David K Diehl
Biographic Data
| ID | 280623 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David K Diehl |
| GIVEN NAMES | David K |
| FAMILY NAME | Diehl |
| SIGNATURE | DIEHL D K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Vanderbilt University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3043-809X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 200 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Racial Homophily in Context: Tie Types and Organizational Composition in Teacher Networks
Purpose: Racial homophily—the tendency to form ties with same-race colleagues—is common in workplace networks, including schools. But we know less about how it varies across relationship types and organizational racial composition. We examine racial homophily in teachers’ instructional advice, disciplinary advice, and friendship networks, comparing Black and White teachers in majority-White and majority-Black schools. Research Methods/Approach: U…
What is school culture? Proposing a new, integrative model
For decades, the term ‘school culture’ has been widely used in scholarly, policy, and popular discussions of education, school reform, and school leadership. Yet, school culture remains an abstract term, and different definitions abound. Moreover, important research on aspects of the school environment often does not fall under the purview of school culture research. Drawing from recent work in organizational sociology and cultural sociology, we …
Forms of culture in the implementation of school reform efforts: A conceptual framework
Despite concerted efforts to improve educational practices through reform, classroom implementation remains a persistent challenge. This theoretical article draws on recent work in cultural sociology to offer a fresh perspective on this problem. It introduces a framework that differentiates between declarative, procedural, and public forms of culture, highlighting their unique mechanisms of internalization and enactment. This multidimensional und…
Framing School Integration: A Computational Analysis of Newspaper Discourse, 1990-2020
Research on public opinion finds that most Americans support the racial integration of schools in theory. At the same time, however, they tend to oppose specific policies for achieving it. How is it that the American public comes to conceive of school integration as both an abstract idea and a set of concrete policies? Research has shown that one major source of the public's understanding of complex social issues like school integration are news …
What exactly is “social” about social networks: Accounting for socio-cultural context in networks of human interaction
An Integrated Framework for Studying How Schools Respond to External Pressures
The changing educational landscape requires new organizational frameworks to understand how schools and universities make sense of and respond to broader institutional forces like accountability, diversity, and the market. In this article, we draw on recent innovations in organizational theory to propose a model that identifies two general processes through which pressures from the environment shape educational practice in schools: filtering and …
Educational belief systems among American parents: Exploring the relationship between integration, testing, and enhanced academics
Current research typically uses surveys to study parental preferences but examines the responses in isolation from each other. A key insight from the sociology of culture and political psychology, however, is that the meaning of responses in opinion data comes from their relationships with one another. To make progress in understanding the meaning of parental preferences, it is necessary to study their educational belief systems - the structural …
Beyond composition: What the study of diversity in K12 schools can learn from research in higher education
Several decades of interdisciplinary research have demonstrated the benefits of racially and ethnically integrated K12 schools. However, there is still much we do not know about what happens inside diverse schools that lead to these outcomes. In this article, we argue that the study of diversity in higher education, with its greater focus on internal institutional dynamics and a broader range of outcomes, can help K12 researchers fill in these ga…
The Ongoing Domestication of Global Models: Explaining the Evolution of Multicultural Education across the Anglosphere
Despite their political and cultural similarities, Anglosphere countries have developed distinct national multicultural education policies. These policy differences can be understood by examining the interrelated ways these nations domesticated multiple global cultural models over time. First, in response to the model of multiculturalism, Anglosphere nations decided whether or not to adopt official national multicultural policies. Second, in resp…
Beyond the Disposition and Deliberation Dichotomy: The Interrelation of Teacher Habit and Intention in the Adoption of Student Advisories
Using the example of teachers implementing student advisories as part of a larger school reform effort, this article proposes a rethinking of the dichotomous relationship between disposition and deliberation posited by much of the sociological literature. Running student advisories may be a challenge for teachers if they lack the dispositions necessary for providing students with social-emotional support and guidance. Current sociological theory,…
Charter School Authorizations as Disputes: How School Board Members Justify Their Votes in a Neoliberal Context 1
For charter schools to open they must gain the approval of an authorizing body, most commonly a local school board. When deciding whether or not to authorize a particular charter, school board members often engage in public disputes that entail clashes between multiple and conflicting conceptualizations of the goals of education. Drawing on insights from pragmatic sociology and institutional theory, this paper examines videos of 119 public meetin…
The multiplexity of professional learning communities: Exploring the co-evolution of teacher social networks
Research on teacher professional learning communities (PLCs) has found that part of their benefit comes from increased collegiality. And yet, while the nature of such collegiality is theoretically multifaceted and includes a combination of instrumental, expressive and substantive relationships, this multidimensional nature of PLCs is almost never studied directly. In this paper, I fill that gap by examining the dynamics of relationship formation …
The Relationship Between Personality Traits and Interracial Contact on Campus
It is not well understood why, on diverse college campuses, some students are more likely than others to engage in interracial contact. While research has begun to examine the role of individual differences like personality traits, results have thus far been mixed. This article asks if this might be the result of confounding different forms of interracial contact. Using a sample of nearly 500 university students and drawing on distinctions made i…
Foster care for teenagers: Motivators, barriers, and strategies to overcome barriers
Experience: New Foundations for the Human Sciences
Teacher Professional Learning Communities and Institutional Complexity: Negotiating Tensions between Institutional Logics
In recent years, work in organizational theory has increasingly drawn upon the concept of institutional logics, the “assumptions, values, beliefs and rules” that provide the organizing principles f
The Organization of Schools and Classrooms
Schools are complex organizations and their functioning involves far more than just the delivery of academic content. Existing research establishes the importance of taking such organizational features into account in examining how important school outcomes such as academic achievement are shaped by the relationships, interactions, and experiences of students and teachers. Standard approaches, however; tend to treat the organizational structures …
Network Ecology and Adolescent Social Structure
Adolescent societies-whether arising from weak, short-term classroom friendships or from close, long-term friendships-exhibit various levels of network clustering, segregation, and hierarchy. Some are rank-ordered caste systems and others are flat, cliquish worlds. Explaining the source of such structural variation remains a challenge, however, because global network features are generally treated as the agglomeration of micro-level tie-formation…
Classroom Ordering and the Situational Imperatives of Routine and Ritual
This article contends that the problem of classroom order rests less in the roles and compositions of classrooms than in the multidimensional nature of their social situations. Classroom order arises from the dynamic relationship between distinct situational requirements: the coordination of interaction into institutionalized patterns (routine) and the validation of participants' identities (ritual). Utilizing a unique data set of more than 800,0…
Toward a Historical Sociology of Social Situations
In recent years there has been a growing call to historicize sociology by paying more attention to the contextual importance of time and place as well as to issues of process and contingency. Meeting this goal requires bringing historical sociology and interactionism into greater conversation via a historical theory of social situations. Toward this end, the authors of this article draw on Erving Goffman's work in Frame Analysis to conceptualize …
Network Ecology and Adolescent Social Structure
Adolescent societies-whether arising from weak, short-term classroom friendships or from close, long-term friendships-exhibit various levels of network clustering, segregation, and hierarchy. Some are rank-ordered caste systems and others are flat, cliquish worlds. Explaining the source of such structural variation remains a challenge, however, because global network features are generally treated as the agglomeration of micro-level tie-formation…
Toward a Historical Sociology of Social Situations
In recent years there has been a growing call to historicize sociology by paying more attention to the contextual importance of time and place as well as to issues of process and contingency. Meeting this goal requires bringing historical sociology and interactionism into greater conversation via a historical theory of social situations. Toward this end, the authors of this article draw on Erving Goffman's work in Frame Analysis to conceptualize …
Classroom Ordering and the Situational Imperatives of Routine and Ritual
This article contends that the problem of classroom order rests less in the roles and compositions of classrooms than in the multidimensional nature of their social situations. Classroom order arises from the dynamic relationship between distinct situational requirements: the coordination of interaction into institutionalized patterns (routine) and the validation of participants' identities (ritual). Utilizing a unique data set of more than 800,0…
An Integrated Framework for Studying How Schools Respond to External Pressures
The changing educational landscape requires new organizational frameworks to understand how schools and universities make sense of and respond to broader institutional forces like accountability, diversity, and the market. In this article, we draw on recent innovations in organizational theory to propose a model that identifies two general processes through which pressures from the environment shape educational practice in schools: filtering and …
Experience: New Foundations for the Human Sciences
Teacher Professional Learning Communities and Institutional Complexity: Negotiating Tensions between Institutional Logics
In recent years, work in organizational theory has increasingly drawn upon the concept of institutional logics, the “assumptions, values, beliefs and rules” that provide the organizing principles f
Charter School Authorizations as Disputes: How School Board Members Justify Their Votes in a Neoliberal Context 1
For charter schools to open they must gain the approval of an authorizing body, most commonly a local school board. When deciding whether or not to authorize a particular charter, school board members often engage in public disputes that entail clashes between multiple and conflicting conceptualizations of the goals of education. Drawing on insights from pragmatic sociology and institutional theory, this paper examines videos of 119 public meetin…
Foster care for teenagers: Motivators, barriers, and strategies to overcome barriers
Beyond the Disposition and Deliberation Dichotomy: The Interrelation of Teacher Habit and Intention in the Adoption of Student Advisories
Using the example of teachers implementing student advisories as part of a larger school reform effort, this article proposes a rethinking of the dichotomous relationship between disposition and deliberation posited by much of the sociological literature. Running student advisories may be a challenge for teachers if they lack the dispositions necessary for providing students with social-emotional support and guidance. Current sociological theory,…
The multiplexity of professional learning communities: Exploring the co-evolution of teacher social networks
Research on teacher professional learning communities (PLCs) has found that part of their benefit comes from increased collegiality. And yet, while the nature of such collegiality is theoretically multifaceted and includes a combination of instrumental, expressive and substantive relationships, this multidimensional nature of PLCs is almost never studied directly. In this paper, I fill that gap by examining the dynamics of relationship formation …
The Relationship Between Personality Traits and Interracial Contact on Campus
It is not well understood why, on diverse college campuses, some students are more likely than others to engage in interracial contact. While research has begun to examine the role of individual differences like personality traits, results have thus far been mixed. This article asks if this might be the result of confounding different forms of interracial contact. Using a sample of nearly 500 university students and drawing on distinctions made i…
Framing School Integration: A Computational Analysis of Newspaper Discourse, 1990-2020
Research on public opinion finds that most Americans support the racial integration of schools in theory. At the same time, however, they tend to oppose specific policies for achieving it. How is it that the American public comes to conceive of school integration as both an abstract idea and a set of concrete policies? Research has shown that one major source of the public's understanding of complex social issues like school integration are news …
Toward a Historical Sociology of Social Situations
In recent years there has been a growing call to historicize sociology by paying more attention to the contextual importance of time and place as well as to issues of process and contingency. Meeting this goal requires bringing historical sociology and interactionism into greater conversation via a historical theory of social situations. Toward this end, the authors of this article draw on Erving Goffman's work in Frame Analysis to conceptualize …
Classroom Ordering and the Situational Imperatives of Routine and Ritual
This article contends that the problem of classroom order rests less in the roles and compositions of classrooms than in the multidimensional nature of their social situations. Classroom order arises from the dynamic relationship between distinct situational requirements: the coordination of interaction into institutionalized patterns (routine) and the validation of participants' identities (ritual). Utilizing a unique data set of more than 800,0…
Network Ecology and Adolescent Social Structure
Adolescent societies-whether arising from weak, short-term classroom friendships or from close, long-term friendships-exhibit various levels of network clustering, segregation, and hierarchy. Some are rank-ordered caste systems and others are flat, cliquish worlds. Explaining the source of such structural variation remains a challenge, however, because global network features are generally treated as the agglomeration of micro-level tie-formation…
The Organization of Schools and Classrooms
Schools are complex organizations and their functioning involves far more than just the delivery of academic content. Existing research establishes the importance of taking such organizational features into account in examining how important school outcomes such as academic achievement are shaped by the relationships, interactions, and experiences of students and teachers. Standard approaches, however; tend to treat the organizational structures …
Foster care for teenagers: Motivators, barriers, and strategies to overcome barriers
Experience: New Foundations for the Human Sciences
Teacher Professional Learning Communities and Institutional Complexity: Negotiating Tensions between Institutional Logics
In recent years, work in organizational theory has increasingly drawn upon the concept of institutional logics, the “assumptions, values, beliefs and rules” that provide the organizing principles f
Charter School Authorizations as Disputes: How School Board Members Justify Their Votes in a Neoliberal Context 1
For charter schools to open they must gain the approval of an authorizing body, most commonly a local school board. When deciding whether or not to authorize a particular charter, school board members often engage in public disputes that entail clashes between multiple and conflicting conceptualizations of the goals of education. Drawing on insights from pragmatic sociology and institutional theory, this paper examines videos of 119 public meetin…
The multiplexity of professional learning communities: Exploring the co-evolution of teacher social networks
Research on teacher professional learning communities (PLCs) has found that part of their benefit comes from increased collegiality. And yet, while the nature of such collegiality is theoretically multifaceted and includes a combination of instrumental, expressive and substantive relationships, this multidimensional nature of PLCs is almost never studied directly. In this paper, I fill that gap by examining the dynamics of relationship formation …
The Relationship Between Personality Traits and Interracial Contact on Campus
It is not well understood why, on diverse college campuses, some students are more likely than others to engage in interracial contact. While research has begun to examine the role of individual differences like personality traits, results have thus far been mixed. This article asks if this might be the result of confounding different forms of interracial contact. Using a sample of nearly 500 university students and drawing on distinctions made i…
Beyond composition: What the study of diversity in K12 schools can learn from research in higher education
Several decades of interdisciplinary research have demonstrated the benefits of racially and ethnically integrated K12 schools. However, there is still much we do not know about what happens inside diverse schools that lead to these outcomes. In this article, we argue that the study of diversity in higher education, with its greater focus on internal institutional dynamics and a broader range of outcomes, can help K12 researchers fill in these ga…
The Ongoing Domestication of Global Models: Explaining the Evolution of Multicultural Education across the Anglosphere
Despite their political and cultural similarities, Anglosphere countries have developed distinct national multicultural education policies. These policy differences can be understood by examining the interrelated ways these nations domesticated multiple global cultural models over time. First, in response to the model of multiculturalism, Anglosphere nations decided whether or not to adopt official national multicultural policies. Second, in resp…
Beyond the Disposition and Deliberation Dichotomy: The Interrelation of Teacher Habit and Intention in the Adoption of Student Advisories
Using the example of teachers implementing student advisories as part of a larger school reform effort, this article proposes a rethinking of the dichotomous relationship between disposition and deliberation posited by much of the sociological literature. Running student advisories may be a challenge for teachers if they lack the dispositions necessary for providing students with social-emotional support and guidance. Current sociological theory,…
Educational belief systems among American parents: Exploring the relationship between integration, testing, and enhanced academics
Current research typically uses surveys to study parental preferences but examines the responses in isolation from each other. A key insight from the sociology of culture and political psychology, however, is that the meaning of responses in opinion data comes from their relationships with one another. To make progress in understanding the meaning of parental preferences, it is necessary to study their educational belief systems - the structural …
What exactly is “social” about social networks: Accounting for socio-cultural context in networks of human interaction
An Integrated Framework for Studying How Schools Respond to External Pressures
The changing educational landscape requires new organizational frameworks to understand how schools and universities make sense of and respond to broader institutional forces like accountability, diversity, and the market. In this article, we draw on recent innovations in organizational theory to propose a model that identifies two general processes through which pressures from the environment shape educational practice in schools: filtering and …
Framing School Integration: A Computational Analysis of Newspaper Discourse, 1990-2020
Research on public opinion finds that most Americans support the racial integration of schools in theory. At the same time, however, they tend to oppose specific policies for achieving it. How is it that the American public comes to conceive of school integration as both an abstract idea and a set of concrete policies? Research has shown that one major source of the public's understanding of complex social issues like school integration are news …
What is school culture? Proposing a new, integrative model
For decades, the term ‘school culture’ has been widely used in scholarly, policy, and popular discussions of education, school reform, and school leadership. Yet, school culture remains an abstract term, and different definitions abound. Moreover, important research on aspects of the school environment often does not fall under the purview of school culture research. Drawing from recent work in organizational sociology and cultural sociology, we …
Forms of culture in the implementation of school reform efforts: A conceptual framework
Despite concerted efforts to improve educational practices through reform, classroom implementation remains a persistent challenge. This theoretical article draws on recent work in cultural sociology to offer a fresh perspective on this problem. It introduces a framework that differentiates between declarative, procedural, and public forms of culture, highlighting their unique mechanisms of internalization and enactment. This multidimensional und…
Racial Homophily in Context: Tie Types and Organizational Composition in Teacher Networks
Purpose: Racial homophily—the tendency to form ties with same-race colleagues—is common in workplace networks, including schools. But we know less about how it varies across relationship types and organizational racial composition. We examine racial homophily in teachers’ instructional advice, disciplinary advice, and friendship networks, comparing Black and White teachers in majority-White and majority-Black schools. Research Methods/Approach: U…
Sociology (18 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Political science (12 works) · Social Psychology (10 works) · Teacher Education and Leadership Studies (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Pedagogy (8 works) · Social science (8 works) · Law (6 works) · Public relations (6 works)