Two explanations for how many organizations a school works with
Two bodies of research explain why an organization ends up with many outside connections. They disagree about what a high number means.
Social capital, as Nan Lin sets it out, says that reach is something you accumulate by being well placed. He and Mary Dumin measure it with a tool called a position generator: a list of jobs from the best paid to the worst paid, and a question asking which of them you could get to through someone you know. The better placed you start, the more of that ladder you can reach. On that account a wide network is a sign of an organization doing well, and organizations in poorer or more troubled places should have narrower ones. William Julius Wilson described exactly that for poor neighborhoods: the people there are cut off from the institutions that would connect them elsewhere.
Our measure works the same way, with organizations in place of jobs. The survey names seven kinds of outside body, covering welfare, justice, civil society, business and religion, and asks which of them the school works with. That swap is ours and it is not exact. Lin counts access across jobs that can be ranked from top to bottom, and nothing ranks these seven. Only one part carries over: counting how many different kinds an organization can reach.
Because the seven organizations are different kinds rather than more of the same, a higher count means variety rather than volume. Each extra one reaches something the others do not, which is what Ronald Burt means by a tie that is not redundant. Lin's name for the whole quantity is extensity. That is why this is Lin's kind of social capital and not James Coleman's. Coleman's kind is closure, meaning dense ties that loop back on each other and let a group hold people to its rules. A count of kinds measures no closure at all. It measures how many different kinds a school can get to.
Resource dependence, as Jeffrey Pfeffer and Gerald Salancik set it out, says the opposite about what a wide network means. No organization is self-sufficient. Every organization needs things it does not control, and needing them gives whoever supplies them power over it. Building outside ties is one of the ways an organization manages that problem. On this account a wide network is a sign of an organization under pressure.
The idea did not start with them. Philip Selznick watched the Tennessee Valley Authority do it in the 1940s and wrote it up in TVA and the Grass Roots in 1949. The agency was new and it needed local farm groups and the land-grant colleges on its side, so it brought their people into the running of its own programs. It got what it needed. It also ended up carrying out programs those people wanted and letting go of parts of its own. Selznick's word for taking outsiders into the running of your organization to keep the organization safe is cooptation, and his point is that the safety is paid for with a share of the steering. A school faces the same trade in a smaller way, because a partner brought in to help with something gets a say in it.
Most of the second half of their book is about what an organization does with that problem. Amy Hillman, Michael Withers and Brian Collins reviewed thirty years of research on it in the Journal of Management in 2009, and they sort that research around five actions the book proposes. Buy the other organization outright. Set up a joint venture or some other standing arrangement with it. Put people on each other's boards. Go into politics and get the rules changed. Replace your own chief executive.
Notice what is not on that list. Each of the five handles a dependence the organization already has. None of them is declining to take one on in the first place.
The theory covers that anyway, because a dependence starts when you accept the thing on offer. An organization that expects the price to be too high can say no. Christine Oliver set the range of answers out in 1991, and they run from going along with an outside demand, through dodging it, to refusing it outright. A school that turns an offer down is doing something the theory describes rather than something it cannot.
The theory also says what makes one supplier more expensive than another, and there are three parts to it. How badly you need what that supplier has. How many other places you could get the same thing. And how much say the supplier has over whether you get it and on what terms.
Richard Emerson had set the same idea out years earlier, in a 1962 paper in the American Sociological Review. On page 32 he puts it as a proposition about dependence: how much you depend on somebody rises with how much you want the thing only they can give you, and falls with how easily you could get that thing somewhere else. The page after that turns it around into the line this study needs, that the power one side holds over the other is the other side's dependence on it.
Why the swap makes sense
Start with what it costs a school to bring somebody in.
A school that cannot do something on its own gets help from outside. That is the idea behind resource dependence, and it explains why schools under more pressure work with more organizations.
But help is never free. Whoever helps you gets a say in what you do. Pfeffer and Salancik built their whole book on that.
So look at what each kind of help costs a school in control.
A mental-health provider sends a counselor. A social services agency helps a family. Both give the school something it cannot do by itself. And the school still decides what happens to any one student.
The police are not like that. They have legal powers of their own. They have their own view of what counts as an incident. They can decide what happens to a student whatever the school thinks. Of the seven, they take the most decisions out of the school's hands.
So the swap makes sense. A school under pressure wants more help. It wants the kind of help that does not cost it control. It takes the counselor and the social worker. It does not take more police.
Now put the two findings together, because they are one story rather than two.
Working with a lot of organizations does two jobs at once for a school. It brings in more help, and it arranges the help so that nobody has much of a hold on the building. Seven partners, each of them supplying something two or three of the others could partly supply, means no single one of them can lean on the school by threatening to walk away. Spreading a need around like that is an old idea here. Jeffrey Pfeffer's 1976 paper on why firms buy each other gives three reasons, and the third is to spread your business so that you depend less on the partners you already have.
The police cannot be arranged that way. A school cannot get police powers from a second supplier and set the two against each other, because there is one police force. That force decides for itself what counts as an incident and what happens next. No other partner on the list can stand in for it. So the same idea that explains why a school under pressure collects partners explains why this partner is the one it does not collect, and the partner that cannot be balanced against anybody else is the expensive one.
Could this just be about recent arguments over police in schools? No. The swap is already there in the oldest surveys, +0.064 in 2005-06 and +0.053 in 2007-08, about ten years before school policing became a national argument.
Could the other idea explain it instead? Nan Lin's is about how far a school reaches. It says nothing about which partner a school would give up first. Only an idea that treats help as a trade, something for something, predicts that some partners cost more than others.
Whose job is it?
There is a sharper way to say what the control costs, and it comes from Andrew Abbott.
Abbott studied how groups of experts divide work up between them. Each group claims a piece of the work as its own, and says that it is the group qualified to do it. Doctors and nurses claim overlapping pieces. So do lawyers and accountants. When two groups claim the same piece, they compete over it until one of them holds it. Abbott's name for holding a piece of work is a jurisdiction, meaning the recognized right to do that work and to decide what counts as doing it well.
A school claims a piece of work too. Keeping order inside the building belongs to the principal, and a principal is trained and paid for it.
So ask who else claims that same piece. A counselor does not. A counselor works on one student's difficulties. A social worker helps a family at home. Neither of them says that order in the corridor is theirs to keep. The police do say it. Officers keep order for a living, and an officer posted in a school keeps it inside the principal's building, all day.
On Abbott's account that is why the police are the partner a school leaves out. The rougher a principal calls the area, the stronger the claim the police have on the job, and the more of the job a principal hands over by inviting them in.
Does the survey show a school holding on to that job? We looked in the one place it could show, and it does not. The survey counts how many incidents a school records in a year, and how many of those it reports to the police. A school keeping the job should send a smaller share out. Out of every hundred incidents recorded, schools in the areas principals call low-crime report about 30 to the police and schools in the areas they call high-crime report about 27. That looks like the pattern. But the gap disappears once schools of the same size, grade level and kind of place are compared, at +0.004. Compare schools that recorded the same number of incidents and it turns around, at +0.013, with the rougher-area schools reporting slightly more. That is on the 11,517 schools recording at least one incident.
One more check comes out the same way. A school with security staff of its own has somebody else to call, so it should be the readiest to leave the police out. It is not readier at all: the estimate is -0.030 for schools without security staff and -0.030 for schools with them.
A third check would use what a school writes down, and this one cannot be made to work. From 2015-16 the survey asks the schools that have sworn officers whether there is a written policy for those officers, and whether it covers things like student discipline. A written rule about the officer's part in discipline sounds like the boundary being drawn. The trouble is that the survey asks whether the policy covers discipline and never asks what it says. A school that wrote down that the officer stays out of discipline answers yes, and so does a school that wrote down that the officer takes part in it. Those are opposite arrangements, and this question cannot tell them apart. For the record the estimates sit close to zero anyway: having a written policy at all comes out at +0.007 and having one that covers student discipline at +0.013, on the 5,379 schools with officers. Read nothing into that in either direction.
The idea also says which partner a school should give the police up for. It should hand the job to a counselor sooner than to another body with police-like powers of its own. Measure those choices on a scale that does not depend on how common each alternative is, as the swap section under Full results does, and the six come out alike.
Notice also that the two ideas end up pointing at the same organization. The one above says the police are expensive because a school cannot get what they supply from anybody else. This one says they are expensive because they claim the school's own job. The police are both of those at once, so the survey has no way of telling the two ideas apart.
So this is a way of reading the swap rather than something the survey shows. It is worth keeping because it says where the cost comes from. The cost the police carry is a claim on work the school counts as its own.
The question is older than either book. Sidney Levine and Paul White asked it of health agencies in 1961. Michael Aiken and Jerald Hage made the count itself the outcome in 1968, asking of sixteen health and welfare organizations in one city what predicted how many joint programs each one held. Their answers, organizational complexity and program innovation, are recognizably the same thing we find. With sixteen organizations that all dealt with each other, they could not separate the two explanations. Twelve thousand schools that have no dealings with one another can.
That last point matters more than it sounds. Research on why organizations form partnerships usually splits the question in two: what pushes an organization to look for partners at all, and how it then picks particular ones through the network it already belongs to. Schools in this survey have no dealings with one another, so a school cannot pick a partner because of who that partner is already tied to. That is the form the second question usually takes, and it does not arise here.
A weaker form of it does. A school can take on an organization because working with that kind of organization has become the normal thing for schools to do, and copying needs no tie between schools at all. Copying would leave a trace like the sixteen-year change set out under Full results. Work with mental-health providers rose from 55% of schools to 78% while the number of organizations per school held steady. It rose most where it had been rarest, from 53% to 78% in the areas principals call low-crime against 69% to 71% in the areas they call high-crime.
Every estimate here holds the survey year constant, so a change running through the whole country is taken out of the comparison. Copying between nearby schools is not taken out, and nobody can check it. The survey files record whether a school is in a city, a suburb, a town or the countryside, and no state, district or region. So there is no way to ask whether neighboring schools take on the same organizations together.