural, social, and economic capital and their resultant position in the field, teachers in Cross-Square deal with parental demands very differently than in Roseville. Evin, a working-class mother with a migrant background from Turkey, who had moved from Cross-Square to Roseville a year earlier, explains the difference: We are sitting in a classroom and Evin tells me how in the old school in Cross-Square, a lot of parents actually complained about the school as well. Eventually, however, they realized that even if they scheduled appointments with the teachers or complained to the principal “nothing changed.” After a while, Evin says, this became “so frustrating that they stopped trying to get involved.” She shakes her head slightly while she remembers. In the new school, by contrast, she says parents always seem to know what to do, they have powerful networks and “if they are unhappy, they make sure that things will change, […] and it will work – if something is not working well, they make sure something happens.” (Parent Interview 24, author’s field notes) While their own social position often leaves them without leverage against the school, parents also have a hard time finding other people to support them in fighting the school in Cross-Square. Parents in Roseville, as we saw above, often rely on the local school authority as the next level in the hierarchy; they also contact external experts (see also Lareau 1987; Horvat, Weininger, and Lareau 2003, 334). In contrast, parents in Cross-Square rather ask other professionals in the school for help, which is often less effective. While teachers sometimes share similar concerns to the parents, they are rarely a helpful ally. Even if other professionals in the school question the competencies of a specific colleague, struggling teachers are at the same time seen with sympathy and personal relations make it hard to intervene on behalf of the children or the parents. H. Fiss, a social worker, who has worked in the school for many years, recalls: “There was a mother in the class of R. Smith [a teacher who is seen as very problematic due to his teaching style, number of absences, and the flagging success rate of his students] and she came to me and said she had a bad vibe about this, and you know, that was very hard because I

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thought she was right but you know I can’t put a teacher on the spot like this, so I simply said she should trust her guts…” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, August, 2012) This, however, is already quite outspoken. The most common reaction to parents raising concerns or complaining about other teachers is: “Please, no comparisons with other teachers!” or “I don’t wanna hear this!” (Author’s field notes, CrossSquare primary school, September 3, 2012) In consequence, parents in Cross-Square, often feel that – if they are unhappy with how the schools tackles certain issues – they have no choice other than to enrol their child in a different school in Cross-Square, rather than to change the situation on-site: While I wait in the principal’s office, a mother enters the secretary’s office. She asks for the forms to apply to a different school. The secretary sneers “It won’t be different at the other school” and the mother responds, angrily, “Well, I very much hope it will.” It sounds like: anything will be better than this school. (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, August 22, 2012) This dynamic creates very different structural conditions for teachers in CrossSquare than in Roseville. While there are obviously differences between individual teachers in Cross-Square, there is a general tendency wherein parental concerns are not seen as ‘threatening’ or ‘urgent.’ In Cross-Square, teachers do not fear parents as powerful actors in the school-as-field and thus they are less often part of their everyday deliberations. The social position of the parents makes them structurally less able to implement their demands as institutional pressures in order to shape the school-as-field. Expectations of what a school should provide – in new-institutional terms: the coercive isomorphism – are thus less powerful in Cross-Square, as parents’ structural position does not allow them to demand their implementation to the same degree as in Roseville. Again, this highlights the importance of the interplay between local context and institutional pressures for understanding how both structure schools-as-fields differently.

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Another observation is of importance here, namely that even if some middle-class parents send their children to schools like Cross-Square, this does not shape the school-as-field in the same way as in Roseville. In Cross-Square’s primary school, there is a small group of approximately six middle-class families that enrolled their children at the local school. Some of the parents knew each other before school started (for example through other neighbourhood organisations such as kindergartens); others met at the school, usually during their involvement in school activities. Yet, their function for the school-as-field is profoundly different than that of middle-class families in Roseville. First of all, as they are only a small group, their involvement is automatically less profound than in Roseville. These parents must make decisions about when to intervene, support and act – and when not to. More importantly however, while these parents support the school as a whole to some extent, by assuring additional funding for projects for example, they also feel that they have to make sure that their children have access to good conditions even though they attend school in Cross-Square. This often means creating ‘islands’ within the school with the child-friends from other middle-class families and assuring a good quality of teaching in the classrooms of their children. In practice, these parents often assume scare resources, such as the most highly professionalised teachers, for themselves. Helena, a middle-class mother who works as a real estate agent, explains how she and her husband created a substructure for their children within Cross-Square’s primary school: “We always made sure that our children went to the right classroom with teachers who we trusted to do the best for our children […] and if you talk to the head of a school it’s no problem, you know, usually, there are not that many parents who have clear preferences, and as a general rule it is possible to make sure [that at least some of your children’s friends can be together in a class]. Not all of them, sure, but at least some – because the school does not want an elite in one class – and that I understand, but in general the head of the school accommodates our wishes.” (Parent Interview 10, #00:05:16-1#, #00:07:28-9#) Thus, a small group of middle-class parents is not necessary a solution to organisational neighbourhood inequalities. While middle-class parents in neighbourhoods such as Cross-Square certainly have the potential to shape schools-as-fields

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and to bring additional resources to the school, at the same time, there is the ambiguity of creating ‘islands’ of ‘higher quality’ for their own children in certain classrooms rather than improving the organisation as a whole.

Social Inequality, Institutional Pressures and the Question of the Meritocratic Myth

The social composition that comes with the neighbourhood as social unit, however, not only shapes the field by introducing different objective power positions, which allow parents to more or less successfully implement their own expectations as institutional pressures. Social inequality also impacts schools by shaping the opportunities available for the realisation of broader cultural expectations of what schools should achieve in order to be legitimate as well as of teachers’ own expectations. As we shall see, both schools are in very different positions, depending on their neighbourhood context, in terms of their ability to do so.

Cross-Square: Institutional Conflicts within the Field or the Inability to Fulfil the Meritocratic Myth In Cross-Square, latent conflicts and antagonism in the field of education become manifest. The school-as-field is characterised by a social inequality that cannot be solved at school but continues to interfere with its institutionalised aims. The meritocratic promises inherent to teacher training (what new-institutionalists call normative pressures (e.g. DiMaggio and W. Powell 1983, 152f.)) and to the educational field as a whole, namely that everybody has the same opportunities in school, are challenged here. In a deprived neighbourhood like Cross-Square, this institutionalised expectation constantly meets a reality that does not fit. The meritocratic myth of schooling becomes fragile here, as institutionalised professional aims cannot be met for structural reasons.

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Children in Cross-Square often enter school with very low school-relevant skills and little preparation, while living under difficult structural conditions. Teachers teach students whose families struggle, often due to the low-level of state support for welfare recipients, to provide for their children, to invest in new clothes, or to even find a space where children can study at home. Parents regularly talk to teachers about their fears that their child will fall behind. Teachers share these worries, as M. Figger, a teacher working in a neighbourhood similar to Cross-Square explains: “And then I look at the conditions and think, well, homework – as an example – when should he do this, and WHERE? It is never quiet, not at all, and you need some quiet time to concentrate.” (Teacher Interview 15, #00:08:33-4#) Moreover, the lack of space also impacts on other areas of a child’s upbringing. At times, the different realities of teachers’ expectations and families’ living conditions became very visible: During a parents-teacher consultation, the teachers mention that the child often seems tired at school […]. The parents explain that sometimes the girl gets up in the morning and watches TV. The teachers shake their heads “oh NO,” and remind the parents that children should not watch TV on their own – “that’s not good at all for her, that’s not acceptable […].” They then ask, “But she does NOT have a TV in her room, does she?” While the mother says “yes,” the father explains that his daughter does not have her own room, as the family of five lives in a one-bedroom apartment [1,5 Zimmer Wohnung] – and thus, in effect, has a TV in her room. All of them seem slightly embarrassed. (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, November 8, 2012) In other instances, parents struggle less with space than with addiction or psychological issues linked to poverty, and accordingly have a difficult time supporting their children in the way that teachers would expect or wish for. Expectations, such as studying for school at home, often seem simply unrealistic within the given conditions. Moreover, children often lack basic materials, such as scissors or pens, to fully participate in their lessons. Teachers regularly compensate for this by buying such supplies at least for some of the children in their class.

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As a result of these structural conditions, children often do not progress as expected. Teachers regularly speak of ‘despairing’ of the learning process of their students: “It's exasperating […], I did all these diagnostic tests in math, […] but they even struggle with counting, they just don’t know how to do it” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, November 6, 2012). As B. Speicher recalls, reflecting on her time as a teacher in a neighbourhood similar to Cross-Square: “If I wanted to see the futility of my work, I just had to ask after a lesson – come here and tell me what you’ve learnt! And often, they really had no clue at all. That is so frustrating!” (Teacher Interview 21, #00:04:154#) Many teachers explain that most of their students are “behind,” “weak,” or “very slow learners” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, August 22, 2012). This becomes especially pressing when the teachers consider the core curriculum and what not covering all of it means for a student’s subsequent school career. As these teachers explain: “Well, we always fight, but the core curriculum in Berlin, well, it is almost unworkable in this school.” (Teacher Interview 15, #00:05:27-2#) “[...] there is the core curriculum that we HAVE to cover and the students go on to secondary school and, well, there are certain things that they will expect […] but, well, it is difficult, it is not doable, to be honest!” (Teacher Interview 6, #00:08:38-5#) “I’m worried what will happen once they go to secondary school […], and where all of this will lead for the kids.” (Teacher Interviews 15, #00:53:51-5#) While most of the teachers are aware that many of these problems are due to the structural inequality under which the children grow up, they still feel helpless in their attempts to productively address and overcome it. Many teachers point out that to have a chance at all, the system would need more resources to even begin to create equal opportunities for all the children:

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“In this system, with 29 children per class […] IF you have parents who support their children, and also put a bit of pressure on them, well, THESE children will make it even when there are 29 children, but the others CAN’T – no chance!” (Teacher Interview 1, #00:38:51-6#) The field is thus characterised by a mismatch between the institutionalised expectation that every child is provided with the same opportunities – that schools can compensate for social inequality with quality education and, thus, that the selection of children into different educational tracks is basically a fair process, in which the most talented have the best chances – and the everyday experiences of the teachers. This field-specific conflict is especially visible when teachers compare the support systems of their students to those of their own children: “My children, they learn so many things just in passing […] because we talk about, like how to read the clock, and our students have to learn all of this in school.” (Author’s field Notes, Cross-Square primary school, Mai 8, 2012). “Now that I see my grandchildren, how they grow up, it is completely clear to me that we have no chance here.” (Teacher Interview 11, #00:11:07-4#) To sum up, the school in Cross-Square is heavily influenced by structural inequality, which challenges institutionalised expectations of what schools should accomplish. With the social composition of the neighbourhood comes a constant challenge of if schools can actually help to overcome this structural inequality and thus can function as legitimate organisations. As new-institutionalists have argued, organisations adapt to institutionalised pressures in order to “be acknowledged as legitimate and reputable” (DiMaggio and W. Powell 1983, 153). In Cross-Square, the field is thus not only structured by weaker parental control, but it is also harder to meet general expectations of what schools should achieve. When children do not progress as expected, teachers struggle to find ways to experience their work as legitimate. How teachers come to terms with these tensions and what it means for their organisational habitus and organisational practices will be explored in Chapter 6.

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Roseville: Avoiding Conflicts within the Field or Fulfilling the Meritocratic Myth In Roseville, the situation is clearly different. The school-as-field gets localised through privilege (the result of the social composition of the neighbourhood) rather than through inequality. Accordingly, there are fewer obvious conflicts and internal contradictions within the educational field, and teachers in Roseville often highlight their exceptional conditions. In Roseville, children are already equipped with many of the competencies they are expected to acquire in school. For teachers, the task that they set for themselves as professionals – to adequately impart the tools and the knowledge that children require to navigate society and the school system – is much easier to achieve. Although not without its frustrations, there is considerably less distress and exhaustion in Roseville than in Cross-Square. This becomes especially apparent when teachers, who have taught both in contexts like Cross-Square and Roseville, compare their experiences: “Yes, so different […] [but] colleagues in this school like to stay here [in Roseville] and then never have the chance to compare, often, they have no idea with what kind of children they work with here.” (Teacher Interview 21, #00:08:33-7#) “I gave a lesson, prepared with what I would have done with my class in [‘neighbourhood similar to Cross-Square’], and the children were very concentrated, which was a surprise already, and after the lesson they came to me and said ‘you are a nice teacher, but maybe you can challenge us a bit more?’ – they thought it was too easy! ” (Teacher Interview 19, #00:02:42-9#) Accordingly, for most teachers, one important indicator for success is often met, as the principal of Roseville primary school, P. Deuft explains: “Colleagues around here have high expectations when it comes to achievement, and […] well, there are no problems with the transition to secondary school, 85%-90% of our students continue on to Gymnasium.” (Teacher Interview 26, #00:03:40-2#) As in Cross-Square, teachers in Roseville are quite aware that the social background of their students is an important factor in shaping their work and the

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achievements of the children. Professionals describe the students and their families as coming from the “educated classes” and “the upper crust” (Teacher Interview 20, #00:04:46-3#) and many agree: “the clientele in this school is a dream” (Teacher Interview 23, #00:04:28-3#). Teachers clearly see the advantage of these structural conditions for their classroom instruction: “Children have lots of cultural experiences with their families, and this has lots of advantages for us as a school, because they have competencies from that, which they bring to the classroom, and on which we can build, and this naturally raises the level of the lessons.” (Teacher Interview 20, #00:04:46-3#) “Children are well equipped with surroundings that make it easy for them, they get a lot of support from home [...], and well, yes, I would say when it comes to the students, teaching here is really easy.” (Teacher Interview 26, #00:03:40-2#) Moreover, while often unaware of it, teachers also rely on the support system that children receive at home. According to official grading rules, for example, to be awarded the best grade, children need to present knowledge that goes beyond what has been covered in school (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, June 4, 2013). As Heike, a middle-class mother, states: “If they write a music exam in this school, the circle of fifths 14 is the smallest problem, and it goes beyond this, with things that I have never heard of, even though I really do a lot of music – and children, who do not study an instrument and whose parents are not able to support them, these children are lost.” (Parent Interview 16, #00:55:06-4#) The school is thus structurally much more likely to fulfil the institutionalised expectations of what a school should achieve – partly because of the ‘invisible’ work that is done by the parents, but rarely discussed in school. The prevalence of traditional gender arrangements, especially of stay-at-home mothers, plays an important role here. Parents (usually the mothers) regularly help their kids study, as these middle-class parents explain: 14

A diagram in music theory to illustrate the relationship of different tones and their corresponding keys.

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“Well, I’m pretty sure that [...] most parents, independent of what they say, help their children with homework. [...] That’s my impression, if you see how tests and exams are prepared at home.” (Parent Interview 21, #00:19:42-3#) “Many of the children have to study a lot at home…I find that a bit alienating [...] if children can’t participate in things because they have to study, and then on top, [they have] violin and hockey and so on. But it is a taboo, you can’t really talk about this with other parents.” (Parent Interview 19, #00:24:57-1#, #00:25:22-4#) Parents become especially involved if a child is in danger of falling behind or is having trouble in school. Harald, a middle-class father who works in a bank, proudly explains how his family has tackled his son’s difficulty to adapt to the first grade: “In math, we really made up for his difficult start, and now, we can say that he really caught up with the group, [...] and well in German, he is not there yet, but thanks to the support here at home, he will catch up.” (Parent Interview 14, #00:18:24-5#) The question of how much parents are actually supposed to help their children and thus to make sure that they succeed in school is not without conflict. While parents may try to hide how much they help their children at home, sometimes the question still comes up during discussions, as the following anecdote indicates: It is the last PTA meeting for the 4th graders for this school year. Parents are sitting in their child’s classroom, at small desks, some are chatting, there is laughter and the atmosphere is friendly. Almost all parents have shown up. After an initial introduction, the teacher asks if anybody wants to add a topic to the agenda. A mother raises her hand. [...] She mentions that it would be great if tasks like presentations and posters would be assigned less often as homework but could actually be prepared at school. [...] A whisper goes around the room and soon parents are in the middle of a heated debate. A mother points to the posters that decorate the classroom “you all know that our children, [at their age], they can’t produce something like this on their own!” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, May 15, 2013)

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The mother raising the issue here was suggesting that the parents rather than the children were responsible for the high quality of the posters presented at the school – and that this was somewhat unfair. Others saw the help that the children receive at home as a chance to make up for the ‘unfair’ distribution of ‘natural talent,’ as another mother made clear in response: “This is easy for you to say, for your son, it is easy, he does not need as much help!” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, May 15, 2013) Parents have different reasons for helping their child at home, from pushing their child and assuring their success, to spending time with them, getting to know more about their experiences at school, to showing support for their child more generally. Whichever the reasons for their involvement, parents crucially shape schoolsas-fields by helping the school to succeed. These, often informal (AlSayyed 2004, 18f.; Roy 2005, 233), practices are important, as they help to fulfil the institutionalised meritocratic myth by veiling the additional effort engaged in by parents and thus obscuring the limits of what can actually be achieved only in school, especially in comparison to Cross-Square. Some teachers are aware of these limits and struggle with how to deal with them: “It is complicated for me as a teacher [in terms of the grading], because I can see [...] if parents helped; but if parents help, it also helps the children to learn, and I can’t forbid it. Also, I can’t punish children for having supportive parents.” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, May 15, 2013) “I guarantee you that her father prepared the hand-out and not the girl – and how am I supposed to grade that?” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, January 31, 2013) Others comment ironically on the ‘fake’ character of their experienced success: “We have children here, they pass through here, you can be dumb as a teacher and the children will still learn” (Teacher Interview 26, #00:35:45-1#), “you don’t need training to teach here” (Teacher Interview 23, #00:04:28-3#), “you can hardly prevent these children from learning [even with very bad teaching]” (Teacher Interview 21, #00:13:45-8#).

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Nevertheless, for teachers in Roseville, these limitations are much easier to ignore than the sense of failure experienced by teachers in Cross-Square, and Roseville teachers, despite the intensive involvement from outside the classroom, still experience themselves as competent and successful educators. Interestingly, the conflict within the field of education in Roseville is somewhat the opposite of that in Cross-Square: The quasi-autonomous ability of students to learn in Roseville also poses a challenge to the meritocratic assumptions of teachers and the public school system; in Roseville however, this conflict is much easier to hide than in CrossSquare. Thus, in Roseville, the social composition that comes with the neighbourhood as social unit not only implements greater parental control, but also makes it easier for the school to succeed as a legitimate organisation (Meyer and Rowan 1977; DiMaggio and W. Powell 1983) which is seemingly able to fulfil the institutionalised expectation of advancing the education of all children.

5.2 A Neighbourhood’s Symbolic Meaning as Institutional Pressure

In addition to structuring a school’s social composition, neighbourhoods also shape schools-as-fields through a further institutional pressure: their symbolic meanings. The dominant understanding of what a neighbourhood symbolises is significant for its position in the spatial stratification of a city (Logan and Molotch 1987; Blokland 2009). While the image and reputation of a neighbourhood has mostly been discussed in regard to the schooling choices made by parents (Ball and Vincent 1998), I argue that these images are also relevant for professionals working in neighbourhood organisations, as they symbolically structure schoolsas-fields. As we shall see, neighbourhoods often function as a ‘shortcut,’ positioning schools within the educational field of Berlin. By dint of their symbolic meaning, a neighbourhood is positioned at the top or at the bottom of both the geographical and – intertwined with it – the educational field. As such, the symbolic meaning of a

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neighbourhood is linked to specific, often biased, evaluations of teachers’ work and the quality of a school as a whole. Often these assessments are much more related to a school’s local context, and the assumptions made about it, than to the actual quality of a given school. Accordingly, the symbolic meaning of a neighbourhood, the language in which people speak about it, and the external expectations, assumptions, and representations linked to it, are important structures that shape schools-as-fields. As such, specific neighbourhoods come with culturallyinfluenced symbolic meanings that can be understood as institutional pressures in and of themselves (see also Chapter 3). Bourdieu (1987) as well as Butler (e.g. J. Butler 2001) have highlighted the importance of such forms of symbolic power. In this perspective, the ways in which subjects are addressed, become an important element of domination, and shape the kind of subjects that individuals must become – or in Butler’s perspective can only become (Villa 2011). Following Bourdieu, the term symbolic violence describes the experience of being categorised according to the symbols that the dominant class understands as legitimate, while having “little choice about whether to accept or reject” these categorisations oneself (Bourdieu 1987, 812). While Butler, in the post-structural tradition, sees domination as part of every categorisation, as it forces the individual to become coherent and to perform to categories, she also acknowledges that hierarchies in the social positions from which people speak can have different impacts (Villa 2011, 59). Following these insights, it is important to highlight how the structural conditions of the symbolic space in which teachers work are totally different in their meaning (excellent, deprived) and in their symbolic hierarchy – depending on the neighbourhood context. These symbolic meanings are invariably contested (D. Massey 1994) and different, conflicting, readings of a neighbourhood’s character can co-exist (Blokland 2009). Nevertheless, most teachers related to a dominant symbolic meaning of privilege in Roseville and deprivation in Cross-Square. As such, teachers themselves engage in symbolic work and thus, as we saw in Chapter 3, institutionalise the symbolic meaning of their neighbourhoods by implementing or challenging those in their practices.

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Cross-Square: A Neighbourhood’s Meaning as Symbolic Violence

The Cross-Square school is positioned in a neighbourhood that can be described, akin to other neighbourhoods with similar structural conditions and similar symbolic (institutionalised) meanings, as a “profoundly stigmatized, poverty-stricken, and ethnically marked” (Paulle 2013, x) residential area. In the German public discourse, deprived neighbourhoods are often described as a sozialer Brennpunkt, a ‘social hot spot’ with high poverty, crime, and conflict. Many teachers use this categorisation of the neighbourhood – rather than the school – to explain their daily experiences, both to themselves and others. Moreover, in official documents, the school directly positions itself by explaining: “we are a school in a social hot spot” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, June 21, 2012). In Cross-Square, most teachers experienced some form of symbolic violence as various, often powerful, actors, such as the local school authority, middle-class parents, or other organisations, constantly labelled them and their school as undesirable, in reference to their location in a sozialem Brennpunkt (social hotspot). While teachers are themselves part of the dominant class to a certain degree, they are simultaneously part of an organisation at the bottom of the educational and geographical field – something they are well aware of. The discourses and general assumptions about schools in such neighbourhoods become salient when teachers describe their powerlessness against these external evaluations, as the actual quality of their work seems unable to change the powerful symbolic meanings of their work place. This, again, shows how institutionalised understandings and cultural frames that are applied to organisations differ by neighbourhood, shaping organisations-as-fields in different ways. Several teachers told stories of how acquaintances reacted when they learnt where they worked. Notably, the neighbourhood acted as one of the most important signifiers. A. Hellwig describes: “If I’m on holiday, and I travel and you meet new people and if I tell them I work as a teacher, that is very respected, it is a respected profession, but if I then say primary school and Berlin, well, then people are already like ‘uhhh’ and if I then go on and tell them I work in Cross-Square, then everybody goes like ‘oh, poor you [...]’ – and that makes me very angry,

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and I always try to explain, [...] we have great kids and if something is problematic, then it is the social situation, [...] and also the media, they just report the bad stuff […] but no one sees what great work we do here and how great our kids are.” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, June 13, 2012) Other teachers explained how they “never get public recognition, everybody is just complaining, bleating, and pointing out the negative” (Teacher Interview 11, #00:22:24-2#). Some blame the media for their negative evaluation of their work, while others point to city officials, such as a school inspector, who labelled the school an ‘Ausländerschule’ – a school for foreigners, thereby implying, in a highly problematic way, that the school is not functional enough to attract ‘German’ parents (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, September 3, 2012). While there are of course other instances when the work of the school is acknowledged, this is rarely the case. Often, teachers rather feel that they are labelled negatively independent of what they actually do, and that there is no way out of the stigma of being a primary school in a ‘bad’ neighbourhood – as E. Holstein, the principal, explains: “As a school, well, sometimes I guess we just have a label and it is really hard to work against that” (Author’s field notes, CrossSquare primary school, August 21, 2013). Moreover, teachers also experience the devaluation of the school in interactions with other members of the educational field. Often, secondary schools signal their preference not to have students coming from Cross-Square. When the school organised an information evening at which secondary schools could present themselves to students and their parents, the visiting principals generally highlighted that they were looking for ‘good’ and ‘high achieving’ students with good grades – implying that such students were not to be found at Cross-Square. L. Acar, a teacher who has been working at Cross-Square for many years, recalls during our interview: “I was a bit surprised that our parents all gathered around the information desk of the Gymnasium [...], which also demonstrates parents’ hopes for their children [...] but then the guy from the Gymnasium just stands there, ‘Well, at our school, we have strict rules’ [implying that

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children from Cross-Square’s primary school would not make it there].” (Teacher Interview 12, #00:54:20-4#) E. Holstein, the principal, explained that, at first, the Gymnasium did not want to show up for the information evening at all – “they are paralyzed by their own arrogance” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, November 27, 2012). Moreover, while looking toward potential secondary schools, teachers have to find ways of negotiating the fact that their students often will not ‘make it’ and that, especially for the ‘better’ schools ‘outside of the neighbourhood,’ the grade point average of their students is unlikely to be high enough. Just as problematic as the grade point average is the label ‘Cross-Square.’ Working-class parents, such as Markus and Stefanie, told stories about their interactions with schools outside of the neighbourhood: “We had an appointment for the enrolment with the principal of the school [...] and he told us, frankly, we don’t take children from CrossSquare – you know, we don’t take children from other boroughs, but especially children from Cross-Square, no, yes, that’s what he really said, he said [...] children from Cross-Square are no good!” (Parent Interviews 5: #00:34:53-3#, #00:36:17-8#) Moreover, middle-class parents signal Cross-Square primary school’s undesirability to teachers, especially during enrolment periods: A. Hellwig tells me about a mother, who she recently spoke to on the phone. This mother, with an academic background, called up the school, as she was unsure if she really wanted to send her son there. [...] A. Hellwig invited her to come to her classroom [to observe the lesson], as she is convinced of the school’s work [...] This mother, then, did came by, but never got back to A. Hellwig afterwards, as she explains: “In the end, you know, realistically, she won’t send her child here. You know sometimes that makes me so sad, this attitude, it is the image of Cross-Square, many children with migrant backgrounds – but if they all would just send their children here, everyone who lives here [in the neighbourhood], then we would have a completely different mix, completely normal.” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, August 30, 2012)

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The mother, at least in A. Hellwig’s retelling, is not rejecting the school per se, but rather Cross-Square as a neighbourhood and the assumed conditions which it entails. Thus, the actual work of the school seems unable to change the general perception linked to the neighbourhood. But even better-off parents who enrolled their children in Cross-Square’s primary school often decide to leave the neighbourhood as soon as their children have the opportunity to begin attending secondary school (usually between grade 4 and grade 6). Cross-Square becomes shorthand for bad schools: As Defne, a lower middle-class mother with a migrant background, states, “I’m glad that he’s done with primary school and now – let’s get out of Cross-Square!” (Parent Interview 9, #00:08:24-1#) Teachers are very aware that the school and the neighbourhood are viewed in a negative light and that they do not manage to keep “the parents that we would like to keep at the school” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, October 22, 2012). Teachers have different ways of reproducing, accepting and rejecting these images – and thus of shaping them through their symbolic practices. The interplay of enacting, recreating, and challenging institutionalised pressures is part of the process of institutionalisation: Some acknowledge that they themselves would not want to send their own children to a school in Cross-Square: “No, you know, I like the teachers, I think they do great work, but this clientele, no, that is impossible” (Teacher Interview 15, #00:12:31-2#). Others argue that schools in Cross-Square are in general ‘no good’ and that it is basically impossible (and maybe even wrong) to keep talented students at the school. Some are very straightforward, linking the neighbourhood to unsuccessful school trajectories, as F. Hoff, an engaged teacher, explained: “I have to say, with those students, for whom I see a chance, even a small one, I make sure to send them OUTSIDE of this borough, outside of Cross-Square, to Mosthaus [neighbourhood next to Cross-Square, more middle-class] at least, [...] they have a different clientele there [...] and even if our students don’t make it there, if they leave school after 10 th grade, but are coming from there, it is different! You know, even the Gymnasium in this neighbourhood - I don’t trust it.” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, December 7, 2012)

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Others argue that the external judgments are mistaken and that the school and the neighbourhood are actually better than generally assumed – or at least that for them as educators a school in a neighbourhood like Roseville would be “too boring” and “not challenging enough” (Teacher Interview 11, #00:08:52-5#; Teacher Interview 10, #00:37:07-4#). While teachers do experience forms of symbolic violence and devaluation, divorced from their own teaching skills, they also engage in practices of accruing value for themselves. Structurally, they nevertheless face symbolic devaluation as part of their daily duties. The practices that teachers develop to deal with this will be the focus of Chapter 6.

Roseville: A Neighbourhood’s Meaning as Symbolic Valorisation

These symbolic processes are similar in Roseville, yet at the opposite end of the field. Here, the school is positioned in a neighbourhood that is characterised by relatively high social status and at a distinct emotional distance from social problems located in other parts of the city. The school’s position at the top of the educational and geographical field is signalled to teachers and the symbolic meaning that comes with it shapes the school-as-field as a form of symbolic institutional pressure. In Roseville, in contrast to Cross-Square, the school is constantly addressed as a desirable organisation. Similar to Cross-Square, however, that perception is not necessarily connected to the lived reality at the school. Rather, Roseville’s positive symbolic meaning as a neighbourhood engenders the quasiautomatic assumption that a school in this location provides high-quality teaching. This positive perception also becomes apparent in how teachers describe their work: Many point out that they are “VERY lucky” (Teacher Interview 18, #00:00:59-4#), often directly comparing themselves to neighbourhoods like Cross-Square. One teacher, B. Speicher, described her own journey through the

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educational field as finally being “on the bright side for once” in Roseville (Teacher Interview 21, #00:18:27-0#). Being on the bright side, however, is not so much linked to the specific school, but to the assumptions that are linked to Roseville as a neighbourhood, as P. Deuft, the principal, explains: “We are in the luxurious situation of having many teachers wanting to teach here – many teachers want to come to Roseville; well-behaved children; educated parents and a nice catchment area! So we can choose what kind of teachers we want here.” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, February 1, 2013) The high symbolic meaning of Roseville as a neighbourhood also becomes apparent in the school’s relation to other members of the educational field. Teachers have a clear understanding of their position in an exclusive network of schools in Roseville – and children often move on to “other schools with very good reputations in this neighbourhood” (Teacher Interview 26, #00:21:26-7#). Within this network, the high social status of a respective educational organisation is signalled to the others: Principal Deuft points out, for example, how the director of a kindergarten nearby told her that “in the neighbourhood, everybody sings the school’s praises!” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, January 16, 2013) Teachers also expressed the high status of Roseville’s primary school within the educational field in how they talked about other schools – including those located in neighbourhoods like Cross-Square. Working in Roseville is seen as a completely different and preferable experience: “None of our teachers would voluntarily work in Cross-Square” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, May 16, 2013) or “the level is just so much lower there” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, January 24, 2013). Comments were also made when teachers had to change to different social contexts: “it will be quite a change for her working down there [...] in an area with more children whose first language is not German” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, January 7, 2013).

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Parents also signal Roseville’s desirability to the teachers – especially during enrolment periods when demand usually exceeds the number of spaces available. Heike, a middle-class mother, explains: “The school is very sought-after, all the neighbours told us that we should be happy that our children would go there” (Parent Interview 16, #00:04:07-9#). Once the enrolment acceptance letters are sent out, the phone regularly rings with parents inquiring if their children ‘made it’ and will attain a place at Roseville primary school (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, January 16, 2013). Stories abound of parents who desperately want to send their children to Roseville’s primary school, write letters to the principal and promise to be very engaged in the school. Here again, parents make use of informal strategies to assure access to Roseville’s primary school. P. Deuft explains: “Some of the parents always want to meet with me personally, as if this would change anything, they think they are so great that I will accept them even though we don’t have places any more [...] and I wonder what they want to do – hand me money? [...] Often they also promise to be VERY engaged.” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, January 16, 2013) “Parents often try to make deals so that we will accept their child [even though it is the decision of the local administration], they bring their child’s CV, or they say they have a holiday home at the Baltic Sea where they would be happy to welcome children from the school if we would accept their child – basically they ask: ‘What can we do to get our child enrolled here?’” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, January 11, 2013) As school enrolment in Berlin is still mostly organized by catchment area and the city educational authority decides the granting of exceptions, these strategies are only partially successful – and, according to official documents, not an option to begin with. Nevertheless, demands voiced by the parents shape the field by producing symbolic structures that signal a constant valorisation of the school. As we have already seen, this is very much linked to the neighbourhood of Roseville that acts as a kind of guarantor for a good school. Petra, a journalist, who

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grew up in the neighbourhood and recently moved back with her family, recalls: “When we moved back to Berlin, I did not worry about schools at all, because I knew we would move to Roseville” (Parent Interview 27: #00:04:14-6#). Parents often describe how they explicitly moved to Roseville because of its ‘educational field’: “We moved here, in addition to the other reasons, because we knew that schools are better in this neighbourhood. And it was not especially Roseville’s primary school, but more generally, schools as such are better here. [Why?] Well, on the one hand, because it is a well-off neighbourhood, and schools in such contexts often have better facilities and equipment, and, well, at least in my case, the other reason is the fact that there are no so-called problem kids in these privileged neighbourhoods or at least their share is not as large as in other neighbourhoods.” (Parent Interview 19, #00:01:48-1#, #00:02:33-9#) “I think this is true for many of the parents, that we very consciously moved to Roseville [...] because it is a privileged residential area [...] and you don’t need to fear bad social influences on your children [...] and if they want to go to Gymnasium, here in the neighbourhood, we have at least two or three and they can simply choose, you know.” (Parent Interview 14, #00:37:14-8#, #00:40:02-2#) Finally, teachers in Roseville are also aware of these symbolic structures and generally share them. Still, similar to Cross-Square, some teachers at Roseville primary school also challenge the dominant image of their school – namely the superiority of their organisation. Some teachers voice concerns that the children’s high scores might be due to the pressure their parents put them under and that parents might be too involved in their child’s academic trajectory: “It is difficult with some parents, if they are very ambitious and then put lots of pressure on their children” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, February 20, 2013). Some professionals thus question, at least from time to time, if being a good school with high standards truly must come at the price of pushing students to study for higher grades rather than letting them go on playdates. Despite such occasional doubts, the positive symbolic meaning of the neighbourhood shapes the schoolas-field as a structure with a strong symbolic valorisation and questions of legitimacy of teachers’ work are far less challenging in Roseville than in Cross-Square.

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5.3 Neighbourhoods as Administrative Units: Projects, Cooperation, and Institutional Embeddedness

Finally, neighbourhoods also shape schools-as-fields as administrative units. As such, neighbourhoods in part structure the types of state regulations, additional programmes and policy interventions that are directed at an organisation in a specific local context, interacting with the symbolic and social structures of such places. Depending on their neighbourhood, schools thus face diverging institutional pressures, again demonstrating the importance of going beyond an understanding of neighbourhoods in the tradition of the Chicago School, which focuses almost exclusively on local networks, social relations, and local social compositions. For both schools, institutional regulations and the allocation of public resources have changed in recent years. While some have captured these changes theoretically as a new form of urban life under capitalist and neoliberal regimes (Harvey 2005; Amin and Thrift 1994; Wacquant 2008), or even as a new trend in statehood (Wacquant 2009), others have put forward less radical interpretations. That being said, most scholars do agree that changes in social policy have occurred, although not all understand these reforms as simply pointing in one direction (see e.g. Kazepov 2010). There seems to be some consensus that, in most European welfare states, welfare cuts have taken place (Huber and Stephens 2004), a restructuring of public management according to economic principles has occurred (Peetz, Lohr, and Hilbrich 2010), and that there has been a shift toward project-based systems of public services financing through non-profit organisations (Eliasoph 2011; Allard 2009; Allard 2008; Marwell 2004). In Germany, this trend has become visible in the aim of opening schools to their communities and thus of increasing their embeddedness in their local neighbourhoods (Freytag and Jahnke 2015a, 83f.). In response to various educational reforms, such as the implementation of ‘all-day schools’ and continually tight state budgets, schools are increasingly perceived as being in need of partnerships with non-school actors, such as NGOs, public organisations such as child welfare agencies, and private charities that offer projects, support, or counselling for children

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and families (Baumheier and Warsewa 2009, 20). While these types of partnerships are meant to provide a diverse offer-structure, oriented towards the needs of young people, with the aim of overcoming institutional boundaries of the school and the youth welfare system, they also force an acknowledgement that – without such collaborations – schools are no longer able to provide everything that is required or desirable for the adequate development of young people (Baumheier and Warsewa 2009, 29; Hebborn 2009, 223). Moreover, scholars have understood these changes as a new form of educational governance meant to change the current regulation of the educational system (Freytag, Jahnke, and Kramer 2015, 67; see also Duveneck 2016). Accordingly, teachers in Cross-Square and Roseville discuss funding cuts, and the implementation of ever more projects, mainly in cooperation with external nonprofit and public organisations, such as childcare facilities, child welfare agencies, youth clubs, or child protection services. While the landscape of institutional regulations has changed to some extent for both schools, crucially, these processes vary by neighbourhood and localise schools-as-fields in different ways.

Cross-Square: Additional Workload, Institutional Pressures, and Types of Cooperation

Funding cuts – mainly experienced as an ever growing ratio of teacher to students – hit somewhat harder in Cross-Square than in Roseville, despite the additional, compensatory funding that the Senate [Berlin city government] allocates to schools in socio-economic contexts such as Cross-Square. As teachers explain: “The principals, at this point, everything that they have to tell their colleagues is unpleasant [...] it is always about more work, fewer resources, more pressure.” (Teacher Interview 1, #00:24:18-9#) “There is less funding for schools, for years now, the Senate [Berlin city government] has cut staff, remedial lessons [...] it happens gradually [...]

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and by now, sometimes I think people are so exhausted in these kind of schools [like in Cross-Square] that they don’t even have the energy to protest anymore.” (Teacher Interview 2, #00:03:48-7#) Teachers describe how these cuts impact their work and how a lack of time makes it harder for them to meet the needs of their students, especially in situations such as in Cross-Square, where students have numerous additional needs and their range of abilities is often vast: “With 29 students, I can’t do it, in principal you would have to create a different curriculum for every single student, and I can’t do that! [...] If I had only half of the students, I would pull all of them through, at least more of them, but with 29, it is undoable!” (Teacher Interview 1, #00:41:48-6#, #00:14:05-1#)

On top of this, current institutional changes put the Cross-Square school under increasing pressure to open itself up to the community and to external partners. This comes with an additional workload that at times seems almost unmanageable to the teachers involved. An important reason that the teachers feel overwhelmed is that the school is working on a wide range of topics by engaging in cooperation. While teachers often see such projects as ‘keeping them’ from their principal duties, by which they often mean teaching, the school is simultaneously under a great deal of institutional pressure to get involved. In deprived neighbourhoods, as we saw above, questions of legitimacy are much more pressing than in better-off neighbourhoods. As schools in contexts like Cross-Square are often seen as unsuccessful and in need of reform, the pressure to be ‘active’ can be especially strong. New-institutionalists have argued that this need to assure legitimacy can push organisations to employ measurements even if they do not seem to be of direct help for their daily work (Meyer and Rowan 1977). G. Brutt, a teacher who has worked in the school for many years and has seen a lot of change, explains: “I don’t see any real improvement, it is more like, a project here, a project there, a father’s group here, a group for children there” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, October 18, 2012). While teachers are thus sometimes critical of such projects, the

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school as an organisation must yield to the pressure in order to signal that they are doing ‘all they can’ to come to terms with the problems often linked to them. Schools are therefore often in a position in which various kinds of challenges are addressed through additional projects. In Cross-Square, topics such as child protection, nutrition, multilingualism, integration, conflict resolution, support and counselling for children and families, homework tutoring and afterschool clubs, and the improvement of parents and school relations, are all worked on in cooperation and through projects. The school works with private partners, NGOs, and foundations, as well as being active in different networks that bring educational actors in the neighbourhood together. However, it is not only the impetus within the Cross-Square school to get involved; also, the school is continually being asked by external actors to participate in programmes and projects. NGOs, public and private agencies and foundations regularly offer to cooperate with the school, in large part due to the Cross-Square primary school’s position at the bottom of the educational and geographical field, where many organisations expect to find their target groups. As E. Holstein, the head of the school, explains: “You know, the school is the main platform for all kinds of actors and organisations, because, well, as we have compulsory school attendance, we have most contact with parents and children!” (Teacher Interview 27, #00:58:50-4#) If foundations are looking to support young talent from disadvantaged families, they almost automatically look for such children in deprived neighbourhoods and will ask schools in these local contexts to cooperate. Not only private organisations, but also the local authority in Cross-Square pushes the school to develop more partnerships, in particular with kindergarten and secondary schools in the local area, as well as with the child welfare agency. To assure, for example, a smooth transition from kindergarten to primary school, schools are asked to liaise with local kindergartens. The school in Cross-Square works with six different kindergartens and also invests in its relationships with secondary schools. Moreover, the school cooperates with the child welfare agency.

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A teacher is assigned as contact person for all issues linked to the agency and regularly meets with a case worker at the child welfare agency. This cooperation, however, is not voluntary, as E. Holstein explains: “This is part of the cooperation, we can’t choose, we don’t have a choice here, we have to do it” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, November 6, 2012). In addition, certain policy programmes that are meant to address inequality in school require additional tasks that are not required in neighbourhoods like Roseville. The ‘Bildungs- und Teilhabepaket’ (BuT) (‘Education and Participation Package’) entitles children whose families are on welfare to additional allowances, for example for school trips, school lunch, costs for learning materials and additional learning support. Children who are eligible for theses allowances receive an identification card that is called ‘berlinpass-BuT’. In Cross-Square, families regularly take advantage of this ‘package’, but it demands a lot of administrative work for the school: “It’s such a hassle with the accounting in the ‘Bildungs- und Teilhabepaket,’ [...] and every teacher has to hand in the expense forms for every single school trip” (Teacher Interview 6, #00:12:58-7#). Moreover, specific actors are pushing for partnerships by providing access to funding for projects that are explicitly linked to deprived neighbourhoods. In 1999, the programme ‘Districts with Special Development Needs – The Socially Integrative City’ was instituted to target deprived neighbourhoods in Berlin. In these areas, neighbourhood councils were implemented that often explicitly work to facilitate networking and cooperation between the various actors who work with children and families in the neighbourhood, as well as funding small educational projects within the schools. These push-factors and the additional funding are only present in deprived neighbourhoods and thus vary by neighbourhood. As a result, the number of projects and partnerships in Cross-Square is very high. The principal at a school in a similar neighbourhood summarises the scope of the partnerships as follows: “If I would meet and sit down, uh, with everyone, who somehow works in the school here, if I would sit down with all of them once a week, I would

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do nothing else but to sit in meetings.” (Teacher Interview 6, #00:14:428#) E. Holstein, Cross-Square’s principal, shares this view: “All these additional offers need to be coordinated – you need a manager to do it! I can’t do it on the side, [...] I need to take them [parents] by the hand, to connect them to these offers – it’s almost impossible to succeed!” (Cross-Square’s primary school, in author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, January 11, 2013) As a result, teachers regularly come across projects in their own schools with which they are unfamiliar, as it is often difficult to keep up with all the developments. E. Holstein, for example, during one of our first interviews, wanted to describe a new programme: “well, it is about, oh dear, maybe it will come to me later” (Teacher Interview 27, #00:54:12-3#). Not only the quantity of partnerships but also the types of cooperation that CrossSquare’s primary school sustains has increased the workload for teachers and staff. The school is often involved in projects that are only temporarily funded by state coffers. Even if projects are successful, permanent funding is rarely available and the school must regularly apply for fresh funding. E. Holstein explains: “There is always an end point, [...] and with incredible effort we then need to launch a new project…and school in general is so busy [...], there is a finely woven organisational system, which requires the energy of so many people [...] [to keep everything running], and then the expectation that the school can invent something NEW, even if the old project was successful, well .” (Teacher Interview 27, #00:38:049#) Funding streams are not only short-term, but they also rarely provide for funds to organise, apply for, and audit such projects. A teacher explains, angrily: “[They always assume that you can have more cooperation without more funding or work hours], but cooperation must be seen as an additional

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task and we need the hours to do this!” (Author’s field notes, CrossSquare primary school, August 21, 2012). Hildegard, a politically engaged mother and lawyer, makes a similar point: “The teachers can’t complete all these tasks, I think it takes so much energy and time, you need to write a proposal here, an application there, and tons of additional meetings, [...] and then, on top, you also have to network with kindergartens and secondary schools, to share experiences, but for none of this they get additional hours or compensatory time-off [...] they have to do all of this on top, and we haven’t even started to talk about preparing lessons!” (Parent Interview 12, #00:25:02-9#) This often creates a dilemma: additional funds would be useful but the workload which the application and auditing process entails creates a situation wherein it is almost irrational to apply, as E. Holstein explains: “We stopped applying for money from the neighbourhood council because, you know, the application process is so complicated, it requires so much time and energy, we can’t do it anymore, it is just not possible and it is unfortunate and sad because, you know, there is money, but you can’t take it because it is just too much work to do it!” (Teacher Interview 27, #00:38:04-9#). Moreover, these projects often bring volunteers into the school, who are ostensibly there to support and work with the students (with homework, for example), but entail an immense additional work for the teachers, as the school as an organisational system must integrate them into its daily routines. E. Holstein points out: “This is an additional stress, you know, with school-external people, someone inside needs to be responsible, and we have already had conflicts [...] to be honest, we had impossible people coming in to work here.” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, June 19, 2012) Another teacher has a similar view: “To familiarise someone with our system and the work that we do, that is often more work than if I do [whatever that person was meant to do]

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myself!” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, August 28, 2012) That is not to say that integrating volunteers is always unsuccessful, but simply to acknowledge that it also entails additional work. Furthermore, projects in Cross-Square also shape the school-as-field by focussing on specific issues. The institutional pressures that push the school towards cooperation und partnerships do not do so randomly but have a clear intent. Projects often address a perceived deficiency in what families can provide for their children ‘in a neighbourhood like this,’ and are thus generally agreed upon as appropriate for the organisation by actors both inside and outside of the school. Often, parents are part of the target group for these projects and programmes and, as a rule, support for families is high on the school’s agenda. Accordingly, the school’s partnerships cover topics such as child protection, nutrition, conflict resolution, support and counselling for children and families, homework tutoring, and after-school activities. In addition to such projects, the school also has a social worker who is responsible for helping out if conflicts arise within families and for supporting teachers and parents in difficult situations; as seen above, there is a close cooperation with the child welfare agency. In total, the social context of the children and ‘social’ problems in general provide the focus for most additional projects and support structures for these topics are implemented inside the organisation. This is not to say that this focus does not match parts of the school’s, parents’ and children’s needs. However, as we will see in Chapter 6, this emphasis on the social context of the children creates a specific kind of expertise, focus of attention and taken-for-granted assumptions in Cross-Square (that differ in Roseville) and thus specifically localise the field by shaping the practices of its teachers. In summary, in Cross-Square, the school must signal its activity as it is often seen as an unsuccessful organisation in need of improvement. Simultaneously, external institutional pressures also demand new partnerships and projects; NGOs, charities and government agencies target schools in deprived neighbourhoods in order to find their target groups. Moreover, there are organisations such as the neighbourhood council that only exist in specific local contexts. Yet, it is not only the quantity but also the types of cooperation that the school engages in that shape the

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school-as-field through the additional workload required. External resources often come in the form of short-term funding and must be applied for again and again; most of the time, there is no additional budget line to coordinate, apply for, or administer these funds. Moreover, these projects often work with volunteers who must be integrated in the school for short periods of time, which is work-intensive and requires a great deal of attention. Finally, the institutionalised pressures pushing the school towards projects and partnerships focus on specific issues, such as child protection and the need for greater social support and services for families. This, however, also creates specific types of perceptions, focuses of attention, and interpretations that shape the practices of the teachers, as we will see in Chapter 6. The importance of these localising processes for the school-as-field becomes especially apparent when compared to the situation in Roseville.

Roseville: Different Workload, Different Institutional Pressures, and the Role of Parents

Teachers in Roseville also face institutional changes, such as funding cuts, but these have less of an impact than in Cross-Square. Experienced teachers, such as U. Schmidts, who has worked in Roseville for many years, tell stories of how they used to have “more time,” “less pressure,” and how things used to be “more relaxed” – a condition often associated with more time to socialise with colleagues (Teacher Interview 16, #00:41:48-6#). Most teachers agree that now there is more work. Often, this is linked to “administrative tasks,” which most teachers find stressful and not at the core of the self-perceived purpose of their work (Teacher Interview 20, #00:39:42-1#; Teacher Interview 14, #00:29:21-6#, #00:30:15-1#). However, teachers also point out that, in comparison to contexts like CrossSquare, these changes are less problematic in Roseville: “There are not enough people to really do good work [...] and there is need for so much more support and we are still a GOOD neighbourhood, [meaning: how do professionals in neighbourhoods like Cross-Square

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cope?]” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, March 12, 2013) Not only funding cuts hit harder in Cross-Square: Institutional pressures to open up the school to the community and external partners are also less visible in Roseville. There are fewer topics that are dealt with through projects and the scope of activities in which the school is involved is considerably smaller. In Roseville, the neighbourhood as administrative (and social and symbolic) unit structures the institutional pressures that impact the school-as-field differently than in CrossSquare. Due to their social composition, there is less pressure to appear legitimate for schools in privileged neighbourhoods. It is easier for them to produce good results (such as the number of children accepted into Gymnasium), and to be seen as organisations that satisfactorily fulfil their duties. From outside, thus, fewer areas are defined, in which projects must be implemented for improvement. Charities, NGOs, and the local government do not push schools in privileged neighbourhood to engage in additional activities to the same extent than in neighbourhoods like Cross-Square, since these are often seen as unnecessary. However, even if problems do exist, they are less often addressed through programmes and projects. To use the issue of parental participation: While improving the collaboration between school and parents is addressed by several projects in Cross-Square, this is not the case in Roseville, despite the fact that, as a member of the governing body of the school explains: “A big challenge in our school are the parents” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, February 20, 2013). While teachers in Roseville thus often talk about the challenges of working with highly educated parents and mention the issue of drawing boundaries, there are usually no projects in place to help them negotiate their relationships with middleor upper-class parents and their demands – as this group of parents is traditionally not defined as ‘problematic’ (for a similar argument see also Gomolla 2009, 31). Similar tendencies are reflected in the school’s partnerships with the child welfare agency, secondary schools, and kindergartens. Here too, there is less pressure from the local authority to open up the school and to cooperate with other organisations, as parents with higher social status are seen as inherently competent and social

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problems in these families are often seen as off-limits. While the school in Roseville also has a kindergarten commissioner, in charge of representing the school to kindergartens in the catchment area, and a child welfare contact person, these posts are considerably less visible in daily routines of the school, and often require less work than in Cross-Square, as G. Heinz, a young teacher, explains: “I’m the contact person for the child welfare agency [...], it is, you know, a job that I took on at some point, but I never really acted in this role…” (Teacher Interview 17, #00:29:00-7#) Again, this highlights how the effect of similar institutional pressures can play out differently depending on the local context in which it is implemented. Moreover, certain types of organisations simply do not exist in privileged neighbourhoods – such as the neighbourhood council – and thus also do not push for partnerships. Similarly, charities that work with deprived families do not usually look for their target group in Roseville. In comparison to E. Holstein, the principal at Cross-Square, Roseville’s staff spends almost no time on partnerships and appointments with project partners (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, April 30, 2013). Yet, in Roseville, not only the scope of partnerships and projects diverges from that in Cross-Square, but also the kind of projects and partnerships. Often, the school is involved in projects in which teachers do not have to apply for funding or to administer the eventual grant. Partnerships with the school often come in the form of sponsorship and material expenses: “We’ve just won over this bank [...] [to sponsor our school’s homework diary for the children], a supermarket is donating limes for the summer party, yes, [...] and another bank sponsored the prize yesterday, for the football competition.” (Teacher Interview 23, #00:31:06-0#, #00:32:218#) Moreover, if external partners offer courses or afternoon clubs for the children, these are usually programs paid for by the parents, where the responsibility for its coordination lies much more with the parents and the external partners than with

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the school. When asked if partnerships and projects are a large part of their duties, Principal Deuft and Vice-Principal Scherk explain: “No, not really, in total it’s a lot, of course, and I try to bundle these appointments, so we have this day [when all the cooperation partners come together], and there is coffee and cake, and well…” (Teacher Interview 26, #00:38:47-1#) “No, we meet with all of them once a year, and then it works just fine!” (Teacher Interview 23, #00:33:21-0#) In general then, partnerships and projects in Roseville’s primary school are experienced as less time-consuming and less linked to additional work. These differences, however, are not only a consequence of the different institutional pressures under which the school in Roseville operates. Even when faced with similar institutional demands, the school in Roseville can provide different organisational ‘answers’ than the school in Cross-Square. As we have seen, its location in Roseville provides a parental clientele that can provide numerous resources in an uncomplicated fashion, thereby accelerating processes of informal privatization. Parents bring their economic, social and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986) to the school and thus provide alternatives that allow schools to forgo other forms of cooperation to secure additional resources. Rather than applying for external funding, teachers can often rely on parents. As Peter, a physician, explains: “Well, what was possible in this class, but I think it is also due to the environment of the school, that such a dance project could take place [...] They had two professional dancers and they did this in the third and in the second grade [...], and well, I guess in Cross-Square or neighbourhoods like this, it would not be possible to do this, because it would be unclear how to finance it, and here, we paid for it, the parents paid.” (Parent Interview 19, #00:50:34-8#, #00:51:10-8#, #00:51:12-2#) This also releases teachers from the bureaucracy that comes with programmes such as the earlier mentioned ‘Bildungs- und Teilhabepaket’ (BuT) (‘Education

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and Participation Package’). Instead, teachers can rely on parents’ economic capital to cover similar costs, such as school trips and excursions. As J. Potser, a teacher, explains: “All parents in my class pay 100€ per year, it’s quite a bit of money [...], so that is 2400€ that I can use for trips and materials, yes.” (Teacher Interview 14, #00:33:24-9#, #00:33:35-5#) Moreover, the school in Roseville can rely on support of its friends’ association15 rather than to apply for funding, as C. Scherk, the vice-principal explains: “well, we just started [to do projects], kind of, because we get so many things from the friends’ association” (Teacher Interview 23, #00:31:06-0#). Similarly, the principal, P. Deuft, explains: “The friends’ association does SO MUCH for the school” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, January 23, 2013): “80% of the parents are members [...], that’s a lot, and they give money and donate, also alumni donate sometimes, and, well, ideas don’t fail because of a lack of money here, it is rather sometimes challenging to actually spend all the money.” (Teacher Interview 23, #00:09:31-8#) Similarly, Harald, a father, who works for a bank, highlights the importance of parents’ economic capital: “That’s what makes it a good school, the engagement of the parents [...] and the incoming donations are extremely high” (Parent Interview 14, #00:04:08-3#). This form of fundraising is much simpler, avoids timeintensive applications, and can be used more flexibly – which is quite different from projects that are financed by the neighbourhood council in Cross-Square. As a member of the school’s governing body explains during an interview: “[Without the friends’ association], you have to wait [for so many things], like in the former GDR, for two years of so ” (Teacher Interview 23, #00:31:06-0#). When the school wanted to build a small garden house in the schoolyard, for example, they simply asked the friends’ association:

15

Charities generally made up of parents and sometimes teachers, with aims such as: raising additional funds for the school of their child, providing facilities and equipment, improving the live and experiences of children attending the school, fostering good relationships between parents and staff.

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I’m with the principal in her office when someone knocks at the door. The caretaker of the school comes in; he briefly greets the principal and puts several papers on the table, showing pictures of different types of small garden houses [...] The principal says she really wants a house with a pitched roof – the caretaker laughs and says that is exactly what he expected; the house with the pitched roof however is by far the most expensive of the offers and the principal explains: “I will talk about it with the friends’ association, they never know how to spend all their money. ” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, January 25, 2013) In Roseville, the school’s friends’ association also plays an important role when it comes to financing additional activities or special facilities, such as digital whiteboards: “The friends’ association just paid for the whiteboards, and it was quite an investment, just like that, four whiteboards, I think that was around 40.000€.” (Parent Interview 19, #00:17:13-4#) While the school in Cross-Square also has a friends’ association, membership numbers are lower and fees start at 1€ per month – incoming donations are “very low,” as Helena, one of the few middle-class mothers in Cross-Square, explains (Parent Interview 10, #00:12:34-8#). The funds that the friends’ association is able to bring in is mostly public funding that is administered by the friends association, such as funds from the neighbourhood council. The friends’ association in CrossSquare – in contrast to Roseville – thus repeats the logic of publicly funded projects seen earlier. Moreover, friends’ associations very much depend on parents who can organise and administer funds and projects. In Cross-Square, such parents are not always available, whereas in Roseville the association can depend on parents to both take care of the friends’ association and donate money. In Roseville, parents, however, invest more than their economic capital (Bourdieu 1986) to support the school: They also bring their cultural capital, skills, and competencies by offering after-school activities such as a football club or by supporting the instruction in class. Moreover, parents often assist in the daily functioning of the school, as the following anecdote reveals:

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It is in the afternoon, and I enter the principal’s office after a lesson that I sat in. A man in his 30s sits in front of her computer. They talk and laugh, engaging in small talk. The atmosphere is friendly and familiar. [...] Later, P. Deuft explains that this is a father [...] who works for an IT company. He created mailing lists for each class and maintains the website in his free time. (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, January 16, 2013) It is exactly this kind of additional support that the school in Cross-Square needs to organise externally through projects or partnerships. The principal of CrossSquare’s primary school, for example, had to find someone to help to reorganise the school’s computer lab through an outside project. As she explains: “It is complicated, and time consuming, and it requires energy and patience” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, June 19, 2012). This kind of support can often be accessed much more directly through parents in Roseville. Parents also use their social capital to support the school. When the school had trouble with their cleaning company, these problems ‘disappeared.’ When I asked C. Scherk, the vice-principal, over lunch what they had done about it, she smiled and said that a mother had asked her husband, a lawyer, to look at the contract: “He checked what they actually had to clean” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, January 30, 2013). Despite the fact that parents at Cross-Square primary school also do things for the school, it cannot draw on the same level and kind of resources due to the social status of its parents. Even though there is a small group of middle-class parents at Cross-Square primary school, the demand for engagement is distributed quite differently. Parents thus have to draw boundaries and often focus exclusively on the classrooms of their own children. Erika, the environmental engineer living in Cross-Square, explains: “We are just not as many, that is the point! If you are in a class there [Roseville], and [...] all the parents have a background like us, I’m sure there are always like five parents who say – ‘well, we could help’ – and then these five parents don’t have to do all of it, but everybody takes care of some tasks.” (Parent Interview 8, #00:20:36-7#). To make up for this, in Cross-Square, teachers sometimes use their own resources and social capital to support the school. This includes asking their own children,

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partners, and other people for specific forms of help – if they are known to be handy with computers, for example. Asking for support is however a very different thing than having it proactively offered. Finally, similar to Cross-Square, Roseville’s school-as-field is also shaped by the different content of the school’s partnerships and the kind of projects that are seen as adequate for a school in a neighbourhood ‘like this.’ As we saw above, the focus is not on child protection issues, social problems and additional support for families, and there is less institutional pressure to define these as areas of intervention. Rather, individual talents and individualistic conditions of children are at the forefront. Projects often focus on giving students the opportunity to further develop their interests and talents, rather than to providing them with any enrichment at all, as it is sometimes the case in Cross-Square. At Roseville’s reading club, for example, children do not simply read books, but also write reviews, which are occasionally even published in local newspapers – or at least that is what the club aims for. Children are learning to analyse literature on an academic level and to participate in cultural life. Moreover, the presentation of children’s achievements plays an important role in Roseville’s primary school. For example, the theatre, football and basketball clubs in Roseville regularly participate in Berlin-wide competitions: [Several schools from all over Berlin compete for a theatre prize], the director of the theatre is amazed by the performance of Roseville’s primary school. He stands in front of the audience and explains: “This is a highlight, as usual” [later he adds]: “I’ll see you at the awards ceremony!” [...] A few weeks later, during the school’s summer party, the children are invited onto the stage to present portions of their performance and are praised, applauded, and complimented – as the school did indeed win a prize in the theatre competition. (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, Mai 23, 2013; June 14, 2013) Moreover, issues of concern to parents but also to external partnerships are not focused on ‘social problems’ but rather on highly giftedness, highly sensitive children, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and dyslexia and dyscal-

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culia. When P. Deuft, the principal, talks about expanding partnerships, the emphasis is on highly giftedness rather than on intensifying partnerships with the child welfare agency: “In the area of giftedness, we could cooperate much more [...] I just went to a meeting on this with the local government [...] and we don’t focus enough on highly gifted children and they need support as well!” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, March 14, 2013) Roseville also employs a teacher who explicitly focuses on supporting children with dyslexia – rather than a social worker, who supports entire families, as in Cross-Square. Berlin’s school law (Grundschulverordnung (GsVO), §16) dictates that all schools must have teachers dedicated to helping dyslexic students; in practice, this never came up in Cross-Square, highlighting how similar institutional pressures are ‘activated’ differently depending on the local context. It is in these areas that competences and additional knowledge are developed in the school – with consequences for the organisational habitus and organisational practices of teachers, as we will see in Chapter 6.

To sum up, the schools in Roseville and Cross-Square are not only structured differently through their social compositions and the symbolic meanings of their local neighbourhoods, but also by the different institutional pressures that shape the schools-as-fields. In Cross-Square, there is more pressure to open up the school, to cooperate and find partners to solve issues that are identified as problematic. But it is not only the sheer number of activities, projects and partnerships. On top of that, it is also the kind of partnerships that brings additional workload to the school. In Cross-Square, activities are often funded through temporary projects; application and accounting processes are time-consuming but unfunded and often involve working with volunteers. Moreover, the school cooperates with external partners to work on specific topics that are defined – by the school and more importantly by external institutional pressures – as being important for a school ‘in a neighbourhood like this.’ The main focus of the sustained partnerships is thus generally to support children and parents in areas, in which families ostensibly lack basic competencies (homework, nutrition, social skills, etc.).

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In Roseville, there is less institutional pressure to cooperate and work in partnerships; problems that do exist, such as ‘complicated’ middle-class parents, are generally not addressed through projects. Moreover, projects that do take place in the school are generally financed in alternative ways, through sponsorship or parental donations, such as the school’s friends’ association. Moreover, the school can rely on parents’ social and cultural capital to solve those organisational problems that in Cross-Square often need to be tackled through partnership agreements. In addition, the school’s partnerships focus on different matters. Projects deal with questions of achievement and performance and cooperation often focus on individualistic conditions such as ADHD, giftedness, dyslexia and the like, rather than on a child’s family structure or social context.

5.4 Schools as Localised Fields and Neighbourhood Inequality

Why, then, is all of this important for understanding organisational neighbourhood inequality? As we have seen, schools-as-fields are shaped by their local neighbourhoods. The neighbourhood functions as a ‘hinge’ that structures how institutional pressures and the objective power relations within and between organisations interact to create localised fields. In this chapter, I have introduced three shaping factors that together produce such localised field-constellations: In Cross-Square, the school-as-field is structured by its social composition that stems from its neighbourhood as social unit. Due to their social, cultural and economic capital, parents are structurally in a less powerful position than the teachers, making parental strategies of controlling, questioning or challenging the school less accessible. Often, parents must accept individualizing rather than organisational explanations for the success or failure of their child. Yet, even if parents become active, such interventions are often unsuccessful, partly because of the weak alliances with other professionals at the school. Moreover, social inequality introduces internal tensions to the school-as-field, as institutionalised promises of providing for all children cannot be met structurally. This poses serious questions

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about the legitimacy (Meyer and Rowan 1977) of Cross-Square’s primary school and of the work of its teachers. Furthermore, the symbolic meaning linked to the neighbourhood of Cross-Square positions the school at the bottom of the Berlinwide educational field. This negative label is often independent of the school’s actual practices; such institutionalised symbolic meanings can be understood as a form of symbolic violence and signal a devaluation and rejection from ‘outside.’ Finally, in Cross-Square, the neighbourhood as administrative unit is also crucial: Institutionally, the school is under more pressure to appear active and to address various kinds of problems that are linked to the school and the neighbourhood. The school-as-field is thus characterised by a high number of partnerships, often with other public organisations and NGOs, involving the school in activities that are time consuming, only funded short-term, and generally work-intensive. Moreover, the school cooperates mostly on specific topics that are seen as appropriate for a school in such a neighbourhood since they focus on social issues. In contrast, the field in Roseville is shaped by the powerful position of the parents, who can force the school to comply with their demands. Although parents use their social, economic, and cultural capital to intervene in critical moments, their position in the field also results in subtle forms of control, as teachers often anticipate parents’ concerns without their direct intervention. Parents’ position in the field thus allows them to implement their expectations in the school as a form of institutional pressure. Moreover, as Roseville is characterised by privilege rather than by poverty, internal contradictions within the field are less visible and children generally progress successfully, which makes the work of the school as an organisation appear legitimate – while questions of parents’ role in this process are often pushed aside. In addition, the symbolic meaning of Roseville as a neighbourhood shapes the school-as-field. The ‘outside’ constantly signals a symbolic valorisation of the school as an in-demand and successful organisation. Similar to Cross-Square, this is linked much more to the school’s local context and to parents’ assumptions about it, than to the school’s actual work. Finally, as the Roseville school is generally perceived as successful, there is also less pressure to be publicly active and to open up the school to external partnerships. Even problems that do indeed exist, such as overinvolved parents, are not addressed in this manner. Moreover, the school can avoid partnerships by finding alternative solutions to organisational problems, since parents’ economic, social, and cultural capital

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provides access to additional resources. Finally, the content of partnerships differs in comparison to those in Cross-Square: individual talents, as well as individual challenges, such as gifted children, are much more prominent than a child’s social needs or family problems. In summary, neighbourhoods localise schools-as-fields by introducing first, as social units, different social compositions and thus different objective power positions within the school as well as different institutional conflicts over their legitimacy as organisation; second, as symbolic units, by infusing different symbolic meanings and hierarchies that entail various forms of symbolic violence or valorisation; and finally, third, as administrative units, by structuring the institutional pressures of projects and partnerships that penetrate school-as-fields. These different factors are divided here for analytical purpose, but obviously can overlap, interact with and reinforce each other. The social composition of a neighbourhood is important for the installation of a neighbourhood council, but also for the social composition of the school; the social composition of a neighbourhood impacts the image of a neighbourhood, which might intensify the process of segregation, which might change the social composition of the school. Together then, these factors produce diverging field-constellations in different neighbourhood contexts. To conceptualise schools as localised fields thus helps to identify how neighbourhoods shape organisations-as-fields and thus potentially also the daily work of teachers in different neighbourhoods. Simultaneously, it highlights the need to conceptualise neighbourhoods and their importance for social processes in more complex ways than it is often the case, especially in the literature on neighbourhood effects. Here, it is helpful to combine new-institutionalism and urban studies, as discussed in the chapter on theoretical underpinnings, to understand how institutional and local forces intertwine to produce neighbourhood inequality. The next chapter explores how the described field constellations function as structural conditions, in which educational professionals develop their routines, taken-forgranted assumptions and conceptualisations of their job – or put differently, their organisational habitus and organisational practices.

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How Educational Professionals Adapt: Localised Organisational Habitus and Organisational Practices

If schools-as-fields are localised by their specific field-constellations and thus differ structurally depending on their neighbourhood context, what does that mean for neighbourhood inequality? As discussed in Chapter 3, thinking about organisations-as-fields allows for a conceptualisation of teachers’ habitus and practices as shaped by the local conditions under which they work – a process which can add to inequality if service provision differs between neighbourhoods. This chapter then zooms in on these processes by tracing how the organisational habitus and the organisational practices of teachers are shaped differently by the localised schools-as-fields. I argue that the daily understandings and taken-forgranted assumptions of the teachers as well as their practices differ by neighbourhood, as educational professionals adapt to the localised constellations of schoolsas-fields. Three crucial areas can be linked to the localisation of organisational habitus and organisational practices: First, as seen previously, teachers must deal with different internal tensions and forms of symbolic violence within a school-as-field; in reaction to these localised conditions, educational professionals develop different emotional practices in order to come to terms with conflicts of legitimacy and success. Second, depending on the differing parental power positions in the field, teachers develop diverging understandings of what educational professionals can or cannot do. The assumed autonomy available to teachers clearly differs between Cross-Square and Roseville. Finally, due to the localised institutional pressures and thus the presence of projects that support the development of specific expertise, as well as a parent’s

© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 J. Nast, Unequal Neighbourhoods, Unequal Schools, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-27591-4_6

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ability to resist specific interpretations, teachers develop diverging ways of identifying and solving problems in the two neighbourhoods. All of these adaptions add to the already unequal conditions for children growing up in different neighbourhood contexts.

6.1 Emotional Practices: Coming to Terms with Inequality

While education is often posited “as an abstract process, as a set of reasoned and logical practices, and as a series of formal spaces, [...] uncontaminated by emotions” (Kenway and Youdell 2011, 132), research has increasingly pointed to the emotional side of teaching (Kenway and Youdell 2011, 132; Boler 1999; Hargreaves 2001; R. E. Sutton and Wheatley 2003; see also Lupton 2004 and Chapter 2). From the perspective of practices, emotions are not ‘hard-wired’ or purely bodily but are deeply social and thus cannot exist in isolation from social structures (Scheer 2012). Teachers’ emotions and their emotional practices are thus not universal or independent of social context (Scheer 2012, 193), but are shaped by schools-as-fields. In Cross-Square and Roseville, teachers and other educational professionals are regularly confronted with diverging emotional experiences evoked by their school-as-field. Here, the unequal symbolic meanings of both contexts, as well as the presence of social inequality, become decisive, as teachers in Cross-Square struggle with forms of symbolic violence and questions about the legitimacy of their work to a larger extent than their colleagues in Roseville. In consequence, teachers in both environments develop diverging forms of emotional habitus and emotional practices to navigate the parameters of their own role and its limitations. Emotional practices in this case include practices that individuals engage in to achieve a certain emotional state: “This includes the striving for a desired feeling as well as the modifying of one that is not desirable. [...] In other words, they are part of what is often referred to as “emotional management”” (Scheer 2012, 209).

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The structure of schools-as-fields is thus inscribed into the emotional habitus of professionals and the practices they employ to come to terms with it. As we will see, this has important consequences for children in Cross-Square and Roseville, and adds to existing local inequalities.

If I’ve Learned One Thing or: “You Can’t Save All the Children in this Neighbourhood”

As seen in the previous chapter, as teachers in Cross-Square are confronted with severe social inequality, they experience greater tensions within the educational field, which pressures them to delineate the legitimacy of their work and to confront the failure to achieve institutional demands. Moreover, the symbolic position of the neighbourhood comes with forms of symbolic violence, in which symbolic challenges are not only part of teachers’ daily routines, but are also visible in the perceptions of others, the outside that signals devaluation and rejection of the teachers’ work. These conditions of the school-as-field are inscribed into teachers’ bodies and their emotional experiences in Cross-Square. Teachers often speak about feeling worn down by the impossibility of completing the official curriculum and by the task of teaching students struggling with the material. As I. Rosinger, the dedicated vice-principal at Cross-Square, explains, while correcting math homework: “Oh God, what the hell should we do?” (Author’s field notes, CrossSquare primary school, August 22, 2012), “[their progress], is impossible, [...] sometimes I wonder what am I actually doing here” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, August 9, 2012), “Sometimes I wonder, if I’m actually on the right track – [...] this [progress of the children] is really substandard” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, August 22, 2012).

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Over time, however, most teachers learn to accept the social situation in their school and to manage their emotional experiences differently: “The first two years, I cried every day after school, [...] but after a while I realised that I’m neither helping myself nor the children if I give in into that feeling.” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, August 27, 2012) “To draw boundaries, not to sink into misery, not to feel too much pity, that was the hardest part in the beginning of working in a social hotspot [...] it is really hard if you know all the children’s histories.” (Teacher Interview 10, #00:43:01-2#) Most teachers arrive at an understanding, as part of their organisational habitus, summarised here by Elif, a social worker who has worked in the school for many years, that “if I’ve learnt one thing, it is that you can’t save all the children” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, October 1, 2012). Many teachers describe this basic acceptance: “Generally, you know, with some children, you can see that they get their act together – and others don’t – we can reach some of the children, but if someone says that he or she can reach all of them, well this person is fooling himself, I have to say!” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, November 29, 2012) “[The most difficult part of my work?] I always wanted to reach all the children, but that’s not doable, [...] and then you realise: I can’t reach this child, I don’t have the strength and the energy to do it [...] and so you give up on some of them.” (Teacher Interview 25, #00:25:20-9#, #00:25:33-2#, #00:25:36-0#) “I can’t save the world, I CAN’T, and I always say to myself, I try to do what I can, and to push them as far as possible, and if it does not work, it does not work. Period!” (Teacher Interview 15, #00:40:42-9#) This position has, however, severe implications for neighbourhood inequality. Especially in an environment that is not characterised by powerful parents, who can force the school to care, this often means that children, who do not get their ‘act

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together,’ are left behind. The adaption to the field-constellation by the teachers – becoming accustomed to the inequality and accepting the limited leverage of the school – somewhat worsens the children’s already unequal chances. The fact that “with time, you know, the frustration gets better, you get used to the fact that you can’t save them all” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, November 13, 2012) comes at a price, as D. Elmar, a young teacher, reflects self-critically: “There is a danger of just accepting the status quo, to put up with it, to say ‘ok, I try to take care of them, but it is never enough, but at least, you know, this or this child [I reached]’” (Teacher Interview 1, #00:30:14-2#). The understanding that in a neighbourhood like Cross-Square reaching all the children is impossible becomes part of the professional’s organisational habitus and helps them draw boundaries around their involvement. At the same time, teachers develop emotional practices to help them navigate and come to terms with the limitations of their work, of which I distinguish four here: blaming the victim, looking at the bright site, advanced pedagogy, and finally, disengagement. These practices are not always clear-cut, as they sometimes overlap, vary in degree or present simultaneously.

Blaming the Victim Some teachers cope with the emotional challenges of enduring inequality by blaming the children and their families. Here, teachers navigate the understanding that ‘you can’t save them all’ by claiming that this is the result of families’ and children’s lack of interest and investment in education. This can be understood as an emotional practice – as it brings relief through the acceptance that there is nothing further to be done for the child and that it is not the teacher’s fault – and entails a “manipulation of body and mind [...] to change or remove emotion” (Scheer 2012, 209). Within this emotional practice, parents are blamed for being disinterested and unsupportive of the school. As L. Schütz, a music teacher in her 40s and increasingly frustrated by her job, explains: “Everybody has the same chances, but you need to make use of them, and you need to have some kind of motivation, you need to be willing, and

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well, the parents, they are the problem, they don’t do anything, they don’t take care of their children.” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, December 13, 2012) Others do not see families as the main problem, but rather their students themselves, who they describe as lacking what it takes, both in terms of interest and work ethos: “If you never sit down and do your school work, you know, they go home, they put down their backpack and the next day they come here again – you can’t learn this way!” She points towards the text that one of her students handed in and says: [they have] “not worked on it, not learnt anything, not understood a bit.” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, October 18, 2012) “Our children just do not learn during lessons, NOT AT ALL, they ‘switch off,’ [...] children, who want to learn, who really want to, they do their thing [...], and with the others, you have no chance, [...] I always say [...]: It doesn’t matter with which method our children do NOT learn.” (Teacher Interview 11, #00:03:49-1#) This does not mean that teachers do not also care about their students. Nevertheless, they often blame the fact that they are unsuccessful at work not on the structural conditions of the field and the emotional frustrations that come with it, but entirely on their students, and thus disengage pedagogically. While many of them understand the complicated conditions under which many of the children grow up, this can be easily forgotten and the individualising narrative of ‘if you would only want to, you could do it’ is applied instead. This is exacerbated by the tendency to link problems in Cross-Square to ‘culture’ rather than to social inequality. While this clearly varies between teachers, within the group that tends to blame the children and their families, ‘Islamic culture’ and religion are often used to explain why things are so difficult. A. Can, one of the few teachers with a migrant background, who teachers Turkish and math, explains: “I keep saying that it is about social inequality and not about ethnicity, but sometimes I feel like no one is listening” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, October 18, 2012).

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By blaming the victim, teachers come to terms with the limits of their own role and with their acceptance of ‘you can’t save them all’ by focusing on the perceived limitations and faults of the children and their parents rather than on the structural conditions under which these families navigate everyday life, or the limitations of what the school as an organisation can provide to support them. This comes close to what others have described as ‘punishing the poor’ in public organisations. Gillies, for example, argues that teachers and ‘other middle-class professionals’ impose middle-class values on working-class lives resulting in the pathologisation of the latter (Gillies 2007, 117; Lareau 2003, 232).

Looking at the bright side Other teachers save themselves emotionally by looking at the bright side, although this practice is only available to relatively successful teachers. Here, successes – in the sense of positive experiences – are used as a defence against feelings of failure. This emotional practice often evokes joy, happiness, and pride, as N. Preuer, a very emotional teacher in her early 40s, explains: “It is a great profession, I wanted you to shadow me in my work, so that you can see how much fun it can be!” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, November 27, 2012) Teachers applying these emotional practices generally focus on what works well, while ignoring what is not. As R. Plenter, a teacher from a school similar to CrossSquare, points out: “You have to find a way, and I’m quite good at not despairing at the difficulty of the situation, but to really see the small successes!” (Teacher Interview 5, #00:24:57-0#) Some teachers idealise the situation by arguing that in their class all is well, that they love the children and – even if the school cannot – they change the world in their classroom. Existing problems, such as lacking competencies in writing, speaking, and math, are often downplayed or ignored. Pride and recognition are gained from the number of children that graduate on to Gymnasium – the school form that will allow pupils to apply directly to university. As N. Preuer explains, tears in her eyes:

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“[That is the only reason] that I’m not applying to work closer to where I live [in a middle-class area of Berlin] [...] the fact that I know that I can do this, and there are not many people who can, I can push these children so that they can go to Gymnasium in the end, including children with an immigrant background!” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, November 27. 2012) It is worth noting that even here the dynamic is all about saving those that can be saved, and accepting that not all children will make it, although these teachers often feel that they can save more children than other instructors. A. Hellwig, who we have met previously, points out: “It is important to support the children, where you think that you can inspire something, [...] these [are the] children I sometimes take to a museum during school holidays.” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, June 13, 2012) Teachers who engage in this emotional practice understand themselves as ‘special’ and as an ‘exception,’ insofar as they know how to turn the situation around for these children, as A. Hellwig explains: “I don’t have any problems with my selfconfidence, I know I’m a good teacher!” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, October 22, 2012) Here, working in a deprived neighbourhood is something to be proud of, as B. Speicher recalls, looking back at her days in a school in a neighbourhood similar to Cross-Square: “If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere!” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, April 30, 2013). Teachers mention that only “special people” want to work “in a sozialem Brennpunkt [social hot spot]” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, June 5, 2012): “You kind of see two types, some leave Cross-Square and go to work in [better-off neighbourhoods][...] and then there are the others, who want to stay here” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, August 11, 2012).

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Advanced Pedagogy Another set of emotional practices can be described as advanced pedagogy. Here, teachers are aware of the limitations of students’ achievements and try to tackle these through improved pedagogical tools. With better methods, there is the hope that the educational trajectories of the children will change. Teachers meet with their colleagues, create learning plans for each student and extensively prepare lessons. In response, teachers must also deal with frustration if these methods do not succeed and over time it is often hard to keep up this approach, as it is very time-intensive. As I. Rosinger, the vice-principal, discussed with one of her colleagues: “It must be about more than training them to replicate what they just have learnt, they need to be challenged to really think.” Her colleague objected, “Yes, of course, but when I sometimes see what comes out of that…” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, August 22, 2012), “It is frustrating, you do all you can, but they still do not learn!” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, P2, November 6, 2012) Nonetheless, some teachers do manage to engage in these practices over long periods of time and argue that even if new concepts do not always work immediately, it is necessary for teachers to improve their methods in order to push students to the next level. If teachers succeed, the emotional rewards are high: “It is a [...] pedagogical challenge, [...] it is great to see, if it works, here, you get flour and salt and no water and no yeast and still in the end it becomes bread! And that challenge, if it works, [...] that kind of happiness, [...], you can’t describe it, if you experience it, you know what happiness is!” (Teacher Interview 19, #00:37:07-4#) Self-worth is achieved through the excellent reputation that these teachers maintain within the school and the recognition they receive from the principal, as L. Acar, an experienced teacher close to retirement, describes: “I have the impression that [the principal] really appreciates what I do” (Teacher Interview 12, #00:51:01-4#). Also, this group is often very critical of other teachers in the school

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and thus partly blames other teachers – rather than the families – for what cannot be achieved in school. As E. Holstein, the principal, explains: “We have this young colleague, and her lessons are highly professional, but I also told her that she engages in collegial arrogance. [...] Partly, she is very judgmental of other colleagues [...] and impatient. [...] But she fears that the school will develop in the wrong direction and will go down the drain.” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, June 15, 2012) Teachers who react to the inequality within the field by engaging in advanced pedagogy, also struggle to draw boundaries between what actually can be addressed (and solved) and what cannot. Within these emotional practices, relief is achieved by having other professionals identify the students that ‘can’t be saved.’ I. Rosinger explains self-critically: “Then you test them [for special needs], and in a way, you know, I know that it makes me feel better because then it is no longer me, who does not know how to reach this kid, but the child is part of the problem then.” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, August 22, 2012)

Giving up Finally, some teachers end up withdrawing. There are different degrees, although most teachers engage in this set of practices from time to time or in specific situations. Especially younger teachers often express their doubts if they will be able to “make it till the end” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, November 9, 2012) and to lean in until retirement: “I think it takes a lot of energy and courage, and confidence not to quit” (Teacher Interview 4, #00:37:08-4#). Generally, professionals regularly see colleagues, who “collapse” (Teacher Interview 2, #00:06:47-1#), “get burned out” or are “on permanent sick-leave” (Teacher Interview 6, #00:37:14-0#).

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The emotional practice of withdrawing entails accepting that it is impossible to change the situation and that ending one’s engagement is the only reasonable response. Sometimes, it is easy to come close to the point of giving up: “You have to be aware, otherwise you can be carried away by frustration [...] I see this in colleagues and in myself” (Teacher Interview 11, #00:11:07-4#). A teacher engaging in this practice explains to another teacher why he no longer corrects students’ homework: “Just let it be, it doesn’t make a difference if I correct the homework or not, there is no effect, it makes no difference anyway” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, October 23, 2012). Regularly requesting sick-leave is part of this set of emotional practices. Even when present, teachers can engage in this practice, by constantly pointing out that they are not willing to participate in any kind of additional work or activity – and if necessary that they will ‘get sick’ in order to avoid it. R. Smith, an older teacher close to retirement, clearly engages in this practice. He explains with a wink that he will not participate in the school’s ‘organisation day,’ during which teachers take time to clean out the common rooms: “I can already feel the flu, Monday I will go to the doctor again16, and then, I’m gone!” (Author’s field notes, CrossSquare primary school, October 25, 2012) Such withdrawn teachers often frustrate those colleagues who do not engage in this practice: “If things get too complicated some teachers simply withdraw from school and hide behind illness as a solution - it is hopeless!” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, November 27, 2012) “Sometimes, I have the impression that colleagues feel like ‘now that I’ve worked pretty hard, I can stay at home and rebalance myself.’ But you need to face the fact that this really puts additional stress on the other colleagues, who have to step in.” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, June 13, 2012)

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In Germany, employees are entitled to paid sick leave for up to 6 weeks if they present a doctor’s note.

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A notable alternative is moving out of the city, while still working in CrossSquare. Several teachers explain how they felt the need to create space between themselves and the social problems after work. P. Petersen, who now works in Roseville, remembers her feelings working in a neighbourhood similar to CrossSquare: “I decided to move out of the city! [...] At the time, we lived in a downtown neighbourhood [...] and I wanted to move out, [...] like to a little oasis, and [...] many teachers and the principal of my former school did the same, far away [from the school], living amidst greenery.” (Teacher Interview 24, #00:05:15-2#)

To sum up, teachers must respond to the structural inequality they face, the inability of schools to solve it, and the symbolic devaluation that it entails. These structural conditions are inscribed into their organisational habitus, their understanding of what their job involves, and what they wish to achieve within their profession. As we have seen, a basic understanding within Cross-Square becomes that ‘you can’t save all children in a neighbourhood like this.’ To navigate their limited role in changing the life chances of the children at their school, different emotional practices are employed. Through these, teachers attach meaning and value to their daily tasks or at least make failing not ‘their fault.’ Irrespective of whether educational professionals engage in blaming the victim, looking at the bright site, advanced pedagogy, or withdrawing, all these practices derive from a basic acceptance that not all children can be saved.

Supporting Them All or Why it is All Right to Stay in Paradise

In contrast to Cross-Square, the school-as-field in Roseville is confronted with significantly fewer tensions. Generally speaking, children learn effectively and progress as expected. While doubts about the role of teachers in individual children’s success stories occur from time to time, such thoughts are easier to ignore

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than the doubts expressed by teachers in Cross-Square. Moreover, teachers experience high levels of symbolic valorisation as the ‘outside’ signals to them that they work at a successful and legitimate organisation. These symbolic structures of the field are also inscribed into educational professionals’ organisational habitus in Roseville. Teachers have a clear understanding of their privilege to work in “heaven on earth” (Teacher Interview 14, #00:37:173#), “in this wonderful oasis” (Teacher Interview 18, #00:41:38-0#) and that this, if you compare it to Cross-Square, is “paradise” (Teacher Interview 18, #00:41:07-0#). Fulfilling the expectations of the field is generally not a strain and, for the most part, teachers describe their work experiences as fulfilling, as does D. Glorius, a woman in her 40s: “At the end of the week? I’m usually sold on what the children have done” (Teacher Interview 13, 141:143, #00:20:17-9#). During a workshop at which teachers discussed stressful aspects of their work, children were not mentioned at all (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, April 15, 2013). This is due not only to the fact that children easily achieve what is expected of them, but also to the fact that questions of inequality and of children’s future are less pressing in Roseville. Those teachers who have worked in neighbourhoods like Cross-Square describe the emotional situation as follows: “The bottom line is, teaching in Roseville is much less energy-sapping, and also more motivating, you feel you are in the right place, you know, there is progress, something that in [neighbourhood like Cross-Square], especially in the end, was so much harder to achieve! There, sometimes I felt that I was just managing the hardship, everything that society isn’t able to handle, well, often that was really frustrating, and I was happy to be away from that…you become sarcastic after a while [...] – as a relief strategy!” (Teacher Interview 21, #00:28:17-1#) “I have to say, in this school, I lost my fear of the future – but in my old school, I was really afraid for the future [...] children are so egoistic and ruthless, and I could never quite see how that should improve with age!” (Teacher Interview 25, #00:09:29-8#, #00:09:41-2#) This should not imply that teachers never experience tension or insecurity in Roseville: Similar to the experiences of teachers in Cross-Square, teachers also struggle with the feeling of not being able to reach all the children at all times.

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Yet, the level and extent of this feeling clearly differs. Emotional pressures rather result from the expectations that come with working in ‘paradise.’ Whereas in Cross-Square, teachers arrive at an understanding that they cannot save all the children, teachers in Roseville, in accordance with the symbolic and social structure of their field, are confronted with quite the opposite – namely: having to save or, more precisely, to support all the children. U. Schmidts, who we met earlier, describes this pressure: “I always keep my eyes firmly on the secondary school, the children will NEED this knowledge there – at least the ones who go to Gymnasium.” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, April 23, 2013) Very much in contrast to Cross-Square, teachers’ organisational habitus encompasses the feeling of having to prepare their students for the rigours of Gymnasium: “I’m under pressure [...] to cover the curriculum, and that children really learn everything they need” (Teacher Interview 13, #00:26:39-9#) and “Of course, I try to drill them – I tell them ‘children, you will go to Gymnasium soon’ [...] to push them to the right place in their final year [of primary school]” (Teacher Interview 16, #01:02:02-7#). While not all children actually go to Gymnasium, it is always talked about as an exception: One teacher mentioned, for example, how ‘only’ three of her students would not be attending Gymnasium next year (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, April 17, 2013). This exception is often accepted for children from families with lower social status, and the overall understanding of ‘having to support them all’ is thus sometimes compromised: “This is not a Gymnasium child!” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, April 19, 2013). For the most part, however, teachers work under the expectation that all their students have to enter Gymnasium. In Roseville, similar to Cross-Square, emotional problems arise when teachers are unable to fulfil the expectations of their field. This can be the case when teachers are regularly on sick leave, have conflicts with specific parents, or do not perform as expected. Here too, emotional practices are employed to manage these pressures.

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Managing the Pressure: ‘Parental Mockery’ Most teachers in Roseville to some degree engage in a set of practices that can be described as ‘parental mockery.’ As argued above, the expectations of the field put teachers under pressure, from which they distance themselves by critically evaluating ‘the parents.’ This tactic is necessary as pressures can be quite real, as F. Botts, a teacher in her late 40s who only recently joined the school but was already involved in conflicts with parents, explains: “[I asked myself] am I a good teacher or…well, most of all, what was really terrible was that I actually started to make mistakes, because I was under so much pressure” (Teacher Interview 25, #00:03:50-8#). Teachers navigate these pressures by making fun of parents, for example by means of “sarcastic jokes” about parents taking teachers to court (Teacher Interview 22, #00:08:50-9#), or criticising them. This does not mean that teachers actively confront specific parents. Rather, teachers engage in the emotional practice of ‘ parental mockery’ with family, friends, and colleagues behind closed doors. A typical concern is the fact that parents put too much pressure on their children and that this, rather than the teachers’ actions, hinders a child’s success: “It is their decision how they educate their children [...], but if these children would – totally normally – do their homework, play, be outside, watch TV, draw, listen to music and dream, whatever [...] they would be happier and more content and would be better able to achieve things here at school than when they are permanently under pressure!” (Teacher Interview 18, #00:13:58-9#). In contrast to Cross-Square, practices that encompass openly ‘blaming the victim’ or ‘giving up’ on a child are not acceptable in Roseville, as they do not correspond to the social and symbolic logic of the field and the expectations linked to it. While labelling parents – and thus the general expectations of the field – as ‘crazy’ brings a relief, this emotional practice does not challenge the general understanding of having to support all the children – it just makes it easier to bear.

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For teachers who do not experience fundamental tensions with the parents of their students, emotional practices often revolve around how to justify their decision to stay ‘in paradise’ rather than to confront the social inequality of neighbourhoods such as Cross-Square. In this sense, teachers in Roseville also have to come to terms with inequality, yet in a different way. Here, three practices can be differentiated: Some teachers argue that they have already ‘done their part’, others emphasise the level of teaching that is only possible in neighbourhoods like Roseville, and finally, some point out that their own family situation makes it unfeasible to work in neighbourhoods like Cross-Square.

I’ve Done my Part and These Children Need Help as Well Sometimes, teachers explain their decision not to work in neighbourhoods such as Cross-Square in a rather apologetic way, by pointing out that they have previously worked in ‘social hotspots’ and thus: “I’ve done my part for [neighbourhood similar to Cross-Square]” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, January 10, 2013). Since they have already participated in the fight against inequality, the teachers then argue that it is appropriate to now work “on the bright side for once” (Teacher Interview 21, #00:18:27-0#). Going back to neighbourhoods like Cross-Square is not an option. P. Deuft, the principal, worked in a deprived neighbourhood at the beginning of her career. She explains: “If you are content somewhere [like Roseville] you do not want to downgrade your situation. [...] It is so difficult to keep everybody happy in a school with so many burdens. [...] I can understand that it is very frustrating for colleagues in neighbourhoods like Cross-Square, everybody is working hard, and there is so little in return; they don’t get the support they need [...], they can push themselves, they can give the greatest lessons, and still…” (Teacher Interview 26, #00:53:28-7#) Moreover, teachers often argue that children in neighbourhoods like Roseville also need support and good teachers – and that actually, by teaching these children,

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they also do something ‘good.’ Here, the challenges that are present in neighbourhoods like Cross-Square are relativized by claims that teachers with more advanced teaching approaches are crucial to Roseville – possibly more so than to Cross-Square – since their students’ potential is greater. As M. Püschner, a teacher, explains: “Think about it [if we work on the teaching styles in this school], how much children could improve, think about what kind of children you have here, what they can achieve…” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, March 14, 2013)

The Level of Teaching Other teachers openly admit that they enjoy the level at which they are able to teach in Roseville and are not willing to compromise on the quality of their work – as would be required of them in Cross-Square. Here, legitimacy is increased, as teaching at a high level is a professional goal rather than a way to avoid confronting inequality and the consequences that come with it. Teachers point out how the level, at which their students already enter school, allows them to push them much further than it would be possible in Cross-Square – something they clearly enjoy: “I really appreciate the level at which I can work here with the students. The stories that the children write, they are written in a German that I can read, and I can work with them on their grammar, and teach them interesting verbs and adjectives…I wouldn’t even bother doing that in Cross-Square, there, it is all about speaking German correctly at all, and that they build complete sentences and maybe conjugate verbs correctly!” (Teacher Interview 14, #00:28:42-0#) “Children are incredibly willing to learn and to achieve things, and this allows you to teach differently and that is fun! I can do really great things – or in German, if I speak to friends in [neighbourhood like CrossSquare] they first have to explain to their students what a stork is, here, in contrast, I can ask the children, and they will tell me 20 different types of birds!” (Teacher Interview 22, #00:03:17-9#)

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It is Because of My Own Children The most common emotional practice, however, is the argument that teachers are themselves parents and thus need to find an appropriate balance between their private lives (and its expectations) and their professional development. Partly, the teachers’ concerns revolve around practical questions such as how long it takes them to get to school – especially if they only work part-time. As many of the teachers live in Roseville or nearby, it is more convenient to work there than at the schools where they started their careers (and from which they often applied to work at Roseville) – inner-city schools that they think of as hard to reach: “I live around the corner from the school, and I have three children, and [if I worked someplace else] I would not be able to reconcile all of this.” (Teacher Interview 14, #00:28:12-3#) “Well, I think at the time it was crucial to me that the school was close to where I lived, because I had two small children and no car , and well, in that way it was very practical, because I could balance my occupation and my family work and to do this, it was crucial to have a short trip to work, that was really important to me!” (Teacher Interview 20, #00:01:48-6#) Beyond their commutes, teachers also argue that it is difficult to combine the emotional stress of working in an environment like Cross-Square with the additional emotional labour of having a family. In this narrative, working in a neighbourhood like Cross-Square at some point in the future is quite popular: “It is a bit sad, because during my training, I really focused on teaching children in difficult situations, [...] but for now, with my own children, I have postponed certain occupational developments [...], it is just difficult while having a family [...], maybe I have the energy for it [working in a neighbourhood like Cross-Square] once my children move out [...], but I really think that it is easier to find a balance with work, because in a social hotspot, it just takes more energy, and you need that for the work in your family.” (Teacher Interview 20, #00:03:01-5# #00:38:117#, #00:38:35-9#)

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“I’m not sure if I would go back [to a neighbourhood like Cross-Square], , in this neighbourhood, you have to put your heart and soul into the work, you have to be an idealist, to always work long hours, and if you have children of your own, I find it difficult, it’s a balancing act that is hard to do – and hard to succeed at! [...] I might go back once my own children are older! Yes , I can imagine doing it at a later point in my life!” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, March 12, 2013)

As we have seen, teachers in both neighbourhoods engage in very different emotional habitus and emotional practices. Due to the symbolic structures in which they work, and the emotional reactions that these structures evoke, teachers must find ways of coming to terms with these experiences. In Cross-Square, this involves the basic acceptance that not all the children in a deprived neighbourhood can be reached. Teachers engage in different practices to come to terms with this limitation, mostly revolving around the question of who is at fault when the school cannot keep its meritocratic promise. In Roseville, the symbolic structure of the field shapes the organisational habitus by insisting that in such a privileged neighbourhood all children must be adequately supported. Emotional practices are deployed when this expectation cannot be fulfilled or when justifying why the less structurally challenging conditions of Roseville are preferable to fighting against inequality someplace else. Partly, the different habitus are not only due to the different symbolic structures of social inequality and valorisation, but also due to the fact that parents in Cross-Square and Roseville have very different power positions within the schools-as-fields: In brief, no parent in Roseville would accept a declaration that ‘you can’t save all the children in a neighbourhood like this.’ In addition to the different emotional practices they develop in response to the symbolic structures in which they work, teachers are thus also confronted with different understandings of what they can and cannot do in the respective school – a phenomenon that will be analysed in the following.

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6.2 What to Do and What Not to Do: Between Autonomy and Control

As discussed in the previous chapter, the symbolic pressures of coming to terms with inequality go hand-in-hand with different structures of (subtle) control. Depending on the neighbourhood, parents have different power positions in the school-as-field, which become deeply inscribed into the organisational habitus and organisational practices of the teachers. While all teachers understand their job to be linked to authenticity, and thus to a certain level of autonomy, the degree to which this is realisable clearly differs between the two schools. In the following, I show how parents are present in teachers’ narratives, considerations, and understanding of their work in different ways in both schools. These differences are also visible in the practices engaged in by the teachers, both in their standards of teaching and in the ways they treat the children emotionally.

Parents’ Role in Organisational Habitus of Teachers: The Little Voice Inside Your Head

The different power positions of parents in Cross-Square and Roseville and the corresponding forms of control they exert are clearly reflected in the narratives teachers use to interpret their work. Parents are present in the understandings, considerations and framings – and thus also in the organisational habitus – of teachers to different degrees. In Roseville, teachers generally speaking anticipate that parents can – in principle – work against them. As P. Meyer, a young teacher, points out: “With some of the parents, you need to guard yourself, you just need to know - they might sue you!” (Teacher Interview 21, #00:45:47-8#) This parental influence does not, however, result in direct forms of control, working instead in more subtle ways. As we saw in the previous chapter, due to their power position, parents can constantly enact their expectations as institutional pressures in the field. As a result, parents are

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implicitly present in teachers’ assumptions and daily understandings of their work. During everyday tasks, teachers anticipate parental reactions to procedures and decisions, and regularly reminded each other (and me) to keep the perspective of the parents in mind: We are on our way back from the swimming lessons for which children and teachers are bussed to and from an indoor swimming pool. I am sitting with the three accompanying teachers downstairs [Berlin makes use of retired double-decker city buses for this task], while most of the thirdgraders are upstairs. We eat sandwiches and talk as the children start to get loud upstairs and we can hear them scream, laugh and giggle. The teachers discuss how, in principle, they have to intervene, one of them should probably even sit upstairs, but they don’t feel like it right now. I suggest, laughing, “Sometimes, even teachers can’t be bothered.” E. Glademir, the most experienced teacher in the group, looks at me, raises her eyebrows, and, sharply, makes it clear to me “I would avoid such comments in front of the students, a line like this makes its way to the parents quickly!” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, February 28, 2013) Especially younger teachers are often warned that parents’ reactions need to be considered, as this anecdote reveals: The principal sits down with a student-teacher. The teacher has commented on children’s exams, but her comments are hard to read or even crossed out. [...] The principal asks with anger in her voice: “Who is supposed to read this? The children?” She continues: “I find it embarrassing in front of the parents – to return something like this to the children [...], you should start thinking about how you will explain this to the parents! [...] Here in this school, something like this comes back like a boomerang – you will have to justify this! Parents will inquire [...] EVERYTHING that goes to parents and children needs to be tidy!” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, January 23, 2013) An important element of the process in which parents become a ‘little voice’ in teachers’ heads, is that teachers’ social position partly depends on their standing with the parents. Thus, even being labelled as ‘good’ teacher creates pressure to stay in that category, as F. Yupps, a cheerful young teacher, explains: “I might

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lose my reputation [...] and I find myself checking – how is my reputation ?” (Teacher Interview 18, #00:33:50-0#, #00:34:16-9#) P. Deuft, the principal, evaluates teachers partly based on how happy parents are with their performance. While on the phone with another principal, she mentions a colleague: “She is a nice young woman with experience in social studies – the children like her, and the parents are convinced by her work!” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, January 7, 2013) Accordingly, teachers often refer to parents to justify their decisions and their practices, especially if conflicts between colleagues or with the principal arise: “Parents see it as I do!” or “Parents are happy with my work!” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, March 12, 2013). For the internal communication within the school, parents and their function as a ‘little voice’ are also used strategically. P. Deuft, for example, suggests to C. Scherk, the vice-principal, that a new project should be discussed in front of the parents to make sure that teachers will agree to it: “We should rather discuss this during the meeting with the parents – then our colleagues won’t dare to delay the whole process!” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, January 23, 2013) In Roseville, parents thus powerfully shape teachers’ self-control. In a way, parents are constantly present: While they are also seen as a support mechanism, teachers are very aware that parents also carefully supervise not only how their child learns but also the teacher’s performance. P. Bostler, a teacher in her early 40s who is always afraid of doing something wrong points out: “You can always count on the parents, if you need them, they are there, [...] BUT you also have to reckon with them, that means, if you have to write a letter to the parents, better think twice how you formulate it, you have to make sure not to make yourself vulnerable, and you need to make sure to fulfil all the educational standards, and the curriculum, and I

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don’t think anyone would care in a neighbourhood like Cross-Square.” (Teacher Interview 19, #00:03:45-9#)

In Cross-Square, parents are less present in the considerations and narratives of the teachers. In contrast to Roseville, teachers in Cross-Square learn – according to the structure of the school-as-field – to anticipate that there will be little control by parents and that parents’ resistance can be easily negotiated. Teachers often point out that they enjoy this freedom. While officially parents are always welcome in Cross-Square, many teachers explain that the “advantage” of working in a school “like this” lies with parents who “trust us blindly” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, November 9, 2012): “We can work without having parents disturb us” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, October 29, 2012) and “parents accept what we say” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, August 21, 2013). As N. Preuer explains: “I love foreign mothers , I prefer them over complaining German parents!” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, December 4, 2012). Many teachers also explicitly compare their daily routines to what they imagine those to be like in Roseville: “The advantage of working in our school are the parents, they simply drop off their children, it is exhausting to work here, but at least you don’t have parents, not like in a school in Roseville, where I worked briefly during my training, and it was so exhausting, Mr PhD and Ms Professor bring in their diamonds, and you, as a teacher [...] have to justify and explain yourself constantly.” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, August 16, 2012) “There [a neighbourhood like Roseville], you have parents, who expect miracles from you, and that is a lot of pressure, and here, we don’t have that kind of pressure, it doesn’t matter if you get along with the kids, or what you achieve, you very rarely have parents who go to the barricades, and I’m grateful for that.” (Teacher Interview 2, #00:47:09-7#)

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Over coffee, A. Can, the teacher we met earlier, summarises the situation like this: “[In Cross-Square] teachers are authorities and in [neighbourhoods like Roseville well, parents tend to look down on teachers – it’s a big difference.” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, September 3, 2012) This does not mean that parents are never present in the considerations of CrossSquare teachers, but it is only seldom the case. If parents do come up, it is often as an after-thought, but it is rarely a serious concern that needs to be taken into account, as in Roseville. The official claim that ‘parents in neighbourhoods like Cross-Square should be more active’ is thus much more ambiguous within local organisations, as teachers also enjoy the absence of controlling parents in their daily work. Moreover, even if parents do raise concerns, teachers can use their power position to negotiate these situations more easily. Teachers employ several practices to avoid hearing the parents as that ‘little voice’ and parental concerns do not become part of their organisational habitus. An important technique here is irony. Teachers often speak of very involved or caring parents as ‘cute’ or make fun of their interventions. While in Roseville teachers feel embarrassed if a parent points out a mistake, in Cross-Square the response is a different one – teachers find it amusing and mention it as a funny anecdote, as A. Hellwig: “I have two mothers with German background [...], and they check if I make a mistake, a grammar mistake or a spelling mistake, [...], and I tell them if they want it, they will also receive a report at the end of the school year and that I will give them a really good grade. ” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, September 26, 2012) Furthermore, teachers have an easier time suggesting that problems that arise are the fault of the parents rather than a failure of the school. Hanna, a mother living on welfare, tells the story of how she tried to complain about her daughter’s German teacher at her previous school:

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“When I spoke to the principal, she said to me ‘if you want your child to learn proper German, then you have to enrol her in another school obviously’ –and I never felt so humiliated before.” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, September 3, 2012) In Hanna’s experience the principal did not take her concern seriously, but rather made it seem like her demand was illegitimate or silly, and the fact that the German lessons were not of high standard – in the end – her own fault. The problem, here, is no longer that the school is insufficiently providing for a child, but that the parent has presumably made a poor choice of school by living in a neighbourhood like Cross-Square. Some teachers, most often those who engage in emotional practices of advanced pedagogy and think highly of their own work, see the downside of this lack of parental control. D. Elmar, a young teacher, explains: “I think that schools can work on such a low level in these neighbourhoods, where social status is low, because parents do not really look into what happens at school and are not well informed…because highly educated people, what do you think would happen? They would complain – ‘what happened in math?’ and they check, assignments, if there are still mistakes [...] and they will tell you. [...] There is much more control, quality control, and people with low social status [can’t do this].” (Teacher Interview 1, #00:30:14-2#, #00:30:49-6#)

Some teachers recalled moments in which the principal became the ‘little voice’: “[Our former principal made sure that the whole school had] strict rules, and everybody shared them, and the standards were met, if not, the principal stepped in and no one wanted to take her on [...] we had a common orientation, and if someone lost it, they were put straight!” (Teacher Interview 10, #00:15:25-7#) Under what condition the principal can become ‘the little voice inside your head’ and what that means for the school as an organisation must be researched further,

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although it is partly addressed in the literature on school improvement (Harris 2010; Potter, Reynolds, and Chapman 2010; Chapman and Harris 2010).

Parents’ Role in Organisational Habitus of Teachers: Who Knows Best?

The presence of parents in the organisational habitus of teachers varies not only in amount, but also in tone. In both schools-as-fields, the different power positions of parents and teachers create different understandings of ‘who knows best,’ and the perceived limits of professionals’ interventions differ accordingly. In CrossSquare, parents are not only less present in the daily considerations of teachers, but they are also seen as mostly incompetent. Teachers often feel that they have a better grasp on a child’s best interest. In Roseville, the situation is quite different since the teachers’ understanding of their own role mirrors the powerful position of the parents. Teachers are very aware that it is nearly impossible to make decisions in opposition to the parents. Even if teachers believe that they know best, they quickly learn that they are typically not in a position to realise their preferences. These differences in the self-understanding of teachers become apparent in how much teachers feel able to tell parents what to do or not to do.

Cross-Square: The Organisational Habitus of ‘We Know Best’ In Cross-Square, many teachers see it as part of their job to guide parents. Teachers explain: “well, sometimes, you have to criticise them and to remind them of their duties” (Teacher Interview 9, #00:12:32-0#). Teachers are aware that this is not always pleasant: “I guess, many of the parents feel pressured by us, because we always dig deeper, and because we also ask uncomfortable questions” (Teacher Interview 10, #00:46:53-3#). Nevertheless, the necessity of such actions becomes part of teachers’ organisational habitus.

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The areas in which teachers feel they have a right to intervene are often quite broad, although there is often a focus on how parents can better support the learning process of their children. In Cross-Square, teachers invariably expect parents to be ‘more supportive’ of their children; simultaneously, however, there is an assumption that parents’ involvement in the actual learning processes of their children is rarely helpful. Teachers comment critically on the actions of those parents, who try to work with their children at home – but always in the ‘wrong’ way. Moreover, sending children to additional private lessons is often seen very critically: “I have this father, who is too eager, and one of my best students, she goes to additional lessons three or four times a week, and I almost fell of my chair, and I asked ‘why is she going so often, that is way too much – NO, she does not need that…’ and I told him what she actually should focus on.” (Teacher Interview 15, #00:21:25-1#) Hildegard, one of the few middle-class mothers in Cross-Square’s primary school, explains how she experienced the teachers’ positioning towards her: “I decide to get additional support for my child, and the teachers thought that it would be too much, but I had a plan, and I found them to be quite, well I told them later on, but I thought they were a bit intrusive and overbearing – you know, in the end, I have to decide what’s right!” (Parent Interview 14, #00:33:00-3#) The fact that teachers often assume that they know best is also visible in further area of school life: namely the decision about what level children can reasonably achieve, not only the kind of secondary school a child should attend 17 but also what their future will look like more broadly. In Cross-Square, the opinion that 17

In Berlin’s schools, teachers are obligated to advise parents and their children on secondary school choice. In a written report, teachers evaluate children’s capability, learning skills and dispositions, and calculate an overall average grade. Based on this, they recommend a type of school: Either the integrated secondary school (‘Integrierte Sekundarschule’) where students can earn all possible school degrees; or the Gymnasium, an academic secondary school preparing students for university education. While parents are free in their school choice in Berlin, they are asked to consider the school’s recommendation. Moreover, if demand exceeds a secondary school’s capacity, the admission process takes the primary school’s recommendation into account (among other criteria).

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parents have ‘unrealistic goals’ for their children and their future is very common. Sometimes, teachers are forced to admit that they misjudged a child, who supersedes the low expectations placed upon them, but as a rule, teachers are confident in their assessment of a child’s abilities. If parents do not agree with that assessment, teachers often react angrily and criticise the parents’ unreasonable behaviour. One mother caused a great deal of tension when, against the advice of the teachers, she objected to the expulsion of her son from school over his anger issues. I. Rosinger, the vice-principal, who had been involved in the process, explains: “The fact, that there are five highly qualified professionals sitting there [...], but she doesn’t believe us, [...] [and pretends] that we simply do not like her son!” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, August 17, 2012) In such instances, teachers often insist on their interpretation of a child’s performance. This is also the case with more minor interactions, such as when a parent insists that their child is studying at home, but the teacher is convinced of the contrary: “Parents then claim their child does study at home…the whole afternoon – and I have to say ‘well, maybe you have to check more carefully what your child is doing the whole afternoon, it is certainly NOT homework.’” (Teacher Interview 11, #00:17:03-7#) This attitude is also reflected in the reaction of certain teachers when they are confronted with values or worldviews they do not share, especially if they see them as belonging to a ‘different culture.’ Such values often quickly lose any legitimacy in the school, are often not respected, and some teachers respond with open prejudice and hostility: I’m sitting at the table with a group of teachers. S. Peters complains about an incident in her class. One of the children had brought sweets, jellybeans, and she distributed them in class. Later, a father was furious and very angry, because this type of sweets is not halal but haram [and the Muslim children – most of the children in class – shouldn’t eat them][...] S. Peters explains that she can’t take care of all of this and

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shakes her head. [...] Another teacher adds “You see these parents, in the mornings, first thing they do is to go to the bakery to buy some sweet rubbish for their children – but if these same children eat pork ONCE, then they freak out.” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, October 30, November 6, 2012) At times, the assumed professional superiority could become quite personal when teachers also pushed individual parents on personal matters, as N. Gregor, a dedicated teacher, reflects: “We had this parent-teacher interview, and my colleague kept asking why the mother was wearing a headscarf [...] and she couldn’t let go, and I had to stop her [from pressing this mother][...], and afterwards she said ‘I came so close [to changing the mother’s mind] and you ruined it’ – and I said ‘you were getting too close’ [...], and the next day, this mother didn’t greet my colleague and then she told me ‘Thank god that you stopped me [from asking further questions]!” (Teacher Interview 10, #00:08:22-8#) Of course, there are also exceptions to the understanding of ‘we know best’ – yet, teachers putting forward different perspectives are aware that they have a different attitude than most of their colleagues. These teachers explain, for example, that it is crucial to treat parents with respect rather than to judge them: “Parents are adults, and you can’t talk to them like children, and you have to respect them, and well, most likely, they decided to be parents, and thought about it, and they don’t do EVERYTHING wrong.” (Teacher Interview 15, #00:26:03-6#) “If they get their children [to school] spic and span, then they have already achieved a lot – and if they don’t manage, then there are reasons for that and they need support rather than someone telling them that they do things in the wrong way.” (Teacher Interview 12, #00:06:05-2#) However, for most teachers, ‘knowing best’ is a clear element of their localised organisational habitus. In some areas teachers might indeed have helpful information to impart to parents, which could also be seen as a way of overcoming local inequalities by supporting parents who might not possess the same degree of

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knowledge as highly educated middle-class parents. However, it is imperative to acknowledge that ‘knowing best’ can also be problematic, as there is little outside regulation to control when teachers intervene, even when they descend into prejudice and discrimination. Thus, teachers’ general understanding of being in a position to decide ‘what is best’ places children in Cross-Square much more at the mercy of the organisation than in Roseville.

Roseville: The Organisational Habitus of ‘Parents Know Best’ In contrast, parents in Roseville often take on the position of ‘we know best.’ Questions about homework or helping their children at home are not subjects that parents feel the need to discuss or agree upon with teachers. Petra, a middle-class mother, tells the following story: “[Our German teacher always says] that at the beginning children should spell as they hear the language [...], and I want to ask her [about that] again at the next PTA meeting, [...] [and if she says that’s just how it is] – ok. But then I will start to do my own programme of language learning with my son at home [...]. Because I know it is bad for him [to learn to write like this], we won’t go along with this, but that’s our problem, then I will sit down with him and do it on my own – I’m already doing it.” (Parent Interview 27, #01:00:29-8#, #01:01:06-1#) In Roseville, teachers share the parents’ interpretation of their role. Even if teachers worry that the ‘extra homework’ assigned by the parents might be problematic, they do not feel comfortable to tell them what to do. The organisational habitus of teachers in Roseville is characterised much more by an understanding of the limits of their role as professionals rather than by a professional superiority of ‘knowing best’. Some teachers truly struggle with how to address problems with parents, and the ways in which they describe this insecurity are very reflective of their localised organisational habitus. F. Yupps, a young teacher, points out: “I was drafting a letter to the parents [to address the fact that some children are under a lot of pressure], but I was so unsure, am I interfering too much in the educational goals of the parents if I write this, and the

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main message was ‘please do not put your children under so much pressure,’ and I really tried to say this in a very friendly and appropriate way, and these are the moments that push me to my limits.” (Teacher Interview 18, #00:13:58-9#) Even if concerns are addressed, it is always very clear that “[in contrast to teachers] parents don’t work for you, and thus you can’t invite them in for a critical feedback session,” as C. Scherk, the vice-principal, points out (Teacher Interview 23, #00:25:53-5#). In contrast to Cross-Square, there is a clear understanding that parents have the right to decide what is best for their children, especially as it pertains to the choice of secondary school and to what a given child can achieve more generally. Moreover, there is a certain acceptance that parents will sometimes act against pedagogical advice and set a different agenda than the school (namely, ensuring that their child succeeds in the system). While some teachers have trouble with the ‘quasi-automatic’ process by which children are often signed up for Gymnasium by their parents and would prefer to send children to schools that are actually ‘good for them’ – meaning a school type that matches children’s intellectual development and interests – these teachers are not supported by the school board: We are in the principal’s office. A teacher enters, angrily, and keeps shaking her head, in disbelief. The parents of a child in her class are unwilling to accept her recommendation to not send the kid to Gymnasium: “I’m thinking of the child’s best interest,” she explains; the principal disagrees “It’s not our decision - you can give a recommendation, but it is the parents’ decision.” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, January 16, 2013) Most teachers thus are very aware that they must compromise between their own assessment and the decisions of the parents. Often, teachers also have no other choice, as some parents are willing to ensure that their preferences are considered, as C. Scherk explains: “I was against it [sending the child to Gymnasium] but after the summer holiday these parents came back with their lawyer and they found a way!” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, January 11, 2013).

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Furthermore, when confronted with parental values and beliefs that differ from their own, teachers do not consider it their place to tell parents what to do. The degree of privacy demanded from the organisation by the parents is much higher and much more respected than in Cross-Square. P. Bostler explains: “You have to be very careful [in addressing things] with the parents, it is their privacy, you know!” (Teacher Interview 19, #00:05:26-2#). In general, giving advice is often a question of finding a balance so that parents do not feel disrespected. Sometimes, teachers feel strongly about a decision and wish to tell the parents what to do – but they are constantly reminded by P. Deuft, the principal: “You can give advice, but it IS the PARENTS’ decision” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, January 7, 2013).

Autonomy and Space to Manoeuvre: Educational Practices and Parental Control

The ways in which parents are present in the organisational habitus of the teachers is mirrored in their organisational practices. Teachers not only learn to anticipate the various levels of parental control, they also learn to act accordingly. While autonomy is important to the professionals in both schools – as many teachers point out “teachers need to find their own style [...] otherwise it won’t work” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, January 30, 2013) – the degree to which this “pedagogical freedom” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, February 28, 2013) is realised differs considerably in Roseville and Cross-Square. Teachers use the additional discretion – as Lipsky (2010) might have called it – in their organisational practices, including teaching, as well as in the ways in which they treat children emotionally. Ultimately, teachers compromise the needs of their students more easily in Cross-Square than in Roseville and develop diverging understandings of what kind of provision is still acceptable – with important consequences for organisational neighbourhood inequality.

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Varying Standards in Educational Practices or: What Is Still Acceptable? As teachers adapt their practices to their understanding of what they can or cannot do in the classroom, the standards of what schools-as-fields provide for children vary considerably between Cross-Square and Roseville. In Cross-Square, the teachers’ own understanding of their role includes a high level of autonomy and a perception of professional superiority and ‘knowing best.’ This results in organisational practices that range, in the best-case scenario, from doing what teachers think is best for the children to the worst-case scenario of doing what is most convenient for themselves or for the school as an organisation. While many teachers do excellent work at Cross-Square, the degree to which teachers can deviate from official standards (and the laws governing schools) is surprisingly high. Certainly, there are also different teaching styles in Roseville – however, there is a clear bottom limit for standards at which parents intervene. In Cross-Square, overwhelmed by the multiplicity of their tasks and with little parental control, it becomes easier for teachers to compromise on the quality of their work. As N. Gregor, a committed teacher, explains: “the bottom line is to ‘keep things running’ and at the end of the day, it is about that and not about the quality [of our work]” (Teacher Interview 10, #00:26:50-3#). To keep things running, certain organisational practices become ‘acceptable’ that are often unimaginable in Roseville. This is especially the case for teachers who are no longer able to teach yet remain in the system. Even if teachers are in agreement – “In my opinion, she [a colleague] should not have been allowed to teach anymore” (Teacher Interview 5, #00:26:26-4#) – they often see little opportunity to get rid of such colleagues: “We have to schedule these teachers! You know, teachers who are exhausted, who can’t go on anymore, and to be frank, who are no longer acceptable for the children [...], and I don’t think parents in a neighbourhood like Roseville would put up with this!” (Author’s field notes, CrossSquare primary school, December 6, 2012) “In our school [the rule is, if your teaching does not reach a certain quality threshold], you can’t teach third graders as their main teacher; [...]

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but by now the vice-principal [...] doesn’t know where to put all these people who do not qualify as main teacher.” (Teacher Interview 15, #01:03:49-2#) At the same time, ‘getting rid of teachers’ is an ambivalent process, as the principal of a school does not only feel responsible for the children, but also for the teachers. In a school similar to Cross-Square, the principal explains: “…if this was your mother, you know, 61 years old, with nerves at the breaking point, [...] and she would say ‘but I still want to work, [...] I don’t want to retire’ [...] you don’t treat people, who have done a great job for 30 year, like that!” (Teacher Interview 6, #00:50:50-2#, #00:51:13-7#) While the question of finding adequate solutions for such teachers is obviously a complex one, the children invariably bear the entirety of the consequences. In Cross-Square, children receive little protection if a teacher refuses to follow basic standards. Even some teachers saw the demanded level of autonomy as disproportionate: “You know, I don’t ask the ticket inspector, if he sees inspecting tickets as part of his job” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, November 27, 2012), thereby implying that some of her colleagues do not provide the teaching standards required by law. The effects of this inadequate instruction are very visible when students are seriously behind in curriculum. This is the case for a class whose main teacher, H. Pott, is regularly on sick leave, typically two to three days per week. H. Pott is a friendly, slightly overweight woman in her early 50s, who quickly loses her temper and does not endure the pressures of the field for very long. As she is regularly absent, she does not manage to adequately prepare her lessons, to write support plans or to apply for additional support for specific children. Several teachers regularly substitute and are quite worried about the situation: “Poor children, having other teachers substitute their main teacher is no solution, everybody is doing something else, they don’t progress.” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, October 23, 2012)

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The children themselves wrote a letter to E. Holstein, the principal, to ask for a new main teacher. After a talk with the children, however, E. Holstein did not rank the complaints as serious enough for an intervention, but also felt that there was little she could do: “I collected information, you know, but there is very little I can do to change the situation, there is really no help in the system [to transfer such teachers]!” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, November 27, 2012) So the situation continued despite the fact that the students were in their final two years of primary school, the decisive period for secondary school recommendations in Berlin. Over time, the children became more and more rebellious. While teachers were in principle aware that the situation in this class was impossible to justify, in practice, their frustration over the students’ behaviour was taken out on the children. Teachers began to complain; the children bore the brunt. E. Holstein, the principal, told them: “I’m really angry with you! I’ve heard from other teachers that you behaved unspeakably [...], I do like all of you, and I do respect you, but if I hear that you behave like this towards an adult, I am ashamed for all of you, and I’m really disappointed [...] and I will write a letter to your parents letting them know that you all misbehaved.” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, November 22, 2012) In the end, the children were forced to write a letter of apology to the teacher, who complained about them. The fact that the children behaved badly after weeks of being left alone with an instructor who is hardly able to teach is reframed here. The focus is no longer on the school-as-field as an organisation that failed to provide children with an adequate teacher but on the misbehaviour of the children. And instead of an apology for the situation in school, parents were informed about their misbehaved children. Similar tendencies can be found in other classes, often years later, when teachers are assigned to new classes and find students, who have fallen behind in the curriculum: “They know nothing, they don’t even know how to do basic calculations [...] and they are in grade 5” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, September 3, 2012); “there is no way we cover all of this material

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this year and get back on track [...] and it is not the fault of the children, their teacher was sick a lot.” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, October 23, 2012) However, teachers confronted with these situations are very clear that it is not their place to intervene. A. Can explains: “No, [I would not talk about this with their former teachers], everyone works differently, and it is not my place to tell them, you have to do it like this!” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, October 18, 2012) When teachers do intervene, they do not do so by discussing teaching practices, but by navigating, which other teachers give instructions in their class or succeed them as main teachers. As part of their organisational habitus, the general principle of ‘I know best’ also applies to how teachers interact with their colleagues, since this principle also implies ‘you know best.’ As such, the approaches of other teachers are often accepted, or at least not actively challenged. Elif, an educator, who has worked in the school for many years, explains: “There is this taboo around talking about the situation in this class, with this teacher, who is always on sick leave.” (Author’s field notes, CrossSquare primary school, November 22, 2012) “I know, you can’t save all children, but seriously, they let the children down around here” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, October 1, 2012). Yet, even in less extreme cases, the quality of teaching considerably varies and is often noticeably unsatisfactory, as this anecdote reveals: We are standing in front of the school, smoking. One of the younger educators pushes his hair behind his ears and lights another cigarette. He explains that he needs advice. He is unsure how to react to what is going on in the classroom that he works in. He says that often there are no lessons at all, that the teacher is always late, and he just sits there and does not know what to do. (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, November 15, 2012)

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Other teachers decide to avoid holding legally mandated parents-teachers conferences or counselling before children go to secondary school – despite being officially required to do so. H. Fiss, the school’s social worker, explains: “Sometimes, it is like, well with this clientele, you don’t have to talk to the parents, and so some teachers just decide to no longer offer parentteacher conferences, and parents do not really dare to show up at school [independent of these official meetings].” (Author’s field notes, CrossSquare primary school, November 23, 2012). Of course, there are also teachers who make sure that ‘their’ children have adequate learning conditions. However, some teachers also put organisational (or personal) needs first. And even if worried parents sometimes complain, as we saw previously, they are often unsuccessful in enacting changes. Considering the parents’ social position, teachers can navigate the pressures stemming from organisational needs and personal exhaustion through the lens of their personal needs and competencies, rather than through the expectation of any real or anticipated parental resistance.

In Roseville, in contrast, parents are unwilling to accept compromises over longer periods. As we saw before, parents engage in active and subtle forms of control and have the means to force the school to comply with their wishes. As N. Heller, a younger teacher, who tries to keep her distance from the parents, explains: “Parents are very interested in the success of their children and are very active, to put it positively” (Teacher Interview 20, #00:04:46-3#). This does not mean that teachers never get sick, compromise on standards or misbehave. However, the degree to which problematic organisational practices can become normal clearly differs in comparison to Cross-Square. As parents constantly push the interests of their children to the forefront, teachers are much less likely to put organisational needs first. As C. Scherk, the vice-principal, points out:

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“The positive thing about active parents is that it helps you to meet certain standards and regulations and to always be in line with the laws governing schools, and not to make compromises [in your own practices].” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, January 11, 2013) Accordingly, it is considerably less possible in Roseville, compared to CrossSquare, to just ‘keep things running’ or to prioritize organisational needs by compromising on the quality of instruction. Parents, for example, are generally not willing to put up with substitute teachers over long periods: P. Deuft explains how the situation got complicated when a teacher was on sick leave for a long time [...]: “The parents told us, our lawyers are waiting in the wings, ready to act!” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, November 21, 2012) Often, parents remain unsatisfied until the organisational practice in question is actually changed, which impacts what teachers and the organisation as a whole can – and cannot – do and how they deal with problems of quality control. During my field research, parents began to complain about F. Botts, a teacher who was new to the school and had previously worked in a deprived neighbourhood. Parents demanded her removal from the class. P. Deuft, the principal, was unwilling to do so in the beginning – out of solidarity to her colleague, but also to demonstrate to the parents that it was not their place to make such decisions. However, P. Deuft’s position shifted over the ensuing four weeks, as parents turned to the local school authority, got other parents in the school involved and collected evidence of the teacher’s incompetence. P. Deuft explained: “It continues, the rumours have spread, parents from other classes have complained as well [...] and they went to the school authority at the Senate [Berlin city government]!” While initially very supportive and protective of F. Botts, P. Deuft became more and more critical during this period: “I’ve looked at her material, it is way too challenging for children of this age!” Also, P. Deuft complained that F. Botts lacked tact in dealing with the parents, making the situation worse. In the process, P. Deuft softened to parents’ wishes and felt less able to protect the teacher. Nevertheless, P. Deuft still planned to work with F. Botts – “like, with a student teacher!

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I will audit her teaching, observe what she is doing, go through her teaching material with her, […] and will write up a target agreement.” But the weeks that followed, P. Deuft began to doubt if F. Botts would be able to face the parental pressure at all, since parents had begun to write fresh emails, claiming that F. Botts was not fulfilling the latest agreement to improve the situation. While P. Deuft felt sorry for her colleague, she explained: “Now, she is on sick leave again, and I don’t really see her dealing with this pressure – there will be more pressure from the parents if she doesn’t change, and then she will get sick and at some point, I will have to ask her to apply someplace else.” Although the principal cannot force a teacher to leave, she can suggest changing schools and can informally make staying less attractive – by assigning less desirable classes and tasks to that teacher, for example (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, April 29, Mai 6, 15, 29, June 5, 2013). Such developments are not uncommon. During interviews, parents often remembered other ‘fights’ with the school. Yet, even if parents do not succeed in removing a teacher, their interventions are still important. They directly shape the teachers’ own assessments of what they can or cannot do. As a result, teachers in Roseville typically make sure that their practices are (almost) always in line with formal regulations, well-documented and take parental expectations about quality into account. This dynamic is also visible in the grading process. Parents regularly complain if they feel that grades are unfair, unclear, or unjustified. Since teachers have learned to anticipate parental complaints, they document the process of grading in more detail than in Cross-Square – and thus also reflect about it more often: P. Deuft sighs – and makes it clear to her young colleagues: “Parents will demand it later on – grade assignments regularly, I can just highly recommend it, [...] parents will want to know all of it,” [...] “the more grades you have documented, the safer you are – for yourself AND for the parents!” (Field Notes, Roseville primary school, January 24, 2013) What to do – and not to do – is thus much more of an active decision in Roseville than in Cross-Square, where teachers are hardly ever challenged on grades, as on other aspects of their work.

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However, the impact of parents on organisational practices is not without challenges in Roseville. Especially for P. Deuft, the principal, it is crucial to keep a good balance: “I don’t want to acquire this kind of reputation that parents feel they can come to me and get their way, that I just do what they ask, you know, [...] I’m not the servant of the parents.” (Teacher Interview 26, #00:22:45-9#, #00:24:51-8#) Yet, she also makes clear that she always listens to parents’ concerns and tries to find solutions: “I ask parents to formulate as clearly as possible what they want, what exactly the problem is – so that I can support them to solve it. [...] Often we try to find an agreement with the teacher [...] and if there are problems and I also see real deficits, I sit in on the lessons, and I counsel the teachers.” (Teacher Interview 26, #00:09:36-0#, #00:10:28-6#)

To sum up, in contrast to Cross-Square, teachers in Roseville do not have the option to simply ‘keep things running’ and to prioritise their personal or organisational needs over those of the students. Rather, due to the power position of the parents and their ability to activate institutional forces, teachers have to adapt their practices by taking well-reflected and well-documented decisions that are in line with their organisational habitus – and the laws governing schools. Organisational practices are thus much more controlled in Roseville than in Cross-Square, as control not only comes from within the organisation itself (with all the ambiguities and questions of solidarity that entails), but is employed from the parents, who are unwilling to compromise on their children’s well-being. In effect, the degree to which teachers can deviate from official rules and standards is considerably lower in Roseville than in Cross-Square. This results in very different teaching provision and thus clearly increases organisational neighbourhood inequality. This is not only the case for grading or teaching standards, but also – and almost more importantly – for the ways in which teachers treat children emotionally.

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Varying Standards for the Treatment of Children or: What Is Still Acceptable? In line with the field and their organisational habitus, teachers not only adapt to different levels of control and feel more or less entitled to follow their own standards, they also develop different organisational practices for the treatment of their students. In Cross-Square, as stress levels are high, and teachers deal with symbolic pressures and the daily presence of social inequality, weaker parental control often also means weaker self-control on the part of the teachers. Certain teachers begin to treat children disrespectfully: Walking through parts of the school during class, you hear teachers scream, ranging from angry statements that are hard to understand to the outright yelling of questions such as “WHAT are you doing, why don’t you do your work?” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, December 13, 2012) If teachers yell at children, it is often not a controlled intervention, but rather a loss of control. Some teachers are sorry afterwards, others point out that – ‘at least’ – they are not physically aggressive: “That’s my weak point, you know, something I also need to work on, if I get angry I really raise my voice, I scream if I’m really angry [...] and I can’t really control my temper [...], but so far I have never had the feeling, and I never done it, like to get rough with the students [...] I do not shove them or slap them or whatever, I never felt the need to do that.” (Teacher Interview 5, #00:30:06-2#, #00:30:34-2#) Sometimes, children complain that a teacher has insulted them. One day, during class, a group of children comes into the office of H. Fiss, the social worker, to tell her that a teacher’s assistant called them “assholes” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, November 23, 2012). H. Fiss did not have time to deal with the situation at that moment and sent them to see E. Holstein, the principal, to tell her about it. Most of the time, such incidences do not come with consequences for the reasons mentioned above.

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Some teachers, however, go further: A. Bilgin, a young teacher, stands in front of the class. He is always very friendly when he talks to me, but with the children he is often very impatient. Today, he is alone with the children, [and the children do not follow his orders]; it gets increasingly noisy. At one corner of the teacher’s desk, there are clothes pegs that are used to pin the children’s pictures onto a washing line [in the classroom]. He takes a few pegs and throws them at the children. (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, September 4, 2012) Parents also sometimes worry about the treatment of their children at the hands of the teachers. Stefanie, a working-class mother, who has sent all her children to Cross-Square’s School, explains: “Well these two teachers really scream a lot, says my daughter [...] and one of them, he also insults the children, [...] and he also chucks his keys at the children.” (Parent Interview 5, #01:21:06-7#, #01:21:54-5#, #01:22:36-6#) Another pattern does not so much involve the loss of self-control as an abuse of power against the children. Parents explain that some teachers just do not like children or are “very strict” (Parent Interviews 2, #00:05:50-5#). Here, teachers do not scream at the children, but blame them for even minimal deviations from their expectations. Following the logic of ‘I know best’ inherent to the organisational habitus of the teachers, this behaviour often comes with a desire to highlight the children’s mistakes, while ignoring teachers’ own role: The students are in the computer lab to work on their projects. Their teacher sits behind a computer in front of the class. The children have not received clear instructions, and many seem confused, looking around, whispering to the student next to them. They have all opened their word processor, but many do not know how to change the font size or how to navigate within the document. The teacher does not give any advice. [...] [At some point, the teacher starts walking around], and immediately gets very angry. None of the children hears a word of encouragement during the next 30 minutes. Even for small mistakes, he criticises them harshly, raises his voice, shaking his head in bewilderment and anger. “What’s

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wrong with you?” he keeps asking the children. (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, October 19, 2012) While the teacher seemed to expect the children to strive for a result that is never explicitly communicated, every small mistake was held against them. His lack of preparation, and the lack of prior agreement between the two teachers who are ostensibly working together on this project, remained strangely absent from his evaluation of the situation. Similarly, parents sometimes worry that teachers make use of punishments that seem out of proportion for the infraction, as Angelika, a lower middle-class mother, explains: “Their teacher was upset with the behaviour of some of the students, and he, well, he divided the students into smaller groups [...] and the group with the mischief-makers regularly had to run up and down the steps in the gym [...] – and he punished the whole group, if just one child misbehaved.” (Parent Interview 11, #00:47:51-5#) This is not to say that all teachers at Cross-Square treat the children in problematic ways. However, teachers often apply less self-control – and often more verbal (or physical) violence – than in Roseville, as parents are less present in their organisational habitus and accordingly also less able to affect practices at the school. Due to their weak power position in the school-as-field, parents have a harder time protecting their children from abusive or inappropriate behaviour of teachers. In sum, the kind of organisational practices involved in the treatment of children that are seen as tolerable in Cross-Square are very different from what children in Roseville experience.

While they are often idealised, children also misbehave in Roseville and it can also be hard to make a class of children follow your instructions in a privileged neighbourhood. Accordingly, teachers in Roseville also raise their voice from time to time; but walking through the halls during class, one does not hear the voices of screaming teachers. There are much clearer limits to how teachers can treat children than in Cross-Square. During interviews, several parents pointed out that they

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are not happy if teachers “speak negatively about children, especially in front of the class,” are “unfriendly, somehow, too hard” (Parent Interview 17, #00:10:016#, #00:50:55-3#) or “too harsh” (Parent Interview 16, #00:13:11-0#). Brigitte, a middle-class mother who works as a prosecutor, explains: “[If parents are unhappy], it is often because of how teachers treat the children. I guess most of the parents care less about the grades, especially in the first years of school. But how teachers treat children – that is important to most parents. And it should be, well, you know, positive and constructive, and so on .” (Parent Interview 17, #00:07:09-2#) If teachers do not meet these expectations, “then we have a problem” (Parent Interview 20, #00:16:38-8#). The anticipated presence of powerful parents – who intervene and create ‘safe spaces’ for their children, in which their needs, concerns, and fears are taken into account – plays an important role here. Those teachers, who recently transferred from neighbourhoods like Cross-Square to Roseville, describe how they had to adapt their practices, making the difference in the treatment of the children very visible. Often, teachers only realise how they treated the children at their previous school once they begin working in Roseville: “Well, the tone was different – and in the beginning [after changing to Roseville from a neighbourhood like Cross-Square] that was really my problem [...] and also the colleagues told me [...] – that I used my voice to let students know – ‘there is a line’ – and the children were not used to it and [...] really you have to get used to a different tone.” (Teacher Interview 21, #00:39:58-2#) “I just realised it, when I was really new in Roseville, I caught a child with a ball, playing inside, [...] and I reacted in a tone that I would have used in [school in a neighbourhood like Cross-Square], [...], and the child looked at me and in this moment I realised that it was completely wrong, that my tone was inappropriate [...], and it alarmed me, and I thought ‘oh dear, what happened to me? What did I do’ – that just wasn’t right!” (Teacher Interview 24, #00:09:26-2#) “Well, the tone is a big thing, our clientele just expects a specific tone, and, well, sometimes colleagues, who come from other boroughs, they don’t know the expected tone [...] you know, you can’t speak harshly with

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the children [...] they are not used to it from home, [...] at least that’s what parents claim if they complain about teachers’ tone.” (Teacher Interview 26, #00:11:35-9#) Teachers are quite aware of these expectations and thus regularly reflect on their treatment of the children. After lessons, teachers would check with me, as an observer: “Have I been too strict?” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, April 18, 2013) G. Heinz, a rather young teacher who often feels overwhelmed, explains that it is easy to acquire a reputation if teachers do not treat the children as parents would expect: “I’m lucky, I have a good reputation, but if you are very strict or mean or if you raise your voice quickly, parents really don’t like that and once you acquire a reputation like this, it’s hard to change it!” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, April 12, 2013) Sometimes, there are also situations, in which teachers might hurt a child’s feelings without noticing. Again, parents make sure that teachers are aware and adapt their practices – creating emotionally ‘safe spaces’ for their children: One of the girls in the class is afraid of the swimming lessons. L. Schäffer, her teacher, tells me how she only wants to swim when she is with her, as the girl apparently especially likes and trusts her. Yet, during the last swimming lesson, she had to group children by children’s swimming ability and the girl was downgraded to a less advanced group [and had to swim under the supervision of another teacher]. “The next day, I had her mother calling, telling me that the girl felt demoted and now is even more afraid of swimming!” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, February 20, 2013) There are some areas, in which parents are particularly unwilling to make compromises – and can make sure that they do not have to. This is especially the case when teachers treat children in racist ways. While in Cross-Square, parents have a hard time calling out racists comments or having their values respected, parents in Roseville can act differently:

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“Parents put in a disciplinary complaint against one of the teachers, I’m not sure if I’m allowed to speak about it, but they claim that the teacher insulted a student in a racist way!” (Teacher Interview 18, #00:27:11-1#) P. Bock, the teacher in question, did not see her behaviour as problematic and in general, teachers react – similar to Cross-Square – by making fun of the parents: “ sure, we are all racists!” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, May 7, 2013) Although P. Bock may not believe her comments to be racist, the parents did. And – in contrast to most families in Cross-Square – these parents have the means to deploy institutional pressures to assure that their rights are respected. Even though her colleagues agree that P. Bock’s comments were not racist, she still had to justify herself in front of the school authority. In general, teachers sometimes argue that parents’ expectations are somewhat over the top and that the children are used to being treated very well: “Partly, you know, if I would want to put it negatively, the children are a bit spoilt, they are used to a high level of attention and support!” (Teacher Interview 20, #00:04:46-3#) Yet, while teachers do not always agree with the concerns voiced by the parents, they still try to accommodate the emotional needs of the children in their practices. While it is not necessary to agree that such careful treatment is always preferable or, conversely, that parents coddle their children too much, it is clear that, as a result, different habitus and subject formations take place, depending on the children’s experiences of how organisations and professionals are allowed to treat them. How this might add an additional layer to organisational neighbourhood inequality must be researched further (see also Lareau, 2003, for a similar argument).

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Finally, the localisation of the field crucially shapes a further area of professionals’ organisational practices: Due to localised institutional pressures and thus the presence of projects that support the development of specific expertise alongside the ability of parents to resist specific interpretations, teachers identify and frame the problems of their students – and, accordingly, develop different solutions – depending on their local context. In effect, the localised organisational habitus and organisational practices differ not only in terms of how professionals frame problems but also in the practices they employ to solve them.

Localised Organisational Habitus: Defining Social or Individual Problems

An important difference between teachers in Cross-Square and Roseville lies in their perceptions of what kind of problems they observe in their work – for example if children are rebellious, if they stop engaging or constantly disturb lessons. In the following, I argue that the kinds of problems that teachers identify are structured by the localised schools-as-fields, in which teachers work.

Cross-Square: Defining Social Problems In Cross-Square, the fact that students experience problems in school is often accepted as normal – and thus, not identified as a problem as such, since not all children can be saved to begin with. As one mother recalls a teacher saying, “You know, in our school, ALL children are a bit crazy…and see, they are great ” (Parent Interview 12, #00:10:09-9#). While some describe this diversity as part of the tolerant atmosphere in the school, it also comes with the basic acceptance that not all children will be successful. Many teachers underline that

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their students are not meant to succeed: “We can’t turn our children into geniuses, here we need to be happy if they learn to say ‘thanks’ and ‘please’ and somehow manage life” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, August 14, 2012). The diverging ways in which teachers in the two schools deal with the issue of dyslexia creates an image of how learning difficulties are simply understood as normal in Cross-Square, whereas (as we will see below) dyslexia is a highly discussed topic in Roseville. In Cross-Square, this condition almost never comes up. When asked, a teacher explains: “Personally, I reject testing for dyslexia [...]. And there is a simple reason for it: our children have LANGUAGE PROBLEMS, they don’t suffer from dyslexia [...], and it is clear that they will never be able to write really well, that is just how it is [...], they DON’T have dyslexia, what they need is an emphasis on German: just speak, speak, speak!” (Teacher Interview 15, #00:55:40-0#, #00:56:12-4#) Two important aspects are revealed here: First, it is normal that children have trouble learning the language – “they will never be able to write really well” – and thus writing poorly is not necessarily a problem that needs to be explored any further. Second, the framing of ‘second-language learners’ is so dominant in Cross-Square that other explanations, such as dyslexia, are simply not considered. What this teacher does not mention is that it is in fact possible to differentiate between the challenges of second-language learners and dyslexia (von Suchodoletz 2007, 5). Moreover, more support services are available to children diagnosed with dyslexia, than to second-language learners: Following Berlin school law, children with dyslexia receive additional time during exams, additional equipment (e.g. a dictionary), oral instead of written exams and, if necessary, reading and writing skills are not graded in any subject for a specific period of time, in order to compensate for their learning disability (Grundschulverordnung (GsVO), §16). These advantages become available to middle-class children in Roseville rather than to students in Cross-Square. Even if particular parents bring up the subject of dyslexia themselves, teachers

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often dismiss their concerns. Stefanie, a German working-class mother, speaks about her frustrating experience: “We had trouble with G. Brutt for a long time, because she was putting my son down [...]. She always said, he does not practise enough BUT WE PRACTISED [...] and when I finally had him tested – we had to go there on our own, [no one suggested that], and even when I suggested it earlier and asked the former teacher if we should have him tested, because his father has dyslexia as well, she always said no, no, he’s all right [...] the school let us down!” (Parent Interview 5, #00:38:20-6#, #00:38:24-7#, #00:38:57-6#) If dyslexia is brought up at Cross-Square at all on the initiative of the school, it is usually in those classrooms lead by teachers whose emotional practices include advanced pedagogy; but even then, dyslexia is typically only suggested when a particular child has massive problems with writing, whereas in Roseville, as we will see below, ‘slight’ forms of dyslexia are common as well. Similarly, the question of highly gifted children is basically absent in CrossSquare, despite being very present in Roseville. Even if external partners suggest that a child’s problems might not be simply ‘normal’ or the result of a lack of talent, but could in fact signal the possibility of a gifted child, teachers often response with disinterest. Statistically speaking however, there should be a similar number of highly gifted children in each school. F. Elfenberth, a former teacher, who volunteered in another school in Cross-Square as a tutor, recalls: “There was this boy, and he had a great understanding of texts, he could calculate, it was fantastic, but after a few sessions he didn’t show up for tutoring anymore. And then I learnt from another child, that this boy had to repeat the school year [...], and I asked what happened and the child said he was just sitting there, playing with his pimples and didn’t do anything at all. [...] And that’s exactly what happens if highly gifted children don’t get support [...] so I spoke to the principal, and she was like ‘Really? You think this boy is highly gifted? I can’t really believe that, but I will talk to his teacher and the teacher said he had no learning ability at all and I must be mistaken.” (Teacher Interview MA 10, #00:51:23-1#, #00:52:55-6#)

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In Cross-Square, the localised organisational habitus does not encompass expertise on ‘special’ conditions such as dyslexia or giftedness. Rather, having trouble in school is understood as normal – something that most children experience. This does not mean however, that there are no frames for understanding a child’s problems. Those that do exist generally focus on a child’s social context or family situation. As we have seen in the previous chapter, in Cross-Square, existing partnerships, often with NGOs or other public services, localise the school by introducing specific expertise into the schools’ routines, such as on multilingualism, conflict resolution or family counselling. Obviously, this focus responds to some of the needs presented by parents, children, and the school. However, these emphases also create specific focuses and taken-for-granted assumptions in CrossSquare and thus localise teachers’ organisational habitus. If a student has problems, the child’s social context and family become the reference point that is most often used to make sense of the situation. Sometimes, even if children have problems that are quite severe, teachers do not suggest further diagnostics, but focus instead on the family context as an explanation: We are talking about a boy, who often seems very absent, has a really hard time understanding and following the lessons and never does his homework. A. Hellwig, his teacher, explains that his sister is helping him but he “often acts up and then she gives up”; as a side note she adds: “something is going on with him psychologically, that I don’t understand.” Then she keeps describing how the other families do or do not support the homework of the children. (Author’s field notes, CrossSquare primary school, September 26, 2012) Even though A. Hellwig has noted that the boy’s condition might go beyond the issue of homework help (“something is going on with him psychologically”), the main attention remains on the role of his sister and his family more generally. This is very common: if a child is having trouble, parents generally come up as the first explanation: “the mother is sick at the moment” (Author’s field notes, CrossSquare primary school, August 22, 2012); “I can’t bake him a new mother” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, November 6, 2012), or “this girl has a lot of problems at the moment, she is not doing well, because her mother is so difficult” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, November 27,

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2012). Accordingly, a family’s need for support, their social situation and its corresponding problems are high on teachers’ agenda. Moreover, the school has a good support structure in place that further supports teachers in identifying social problems, even with limited resources of time: “We have this social worker in the school, and she is very helpful and does a lot in this area. You can send parents there, if they have problems. Or if I have a child that is problematic, she brings everybody together, also the child welfare agency [...] and that’s a real support.” (Teacher Interview 3, #00:26:17-0#) The dominance of ‘social’ explanations also pushes teachers in Cross-Square to further specialise in these areas. Teachers receive additional training to make sure that they can identify cases of child endangerment. During a meeting, teachers and educators discuss: “We should have further training for everybody in the school [...] so that everybody knows our action guidelines for cases of child endangerment, to make sure that it is really in the minds of all the colleagues.” Another teacher adds: “yes, and our project with the child welfare agency will further support this!” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, November 27, 2012) This localised organisational habitus also becomes visible in the way in which teachers describe their role. Many professionals explain that in Cross-Square they are more than teachers: “In Cross-Square, we do not simply focus on teaching, as [they do] in Roseville, but on education more broadly, and I would say we have a sensibility for the problems that a child as a whole brings to school.” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, October 29, 2012) “I’m practically a social worker – on top of being a teacher!” (Teacher Interview 5, #00:21:29-7#)

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Generally speaking, then, the awareness of certain topics, fostered through additional training, partnerships and projects, is much more present in teachers’ framing of what is going on. Their attention is channelled towards a framework where social problems are at the forefront, while other explanations such as dyslexia, giftedness and so on are almost absent – in contrast to Roseville, as we will see in the following.

Roseville: Defining Individual Problems In Roseville, as we have seen, having trouble in school is not seen as normal, but as a pathology that must be addressed. As teachers explain: “almost all of our children will go to Gymnasium – and parents have already known this since the child was born!” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, April 19, 2013) or: “Around here, even if children are only a bit slower in their learning process [actions are taken]” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, March 5, 2013). As parents expect and push for good results, a lack of excellence at school requires an explanation. In contrast to Cross-Square, these explanations do generally not focus on a child’s family situation but rather on psychological conditions, such as being gifted, or being diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or dyslexia. Problems that might be due to children’s family context are played down as ‘not relevant around here.’ If family life is considered, it is done so very carefully, with a focus on temporary and specific problems. In contrast to Cross-Square, even in instances where the situation in the family could be central stage, the focus nevertheless often lies on individual, psychological, explanations. Parents play an important role here, as they shape the field by constantly bringing these conditions up, as Melanie, a middle-class mother, recalls: “Nowadays, it sometimes feels like you have to have something, sometimes – I have this impression, you know, when the whole school thing started, my husband and I made fun of them all, because all children seemed to be highly gifted, in the first grade during the PTA meetings, we

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were sitting there – like, ok, our [son] is not gifted, that’s for sure.” (Parent Interview 13, #00:27:12-1#) P. Meyer, a young teacher, explains: “[Once it gets problematic], some parents have their children tested until they find something – and then they will say ‘but my child has this and that, you cannot be that strict.’” (Teacher Interview 22, #00:19:24-4#). P. Deuft, the principal, adds: “A lot of it is fake, they all have their physicians [...], and if there are problems in school, they simply go [...] for testing!” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, January 24, 2013) Sometimes, teachers suspect that parents use a diagnosis strategically. This can become apparent when parents talk about “very slight forms of ADHD” or about a “tendency toward dyslexia” (see e.g. author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, January 24, 2013). In so doing, parents can assure that their child belongs in one of these categories rather than that they are only capable of average or below average achievements. Due to parents’ insistence, but also out of professional interest in an ‘important topic’ of relevance in ‘a neighbourhood like this,’ teachers acquire additional competencies in these areas. Teachers exchange information about new diagnoses. As one teacher explains, while handing out a flyer on hypersensitive children to her colleague: “There is a new way of being special, hypersensitive children – I just have it on my radar now, it’s between highly giftedness and ADHD!” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, April 19, 2013) In the teachers’ lounge there are information brochures on workshops for addressing dyslexia in English, and P. Deuft, the principal, attended an info-session on giftedness organised by the local school authority: “Highly gifted children are not enough in the focus [yet]!” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, March 14, 2013) Moreover, testing for specific conditions, such as dyslexia, is partly institutionalised. There is a dyslexia-support teacher, who provides counselling to other professionals at the

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school. While the laws governing Berlin schools dictate that every school should have such a specially-trained teacher, the topic never arose in Cross-Square. As a result, when describing their students and identifying potential problems, teachers regularly bring up these categories: “In my class, one child has a perception disorder” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, January 31, 2013), “two of the children are highly gifted, both officially diagnosed, one has dyslexia and two are just a bit slower than the other children, we just had them tested!” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, January 31, 2013) In addition, in contrast to Cross-Square, teachers actively suggest that children get tested, as Petra, who used to work as a journalist, but now is a stay-at-home mother, recalls: “The teacher suggested that we should have our son tested. She did not mention that it was for giftedness [...] and then when the results came, they said, well, your son is highly gifted [...] I couldn’t believe it, you know. Well and then I went to N. Heller and she said she expected this result. And it was for this reason that she had suggested having him tested in the first place.” (Parent Interview 27, #00:31:48-7#) Moreover, in Roseville, all children are routinely tested for dyslexia, making the chance of getting a diagnosis much higher: “We test all children, you know, so that we know, in third grade, we test everybody. And we will also start testing everybody for dyscalculia” (Teacher Interview 23, #00:15:50-9#). Very much in contrast to Cross-Square, dyslexia is also an important topic for children learning a second language (in Roseville’s primary school this is English) and the school offers specific material to address the question of dyslexia in English. In Roseville, specific explanations, especially dyslexia, gifted children, ADHD and hypersensitivity, are thus very present in the localised organisational habitus of the teachers, while a child’s social context or family situation are often systematically ignored. In part, teachers simply do not have the additional expertise on ‘social problems’ nor the institutional support. While in Cross-Square, as we saw earlier, there is a social worker at the school, in Roseville, additional profession-

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alisation is institutionalised by a dyslexia-support teacher. Partnerships and projects that the school sustains also do not focus on social problems, but rather on the optimal support for the children’s talents. As a result, teachers often come to an understanding that ‘social’ problems are none of their concern, as P. Bostler explains: “Families in our school are so supportive of their children [...], if children have difficulties, it is certainly not due to their family!” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, March 7, 2013) Yet, this makes it less likely for teachers to identify and react to social problems that also exist in Roseville. Questions of child endangerment, for example, are often seen as simply irrelevant in such a privileged neighbourhood. Teachers in Roseville describe how they basically never have contact with the child welfare agency and thus contact persons, procedures, and indications to involve the agency are often unclear, as we will see in more detail. As a rule, it is rather uncommon to inquire if observed problems might also be due to conflicts at home, as the example of Christian, a boy who is constantly involved in fights, isolated and deeply troubled, exemplifies: I enter the classroom together with U. Schmidts. The atmosphere in the classroom is tense. [...] Christian’s head is slightly red. A group of boys starts explaining that Christian started a fight – again! Christian seems to struggle between crying and starting to fight back [...] U. Schmidts tells Christian: “Quiet now! You never accept that YOU also did something wrong.” Then, she turns to the blackboard and starts the math lesson. However, the conflict keeps coming up during the lesson and the boys in the back of the classroom and Christian keep teasing each other. (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, April 26, 2013) In Cross-Square, if a child were to constantly get into fights like this, the student’s situation at home would be questioned. In Roseville, these questions often remain unaddressed. After explicitly asking U. Schmidts about Christian’s family context, she explains: “I guess there is something going on at home…” (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, April 26, 2013) and shrugs her shoulders – it seems to be none of her business. The same is true in situations in which children have regular breakdowns, wet themselves at school, start to cry if they make the smallest mistake, hid under the table, regularly disappear from school or refuse to

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speak – or explain, crying ‘the holiday will be terrible, my parents don’t have time for me, and I’ll be alone at home all day!’ (Author’s field notes, Roseville primary school, April 29, 2013) While several of these issues are potential signs of child endangerment according to the guidelines provided by the city of the Berlin Senate Department for Education, Youth and Sciences (Senatsverwaltung für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Forschung 2007, 13f.), teachers do not perceive them as such. This is not to say that in all cases a child is indeed at risk or that the child welfare agency would need to intervene. Nevertheless, in such incidents, teachers are officially advised to talk to parents, to inquire further, and to make sure that parents receive support if needed. This does not mean that family situations are never addressed in Roseville. If teachers do so, however, this is done in profoundly different ways than in CrossSquare. Most importantly, if family situations are considered, teachers are usually interested in individual family conditions and their effect on a specific child – such as if a child’s parents are divorcing, if someone has died or if the family has recently moved. In contrast to Cross-Square, this framing of family life is generally focused on temporary events, and describes a situation that needs to be taken into account but will eventually end, whereas the social framing in Cross-Square often comes with an understanding of ‘nothing can be done.’ Moreover, the identified problems are more individualised in Roseville than in Cross-Square. Children there have more rights to their own individuality. They are not simply seen as belonging to a standardised group ‘with typical problems.’ The difference becomes apparent in how teachers compare the situation in both neighbourhood contexts: “[In ‘neighbourhood like Cross-Square’ it] is different, there you just have to look at the parents and the social conditions, [to understand] why a child is the way it is. Here, it is much subtler. Behavioural problems are much subtler, you really need to observe for a long time, also the children, it is subtler, and [...] if you have the third child of the same family, you might start to guess, what is going on, why things are the way they are.” (Teacher Interview 21, #00:18:32-2#)

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Addressing family problems is, however, not only not part of teachers’ organisational habitus. Parents also actively resist such interpretations. As Petra, a middleclass mother, explains: “[We have this group of befriended mothers], the mother mafia, as we call us . [...] And one of them has conflicts with the teachers all the time, and then one of the teachers said she should see a psychologist, [...] because she seems overwhelmed by her three children and so on. And she told me, can you believe this, this teacher said to me I SHOULD GO to a psychologist. Such brazenness! I mean, the teacher can think this, but if a teacher says such a thing to a MOTHER [...] - holy shit! [...] And this mother got really angry and complained about the teacher to the principal – it was quite a story!” (Parent Interview 27, #00:36:07-6#, #00:36:31-0#, #00:44:36-1#)

Also within the teachers’ self-definitions – and thus their localised organisational habitus – it becomes clear that the focus, in contrast to Cross-Square, is not on the social aspects of children’s lives, but on their progress toward expertise in specific topics. Covering the curriculum is crucial for many teachers in Roseville, and social or emotional conflicts are often seen as taking time away from the ‘real’ work: “I don’t have enough time, and I always think, children have to learn German and math, and if we think about the communication of children with each other, to express feelings and needs, I would like to do more, but…” (Teacher Interview 14, #00:17:23-9#).

In short, then, the differences between Cross-Square and Roseville show how neighbourhood contexts shape the expertise that is made available in schools-asfields. The organisational habitus of teachers differs between neighbourhoods and teachers are thus more likely to identify and address certain problems rather than others, depending on their local context.

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Localised Organisational Practices: Finding Solutions

These differences, however, are not only present in the kinds of problems that teachers identify, but also in the practices they engage in. Depending on the local context, professionals follow different roads to achieve workable solutions. Here, beyond the localised expertise made available through partnerships and institutional pressures, parents play an important role as they foster or resist specific solutions.

Cross-Square: Finding Solutions for Social Problems In Cross-Square, as we have seen, teachers mostly frame problems as a function of a child’s social or family context, which is then also where they try to find solutions. An important strategy, at least for teachers following the emotional practice of advanced pedagogy, is to introduce children to ‘different’ social contexts to allow them to have ‘different’ experiences. A typical example is to suggest that a child attends the school’s after-school club, out-of-school sport clubs, or – in specific cases – occupational therapy. Moreover, committed teachers also offer additional support directly to families to improve a child’s home life: “If we have parents-teacher meetings, then we also let them know where to get help and hand out addresses for support or we find other mothers, who might have had similar problems.” (Teacher Interview 8, #00:08:146#) A prominent partner for organising additional support – or to intervene when necessary – is the child welfare agency. As we have seen previously, the localised field supports this action through institutionalised partnerships. The child welfare agency is thus very present in the working routines of teachers at Cross-Square: “You know, I’m not an administrator, but I write descriptions [for the files of the child welfare agency] – this is how it is, you run after the child

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welfare agency, after the parents and in between you prepare your lessons.” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, November 6, 2012) If teachers feel overwhelmed by this, they can often rely on the social worker to support them. As we have seen before, the school has a structure in place that supports teachers in finding solutions to social problems – thus making these solutions more likely. H. Fiss, the social worker, explains: “[That often happens], you know the teachers, they keep asking ‘can you call up the child welfare agency?’” (Author’s field notes, Cross-Square primary school, November 23, 2012) The tendency to rely on the child welfare agency for solutions also becomes apparent in the agency’s statistical year-end report for Berlin (Amt für Statistik Berlin-Brandenburg 2013). The number of confirmed cases of child endangerment, 18 subdivided by the type of organisation which notified the youth welfare office, can be compared by borough (Bezirke). Even though a given borough encompasses different local neighbourhoods, general tendencies can be inferred since the boroughs in which Roseville and Cross-Square are located are also as a whole privileged or deprived. The percentage of cases in which the school notified the child welfare agency provide some insight into how different localised practices play out in each borough. In the borough which encompassed Cross-Square, the child welfare agency was notified of 13% of all cases of child endangerment by the school. In the borough which encompasses Roseville, it was only 8% (the difference is significant on a Chi2 Test at the level of p