The Differential Effects of Innovation on the Student Social Structure of a High School.

A large high school, from a sociological point of view, is comparable to the other large-scale organizations such as hospitals, governmental, industrial, and business concerns. Such organizations represent webs or networks of interrelated parts with formal and informal structures that constitute the social system. Waller provided the pioneer work in viewing a school as a social system. More recently, the works of Brookover and Gottlieb, Gordon, and Havinghurst and Neugarten have continued to use this orientation. These studies have utilized the functional analysis of social systems which focuses on the functional interrelations of the parts, and the "relevant consequences" of one part, or parts, to the total system. In considering schools as social systems there has been little attention given to innovation and its concomitant effects within the system. Neal Gross recognized this neglected area in the sociology of education and suggested that Gouldner's analysis of the effects of change in the formal structure of a factory might be useful in school systems. Riley and Riley have considered some important theoretical aspects of innovation within school systems. However, their analysis failed to consider the differential effects of innovation in the social system as a result of differing degrees of interdependence of the system parts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]