School-Level Bureaucrats: How High School Counselors Inhabit the Conflicting Logics of Their Work

Through three years of training, school counselors build a professional identity based on providing social-emotional, academic, and postsecondary guidance to students. But school counselors face conflict in meeting these expectations in a bureaucratic environment that asks them to prioritize efficiency when meeting with students rather than building one-on-one relationships. I draw from interviews with high school counselors and school personnel and a year of observations to study the institutional logics that govern their work and use inhabited institutional theory to study how time scarcity shaped how counselors interpreted these conflicting macro-level logics in their micro-level interactions. The counselors in this study developed patterns of practice that helped them manage this conflict, negotiating but eventually settling with nonideal strategies in the best way they could with the resources made available to them. Efforts to reject the efficiency model were met with pushback from school leaders and unintended consequences for counselors and students alike. The conflict inherent in their work left little room for the mental health or postsecondary counseling they expect and are trained to provide.