Transforming professionalism: Relational bureaucracy and parent–teacher partnerships in child care settings

Approaches to improving family partnerships

Translating the widespread mandate for family partnerships into action at the program level has fallen into what has been called a ‘rhetoric rut’ (Harvard Family Research Project, 2000). According to Rusher and Ware (1998), the creation and nurturing of child care program relationships with families may be the weakest component of the movement toward quality child care. McWilliam et al. (1997) conducted a survey of child care center directors that found a gap between directors’ family-centered philosophy and actual practice in their centers. Efforts to improve this, and other, dimensions of child care quality typically focus on the skills and training of the workforce, such as improving the preparation and training of teachers in the area of family engagement (Baum and McMurray-Schwarz, 2004). However, evidence from the child care and health care fields suggests that a reliance on teacher training alone to improve quality may neglect key underlying organizational or systemic barriers to family engagement (Bromer and Henly, 2004; Eaton, 2000; Winton and McCollum, 2008). Several studies suggest that informal early childhood education programs, such as small home-based ‘family’ child care programs, do a better job building relationships with and supporting families than do more formal or institutionalized programs such as child care centers or preschools (Bromer and Henley, 2004; Fitz-Gibbon, 2002). These informal child care programs tend to have staff with less training and fewer formal credentials. This evidence challenges the assumption that formal training and education alone are the solution, and suggests that the institutional setting itself may influence relationships.

Changing the organizational context is rarely studied as a strategy for improving interventions and quality in human services, including child care (Yoo et al., 2007). Hemmelgarn et al. (2001) studied family-centered care in the health care context, and noted that most studies on this topic ‘have focused on the characteristics of individual health care providers. The assumption of these studies is that the extent to which any component of FCC [family-centered care] is emphasized in a particular medical setting is primarily a function of the training, experience, and orientation of the individual provider’ (p. 94). Hemmelgarn et al. (2001) provide evidence that supports a different assumption: that the culture of the organization is the key factor determining the implementation of family-centered care. Organizational culture refers to norms, values, assumptions, and shared meanings, and embodies shared values about how the organization defines professionalism (Hemmelgarn et al., 2001). In her in-depth study of nursing home care in California, Eaton (2000) found that quality care required more than training of staff. She found that improving the quality of care required a major organizational paradigm shift that targeted the ‘culture’ of care within the organization. This organizational culture, reflected in its philosophy of care, was the central element shaping both organizational processes and ultimately outcomes. Studies such as Eaton’s show that organizational factors influence the quality of client–professional relationships as well as client outcomes (Eaton, 2000; Gittell, 2002; Glisson and Hemmelgarn, 1998; Stone et al., 2002). These studies indicate that in order to understand the barriers to and solutions for improving family engagement one must examine the organizational context of early childhood programs (Douglas and Klerman, 2012).

Caring in the bureaucratic context

Theories about carework within organizations propose that conventional bureaucratic structures and professional culture discourage caring and relational work practices (Cancian, 2000; Fitz-Gibbon, 2002). The feminist sociology of work charts how emotional labor has historically been separated from the public sphere, in effect removing caring and emotion from the definition of work (Fletcher, 1999). Whereas child care offered in homes frequently reflects the caring and relational qualities of home, child care offered in centers increasingly reflects the institutionalized and bureaucratic qualities more typical of schools (Sykes, 1991).

Caring and informal methods of helping can be perceived as ‘unprofessional’ in the workplace, a sign of ‘breaking the rules’ of fairness and detachment (Bromer and Henly, 2004; Fletcher, 1999; Noddings, 1990). This can create conflicts for those committed to caring or who find themselves caring about a particular family (Fisher and Tronto, 1990; Stone, 2000). ‘Breaking the rules’ was a dominant theme in a small series of interviews in one early childhood education program (Douglass, 2007). For example, a teacher explained how she sometimes ‘broke the rules’ by giving a family diapers or a ride home, or giving out her cell phone number in response to the individual needs of a family in crisis. In conventional bureaucracy, standardization ensures the consistent use of efficient, scientific, and rational practices. The professional role is detached and objective, and ‘is perceived to be about applying general, scientific knowledge to specific cases in rigorous and therefore routinized or institutional ways’ (Noordegraaf, 2007: 765).

Organizational policies that direct staff to treat all parents the same may interfere with the ability to act responsively and flexibly to the needs of individual families. Goldstein argues that ‘inconsistency is the hallmark of caring practice’ (1998: 255). Caring involves making a judgment about the best course of action to take in a given situation, often based on personal knowledge of individual circumstances rather than on application of a ‘one size fits all’ notion of fairness. In Weber’s ideal bureaucracy, formality and distance ‘are seen as the only route to a rational decision’, thereby excluding emotion or individual circumstances as an element of decision-making (Davies, 1995: 25). Weber describes the bureaucratic administrator’s relationship to employees and clients as ‘personally detached and strictly objective’, not ‘moved by personal sympathies’ (Weber, 1968: 975). In practice, teachers very often believe that they must give up caring to become professional. As Goldstein (1998) has argued, the recent ‘emphasis on science and scientific approaches to the education of young children drove underground the softer and more humanistic aspects of early childhood education that had predominated in the philosophical writings of earlier years, and thus eclipsed the central importance of caring’ (p. 259).

Power in the bureaucratic context

Bureaucracy also structures power relations in ways that can work against partnerships with families. Within conventional bureaucratic organizations, professionals are expected to possess expert knowledge. Expert knowledge positions the professional over the parent/client (Adler et al., 2008; Morgaine, 1999; Osgood, 2006; Sykes, 1991; Waerness, 1996). In his study of nursing home care, Lopez describes the conflict between adhering to a rigid protocol to keep clients out of bed for a set period of time daily and the suffering of one particular 93-year-old client who requested to remain in bed (2006). As one nurse explained, if she allowed the client to stay in bed, she would ‘get in trouble’ (p. 143). As Lopez writes, the nurses ‘imagined, based on a self-assured belief in their own superior medical-technical expertise, that they knew better than the patient what was best, and how much pain was too much’ (p. 143).

Feminist relational theorists talk of mutuality and connection as factors that foster relationships and organizational effectiveness. Fletcher (1999) writes that the theory of ‘power over’ that underlies organizational principles of hierarchy conflicts with the partnership theory of ‘power with’ (p. 33). The possibility that the client may have knowledge and could make a contribution is not considered, making a partnership of shared knowledge and power impossible. This power imbalance, rooted in the ‘professional as expert’ paradigm, is a barrier to family engagement practices that affirm the expertise of the family and culturally-based caregiving practices (Gonzales-Mena, 2008). In Morrow and Malin’s (2004) study of one program’s effort to build partnerships with parents, teachers spoke of a loss of ‘professional status’ and ‘blurry’ boundaries as their contact and partnerships with parents grew. Caring in the context of unequal power may foster paternalistic helping behaviors, rather than professional–client partnerships. Hwang and Powell (2009) argue that ‘professionalization can lead to diminished experimentation as well as an orientation towards doing for other rather than with them’ (p. 270). These findings illustrate the constraints conventional notions of professionalism place on a partnership model.

Organizations define the roles and rules for caring and power relations and cultivate in their members a set of attitudes and behaviors related to parents and families. These institutionalized scripts position teachers as experts, and relationships between parents and teachers as formal, brief, and task-oriented (Smrekar and Cohen-Vogel, 2001). The ‘school’ model in early childhood education can portray parents as a ‘necessary evil’ (McWilliam et al., 1997) and promote a ‘culture of detachment’ in the workplace that can act as a barrier to collaborative relationships (Colley, 2006). The following excerpt comes from a reflective essay written by a student in an early childhood education college course (Douglass, 2007). Her reflection highlights one way these scripts are passed along to new teachers and become institutionalized:

So much of what I have heard from previous childcare centers has turned me away from wanting to become close with families of the children I work with. I have heard ‘horror stories’ that families are ‘the enemy,’ making the teacher’s job difficult and nearly impossible, with demands on the teacher that sound ideal but seem unachievable. Fearing parents and families seems to be a pattern with so many teachers in childcare centers. Teachers sometimes have ideas in their minds and don’t want these ideas challenged or contested. In the past and even recently I have myself developed a fear of parents and families, wanting only to associate with them on a ‘needs’ basis.

Teachers learn about relationships from the social context of early care and education programs. Given the relatively minimal pre-service requirements for child care staff, the most intensive training about what it means to be a professional likely occurs in the context of the workplace. Despite the rhetoric about family involvement, the structures and social context of child care programs can perpetuate a form of professionalism defined by impersonal relations, the absence of caring, standardized work practices, and unequal power relations.

Professional caring

The dynamics of care work in formal organizational settings has received scholarly attention in multiple fields and disciplines. Recent work in the nursing and health services contexts has begun to specify the organizational mechanisms that may improve the quality of professional–client relationships and service quality outcomes. One such approach is alternative organizational structures that support caring as a valued and measureable work practice. While Weber’s bureaucracy positioned emotion in opposition to reason, Waerness (1996) defines an alternative ‘rationality of caring’ that draws on personal knowledge of another person, as well as reason, to respond to many of the complex human situations in which scientific knowledge is inadequate. One example of this professional caring role is a clinical practice model in nursing that attempts to bridge caring and science. The model explicates the ‘art and science’ of caring as a set of skills that can be taught, evaluated, and recorded (Cancian, 2000). Davies (1995), Eaton (2000) and Fletcher (1999) all suggest strategies to align relational work with organizational norms in measurable ways, such as: specification of caring as a set of skills and behaviors, creating outcomes for relational work, explicitly including relational work in regulatory or reimbursement systems, and developing organizational structures required to support these caring practices. By embedding caring practices within performance or regulatory frameworks, bureaucratic structures establish caring as legitimate, rather than forbidden. Theories of emotional intelligence also recognize the integration of cognition and emotion in effective relationship-based work (Bardzil and Slaski, 2003). The emotional intelligence literature offers a framework that specifies key emotional competencies that can be measured, such as self-awareness, social awareness, self-management, and relationship management (Bardzil and Slaski, 2003; Goleman, 2001).

Another body of research has explored new ways of organizing caring work in the formal organizational context. In order to preserve and support caring practices, organizations must enable flexible, individualized, and ‘inconsistent’ practices that are responsive to clients. For example, organizations can develop ‘soft and selective standards that do not prescribe how trade-offs must be made but provide direction for making trade-offs’ (Noordegraaf, 2007: 779; also Davies, 1995). Mass customization offers a model for this approach by integrating principles of standardization with customization (Selladurai, 2004). For example, rather than follow a pre-specified set of rules or ‘evidence-based practices’ with all families, an early childhood education program could develop a protocol for responding flexibly and sensitively to the differing needs, strengths, context, and interests of families. In this way, work processes can be standardized through the consistent use of a flexible protocol.

In his recent study of nursing homes, Lopez found that organizations can foster authentic professional–client relationships through the use of ‘organized emotional care’, specific organizational structures and practices that support, rather than restrict or coerce, caring relationships (2006). Lopez identifies several organizational practices that fostered emotional care, such as structured opportunities for caring worker–client relationships. In one of the nursing homes in his study, he found a hybrid approach to emotional care that employed bureaucratic rules and procedures to support interactive work. The organization established rules about when and how workers should interact with clients, for example instructing workers to involve clients in making decisions about leaving their rooms and taking trips, and engaging clients in conversations that promote relationship-building. Lopez argues that rather than being a coercive bureaucratic structure that impeded relationships, these rules emphasized the humanity of the client and created ‘new possibilities for meaningful relationships’ between caregivers and clients (p. 152).

Another example of organizing relational work comes from Gittell (2002), who has shown how strong relationships among health care providers improved provider–client relationships by creating a more coordinated experience for the client with the organization. Attention to relationships within the organization, among staff, is thought to positively impact professional–client relationships. Gittell describes how this relational coordination improves performance, particularly in settings that require responsive and improvised responses to clients, a setting similar to that of parent–teacher partnerships in many early childhood education organizations. Relational coordination is thus another systematic approach to supporting flexible responses in working with families, and can be extended to encompass the provider/parent or provider/client relationship (Gittell, 2012).

Shared power

Alternative organizational approaches have also been proposed to support shared power between professionals and clients. Ashcraft (2001) identifies ‘feminist bureaucracy’ as a hybrid that blends egalitarian and hierarchical models to encompass both relational and scientific values. Democratic organizations that share power and decision-making through participatory processes may be more likely to foster a staff willing to share power with clients. In contrast to Weber’s bureaucracy, the theoretical ‘post-bureaucratic’ organization is characterized by dialogue and consensus decision-making, rather than hierarchical control. Heckscher (1994) describes the post-bureaucratic organization as the ‘combination of control and flexibility’ (p. 36). This more flexible and responsive model, governed by trust, mission, principles, and consensus, appears to be a better fit for a supportive family partnership model in early childhood education. Another approach to shared power is Goode and Jones’s (2007) culturally and linguistically competent organization, which is intended to support organizational capacity to manage the dynamics of difference and adapt to the diverse cultural context of clients. The characteristics of this organizational model include services tailored to the unique needs and preferences of clients, and inclusion of clients in decision-making. Although Goode and Jones do not directly address bureaucracy as an organizing characteristic, their model appears to assume a certain level of bureaucracy, and suggests strategies to increase organizations’ capacity to be responsive and incorporate the needs and values of its clientele. Another element of organizational cultural competence with particular relevance to shared power is recruiting, hiring, and retaining a diverse workforce reflective of families served (Matthews and Ewen, 2006). Matthews and Ewen explain:

Providers and caregivers who share the linguistic and cultural backgrounds of families may best be able to explain and communicate potentially sensitive issues, such as those around special needs including physical, emotional, and learning disabilities or delays. Providers who share the cultural background of the children in a child care setting may also share their knowledge of cultural practices with other providers in the setting and translate nuances of culture. (2006: 4)

Transforming professional work within the formal organizational context requires that organizations adopt a new definition of professionalism and embed it in organizational policies and processes. Several educational theorists have called for a new understanding of professionalism that embodies shared power as a key dimension of professional practice. Sachs (2003) proposes a form of professionalism in teaching called ‘transformative’ or democratic professionalism that shifts power from the professional to a shared and collaborative power between parent and teacher. Democratic professionals build alliances with parents and others whose voices have been marginalized, ‘demystify’ professional work, and collaborate and cooperate with various stakeholders. Similarly, Moss suggests the notion of teachers as ‘researchers’, rather than conventional bureaucratic ‘technicians’ (Moss, 2006). This ‘teacher researcher’ view of professional practice envisions teachers as reflective practitioners who are guided by more than just academic or expert knowledge, and draw upon knowledge obtained through relationships, dialogue, listening, values, and perceptions (Cherniss and Goleman, 2001; Morgaine, 1999; Moss, 2006). This approach recognizes inclusionary democratic practice, and the value of subjectivity, uncertainty, and responsiveness to individuals and situations. Democratic or transformative professionalism provides greater opportunity for the knowledge and expertise of families to inform the dialogue and the practices of the early childhood program.

Professionalism as conventionally defined may be losing its relevance in contemporary society and may lend support to these new organizational norms for professionalism. Adler et al. (2008) describe an evolution and transformation of professionalism that is moving away from an elitist model of ‘power over’ towards one of greater interdependence and collaboration. The historical autonomy of most professions is lessening, as demands for accountability and consumer empowerment increase. Adler et al. suggest an emerging form of ‘collaborative professionalism’ that moves beyond the autonomy and exclusive control of expertise of conventional professionalism. This collaborative professionalism shares many similarities with ‘democratic’ and ‘transformative’ models of bureaucracy and professionalism. For example, Adler et al. suggest that the collaborative professional learns to ‘see other professional communities and non-professionals [perhaps parents] as sources of learning and support, rather than interference’ (2008: 15). This move away from the ‘professional as expert’ aligns with the move toward a more democratic professional–client partnership. It is interesting to consider how the demands for accountability may both contribute to and alleviate the current challenges of parent–teacher partnerships. On one hand, the movement for accountability has led to increasing standardization and bureaucracy, which can interfere with family partnership practices. On the other hand, the movement for accountability may be lessening the power imbalance between professionals and clients, thus supporting the move toward true partnerships of shared power and expertise.