Chapter 4: Bridging and Buffering Parent Involvement in Schools: Managing Exchanges of Social and Cultural Resources¹

Informed by concepts drawn from a contingency theory of organizations, this exploratory study examines the ways in which two elementary schools manage relations with students’ parents. The findings suggest that contingency theory provides a heuristic that generally illuminates school-family relations. Because schools depend on parents to provide important resources, they bridge to parents by communicating, co-opting, bargaining, contracting, coaching and serving. Because parents can also pose three types of uncertainty—diversity of family backgrounds, instability and threat—the schools buffer parent influence by coding inputs and limiting access. However, the findings also suggest that the resources that schools depend on families to provide and, hence, the strategies that schools employ to manage relations with parents diverge in important ways from contingency theory. The schools chiefly depend on parents to provide socio-cultural, not material, resources. Thus, the schools utilize strategies—such as communication—that rely on teachers, more than administrators or school-level programs, to shape rather than diminish their dependence on parents. Moreover, the cases suggest that mismatches between the socio-cultural order of schools and the socio-cultural resources of some parents, particularly those from low income or minority ethno-linguistic backgrounds or both, can severely compromise the capacity of schools to engage those parents.