Prescriptions for school administration, especially those emerging from school improvement and effective schools research, typically present an exclusively rational view of the process--one devoid of feelings and full of unexamined values. Gordon suggests that the institutional norms recommended by such research are at best the "trappings of thought" (1984, p. 46) which must be utilized by real people who think in radically different ways depending on how they perceive situations. For example, the variety of responses within schools to an educational innovation such as computers can range from perceiving computers as a threat to welcoming them as an emancipatory marvel. The existence of multiple responses to a single innovation, sometimes within a single organization unit, suggests that we will not really understand how to make schools better until we better appreciate why people in those schools think the way they do about schools and what goes on in them.
This study, part of a long-term research program, was aimed at exploring the nature, causes, and consequences of school administrators' practices (see Leithwood, Cousins, & Begley, in press). Early stages of this research focused primarily on what principals do--their practices (e.g., Leithwood & Montgomery, 1982, 1986). More recently, attention within the research program has shifted to the causes of such practices and, in particular, the internal mental states or thinking processes employed by individuals (e.g.