ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is to explore novice principals’ attempts to make sense of their new organisational roles, challenges and discrepancies. To frame our work, we focused on new comer sense-making perspective of job socialisation. Sense-making is a relevant conceptual perspective through which novice principals come to discover, interpret and respond to their new pluralistic context. Data were drawn from a longitudinal study of novice principals in one of the largest provinces in Saudi Arabia. The analysis focuses on interview data collected from sample of 12 randomly selected newly hired first-time principals after they were selected. We interviewed them before and during the school year. We find that almost all of the novices experienced four main problems of practice – multiple roles, loneliness and isolation, workflow, and legacy and style of former administration. Our conclusions inform the need to focus on the principals’ occupational socialisation.

摘要

本文的目的是探索新手校长试图弄清他们的新组织角色，挑战和差异。为了构筑我们的工作，我们专注于工作社交的新视角。感官是一个相关的概念观点，新手负责人可以通过这些观点来发现，解释和应对其新的多元语境。数据来自沙特阿拉伯最大的省份之一的新手校长的纵向研究。该分析着重于从12名随机选择的新聘初任校长的样本中收集的访谈数据。我们在学年之前和期间采访了他们。我们发现，几乎所有新手都遇到过实践中的四个主要问题-多重角色，孤独与孤立，工作流程，以及前任政府的遗产和风格。我们的结论表明有必要关注校长的职业社会化。