(Ir)rationalities at work: The logics, heart, and soul of Head Start

Robyn Virginia Remke, Purdue University

Abstract

This project examines the ways in which Head Start employees recognize and respond to organizational irrationality in their daily work activities. Organizational irrationality can be defined as the everyday practices that pull organizational members in different and sometimes competing directions. Irrationality includes organizational phenomena such as paradox, contradiction, tension, and irony and is not necessarily negative. In fact, members can use irrationality to resist organizational control. Using a grounded theory approach, observations of and interviews with Head Start employees were analyzed using a feminist communicology. Interestingly, Head Start employees do not perceive the irrationality as irrationality. They construct an alternative rationality that allows them to use the organizational irrationality to their benefit. They do not attempt to resolve the contradiction or paradox because Head Start is a system they know, understand, circumvent, and believe they are unable to change. There is no need to change or transcend the irrationality because the teachers and staff workers operate in their own co-culture that legitimizes their behavior and rationalizations. They do not try to transcend, which means they do not try to change the system---they know the system and do not want it to change. Yet, they are constantly changing the system because they are constantly modifying it to meet their needs---constantly changing it and modifying it day to day. Indeed, the findings of this study indicate that there are intersections among contradiction, resistance, embodied response, and identification that tell researchers a great deal more about human spirit, resilience, and commitment to worthy causes than about a particular type of difficulty, implausibility, or surprising opportunity that requires sensemaking. Taken together, the findings operate as a springboard for discussion about the ways people who recognize that they are privileged and want to do something good in this world deal with contextual complexities in ways that, to outside observers, might seem disempowering or nonsensical but, to the participants, appear to be viable ways of working the system, dealing with the craziness of it all, relishing in the joys of small accomplishments, and respecting others who gain little respect otherwise.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Buzzanell, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Communication|Womens studies|Welfare|School administration|Organizational behavior|Organization theory

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