ASA submission eb23780
14
district-level support for school improvement efforts (The New York State Department of
Education and Education 2001).” Generally speaking schools are given 3 years
iii
to implement
the plan and make progress on improvements or be closed; progress is monitored by frequent
inspection and visits to schools.
The placement of a group of schools on the SURR list in a particular year, like the six
New York City schools added to the list in 2003 (Becker, Williams et al. 2003) provides a
natural experiment for making predictions about organizational change. Each school has
unambiguous change stimulus, is subject to the same time constraints and has the same
motivation to remain open (school takeovers, reorganizations and closings are the definitive
mortality measure in the education industry). Controlling for treatment effects, a longitudinal
study of collective assessments of change stimuli in SURR schools provides a sufficient test of
the sociocognitive model of organizational reorientation.
Hypotheses, Proposed Measures and Planned Analysis. The sociocognitive model
suggests a number of specific hypotheses about how assessments of change will evolve to predict
organizational change; these are formally provided below:
Hypothesis 1: The variance in individual assessments of change stimuli as emblematic
will decrease over time as assessments converge toward a collective assessment.
Hypothesis 2: Change in variance will stabilize over time and converge to zero
representing an equilibrium position of collective assessment.
Hypothesis 2a: Information in small, dense networks will have a lower variance at the
equilibrium point and will converge more rapidly.
Hypothesis 3: Collective assessment at the period of stabilization predicts the degree of
change in the organization.
Convention