The Face-Work of the Russian Teachers in the Case of Low Pupil Achievement

Teachers and school administrators educate children in an environment filled with various institutionalised rules. These rules function as rationalised myths, thus, by maintaining the appearance of their effectiveness, teachers and school administrators preserve the legitimacy of their own school and their self-image as conscientious and competent workers. They decouple their actual work activities from institutionalised rules and use the logic of confidence to this end. However, when low pupil achievement becomes an unavoidable incident, the school personnel cannot rely on avoidance, discretion, and overlooking as face-saving practices, as presented in the classic work on organisational sociology. On the basis of material from participant observation of school board meetings in one Russian educational organisation, the author of this article describes the repertoire of face-saving techniques used by teachers and school administrators to correct the symbolic consequences of the low educational results of their students. This paper also shows how such ritual activities of school workers are embedded in the domain of their professional operations and decisions. Through the analysis of the empirical data, the researcher establishes the duality of the ceremonial role of school administrators: they are both the challengers and the offenders responsible for the incident; thus, they have to do additional face-work in order to cope with the ritual tensions arising from their structural position.