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The Teachers’ Union as a Knowledge Network:
Evidence from United States Public Schools
John E. McCarthy
Rutgers University & University of Pennsylvania
Saul A. Rubinstein
Rutgers University
June 2014
Under Review at Industrial and Labor Relations Review
Funding for this research was provided by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
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Abstract
School districts house considerable intellectual resources that often go underutilized
because schools are insulated from one another – operating, for the most part, as islands.
Education scholars have argued that teachers and students stand to benefit from boundary
spanning networks throughout the school district because these ties have the potential to
introduce external perspectives and break down conformity pressures. The present study
examines labor management partnerships in general, and school union representatives in
particular, as potential sources of knowledge diffusion between schools. We build from
existing theory, as well as multiple years of qualitative and quantitative data collected in a
high partnership school district, to develop two hypotheses concerning union
representatives’ external social capital and the receipt and application of external
knowledge by teachers in schools. We test these hypotheses by combining two data
sources, obtained from union representatives and, separately, the teachers whose interests
they represent. Our results suggest that school union representatives can bridge important
knowledge boundaries between schools but that a school’s capacity to utilize external
knowledge depends on the level of labor-management partnership in place.
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Introduction
One of the most pressing policy issues over the past three decades is how to encourage
effective, lasting improvement into classrooms (Evans, 2001). Since the publication of A
Nation at Risk in the early 1980s, schools in the United States have been subject to
intensifying scrutiny by policymakers, legislators and the general public. The
schoolteacher has found herself on the defensive, subject to educational fads and control
mechanisms that are determined, and overseen, by bureaucrats far removed from her
classrooms and students. Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind with their focus on
high stakes standardized testing, value-added teacher evaluations, expansion of marketbased solutions like Charter Schools, and the more recent shift toward common core
standards provide examples. While some teachers have embraced these changes, the
majority has not (Evans 2001; Kim and Orfield 2004; Sunderman Tracey, 2004). Scholars
are also cautious of top-down reform efforts – urging that the recipe for lasting school
improvement stems from empowerment and meaningful collaboration among teachers
(Rubinstein and McCarthy, 2012; Rubinstein and McCarthy, 2014).
In addition to collaboration within schools (Leana and Pil, 2006; Louis and Marks
1998; Rubinstein and McCarthy 2014), numerous scholars have encouraged greater
networking between schools in school districts as a way to promote school improvement
(see Eaker, DuFour and Eaker 2008; Fullan 2010; Stoll, Bolam, McMahon, Wallance and
Thomas 2006). According to this latter perspective, school districts house considerable
intellectual resources throughout their schools but these resources often go under-utilized
because schools, as traditionally structured, are highly insulated from one another
(Hargreaves and Giles 2003). Successful strategies or innovations being employed by one
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school are often stuck – inaccessible by the other schools in the district. Thus, increasing
schools’ external connectedness may broaden perspectives and weaken the complacency
and conformity pressures found in highly insulated groups (see Stoll and Seashore-Lewis
2007: 7).
As of yet, there has been little research into the effects of inter-school collaboration.
Nor have researchers examined viable workplace institutions that support it. Our study
combines qualitative and quantitative evidence to examine antecedents and consequences
of inter-school collaboration. Specifically, our research in a school district with a unionmanagement partnership arrangement sustained over 15 years highlights the teacher union
as an effective instrument for school change through school union representatives’
knowledge sharing connections throughout the school district. We find not only that school
union representatives are heavily engaged in knowledge sharing communications between
schools but also that these connections have direct implications for teachers – in particular,
teachers’ awareness and application of external knowledge. However, we also find some
evidence that external knowledge goes further in some schools relative to others: Our data
suggest that schools may benefit more from union representatives’ external ties when
strong school-level labor-management partnerships – characterized by shared decisionmaking and collaboration– are in place.
This study makes several important contributions, both practical and theoretical.
While there are recognized benefits to boundary spanning in organizations (e.g., Ancona
1990), less attention has been given to workplace institutions that support boundaryspanning activities (e.g., Mehra, Kilduff and Brass 2001) – an oversight that generalizes to
public schools. Indeed, despite the potential benefits of inter-school collaboration, some
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scholars are hesitant about increasing collaborative obligations placed on teachers because
their jobs are demanding and their time limited (Little 2005). In order for inter-school
knowledge sharing to successfully take hold, therefore, schools may need designated
boundary-spanners who take the responsibility for building and maintaining external
connections and redistributing resources back into their school. Our research suggests that
school union representatives can fill this void organically by expanding the scope of
existing support services.
This study also makes contributions to industrial relations research and theory.
Scholars have lamented unions’ historically weak contributions to social capital (Cornwell
and Harrison 2004; Jarley 2005) – i.e., interpersonal relationships that confer or potentiate
value to members (Adler and Kwon 2002). Our research suggests that unions can enhance
organizational outcomes through their contributions to “boundary-spanning” ties that are
vital for disseminating knowledge and resources in large organizations (Oh, Labianca and
Chung 2004). Organizations often encounter challenges as they attempt to move high-level
partnerships to lower levels (Cutcher-Gershenfeld, Kochan, and McKersie 1988;
Heckscher and Schurman 1997; Rubinstein and Kochan 2001). In addition to showing
some potential benefits of union-created social capital, our results suggest that union
representatives’ external ties may bear more influence – i.e., get more millage – in high
partnership settings relative to low partnership settings. We believe that this highlights a
challenge of optimizing on labor-management partnerships in large, decentralized
organizations.
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Theoretical Background
Social Capital
Social capital theory is based on idea that interpersonal relationships serve as
powerful conduits for information and resource transfer and help to mobilize social
benefits. The concept has gained a strong footing in the organizational sciences, given that
relationships powerfully affect opportunity structures within organizations (Burt 1992;
Seibert, Kraimer, and Liden 2001) as well coordination capabilities and the sharing and
recombination of knowledge resources between individuals and groups (Burt 2004; Tsai
and Goshal 1998). Drawing from the sociological theories laid down by Coleman (1990)
and Burt (1992), this literature has highlighted the importance of cohesive, trusting ties
among group members, which facilitate local knowledge sharing and recombination
(Collins and Smith 2006) and help to mobilize efforts around a common direction or
innovative pursuit (Obstfelt 2005) as well as more distal external linkages that connect
individuals and groups to a broader pool of resources located throughout their organization
system (Ancona 1990).
Social Capital and Labor Unions
Industrial relations scholarship has recognized the importance of social capital, though
primarily from the standpoint of building mobilization capacity and revitalizing organized
labor (Heckscher 1998; Jarley 1995). For example, Heckscher (1988) was hopeful that
identity groups would coalesce with one another around more general issues relating to
workplace rights. He was optimistic that disparate identities groups would find natural
allies with one another and would unite in supporting one another in collective action.
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These identity groups have had successes1 but thus far have not matched the strength or
durability of traditional labor unions. Furthermore, labor unions have approached these
new forms of social organization tepidly, at best (Heckscher and McCarthy 2015). Craft
unions have been particularly resistant to outsiders. The Service Employees’ union (SEIU)
has perhaps gone the furthest in aligning itself with beleaguered identity groups but in
general union members and union leadership have remained significantly insulated –
preoccupied, for the most part, with local working conditions and insurance provisions
(e.g., Cornwell and Harrison 2004).
Some scholars have also noted the decline of social capital within labor organizations
(Jarley 2005). Early modes of organizing began as tightly bonded mutual-aid networks in
which working-class craftsmen pulled together to support labor standards while offering
assistance to the sick and unemployed and their families (Cobble 1990; Beito 1999;
Bacharach et al. 2001; Jarley 2005). These groups were heavily socially oriented, with
loyalties fortified by dense, stable bonds that conferred privileged resource access to ingroup members (Heckscher and McCarthy 2015). The mutual aid model of organized labor
was significantly disrupted in the early twentieth century by the rise of large industries and
economies of scale and as business and government subsumed social welfare functions
(Jarley 2005). Bacharach and colleagues (2001) note that collective bargaining and
political lobbying, carried out by a small group of representative staff, took the place of
social community and shared obligations to provide mutual aid. Compelling evidence of
weakening solidarity is found in declining instances of mass action observed throughout
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For example, laws protecting against discrimination on the basis gender, race, age, disability and sexual
orientation have resulted from proactive social identity groups. These protections have had tremendous
implications for employment relations.
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the OECD area over the last thirty years (see Heckscher and McCarthy 2015).
While pessimism over the labor movement’s building of social capital may be well
founded, most scholarship has focused on labor’s capacity to amass leverage and political
influence over recalcitrant employers. Scholars have given less attention to the value that
unions can add to organizational effectiveness through their contributions to social capital
(Rubinstein 2000; Rubinstein 2001). The literature on value-added unionism notes that
strong labor-management partnerships can enhance organizational outcomes via
institutions and union-based networks that facilitate communication and broaden
collaboration and participation in decision-making among employees. Employees are more
likely to develop relationships with one another if they have opportunities to interact
throughout the workday (Whitener, Brodt, Korsgaard and Werner 1998) and team-based
work designs thus significantly broaden social exposure. Conceivably, these high
involvement work systems, facilitated through partnership, should increase social capital
to the extent that they bring workers into dialogue around substantive issues and create a
sufficient level of employment stability to enable shared histories and trust.
Rubinstein (2001: 589) has argued that labor-management partnerships can
contribute to organizational social capital and in particular a “kind of communication and
coordination network needed to produce the flexibility and responsiveness required of
today’s ‘high-performance’ work systems.” Consistent with this argument, Rubinstein
(2000) found that the network infrastructure including communications, unionmanagement alignment, and balance of time spent managing people and production
explained 30 percent of the variation in first-time quality and 53 percent of the variation in
quality improvement. However, the most significant contribution to quality and quality
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improvement came from communications which were stronger for union represented
managers relative to non-represented managers, suggesting that labor unions can contribute
significantly to firm effectiveness in ways unattainable in non-union firms because of the
network infrastructure the union can produce.
More recently, Rubinstein and McCarthy (2012) showed that labor management
partnerships in school districts reinforce and are reinforced by continuous communication
and coordination between management and elected union leaders. Analyzing
communication patterns between educators within schools, Rubinstein and McCarthy
(2014) found evidence that school-level partnerships can foster higher levels of
collaboration among teaching faculty, which can result in higher student performance
outcomes.
The Union as a Boundary Spanning Network
With some exceptions (Rubinstein 2000; 2001; Rubinstein and McCarthy 2012.
Rubinstein and McCarthy 2014), labor-management partnerships’ contributions to
organizational effectiveness through social capital are seldom examined and poorly
understood. We address this gap by examining a local union’s role in fostering social
capital between schools within a school district. We conducted over 40 interviews in a high
partnership school district from 2008 to 2013. We interviewed principals, teachers and
union representatives across schools. On numerous occasions, we interviewed
superintendents, school board members, central office administrators, human resource
leaders, and union presidents and executive board members (there was leadership
succession over the period of our study). We sat in on meetings and district-sponsored
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events, including sessions, outlined below, that hosted joint presentations by school
principals and school union representatives. We conducted social network analysis to
capture relationships not only within but also between the district’s schools. Collectively,
our evidence suggested that union representatives in a higher partnership school district
were playing a critical role in disseminating knowledge between schools. The following
incorporates existing theory and research, as well as our own qualitative evidence, to
inform two hypotheses relating to union representatives’ network and their implications
for teachers in schools – specifically, we focus on the extent to which teachers obtain
knowledge that originated in other schools in the district and whether they apply this
knowledge to improve their instruction.
Hypotheses
Boundary Spanning
Organizational boundary spanning creates social capital for organizations by
connecting groups with different types of knowledge and resources (Burt, 2005). These
connections can facilitate coordination and innovation (Tushman 1977), particularly in
knowledge-intensive settings that are functionally interdependent and benefit from the
transfer and recombination of diverse ideas and perspectives (Aldrich and Herker 1977;
Tushman 1977; Roberts and O’Reilly 1979; Allen 1984; Gladstein 1984; Ancona and
Caldwell 1988; Ancona 1999). Its benefits are complimentary to the theory of “structural
holes”, introduced and elaborated by Burt (1992), which views non-redundant external
linkages as a source for timely information and resource access and intellectual diversity.
Although structural holes and boundary spanning have strong conceptual ties, and co-vary
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empirically (Fleming and Waguespack 2007), the two have traditionally been different in
their focus. The focus of structural holes is usually competitive advantage for the individual
who spans across social boundaries. By contrast, the boundary-spanning literature has
focused on externally networked intermediaries that redirect external information and
resources for a collective benefit (Fleming and Waguespack 2007).
Boundary spanning’s benefits have been supported by numerous studies and at
multiple levels of analysis. McEvily and Zaheer (1999) found that Michigan manufacturers
who held a greater number of non-redundant sources of advice outside of the firm had
better access to competitive ideas. Geletkanycz and Hambrick (1997) found that companies
perform better when top-managers held boundary-spanning relationships outside of their
firm and industry. Baum, Calabrese and Silverman (2000) found that Canadian
biotechnology companies with more heterogeneous networks experienced faster revenue
growth and were better able to obtain patents than organization with homogeneous,
overlapping networks. Within organizations, Rodan and Galunic (2004) found that that
heterogeneous sparse knowledge predicted innovation. Ancona's (1990) research
supported a link between externally oriented boundary-spanning activities (informing,
parading and probing) and team performance. Baldwin, Bedell and Johnson (1997) found
that MBA teams whose members were better networked performed better on a class
project. Hansen, Podolny and Pfeffer (2001) found that teams completed task assignments
more quickly when they held more non-redundant contacts outside of the team. Hansen
(1999) found that weak, diverse networks between team members were instrumental in
helping teams search for new knowledge.
As cited, several education researchers have suggested that school districts may
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benefit from knowledge sharing between their schools (see Hargreaves and Giles 2003;
Stoll, Bolam, McMahon, Wallance and Thomas 2006; Eaker, DuFour and Eaker 2008;
Fullan 2010). Inter-school boundary spanning connections are seen as important because
they have the potential to broaden the boundaries of knowledge exchange and combination
and increase resource access and diffusion between schools. As in any organization or work
group, schools can become fixed on a narrow set of perspectives, which often limits the
school’s potential for meaningful change.
Exposure to the practices and learning
techniques employed at other sites can foster meaningful innovation⁠
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and professional
improvement (e.g., Fullan 2010). It is for these reasons that Stoll and Seashore-Lewis
(2007: 7) write that “without due attention to fostering ties outside the school, strong
professional communities can, paradoxically, become a barrier to change.” Hargreaves and
Giles (2003: 134) emphasize similarly that school districts must successfully bring
“together the knowledge, skills and dispositions of teachers in a school or across schools
to promote shared learning and improvement.”
Although there is a general understanding that organizations and organizational
institutions affect the formation and dissolution of ties (Nahapiet and Ghoshal 1998), the
antecedents to organizational boundary spanning has received comparatively little
attention from organizational researchers (Mehra, Kilduff and Brass 2001). Nahapiet and
Ghoshal (1998) note that organizations contribute to the formation of social capital by
bringing people together for extended periods of time, by making individuals
interdependent with one another, by encouraging them to interact in reciprocal exchanges,
and by providing an element of closure (by way of organizational and sub-group
boundaries), which facilitates norms, social identities and trust. In a related vein, scholars
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recognize that organizational initiatives and HR practices – including, for examples, crossfunctional teams, job rotation programs, and individual and group pay policies –
powerfully direct the nature of workers’ social connections as well as their efficacy from
the standpoint of advancing organizational objectives (Baron and Pfeffer 1994; Collins and
Smith 2006; Evans and Davis 2005).
With particular relevance to this study’s focus, researchers have also found that
certain positions in the organizational hierarchy, including team and department managers,
are likely to take on elevated boundary-spanning responsibilities. Indeed, that
organizational managers assume boundary-spanning roles to a greater extent than their
subordinates is not surprising. Boundary spanning is difficult and time intensive (Aldrich
and Herker 1976; Marrone, Tesluk and Carson 2007) and managers often have more
opportunities to build and maintain diverse relationships relative to other workers. In many
organizations, for example, leaders have opportunities to build horizontal connections with
other managers and vertical linkages to upper management via conferences, meetings and
informal social gatherings (cf., Mehra, Brass and Dixson 2006). The nature of leaders’
external ties has implications not only for leaders’ reputations (Mehra, Dixson, Brass and
Robertson 2006) but also for the stock of intellectual and physical resources from which
their subordinates can draw (Druskat and Wheeler 2003; Hirst and Mann 2004; Katz and
Tushman 1983; Leana and Pil 2006).
School Union Representatives as Boundary Spanners
The school district that we studied has had a strong union-management partnership
in place between district management and the local union for nearly twenty years. Union-
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management partnerships are institutional arrangements whereby union leaders, members,
and managers work closely together to identify and solve problems, and to implement
solutions. Decisions are increasingly made through a consensus process and the union and
its members are involved in decisions that had previously been reserved for management.
The focus is on working together to improve teaching quality and student achievement
through joint planning, problem solving, decision-making and the ways teachers interact
and schools are organized. These partnerships are designed to use collaboration among
educators to find solutions to gaps in student achievement, and then effectively implement
those solutions because all of those closest to the problem, with tacit knowledge of it, are
key stakeholders in the improvement process. These institutional arrangements have been
shown to increase collaboration at the school level that in turn positively affects student
performance (Rubinstein and McCarthy, forthcoming.) In an effort to institutionalize and
strengthen the partnership, the school district hosts a series of annual events – attended by
central office administration, union leadership, principals, school union representatives and
other teaching faculty – that explicitly reviews and celebrates the partnership’s history and
accomplishments. Joint presentations by the superintendent and local union president
underscore a mutual commitment to the partnership and also make clear expectations for
partnership building across the district’s schools. These venues provided a stable platform
for building relationships between schools: There were meet-and-greet games; breakfasts
and lunches were communal, allowing parties from different sites to sit side by side and
communicate. Our observations and interviews suggest that these efforts have not only
helped to foster exchanges and relationships between schools but also contributed to a
culture of innovation, transparency and open sharing. In turn, this promoted important
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boundary-spanning conduits between schools, of which school union representatives
played a central part.
The school district also encouraged school union representatives and principals to
work collaboratively on school improvement programs and share their progress with
participants at other schools. This occurred quite formally through the district’s use of an
“innovation fund.” Supported by the national union, an innovation grant was awarded to
schools that agreed to work collaboratively in developing and deploying school
innovations. For example, one participating school created a “Mathucation” program that
creatively interwove physical education and mathematics standards. Other schools worked
collaboratively to develop programs centered on classroom technology implementation
and increasing parental involvement. It is important to stress that, in addition to working
together to develop these projects, labor and management were required to share their
experiences – including the outputs of their efforts – with union representatives and
administrators at other schools. While these discussions directly disseminated knowledge
between schools, they also helped to establish the union’s support for innovation and
transparency between schools – as well as school union representatives’ central role in this
process.
In another example, six schools on the south side of the school district were
experiencing lower achievement in reading among English language learners (ELL). They
decided to work together to develop new reading programs that would help teachers
address the reading needs of students across these schools. Administrators, union leaders
and teachers traveled together to visit reading programs across the country and worked
together through the “Southside Reading Collaborative” to implement new reading
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programs across these six schools. Not only were they able to dramatically improve student
learning but as a result of this effort they strengthened relationships within and across these
six schools.
In addition to these joint union-management initiatives to share innovation between
schools, the local union offers formal training sessions twice a year to its building
leadership in order to help them better understand their role as building representatives, to
gain skills and knowledge about how to function effectively as union leaders within a
union-management partnership arrangement, and to build relationships and social capital
among the union leadership. Approximately twenty-five percent of the building
representatives attended each of the bi-annual sessions. Further, as part of the development
of the union-management partnership, the district and local union have invested in sending
teams of administrators, union leaders, and teachers to training and education programs
across the country – some organized by universities, others by the national union. When
this happens these educators have an opportunity to strengthen their human capital
(knowledge), and also their social capital (relationships). Since these educational
opportunities have taken place over the past 15 years more than 400 union leaders, teachers
and administrators have participated, strengthening the social capital between them, both
within and across schools.
These institutions appeared to support knowledge diffusion between schools. In an
effort to understand these dynamics more thoroughly, we deployed an exploratory social
network survey in the 2010-2011 school year to assess educators’ professional
relationships not only within but also between the district’s schools. Although external
connections were uncommon across the sample, we observed numerous school union
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representatives with high levels of external connectivity –connections to other union
representatives, principals and support staff at other schools. For example, Figure 1
illustrates a network pattern that appeared at multiple schools. The clustered circles in the
center represent ties within the same school. The ties to square nodes, extending from the
upper left and bottom right, represent ties to professionals in other schools. The network
shows a disproportionate number of external connections reported by union representatives
compared to other teachers. Critically, this survey instrument also assessed the topic of
communication and many union representatives reported communicating with others
outside the school around substantive issues relating to school improvement (e.g., giving
or receiving instruction-related advice) – not topics typical of union representatives such
as grievances or contract negotiations.
[INSERT FIGURE 1]
Boundary Spanning and the Receipt and Application of External Knowledge
From a theoretical perspective, boundary spanners are conduits for securing
information, knowledge, resources and political influence that can serve the group’s benefit
(Ancona 1990; Druskat and Wheeler 2003; Hirst and Mann 2004). Individuals who assume
boundary-spanning positions often assume responsibility for re-disseminating external
resources and information (Marrone, Tesluk and Carson 2007). Therefore, individuals in a
group can benefit from boundary spanning even if they do not participate directly (Fleming
and Waguespack, 2007). Management often assumes important boundary spanning
functions. In analyzing the external networking activity of elementary school principals,
for example, Leana and Pil (2006) found that teachers and ultimately students performed
better when their principals had higher levels of social capital outside of their school. These
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findings imply that principals’ external connections secured resources that benefited
teachers and students more broadly (Leana and Pil 2006).
School union representatives take responsibility for representing and voicing the
interests and concerns of their coworkers. Referencing the European context in particular,
Stevenson (2008) argued the role of the school union representative could evolve to
incorporate a broader range of responsibilities related to professional learning and
professional development. From this foundation, we wanted to investigate the implications
of school union representatives’ external ties on teachers more generally – i.e., the union
members whose interests they represent. Given the district’s emphasis on inter-school
knowledge sharing, we were particularly interested in the role union representatives’
played relaying knowledge back to their site – for example, making teachers aware of, and
receptive to, other schools’ practices. Social network theorists note that the structure and
quality of networks varies by individuals and groups, and that these differences
significantly affect resource opportunities and performance outcomes (e.g., Ancona and
Caldwell 1992; Marrone, Tesluk and Carson 2007; Reagans and Zuckerman 2001; Tsai
2001). It may be the case, for example, that some union representatives were more
outwardly orientated, or more motivated to build relationships across schools. Our first
hypothesis thus concerned variations in union representatives’ connections between
schools, and how these variations predicted teachers’ awareness and application of external
knowledge. In particular, we expected that union representatives who had more expansive
networks outside of their school would be better positioned to relay external knowledge
back to their site.
Hypothesis 1: A school’s receipt and application of outside knowledge will be greater
when the school union representative has more external social capital.
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School Partnership Climate as a Moderator
The ability for outside knowledge to affect organizational practices should depend
on institutions that encourage the sharing and assimilation of outside knowledge and thus
the likelihood that externally acquired knowledge gains traction in a school should depend
on institutions that allow the knowledge to be shared, considered, and adapted to the
organization’s particular needs. Labor management partnerships in large organizations can
be conceptualized across multiple levels (Kochan, Adler, McKersie, Eaton, Segal and
Gerhart 2008). In public education, partnership strength can be assessed at the district level
by considering relations between the local union and district management (Rubinstein and
McCarthy 2012) as well as at the level of particular schools by considering relations
between the school union representative, staff and the principal (Rubinstein and McCarthy
2014). Strong labor management partnerships provide information, promote shared
decision-making and participation, and encourage organizational policies and innovations
that are collaboratively informed. Teachers’ input into school decision-making, and their
discretion over their classroom innovations, should be affected by the strength of
partnership in place at the school level (Rubinstein and McCarthy 2014). Because union
representatives and staff are likely to be less informed and empowered in low partnership
settings, they should also have less discretion to incorporate and act upon knowledge and
ideas for school improvement initiatives. The information, discretion and participation
afforded to teachers in high partnership settings should encourage and incorporate ideas
and insights from the workforce. In high partnership settings, therefore, ideas for
improvement, including insights from other schools in the district, are more likely to be
heard and seriously considered by the school’s management (Ichniowski, Kochan, Levine,
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Olson, and Strauss 1996; Rubinstein 2011; Appelbaum, Bailey, Berg, and Kalleberg 2000;
Rubinstein and Kochan 2001; Rubinstein 2001; Appelbaum and Batt 1994).
Hypothesis 2: The effect of a school union representative’s external social capital on
a school’s receipt and application of outside knowledge will be greater when school
partnership climate is high.
Methods
Research Setting
We tested the preceding hypotheses using a school-level sample consisting of 29
schools from ABC Unified School District, located in Southern California. ABC Unified
School District developed a strong labor management partnership after a contentious period
of labor-management tension in the early 1990s (Rubinstein and McCarthy, 2011). Since
that time, the district has established a variety of institutions to support and strengthen the
partnership. It is our expectation – based on our interviews and observations in the district
– that the school union representatives in ABC function differently than do union
representatives most school districts, largely because the labor-management partnership
has proactively encouraged school-level innovations and knowledge sharing between
schools. We expect, in turn, that the level of external social capital held by school union
representatives’ external in ABC is higher than is typical. Nevertheless, across schools
school union representatives participated in varying levels of external networking. The
analyses that follow examine whether variations in union representatives’ external social
capital explained the receipt and application of external knowledge for teachers across the
district.
Surveys and Measures
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Our statistical models draw data from two surveys, both of which were administered
in the 2012-2013 school year.
Survey 1
Union reps’ external social capital. In the second half of the 2012-2013 school year,
we administered an online “bounded list” network survey to all school union
representatives in the school district. The survey required users to input login credentials
that allowed us to identify the respondent and their school. After logging in, respondents
were shown a list of the all of schools in the district and asked to place a check box next to
a school if they communicated with at least one person in that school. If they placed a check
box next to a school, the school would appear on a subsequent survey page, with the names
of union reps and teachers and administrators associated with the school displayed in
alphabetical order beneath the school name.
Building from prior literature that emphasizes communication, trust, and shared goals
in determining social capital strength (Leana and Pil 2006), we asked union representatives
to indicate other educators in the district whom they trusted and with whom they shared
goals. In particular, we assessed whether a tie had a high level of social capital via two
questions, displayed next to each name: 1) “My goals are strongly aligned with this
person.” 2) “I have a strong relationship with this person.” For each contact, respondents
could indicate the presence of shared goals and trust by selecting “Yes” in the appropriate
column. We used school union representatives’ strong out-degree ties – i.e., ties that were
reported as being high in trust and shared goals. From here, we calculated the number of
outside schools for which there was at least one high social capital connection. This served
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as a school-level variable for school union representatives’ external social capital. 2i
Although we did not receive a survey from every union representative in the district, we
did receive a survey from at least one union representative at every school (some schools
had more than one union representative). For two schools, we had responses for multiple
union representatives and their responses were combined, such that a tie was assumed to
exist if either indicated its presence.
Across our sample, the average number of union representatives’ external social
capital was 11 (SD: 7.78), meaning that the average union representative held at least one
tie to roughly 11 other schools. These values were coded at the school level for analysis.
Survey 2
Dependent and Moderator Variables. Our dependent and moderator variables come
from a second district-wide survey that was also administered in the second half of the
2012-2013 school year to all teachers. Unlike our social network instrument, this survey
did not track the identities of individual respondents – only the school to which they were
assigned. The survey asked several questions, answered agree to disagree on a scale of one
to four, about whether teachers knew what other schools were doing to improve and
whether their school had directly applied outside knowledge to get better. Specifically: 1)
“I know what other schools in the district are doing to improve their sites”, 2) “I am up to
date with the instructional strategies being used by other schools in the district”, and 3) “I
have directly applied ideas from other schools to improve my teaching.” (Cronbach’s
Although this measure captured the spread of school union representatives’ ties across multiple sites, it was
not sensitive to how many ties existed at a particular site. If a school union representative reported forty
external connections in total, for example, but those connections fell to only 4 different schools, he or she
would be assigned the value of 4. The measure nonetheless gave an indication of the expansiveness of school
union representatives’ connections to other sites across the district.
2
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alpha: .90). These variables were used for the Receipt and Application of External
Knowledge. We measured Partnership Climate, our moderator variable, via three survey
items: 1) “There are open lines of communication and collaboration between the principal
and the union rep”; 2) “Our staff is working collaboratively to promote and ensure the
success of all members of the union/management partnership”; 3) “Our partnership
creates an environment where one can question and/or challenge decisions or policies
without reprisal.” (Cronbach’s alpha: .90). The overall response rate for this second survey
was 65%.
Control Variables. Poverty is highly correlated with student achievement (Rubinstein
and McCarthy, 2012). We controlled for poverty as the percentage of students on reduced
or free because high poverty could increase a school’s perceived need to change (see
Moolenaar, Sleegers and Daly 2012) – including, perhaps, its willingness to adopt external
knowledge. Because our sample consisted of elementary, middle and high schools – which
may vary in size, structure, and strategic priorities – we also controlled for school type
(high schools omitted).
Results
Descriptive statistics and correlations are presented in tables 1 and 2. Regression
models with bootstrapped standard errors (2000 repetitions) are presented in Table 3. Our
control variables, as well as Partnership Climate, are entered in Model 1. Partnership
Climate is positive and statistically significant at conventional thresholds, suggesting that
teachers in schools with stronger labor management partnerships are more likely to receive
24
and make use of external knowledge. As shown, union representatives’ external social
capital, introduced in Model 2, also appears positive and significant (p < .01), explaining
an incremental 20 % of the variance in the receipt and application of external knowledge.
The interaction between union reps external social capital and partnership climate,
introduced in Model 3, is positive and marginally significant (p = .055) and improves the
adjusted R2 by an additional 7 %. The plotted interaction (Figure 1) shows a positive
relationship between union reps’ external social capital in high partnership settings but a
flat, unremarkable association in low partnership settings. Thus, taken together, our
analyses lend support for Hypothesis 1 and marginal support for Hypothesis 2.
[TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE]
[TABLE 2 ABOUT HERE]
[TABLE 3 ABOUT HERE]
[FIGURE 2 ABOUT HERE]
Discussion
Our qualitative and quantitative data across multiple years in a high partnership
school district showed union representatives as externally connected hubs in the school
district’s communication network and suggests that they provide linkages across schools.
Building from this, our most recent data collection effort shows that variations in union
representatives’ external social capital across the district have direct implications for
teachers. In particular, we find evidence that teachers are more aware of other schools’
innovations and are more likely to act on external knowledge when their union
representatives are better connected externally to professionals in other schools. This
suggests that labor management partnerships broadly, and union representatives in
25
specifically, can broaden the intellectual resources available to workers through their
contributions to knowledge exchange and combination with more distant areas of the
organization. The finding also suggests that local unions can contribute to forms of social
capital that add value in ways that are consistent with an organization’s goals.
As a practical implication for school districts, we believe this research suggests that
inter-school knowledge sharing can occur with a minimal increase to the collaborative
obligations placed on teachers. Indeed, some education scholars have been cautious about
collaborative models of school change, because, if done haphazardly, they can distract
teachers and become counter-productive (Little 2005). Our results suggest that union
representatives have the potential to facilitate knowledge diffusion organically – by
broadening the norms associated with the role and scope of their professional
communications. Indeed, most school districts may already have a network of school union
representatives who interact regularly with one another, suggesting an untapped potential.
The district that we studied was able to improve the efficacy of these ties by fostering a
culture of openness and sharing. It was able to expand the roles and expectations of the
union and union representatives – moving them beyond grievance procedures and
negotiations to partnership builders and innovation facilitators.
This study also contributes to theory on organizations and industrial relations.
Although organization scholars have long been interested in workplace institutions that can
facilitate knowledge transfer between workers (e.g., Collins and Smith 2006), labor unions
are seldom a part of the discussion. Indeed, as referenced, industrial relations scholars have
also been wary of unions’ contributions to social capital. We provide evidence supporting
the idea that unions can add value through their contributions to organizational social
26
capital through union related institutions (Rubinstein 2002). Existing research suggests that
labor-management partnerships have the capacity to strengthen collaboration norms within
work groups, including in schools (Rubinstein and McCarthy 2014) – outgrowths of shared
decision-making and accountability (Rubinstein and McCarthy 2014). Our results also
suggest that labor unions can add value to organizations through their boundary-spanning
networks – networks that have the potential to diffuse innovative, improvement-related
ideas that add value to organizations.
Although only marginally significant, we believe that the positive interaction
between union representatives’ external social capital and school partnership climate lends
some support to the idea that labor-management partnerships facilitate innovation through
greater discretion and collective ownership over change initiatives. In low partnership
settings, school improvement strategies are likely to originate from management and be
passed down with little input from faculty. Moreover, in low partnership settings, there
should be less of an incentive for staff to share knowledge, including external knowledge,
because there is less collective ownership over improvement initiatives and less discretion
to do things differently. Research suggests that high partnership settings are likely to be
more dense and collaborative than low partnership settings (Rubinstein and McCarthy
2014), which provide conduits for knowledge dissemination. Teachers in high partnership
settings should also have a greater interest in external knowledge because they have
discretion to act on that knowledge and thus use it to strengthen school or classroom
innovations.
The marginally significant interaction may also point to a central challenge that
accompanies building and spreading labor management partnerships in large, decentralized
27
organizations. Partnerships are complex and operate across multiple levels (Kochan, Adler,
McKersie, Eaton, Segal and Gerhart 2008). Although this research highlights the role that
a district-level partnership played in promoting innovation at the school level and
encouraging inter-school knowledge sharing linkages between schools, the impact of
school union representatives’ boundary spanning connections on knowledge adoption
appeared to hinge on the quality of partnership at lower levels – particularly, the partnership
existing at the level of individual schools. We think that this finding may underscore the
need to establish institutions that foster expectations and commitments across various
organizational levels, and layers of management.
ABC Unified School District has
proactively encouraged school level partnerships but some schools have made considerably
more progress than others.
The role that labor-management partnerships played in promoting school innovation
in this study runs counter to the conventional view that teachers’ unions are antithetical to
innovation and change (e.g., Moe 2009). Indeed, our data in this district showed that school
innovation occurred because of the local union, not in spite of it. At the school level,
likewise, top-down management impeded the inflow and implementation of new
knowledge. We do not imply that our results generalize to other school districts but we do
believe that strong labor management partnerships are attainable and that, over the long
run, they are likely to be more effective and sustainable than reform by bureaucratic
mandate. Moreover, we do not intend to marginalize traditional functions of labor unions
– e.g., providing voice and advocating for labor’s interests. However, strong social capital
supports workers, carrying positive implications for attitudes (e.g., Seibert et al. 2001;
Morrison 2001) as well as performance e.g., (Leana and Pil 2006). Given that through the
28
union network school union representatives often interact with union representatives at
other schools, this study may suggest new roles that these professionals can potentially fill.
Limitations
This research has important limitations. In addition to a cross section of data collected
on a relatively small sample of schools, our research was carried out in a single school
district with a long and unique history. As noted, the school district had worked to build
and sustain partnership for over twenty years and has moved aggressively to spread
partnership to the school level. Our research suggests that the value of union
representatives’ networks depended on partnership at multiple levels: At the district level,
as noted, labor-management partnership helped to establish norms of transparency,
innovation and inter-school sharing. At the school level, partnership between principal and
teachers appeared to affect the deployment or animation of external knowledge. In short,
our results appeared to depend on a system-wide institutional infrastructure. Unfortunately,
effective labor management partnerships in public schools are too rare (Rubinstein and
McCarthy 2012) and this raises some questions about the generalizability of our research.
We nevertheless believe that this study illustrates possibilities with great potential that, to
this point, are not well enough understood or appreciated.
29
Tables and Figures
Table 1. Descriptive statistics
N
Mean
Std. Dev.
Min
Max
Receipt and Application of External
Knowledge
29
2.81
0.55
1.91
3.7
Reps' External Social Capital
29
11.14
7.78
2
28
Partnership Climate
29
3.13
0.35
2.46
3.76
Elementary School
29
0.59
0.50
0
1
Middle School
29
0.17
0.38
0
1
Poverty
29
0.45
0.26
0.10
0.88
5
6
Table 2. Correlations
1
1
Receipt and
Application of
External Knowledge
2
3
4
1
2
Reps' External
Social Capital
0.5734*
1
3
Partnership Climate
0.4832*
0.2251
1
4
Elementary School
-0.0056
-0.1716
0.4448*
1
5
Middle School
0.173
0.0607
-0.1268
-0.5114*
1
6
Poverty
0.1981
-0.0413
0.0047
0.0157
0.02
Note: Two-tailed test. * p < .10
1
30
Table 3. Predictors of the Receipt and Application of External Knowledge
Model 1
Model 2
Elementary School
-0.191
0.0143
[0.263]
[0.239]
Middle School
0.226
0.292
[0.271]
[0.305]
Poverty
0.42
0.457*
[0.353]
[0.275]
Partnership Climate
0.934***
0.642**
[0.293]
[0.287]
H1: Union Rep External Social Capital
0.0339***
[0.0114]
H2: Partnership Climate X Union Rep
External Social Capital
Constant
-0.234
[0.850]
0.153
[0.812]
Model 3
0.019
[0.237]
0.377
[0.300]
0.550*
[0.304]
-0.241
[0.530]
-0.222
[0.135]
0.0826*
[0.0428]
2.771*
[1.534]
Observations
29
29
29
Adj R-squared
0.352
0.549
0.621
Notes: OLS, Bootstrapped standard errors in brackets (2000 reps); *** p<0.01, **
p<0.05, * p<0.1
31
Figure 1. An example of a school in which the union representative has numerous
external linkages outside the school
Notes: These data derive from a 2011 social network survey, mapping
communication patterns throghout a school district. The centrally clustered circles
represent ties among teachers within the same school. More noteworthy are the two
nodes – the principal and school union representative – showing a high number of
communication linkages to professionals in other schools.
32
Figure 2. The interaction between Partnership Climate and Union Rep External
Social Capital in predicting the Receipt and Application of External Knowledge
33
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