Autonomous Automatons: Is Institutionalism Blunting Site Based Management At State Secondary Schools?

Publicly funded school systems around the world, including those in Australia, are granted wildly differing levels of autonomy. Financial management policies and structures underpin school autonomy. As part of an exploratory case study that investigated the financial management capacities of two large schools in contrasting systems, one in Victoria and the other in NSW, this paper reports the findings of this research into the policy and structural components of these capacities. In analysing these financial management policies and structures through the perspective of institutional theory this paper affirms that various institutional pressures, as hypothesised by DiMaggio and Powell (1983), are blunting both the effectiveness of school based management (SBM) and the level of autonomy schools really have. If no action is taken, SBM is in danger of becoming a policy 'hollow-man' and the goodwill that still clearly exists for it is now in danger of being lost under a deluge of institutional pressures.