In a book, Youth Conflict: Culture and Control in a Multiethnic Urban High School, forthcoming at University of Chicago Press and discussed at a seminar this week at Scancor, Calvin Morrill at UC Irvine and Michael Musheno of S.F. State/UC Berkeley investigate how processes of conflict resolution are created (and disrupted) in contemporary America.
Drawing upon an array of ethnographic data from a longitudinal study of a multiethnic high school in Arizona, Morrill, Musheno and their colleagues describe formal and informal mechanisms for conflict resolution and how they are practiced at an urban school in Arizona. At the seminar, Morrill described how, tradigically, just after what was believed to be the final data collection had ended, a violent incident erupted at the school with several severe injuries. This led the researchers to go back to the school and continue their studies of violence and violence prevention. Morrill told how the reserach team was emotionally distressed by the incident and that the team, in part, referred to it among themselves as “failure of their own ethnography”. They therefore decided to continue their investigation. Morrill, Musheno, and colleagues found the noticeable pattern that while intra-racial tensions (especially among Mexican-born and U.S.-born Chicano students) persisted at the school, they rarely, if ever, reached the level of collective violence at the school throughout the 1990s. However, after the introduction of “safe school techniques of control” spurred by the ‘Safe Schools Movements’ at the end of the century, ethnic boundaries were heightened through intensified control and surveillance of students on campus whereupon the conditions for intra- and interethnic conflict increased, and the incident of collective violence alluded to above occurred.
The U.S. Safe Schools Movements emerged out of the victims rights, mediation, and various school (anti-gang) reform movements of the 1970s and 1980s. Spurred by the federal funding provided by the Safe Schools Act of 1994 and the intensification of collective fear in the aftermath of the Columbine student massacre in Colorado in 1999 and the 9-11 terrorist attacks, Safe Schools evolved into a mass movement aimed at transforming the physical and social control architectures in U.S. Schools, and in turn, created a large market for services and hardware. By the early 2000s, the schools security market had grown to over 5 billion dollars and had attracted U.S. military defense corporations, such as Lockheed Martin (better known for its manufacture of missles), as key providers of hardware (e.g., electronic surveillance equipment), training, and “secure” designs for schools.
Schools adopt “Safe” programs – including so-called ‘Zero Tolerance programs’ – as part of a standardized set of activities sponsored by school districts, states, and the federal government to prevent violent incidents in troubled schools. Such “safe facilities techniques” includes the setting up of “ring perimeter” fencing around schools (similar to what is used for prisons) and posting armed guards in visible places, the removal of trees, shrubs etc. from school yards and confining students to on campus facilities during breaks and in a small open area call “the quad”. This sounds awfully lot like a prison, right? I am certainly not the first to draw on the analogy, but Morrill ’s pictures and photographs from the high school sparked an interesting discussion in the seminar on how the physical boundaries of a school affects the interaction and specifically the conflict-reducing possibilities in a multi-ethnic schools.
An engineering professor at the seminar noticed that the the literature on ‘prison design’ tells that it is well known that spatial proximity and the amount of physical space alloted to prisoners is strongly related to violent incidents among prisoners and between prisoners and guards. Specifically, conflicts tend to escalate and move from dyadic conflicts (Bill mocks Gonzales) towards etnic conflicts (the whities are fighting the mehicanos) when prisoners interact in barren ‘free’ areas without facilities. At this point a sociology professor replied that it seems that restructuring the formal structure of the organization (school) disrupted the informal mechanisms for conflict resolution that had evolved, with the result of heightneded racial tensions. Interestingly, these patterns are similar to Morrill’s earlier ethnographic work on how matrix-style organizations and the pervasive threath of hostile takeovers affected conflict management among American executives. This should have implications for organization research in general and research on organizational redesign/change in particular: If attempts at organizational restructuring (or so called ‘re-engineering’ as was popular in the 90s) fail to account for the informal ways of dealing with conflicts that develop in workplaces and organizations, the new organizational structure will at best lead to some type of decoupling between formal structure and informal behavior, at worst leading to the opposite outcome as envisioned by heightening conflicts, such as in the Arizona high school.
According to Morrill, informal conflict resolution evolve through the interaction of social structures with symbolic systems that are rooted in behavioral patterns. For example, the social structure of efficient yet concensus-oriented meetings common in Sweden would never work without the symbolic of everyone turning up at the 9-a clock coffee break – where conflicts and delicate issues can be (sometimes) informally discussed and negotiated.
Discussing the Scancor seminar with some friends, I came to think of the good old rat experiments we had to digest as undergrad students in psychology where manipulating the physical structure of mouse cages led to more(less) fights among the mice and less(more) small micelings being born if their physical space was decreased(increased).
Conclusion: No love in a safe school? Comments are welcome.
In any case, this will be a great book for anyone interested in the politics of power, education, and system justification theory.
