抄録
The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between organizational decision-making in the school and teacher autonomy by focusing on cultural, organizational and pedagogical discourses narrated by teachers in regard to their own organizational behaviors and autonomous practices. The main data for this paper was gathered in a public junior high school over two years since April 200X. Various discourses not only regulate teacher's organizational behaviors and autonomous practices but also function as interpretive frameworks with regards to their actions to students. Through the medium of various discourses, reciprocal regulations between organizational decision-making and teacher's autonomous practices have emerged as follows. Teachers interpret their silent membership in the organizational decision-making process as appropriate behavior by narrating "new comer", "plural values of education" and "busyness". These patterned discourses function to allow teachers to avoid conflict with their colleagues. The tendency of concert with colleagues is one of the characteristics of the culture as a Japanese teacher, so these patterned discourses can be called "cultural discourses". Since cultural discourses regulate and interpret the teacher's silent membership in staff meetings, bills are passed without making a fuss. However, this undermines the efficacy of democratic characteristics, which are the basis of organizational discourses. Such cultural discourses result in teachers treating organizational decision-making as someone else's problem. Teachers share the organizational discourses that staff must accept organizational decision-making. However, they counter this norm by narrating pedagogical discourses that teachers sometimes need to behave free from organizational decisions to value a trustworthy relationship with students. Thus teachers can interpret their deviant practices from organizational decisions as appropriate. Pedagogical discourses enable teachers to practice autonomously. Teachers will accept organizational decision-making because in reality they can practice free from determinations. The relationship between organizational decision-making and teacher autonomy can be explained through the paradox that teachers decide to do something so as not to be obliged to do it. On the other hand, in order to make teachers perform their duties devotedly, some actors make an attempt to narrate other discourses, which articulate some determinations about school rules with imperative duties, such as avoiding public nuisance or risk for students. The relationships which emerge through interactions of various discourses can be understood as dynamic micro-politics rather than static orders among actors in the school.
