Parental ‘intrapreneurship’ in action: theoretical elaboration through the Israeli case study

Abstract

Parents are widely acknowledged as prominent actors in schools’ success; consequently, school–parent interactions are heavily investigated from sociological, psychological, political, and cultural perspectives. By applying the “open system” perspective to schools as an eco-system, this study addresses parents as integrative stakeholders in schools and analyzes parents’ “intrapreneurial” (internally entrepreneurial) behaviors regarding initiation and implementation of new ventures within existing schools. We reveal the circumstances under which such parental initiatives are institutionalized in schools. By doing so, we define a novel concept of parental entrepreneurship and present it within empirical settings. We further characterize this phenomenon in the Israeli education system, including the identification and mapping of the power relations and motivations of different stakeholders involved. Our study uncovers an emerging new pathway for the school–parent academic discourse and notes several practical implications of this discourse for policy-making in this area.