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The evidence is strong that the instability of teacher rosters in urban school settings has negative consequences for student learning, but our concern is with the opposite phenomenon: What is the value added to the organization when a school's teaching roster is stable over time? Our theory of teacher corps stability hinges on the claim that the stability of a teacher corps over time is a sine qua non that, under certain conditions, permits formation of the social capital needed to catalyze school effectiveness.

We test this claim using longitudinal data from 72 schools in a large, urban southwestern US school district. We first identified a subset of 47 schools with either chronic teacher turnover (high, stable turnover) or a stable teacher roster (low, stable turnover) via school-level HLM growth modeling techniques. These classifications were then used as a covariate in a series of HLM growth models investigating its relationship to growth in structural, relational and cognitive social capital over time.

Our findings sustain a claim of the importance of teacher corps stability. In our sample of urban schools, we found robust increases in the relational and cognitive dimensions of social capital over time in those schools with stable rosters. Furthermore, schools with chronic turnover were declining significantly in relational social capital, but no appreciable growth in structural social capital was found in either stable roster or chronic teacher turnover schools.

Given the nature of teacher corps stability and its relationship to key organizational outcomes, school leaders play a central role in realizing teacher corps stability within their school. A certain amount of this effort must necessarily be focused on retaining a stable corps of quality, happy, committed teachers. However, building social capital concerns the active engagement of all actors; thus, school leaders need to think beyond retention to how the teachers that remain can play larger leadership roles in this process.

Few studies have examined the positive benefits that can emerge in schools where the majority of teachers remain year after year. Collectively, the study findings suggest that teacher corps stability can provide fertile conditions for the development of social capital that has the potential to enhance school effectiveness and that its staff can leverage for school improvement.

Early conceptual thinking about distrust and more recent neurological evidence reveals that distrust is not the same as low trust. They are distinct mental states, active in different brain regions and shaped by different experiences. We use this evidence to conceptualize teacher distrust in the school principal and to construct a set of hypotheses for empirical testing.

A correlational research design with teacher survey data was used for the empirical study. Teacher survey data came from a sample of high school teachers in a metropolitan area of a southwestern state in the United States. A total of 801 high school teachers received an electronic survey by email. Useable responses were received from 416 teachers, leading to a 52% response rate. Hypotheses were tested with structural equation modeling in AMOS 28 using Robust Maximum Likelihood estimation.

The empirical evidence demonstrates that distrust and trust have different antecedents and that these perceptions have opposite relationships with teacher work stress and loyalty behaviors.

This study is a first step toward better understanding the distinction between distrust and trust in school role-relationships.

Describes Willower’s considered and valued role as a professor and reviews aspects of his career. Notes how Willower advocated bringing the work of the practitioner and the scholar closer together and the need to blend knowledge, values, and method. These characteristics contributed to Willower’s substantial role in the foundation and continuing development of the University Council for Educational Administration.

To investigate the consequences of relational trust, especially parent measured trust, for desirable school outcomes.

Using a US Midwestern state sample of 79 schools, parent and teacher trust data are used to derive a trust‐effectiveness typology. Trust was conceptualized as one party's willingness to be vulnerable to another party based on the confidence that the latter party is benevolent, reliable, competent, honest, and open.

Findings derived from the extraction of canonical correlation variates support the prediction that a complex and extensive trust environment is predictive of internal school conditions and consequences, even after accounting for socioeconomic status of the school community. Four theoretical trust‐effectiveness patterns emerge from the interpretation.

The research design was planned as a school level study. Perceptual data collected at the individual level were intended for aggregation thus, nested analyses were not possible. Other evidence is offered for justification of aggregations.

Researchers and school leaders need to consider a broad trust environment as having relevance for predicting and enacting school success, not just those trust levels that can be measured as teacher perceptions.

Previous school trust research, when it has considered parent trust, measured it as a teacher perception. This study measures parent trust directly and hence more credibly. The empirically derived trust‐effectiveness school types introduce the possibility that “high teacher trust” can sometimes be part of a menacing school pattern.

Recent scholarship has augmented Bandura's theory underlying efficacy formation by pointing to more proximate sources of efficacy information involved in forming collective teacher efficacy. These proximate sources of efficacy information theoretically shape a teacher's perception of the teaching context, operationalizing the difficulty of the teaching task that faces the school and the faculty's collective competence to be successful under specific conditions. The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of three contextual variables: socioeconomic status, school level, and school structure on teacher perceptions of collective efficacy.

School level data were collected from a cross‐section of 79 schools in a Midwestern state. Data were analyzed at the school level using hierarchical multiple regression to determine the incremental variance in collective teacher efficacy beliefs attributed to contextual variables after accounting for the effect of prior academic performance.

Results support the premise that contextual variables do add power to explanations of collective teacher efficacy over and above the effects of prior academic performance. Further, of the three contextual variables school structure independently accounted for the most variability in perceptions of collective teacher efficacy.

A sample of 79 schools was considered small to accurately test a hypothesized model of collective teacher efficacy formation using structural equation modeling. That approach would have had the advantage of permitting the researchers to identify the relationships among the predictor variables and between the predictors and the criterion. Additionally, there was a concern of possible aggregation bias associated with aggregating collective teacher efficacy scores to the school level. Despite these limitations, the findings hold theoretical and practical implications in that they defend the theoretical importance of contextual factors as efficacy sources. Furthermore, formalized and centralized conditions conducive to promoting perceptions of collective efficacy in teachers are identified.

Extant collective efficacy studies have generally not operationalized Bandura's efficacy sources to include the effects of current context. This study does.

Much of the prior research into information systems (IS) workers has assumed that they are professionals. In this paper we examine the characteristics of IS workers, IS work and the IS workplace, and suggest that this perspective is mistaken. Drawing on the sociological theory of professions as a reference discipline we contend that IS professionalism is an inappropriate categorization, and that such a portrayal limits our understanding of IS workers and their work. We argue in this paper that a more faithful and potentially useful characterization is to view IS workers as members of an occupational group. Within this perspective, an understanding of the occupational culture, context and history of IS workers is essential to an understanding of the IS occupation. We examine and challenge some common myths regarding IS work, technology and the IS workplace. We conclude by making some recommendations for future research, which should enhance our understanding of IS workers as members of an occupation.