Working Within the Scripts: Building Institutional Infrastructure for Children's Service Coordination in Schools

Abstract

This article describes and discusses theoretically the development of a new institutional infrastructure for service coordination in a university-community- school partnership project in Chicago. Using insights from the New Institutionalism, it examines 5 aspects of infrastructure: (a) convening and goal-structuring processes, (b) institutional interests and reward systems, (c) relations to external environments through institutional activity, (d) communication linkages, and (e) institutional conventions. The findings reveal that most progress in developing infrastructure for service coordination in this Chicago case has grown out of the embedded routines or "scripts" that give structure and definition to the school as an institution. Efforts to develop coordinated activity that have come from outside those scripts and have attempted to change organizational behavior directly have been less successful. The importance of institutional considerations in promoting service coordination is explored along with other implications for policy.