The purpose of this study was to understand how leaders enact justice in their discipline decisions using organizational justice (consisting of procedural, distributive and interactional justice) and restorative justice as analytic categories for leader’s actions.
This study drew on semi-structured interview data of 50 school leaders in a single US state. Leaders worked in a heterogeneous set of schools with respect to size, urbanicity/rurality and grade level, and varied in experience. Data was analyzed with respect to preestablished categories of justice; findings are reported by theme themes with leaders’ actions are evaluated for alignment and divergence from scholarly accounts.
We find that leaders attended strongly to relationships, in keeping with interactional justice, but focused on cameras and protocols for procedural justice and on a preventative approach for distributive justice which are less well aligned with ideal descriptions of these categories.
While many studies have examined leaders’ approaches to student discipline, this is the first study that has examined leaders’ actions using multiple preestablished categories of justice to characterize leaders’ actions. The substantive contribution of this piece is the revelation that satisfying one dimension of justice can mask structural failures in another.
