‘Taking root and growing wings’: on the concept of glocality from the perspectives of school principals in Israel

Education policy, in Israel and worldwide, proclaims the importance of the autonomy of principal agents, including school principals, as a solution to the challenges of developing and maintaining systemic agility, innovativeness, and responsibility. Given the intensity of the glocalisation of education, where educators are simultaneously evaluated according to global standards and according to criteria related to satisfying local constituents and needs, the role of school principals as agents of glocalisation has gained particular significance. In other words, school principals, by holding positions akin to middle managers in multinational firms or to street-level bureaucrats in public agencies, are afforded the opportunity to mitigate these global standards and recommendations, accommodating them to local demands, needs, and preferences. Therefore, formally, even if rarely in practice, school principals are furnished with autonomy and responsibility for their school operations and performance and for their students’ achievement and well-being, while also being made accountable to their superiors in authorising agencies (the national ministry, the district’s education agency, and the municipality’s education agency; that is, upward accountability) and to their schools’ teachers, parents, and communities (i.e. downward accountability). As one Israeli school principal told us: ‘Our role compels us to simultaneously take root and grow wings,’ meaning to be firmly connected to the Israeli context, while also aspiring to global heights. In this policy context, where school principals are formally ascribed the professional authority to balance and negotiate global and local demands, and where the autonomy of school principals is a frequently used mantra (e.g. You & Morris, 2015), it is important to consider whether school principals also perceive their role as agents of glocalisation.

Recent attention to glocalisation, partly because of its orientation towards issues of management and organisation (Bromley & Meyer, 2015; Drori, Höllerer, & Walgenbach, 2014a), has diverted attention to the role of social actors, or social agents, in the related processes of diffusion, adoption, and adaptation. Such agents of glocalisation – be they individuals, organisations, or nation states – are understood to embody ideas and practices, directing their involvement and institutional work towards the global and cross-national processes of translation and advocacy (see Greenwood, Suddaby, & Hinings, 2002; Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006; Sahlin-Andersson & Engwall, 2002). Likewise, recent work on the role of experts and professionals in glocalisation focuses primarily on their formal roles and on their constitution by the complex conditions of global–local encounters (e.g. Carney, 2014; Engwall, 2014; Frenkel, 2014). It has been widely recognised that the prominence of professionals as agents of global-diffusion processes draws upon their possession of theorised and universalised knowledge – of both the process (how to diffuse, adopt, and adapt to glocality) and the content (what should be diffused, adapted, and adopted to form the glocal; see Greenwood et al., 2002). Still, little research addresses their outlook on, or perception of, their glocal position. Rather, the bourgeoning work on professionals and managers in global and cross-cultural circumstances (see Gelfand, Erez, & Aycan, 2007; Tsui, Nifadkar, & Amy Yi Ou, 2007) and more recently also in glocal situations (see Delmestri, 2006, 2014) centres on identities, overlooking the sociological understanding of social roles. But studying the social role of agents – namely the views, opinions, and expectations they regard as constituting their professional authority, here as agents of glocalisation – is important mainly because such role perception is the foundation for subsequent action as translators and the activation of policy implementation. Therefore, our guiding research question is: How do school principals understand their professional role as agents of glocalisation? To unpack the notion of glocal role perception, we propose two dimensions: glocal orientation and glocal sense of practice. This approach, and especially the findings from applying this approach to interview data, allows us to propose a novel outlook on glocality. We argue that, from the perspective of the agents of glocalisation, and specifically from the viewpoint of school principals in Israel, we (1) redefine glocality as a matter of orientation and (2) extract a typology of the practice of glocalisation, differentiating between hybrid glocality and strategic glocality.

This study engages with three social science conversations. First, the notion of glocalisation has been widely recognised as the fusion of the global and the local, thus challenging unidirectional perspectives of top-down or bottom-up globalisation flows. However, only recently has attention been directed to the behaviours, opinions, and characteristics of the agents of glocalisation. By considering the extent to which school principals understand their role as also being responsible for the process of glocalisation in schools, this study fills this gap in the research literature on glocalisation. Second, whereas institutional theorists have debated the centrality of the structural or agentic aspects of organisations and institutions, their arguments commonly address the main actors in the organisations or the main social actors in organisational fields. This study focuses on those social actors who are situated in the middle of the hierarchy and on their sense of agency. Third, whereas the very few studies that have explored the role of middle managers in glocalisation have focused solely on the business sector, this study reorients research towards the public sector and specifically towards the education sector. This research, then, is directed at studying how mid-level managers in glocal social sectors, specifically school principals in Israel’s complex education system, conceive of their role as agents of glocalisation. Drawing upon interviews with a diverse group of school principals, we find that glocal role perception is a bundle of glocal orientation and of glocal sense of practice; with this, we confirm the importance of agents of glocalisation and their role perception in discussions of global–local entanglements.

Glocalisation, which not long ago stood as a brave challenge to the dichotomous interpretation of globalisation as convergence or divergence and of globality as resulting in homogeneity or heterogeneity, is now understood as a commonsensical, rather than an unusual, description of global–local interactions. Indeed, as recently repeated by Robertson himself, ‘There are good reasons for using the term glocalization as a substitute for globalization’ (Robertson, 2014, p. 32). The use of ‘glocalisation’ circumvents the debate about whether globalisation creates a ‘spiky’ or a ‘flat’ world (Florida, 2005; Friedman, 2006) by describing the co-constitutive relations between global themes and local traditions and the fusion of the global with the local to create glocal synergies across time and space. ‘Glocalisation’ refers to the process by which phenomena that flow or diffuse from one place to another become adapted to their new locality (Robertson, 2014, p. 7; Roudometof, 2014).

Since Robertson coined the term glocalisation in the early 1990s (Robertson, 1995), both the idea and the term glocalisation have become widely used and muddled. On the one hand, even after decades of fruitful research on the glocalisation of numerous social phenomena and practices worldwide, the term glocalisation is still being applied to new areas of study (Drori et al., 2014a, 2014b; Roudometof, 2016). Nonetheless, on the other hand, Roudometof (2015) claims that the term is currently employed in different discussions with somewhat different meanings. Specifically, in the study of culture, ‘glocalisation’ is used in reference to consumerism and commercialism, while in urban studies it is examined in relation to urban life. In organisation and management studies, it is related to processes of translation, diffusion, and adaptation (Roudometof, 2015). Overall, the appeal of the notion of glocalisation in elegantly fusing the global and local has driven calls for further articulation and research.

In response to the privileging of global–local synergies, Drori et al. (2014a) call for a multidimensional approach to theorising glocalisation. Specifically, they suggest that glocalisation refers to transfer, transformation, and transcendence along three main axes: vertical (global–local, as the term implies), horizontal (across equivalent entities, such as sectors or nation states), and temporal (across historical eras, past–present–future). Moreover, relying on the widely respected work of Strang and Meyer on diffusion (1993), in this work, Drori, Höllerer, and Walgenbach propose that glocalisation is an arc-like process that requires the abstraction or theorisation of a practice originating from a particularistic social context, in order for this practice-turned model to be transferable to another context (2014a, pp. 95–96). However, even this most recent elaboration on glocalisation still leaves the important matter of agency outside the scope of glocalisation discussions. Drawing inspiration from institutionalist discussions of agency (Hwang & Colyvas, 2011; Lawrence, Leca, & Zilber, 2013; Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006; Meyer & Jepperson, 2000; Powell & Colyvas, 2008), in this study we wish to advance glocalisation discussions in order to take agency into account. We therefore regard agents of glocalisation as important carriers and translators of globally diffusing ideas and practices.

The issues of social agency and the role of social actors, which have long stood centre stage in social science debates, are also seeping into glocalisation studies (see Meyer, 2010). While agents of glocalisation may be individuals, organisations, or nation states (Drori, Höllerer, & Walgenbach, 2014b; Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006; Meyer, 2014), much discussion of agents responsible for glocalisation has focused on experts and professionals. Drawing on their privileged position to construct and utilise theorised and universalised knowledge, experts and professionals are prime drivers in the global diffusion of ideas and practices through the processes of translation and advocacy (see Greenwood et al., 2002; Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006; Sahlin-Andersson & Engwall, 2002).

Research is in fact accumulating on the role of professionals and experts in glocalisation. Some of this work, mainly highlighting coercive or mimetic forms of diffusion (Powell & DiMaggio, 1983), points to the direct impact of certain professional groups. This is the premise for investigation managers’ roles in the glocalisation of managerial and organisational practices (Delmestri, 2014), or of effects by supranational organisations and national administrations on the course of adoption and adaptation (Knill & Tosun, 2014). Other enquiries highlight the indirect manner in which ‘rather than stressing ubiquitous theorizing by adopters, available models [are] imported into local situations or used to inform the construction of new arrangements’ (Strang & Meyer, 1993, p. 494). In this normative mode of diffusion, highlighted in investigations of academia’s diffuse role in credentialing professionals (Engwall, 2014; Kodeih, 2014) or the media’s part in diffusing theorised models (Pallas & Wedlin, 2014), the principal process is enactment by agents of glocalisation, both professionals and adopters. In both situations, researchers have pointed to numerous ways in which social actors activate or enact glocalisation, translating (Czarniawska, 2014), re-contextualising (Meyer, 2014), carrying out (Sahlin-Andersson & Engwall, 2002), or domesticating (Alasuutari, 2014) originally global ideas and practices.

Much of this research on diffusion, adoption, and adaptation assumes that these processes occur at the hands of middle managers or street-level bureaucrats (see Delmestri, 2006; Gofen, 2014; Huy, 2002). Their position in the mid-range of the work process also locates them in a mediating position among the distinct needs, preferences, and demands of their various work-related constituents. By answering to both their supervisors (upward accountability) and their clients (downward accountability), and, as in the case of horizontal glocalisation, by bridging across national or sector-specific cultures, mid-level managers embody institutional ambidexterity (see Jarzabkowski, Smets, Bednarek, Burke, & Spee, 2013). They essentially manage competition among the governing institutional logics of each of the social contexts that are fused into the glocal form (see Reay & Hinings, 2009).

In general, this recent attention to agents of glocalisation focuses primarily on the structural characteristics and capacities of individuals, organisations, and nation states, ignoring mainstream sociological insights about role perception. On the one hand, the rich research tradition on professionals and managers in global and cross-cultural circumstances (see Gelfand et al., 2007; Tsui et al., 2007 for reviews) and, more recently, also in glocal situations (Delmestri, 2006, 2014), centres on identities, overlooking the sociological notion of social roles. On the other hand, the research tradition on the role of experts and professionals in diffusion and glocalisation processes accords little attention to the opinions, expectations, or perceptions of such agents regarding their formal glocal position. Our study here, therefore, aims to supplement current research on agents of glocalisation by focusing on the role perception of middle managers. Here we consider how middle managers understand their role as agents of glocalisation, inquiring how they come to define the different demands, logics, or worlds that they are to mediate, and seeking to understand how they make sense of the practice of fusing these worlds into glocality. Glocality, we argue, comes from the identification of the various distinct contexts that are fused, but it also varies based on the sense-making framework of agents of glocalisation. It is agents’ worldviews and role perceptions that both constitute glocality and unpack global–local relations.

With the aim of unpacking glocality from the perspective of agents of glocalisation, we investigate the role perception of mid-level educators in Israel. While the Israeli Ministry of Education prescribes much of the curricula in Israeli schools, policy reforms of the past several decades have imbued Israeli school principals with formal autonomy and the professional authority to balance and negotiate policies and standards with local needs, preferences, and capacities. School principals are furnished with responsibility for their schools’ operations and performance and for their students’ achievement and well-being, while they are also accountable to their superiors in their school districts, the national ministry, and their municipalities (upward accountability) and to their schools’ teachers, parents, and communities (downward accountability). In this way, school principals are the foremost educators in a formal position akin to middle managers in multinational firms or to street-level bureaucrats in public agencies. More so than ministry officials or teachers, school principals are given formal authority over an entire and bounded educational domain, including curricular, pedagogical, and operations-related matters in their schools. This also gives them a viewpoint on both international and neighbourhood affairs and places them in a position to mitigate both globality and locality in the structured, highly institutionalised field of education. Still, given that much of the activation of such autonomy and professional authority depends on the agents’ role perception, the research strategy described here allows for investigating how school principals perceive, rather than practise, their role as agents of glocalisation.

The Israeli education system affords a glocal sphere of agency and serves in this study as the relevant glocal field. Israeli education, which is a highly centralised and predominantly public system, is interlaced with a global agenda and international initiatives, yet remains firmly committed to Israeli conditions and capacities and to Zionist and Jewish traditions and ideals. Specifically, education reforms in Israel, especially since the 1980s, have introduced decentralisation, school autonomy, parental choice, and a managerial approach to accountability and evaluation (Resnik, 2012), thus displaying a clear pattern of policy travel (Steiner-Khamsi, 2012) or policy borrowing (Dale & Robertson, 2012) from international arenas. Also, similarly to education systems elsewhere (Dale & Robertson, 2012), Israeli education has become inundated with non-governmental organisations – for-profit firms, philanthropic organisations, and community associations – that increasingly intervene in setting education agendas and in operating programmes even within schools (Resnik, 2012). These organisations serve as conduits for the further travel of ideas and practices. At the same time, the Israeli education system also reflects the particularities of Israeli society. In addition to intra-national differences in education based on the socio-economic statuses common in education systems worldwide (see Baker & LeTendre, 2005), the education system in Israel is formally divided into four separate subsystems: the Jewish state secular subsystem, the Jewish state religious subsystem, the Jewish independent religious (ultra-Orthodox) subsystem and the Arab subsystem. Each of the subsystems attends to a specific segment of Israeli society, including delivering specific curricula and language requirements. For example, the formal language in the Jewish subsystems is Hebrew, while in the Arab subsystem the formal language is Arabic. Furthermore, students in the ultra-Orthodox subsystem do not study the otherwise-mandated core subjects of maths, science, Hebrew, and English. National education policies, let alone international recommendations and standards, are therefore implemented uniquely in each subsystem (e.g. Benavot & Resh, 2003), accentuating the differentiation among these four education tracks.

These various system features, coupled with policy initiatives of the past two to three decades, increase de facto school autonomy and result in school principals’ greater formal authority to determine school agendas and promote initiatives that better serve their unique communities and brand their schools. Indeed, increasingly, school principals exhibit a sense of agency (Yemini & Addi-Raccah, 2013) and voice independent opinions and perceptions (Gibton, Sabar, & Goldring, 2000). For example, by definition extracurricular activities in school are less subject to mandates by the Ministry of Education; Yemini and Addi-Raccah (2013) show great variety among schools in the scope and intensity of extracurricular activities according to both the education subsystem and characteristics of school principals. However, even in what remains a highly centralised and partitioned school system, mid-level educators such as school principals are increasingly under pressure to account for student achievement and for teacher performance, and they increasingly exercise their autonomy by adjusting mandated curricula, pedagogy, and governance to their schools’ abilities. As such, the Israeli offers us instances of potential variation in these school principals’ perception of their role as agents of glocalisation.

To gauge the perception of school principals regarding their position as global–local mediators, we have conducted this qualitative and constructive (Guba & Lincoln, 1994) study, focusing on how school principals narrate their mindscapes of glocalisation. A mindscape is a map of ‘rules, images and principles that define what the principalship is and how its practice should unfold’ (also, Gibton et al., 2000; Sergiovanni, 2001, p. 30). Relying on interpretive inquiry (Haggerson & Bowman, 1992), we carefully and methodically transverse the boundary between emic (namely, the perspective of school principals about their formal roles) and etic (our interpretation of their testimonies). We therefore gather the impressions, opinions, expectations, and definitions that school principals express regarding their formal roles (or principalship) and then draw out themes and categories of glocality that emerge from these narratives.

To gauge the sense of glocal agency among school principals, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 32 school principals of primary and secondary schools in Israel, strategically sampled to account for intra-system variety, by school and community characteristics, and by the professional backgrounds and personal attributes of the principals. At the risk of narrowing the scope of glocality in Israeli education, we specifically focus on the two dominant tracks – namely, the Jewish state secular and Jewish religious subsystems – because they account for some 64% of Israeli schools.¹ The distribution of sample characteristics is described in  Appendix 1.

Interviews, which lasted between 45 and 70 minutes, were audio-recorded and then fully transcribed. Interviews solicited opinions, observations, beliefs, and views on a variety of responsibilities of school principals. They were guided into conversation on their overall views of education and specifically about their principalship agendas and their professional opinions on the specific educational matters of curriculum, values, pedagogy, and school operations. To maintain the genuine voice of the interviewees, the terms global and local, or similar scholarly terms, were not introduced into the conversations until mentioned by the interviewees or until the conclusion of the interviews. The principals were asked to be specific in their descriptions and to provide examples and illustrations for their arguments.

The resulting narratives offer a rich portrait of the mindscapes of school principals. Indeed, inasmuch as the school principals we interviewed were asked to exemplify their claims with references to their daily work and to school operations, the narratives deliver their perception of principalship as a site for glocal agency rather than as a practice of glocality. Nevertheless, the anonymity of the interviewees’ identities guarantees the candid expression of their role perception and, with this, a sincere, albeit idealised, sense of glocal agency.

The transcribed interviews were analysed for discursive content through formal content analysis (relying mostly on ATLAS-ti). Data were extracted to form emic categories that were, in turn, reclassified according to etic super-structures developed from the literature on agency and glocalisation (Abu-Sharkh, 2014; Delmestri, 2014; Engwall, 2014) as well as on education and globalisation (Anderson-Levitt, 2003; Baker & LeTendre, 2005; Steiner-Khamsi, 2012; Stromquist & Monkman, 2000). Content was identified by the marking of key terms and through an interpretative analysis that sought relations among terms and between such key terms and stories about their work. First, we deduced the terms, and with them the ideas, that were associated with the notions of global, local, and glocal. These were also labelled according to a set of emergent content categories, namely curriculum, pedagogy, administrative, agenda, and entrepreneurship. Second, we gave a score of glocality to each school principal interviewed, as well as for each content category in her or his narrative. The score, which extends from 1 to 10, marks the emphasis on, or orientation towards, local and global, respectively. Overall, this qualitative methodology sketches the notion of glocality, and it notes the issues that are associated with local and global orientations as school principals in the Israeli education system express their role perception.

Based on the narratives of school principals and the categories-related results from the data, we portray the glocal mindscape of mid-level managers or street-level bureaucrats. These narratives (emic) and categories (etic) convey two main themes, which serve as the organising principles for the following section. First, the narratives define what is considered global and local based on the perception of school principals, and, in acknowledging the glocality of education and principalship, they describe glocality as a matter of orientation (emic). Second, the categories convey a typology of the practice of glocalisation, as differentiated by the motivation of the agent of glocalisation and by the extent of the global–local fusion (etic).

All school principals report that their work requires the integration of many diverse and often contradictory demands or recommendations: of ministerial and municipal policies, international standards, the needs of their pupils, school infrastructure and resources, parents’ preferences, and teachers’ aptitudes and tendencies. However, rather than merely viewing this as the contextual complexity of a contemporary school, the principals also order these contextual constraints in terms of upward and downward accountability or in terms of global and local factors. These principals thus signify the way in which the field of education and the role of principalship are formed in the mental life of a school principal (Harris, 1976).

P22 says, ‘Maths is a global language and English is the international language.’ He continues, ‘I think that Judaism [is] something local, not in the religious way but more in texts that are opening a way to the Jewish bookshelf.’

P25 says, ‘Local content is all the Judaism hours of instruction – Tora, Tanach, Halacha, Talmud and Jewish thought – [while] the global subjects [are] science, English and maths.’

Likewise, school principals have clear and explicit associations between certain pedagogies and global or local viewpoints. Specifically, 32% of school principals mention technology and the coined (while nevertheless ambiguous) phrase ‘21st-century skills’ with global matters. For example, P8 says, ‘21st-century skills are global and, for me, they are the how – how we do things in school,’ and P22 adds, ‘Today students must go into the world equipped with a basket of concepts and knowledge [that will position them] vis-à-vis students in other countries.’ The term literacy is used to describe local education, noting the basic, if not minimal, requirement for erudition as a relevant dimension of the local.

Lastly, school principals also associate different physical and geopolitical dimensions with global and local matters. Locality is defined by 65% of school principals in reference to their schools and pupils or to the communities and neighbourhoods. For example, P3 explains, ‘I am rooted in my community, I am no stranger … the school is oriented toward our community. We are talking about the community and see it as a spatial community.’

Interestingly, 14% of school principals associate the notion of the global with the planet or the natural environment. However, many others classify the Israeli Ministry of Education as global, thus regarding this national governmental body as a macro authority, meaning it is the commanding source of ideas and standards in education. For example, P5 describes the Ministry of Education as the locus of response to international innovations. She says,

Note also that these school principals, all of whom are from the Jewish-education tracks, regard not only Israeli culture and history, but also Jewish studies, Jewish pedagogies, and Jewish history as Israeli and their own, and thus as local. In this way, their views reflect the Zionist ethos, which regards Judaism as a nationality rather than as a religion, thus de-emphasising Judaism’s universalism and accentuating its particularistic – here, Israeli – character and relevance (see Sternhell, 2009).

In summary, the terms global and local have certain distinct meanings for the professional lives of Israeli school principals, both in the principals’ own words (emic perspective) and through our analysis as observers of their words, references, and connotations (etic perspective). Global is described in the general terms of a professionalised method (21st-century skills), professionalised content (STEM namely science, technology, engineering and math, and English), and large physical scope (from a city to the world; see Figure 2). Note that this definition implies that school principals do not equate global with foreign. Rather than feeling alienated from the global issues of STEM, 21st-century skills, and the natural environment, school principals understand these matters to be an integral part of the discourse of contemporary education, and therefore they relate to these matters closely. This acceptance of the global as an integral part of their professional lives, as well as their acceptance of the local as a different yet still intimate part, reveals the pervasiveness of glocality: all school principals note that both so-called global and so-called local matters are integral parts of their daily professional lives, of their students’ educational routines, and of their schools’ operational contexts. In addition, in spite of the clear distinction between global and local, school principals note no contradiction between global and local. In this way, they define glocality in education by seeing the global and the local as distinct, yet married into what are described as the core principles of education and the essence of the school principal’s role in shaping and delivering education.

Given these self-implied definitions of global and local, and given that the marriage of the two comprises the essence of contemporary education in Israel, what is the glocal orientation of school principals and their sense of glocal agency? Let us reiterate that while school principals describe the global and the local in distinct terms, they refer to and interpret both global and local specifically with regard to their responsibility towards their schools. This dual attention to both the global and the local exemplifies the notion of orientation. School principals do not look towards either the global or the local, but, rather, they simultaneously relate to both, identifying the features of each. Many also volunteer commentary about the duality, if not the tension, between these presumably contradictory components of contemporary education. Still, despite the fact this duality is noted by all school principals, it is clear that they differ in their orientations, or inclinations, towards what they each regard as global or as local.

The glocal orientation of school principals is expressed in terms of obligations and priorities. In this way, orientation is a relative matter. Both the global and the local are integrated into contemporary education, and, still, some school principals accentuate or prioritise what they define as global elements over local ones. P2 conveys her global orientation by stating,

Others highlight local agendas and issues as their prime priorities, most commonly noting their obligation to immerse their pupils in Israeli culture. For example, P19 says,

In such statements, P2 and P19 are united in describing their orientations as their priorities, which are also mandated by the ministry. However, P2 describes Israeli studies as commanded by the ministry, while P19 describes Israeli heritage and STEM as mandated. Both school principals convey a sense of glocality, but they nonetheless differ in their glocal orientations.

In this way, global is redefined: for most school principals, the furthest horizon is the national system. Again, this affirms Marginson’s claim (Marginson, 2004) that with regard to education, albeit higher education, the national level is critical for processes of glocalisation and that therefore the appropriate term is glonacalisation.

Third, orientation implies directionality, namely the natural position of the speaker or the common ground for education. Indeed, school principals indicate directionality in terms of what their own prime source of influence is. P19, pointing to the impact of the local on the global, asks,

P22, on the other hand, points to the influence of the global on the local. Describing the role of the school principal, he states,

‘I believe that one of the roles of a school principal is to translate from the big sphere to the specific locale of your school because obviously this is I know best what suits my school and community.’

However, alongside this attribution of directionality, many school principals describe themselves as located in between what they regard as global and what they regard as local. This confirms findings on middle managers and street-level bureaucrats as mediators between different, often conflicting, demands and logics (Delmestri, 2006; Gofen, 2014; Huy, 2002), and highlights the importance of investigating school principalship as a site for the agency of glocalisation.

Fourth, our scoring of orientation reveals that there are no expressions of purely local or purely global orientations among school principals in Israel. Rather, all school principals describe education and school principalship as composed of both global and local components, and they express professional commitment, even if in varying degrees, to both local and global issues. This confirms the basic presupposition of glocalisation discussions (e.g. Donnelly, 2013, p. 104) that the local and the global categories are no more than ideal types (in the Weberian sense); hence, they are more imagined and fetishised than given and absolute.

Interrogating the glocal orientation of school principals, which is based on their self-definition of the categories of global and local,⁴ what is the school principals’ sense of practising glocality? In other words, how do school principals’ senses of glocality and glocal orientations relate with their senses of glocal practice? In the following section, we identify types of glocal senses of practice for school principalship. A glocal sense of practice is defined according to the principals’ descriptions of their role and duties; as before, we focus on their understandings and interpretations of the principalship (emic) rather than on their actual practice of the role. This conveys principals’ senses of how they marry seemingly contradictory demands for global and local content, pedagogies, and communities, in their practices as school principals. Once we categorise principals’ senses of glocal practice, we go further to juxtapose these senses with their glocal orientations. As this section unfolds, we first describe types of glocal practice (Section 4.2.1) and then juxtapose glocal practice with glocal orientation (Section 4.2.2). In sum, this section creates a comprehensive sense of glocality and of the ways Israeli school principals navigate their worlds – tying together assignments of meaning to the ideal types of global and local, expressions of glocal orientation towards one or the other, and the expression of a glocal sense of practice married to glocal attitudes.

Speaking with school principals about their roles, activities, and duties in the context of global–local influences, pressures, and priorities, we find that they express different types of glocality. A glocal sense of practice is, therefore, the manner in which school principals report on how they marry the seemingly contradictory content, pedagogy, and sense of space associated with global and local matters in their day-to-day practices of principalship. In general, we interpret their self-reported roles and practices in terms of two main types: hybrid and strategic glocality. Moreover, enveloped within each type are several forms of glocal sense of practice. Table 1 lists such categorisations and defines the various types of glocal sense of practice.

School principals’ senses of practising glocality are split into two main types. The first is a hybrid sense of glocal practice, which seamlessly blends the content, pedagogy, and sense of space for both global and local matters. Thus, while school principals articulate that the ideal types of global and local are distinct, their descriptions of the day-to-day practices of school principalship fuse these into synthesised glocal form. We identify three subtypes of hybrid glocality here. The holistic approach is defined as creating a new and unique theme of education and of principalship from the fusion of global and local. An example of a holistic sense of practice is the manner in which the school principal of a religious school describes her initiative to include environmental studies, which are considered global matters (Bromley, Meyer, & Ramirez, 2011; Pizmony-Levy, 2011), as part of the school’s religious studies. P1 says,

The second subtype of the hybrid sense of glocal practice we term a meta-idea, which is when one of the ideal types of the global or of the local colours the practice of school principalship, greatly influencing the school’s educational operation. For example, a hybrid sense of glocality as a meta-idea is expressed when the school principal assimilates game-based learning or applies a project-based learning (PBL) technique as the main teaching method. P2 described at length how she is influenced by the world-renowned educator Ron Clarke; her quest is to learn his ground-breaking pedagogy through YouTube. She desperately wants to raise the funds to travel to meet with him in person and to invite an American colleague who practises this pedagogy to visit her school; she continuously involves herself in and keeps up to date with worldwide discussions of this pedagogy. In general, such schools use a pedagogic strategy borrowed from abroad that has now influenced every aspect of school principalship to create a hybrid, seamless form of glocality.

The last subtype of the hybrid sense of glocal practice expresses a humanistic view, where the marrying of the presumably distinct categories of global and local is based on creating a new doctrine according to which the school is to operate. An example of this category of hybrid glocality is a school principal’s attempt to use a moral and humanistic involvement in the world in every aspect of his school’s operation and of the student experience. Such a glocally humanistic worldview is evident in initiating a food-aid project that involves everything from learning about production and delivery, labouring to ensure the diversity of student and teacher populations, creating international relations curricula, and sending student delegations abroad for trips other than the mandated Holocaust memorial trips. P7 bluntly states,

Still, this humanistic and holistic sense of glocality does not exclude local content, pedagogy, or senses of space. Rather, humanistic principles are also applied to local matters, such as the Bible studies that are mandated by the Ministry of Education. P7 describes the sense of humanistic glocality in Bible studies as follows:

Overall, these expressions of hybrid glocality – the glocal-holistic approach, the meta-idea, and the humanistic worldview – each articulate, in its own unique way, a seamless fusion of what school principals otherwise describe as distinctly global and local.

The second type of glocal sense of practice is strategic. This refers to any intentional form of linking between global and local content, pedagogy, or sense of space; this can be done to satisfy a preemptive need or a requirement. A strategic sense of glocal practice is therefore premeditated, tactical, possibly unstable, and temporary; it reveals the seams between global and local content, pedagogy, and sense of space. Strategic glocality is also divided into three subtypes (see Table 1), differentiated by the motivation school principals use when making this strategic move towards a glocal sense of practice. The strategy of obligation is evident when a school principal combines what he or she describes as distinct global and local content, pedagogy, or sense of space because of some duty or obligation. Several school principals describe the guidelines coming from the Ministry of Education in this way. Hence they refer to glocality as an imposed combination or as a coerced balancing act. P24 states,

Others describe their obligation as a form of downward accountability, meaning a sense of obligation to their school’s teachers, parents, and community, as well as to their demands. P19 states,

The strategy of application, which is the second subtype of strategic glocality, is evident when school principals describe how they apply the use of a tool from one world to the exercise of content, pedagogy, and sense of space in another. This is primarily evident in the application of technology. School principals rely on global technology, such as Internet platforms and sources, to teach the local matters that are their core concern. P12 says,

Here, P12 identifies computer-mediated learning as a global pedagogy and then regards technology as a mere tool of the modern world that serves only as a means to deliver local themes. A similar strategy of application is also evident regarding non-technical pedagogy. For example, regarding PBL, P10 says,

Third, much of the strategic glocal sense of practice is related to the school’s branding, reputation-building, and marketing; several school principals describe any combination of the global and the local as an act of promoting their school. They describe the promotion of their school through the declaration that they have special and advanced programmes for maths, technology, or robotics studies – all of which are considered global – to respond to the demand to brand the school’s unique identity. Currently, given that school registration is open across districts and neighbourhoods, school principals are spurred to add such branding and marketing considerations to their roles, perceptions, and practices. To this end, they take into account what their potential clients consider appealing: evidently, the strategic flagging of global content, such as STEM studies, is considered appealing in some such schools, whereas the strategic promotion of local content, such as Judaic studies, is considered appealing to other potential students and their families. For example, P26, who is the principal of a school in a community with high socio-economic status, describes her choice to introduce robotics to the curriculum and to promote her school through the identification of the school in terms of its robotics programme. She says,

Still, it is evident here that this school principal’s perception of robotics is merely a marketing ploy that is attractive to her community; she makes no effort to integrate robotics as a pedagogy (which is used in other schools to bolster maths and science curricula) or as a platform for worldwide communities (which is used in other schools through school-to-school co-teaching). Likewise, P12 describes her shift from a global curricular emphasis to a local one in terms of her school’s community preferences. She states,

Overall, in all these ways of combining the global and the local or of applying one to the other, school principals highlight the strategic impetus for glocality – of obligation, of application, or of marketing – and do not express glocality through blending or seamlessness.

Given these different motivations for combining the global and the local and the different forms of glocal practice, what explains the school principals’ senses of glocality? In the following section, we juxtapose the glocal orientation of school principals with their senses of glocal practice, to reveal the strong associations between these two dimensions of glocality.

What might explain this strong association between a glocal orientation and a glocal sense of practice? We suggest that this strong link is rooted in the definitions that these school principals give for the terms global and local. As detailed in Section 4.1.1 and illustrated in Figure 2, many school principals regard the Ministry of Education as their furthest global horizon; they consider the ministry to be the source of all directives, ideas, strategies, and practices that come from above – namely, from the expert-based broader context of education policy. Those school principals who express local orientation also associate global matters with foreign or non-Israeli sources. Consequently, the only reason they find to relate to, integrate, or otherwise combine items from beyond the Ministry’s recommendations – such as the terminology 21st-century skills or technology – is to serve their in-school agendas in some way, such as by complying with an obligation or a branding/marketing signal.

Let us highlight that none of the school principals conflates the terms foreign and alien: even those who express a strategic glocalisation do not convey alienation from the global matters of, for example, STEM, technology, and the world. Rather, they understand these to be integral parts of the discourse on contemporary education and do not describe global matters as distant from the needs or preferences of their Israeli school communities. Many equate ‘global’ with the setting of standards of excellence. For example, P21 says, ‘[Our goal is to] turn into an excellent school in terms of the 21st century and still preserve what is important and right for us.’

On the other hand, 16% of the Israeli school principals interviewed (5 of 32) express orientations towards the global and senses of hybrid glocality. By definition, these school principals are able to ‘see the world’, meaning that they regard the field of education as extending far beyond the bounds of Israel and its Ministry of Education. They are attuned to educational initiatives and trends from abroad, familiar with cross-national patterns, and up to date on educational ideas and strategies. This worldview is an expression of their universalistic approach, which means that the global is a prism for local affairs and that the local is a prism for global issues. This, therefore, defines their hybrid senses of glocal educational practice. P16 explicitly expresses this integrated hybrid worldview, which combines orientation and sense of practice: ‘Many things, such as environmental concerns, are relevant in [expressing] the human perspective, but for me the global is Israel.’

Overall, we find that glocal role perception is expressed through both glocal orientation and glocal sense of practice. Indeed, we find that glocal orientation and glocal sense of practice are strongly linked, in that a strong orientation towards the global is closely related to a sense of hybrid glocality and that a strong orientation towards the local is closely related to a sense of strategic glocality. These findings contribute to discussions on glocalisation by introducing the viewpoints and, specifically, the role perceptions, of agents who mediate, translate, and enact glocality.

By allowing school principals in Israel to describe their professional role – namely their duties, commitments, and activities – we aim to answer our guiding research question, namely, how do school principals understand their professional role as agents of glocalisation? Our goal here is to understand glocality from the viewpoint of middle managers who are put in a mediating position between presumably opposing global and local forces. We find that these mid-level managers clearly distinguish between what they consider to be global and local educational matters; also, they mostly regard their roles as glocal (Section 4.1.1). Indeed, while school principals do not consider their role to be constituted by world society (but rather mostly point to the important position of the national Ministry in mediating the global and the local), and while they do not explicitly define their professional roles in reference to the expression ‘agents of glocalisation’, they all describe their principalship as combining elements from the world and from the Israeli locale. Therefore, their description of their principalship (emic) allows for applying the concepts from the sociological debate about glocality (etic).

In this study, we propose several novel concepts and categorisations. First, we propose the notion of glocal orientation to bolster the understanding that glocality is best represented as a continuum between the global and the local. While our coding of orientations is impressionistic (based on the overall consciousness expressed by each school principal), future analyses may add metrics of glocal orientation with value-orientation methods. Some such tools have already confirmed that value orientation is a prerequisite for the diffusion, adoption, and adaptation of management-related ideas, practices, and behaviours, even cross-nationally (Fiss & Zajac, 2004). This emphasis on perception and orientation further acknowledges that studies of glocality should address the opinions and interpretations of glocal agents by giving them voice.

Second, we propose the notion of a glocal sense of practice to describe the manner in which school principals or other agents of glocalisation consider the manner in which they blend global and local ideas, procedures, methods, and behaviours into their school’s glocal management. We propose the categorisation of agents’ senses of glocal practice, distinguishing between a hybrid sense of glocal practice and a strategic sense of glocal practice. This categorisation is based on the degree of blending of the global and the local; a hybrid sense has a seamless fusion, and a strategic sense deliberately attaches to or moves between global and local practices. We claim that the distinction holds for various instances of blending, especially in the case of glocalisation. One might imagine this to be the response of any actor who is caught between the global and the local, or who is influenced by multiple institutional logics (Thornton, Ocasio, & Lounsbury, 2012). In this way, our categorisation adds to the approaches of others who have recently proposed typologies of hybridity. Whereas Pache and Santos (2013a)⁵ and Skelcher and Smith (2015)⁶ include resistance and contestation among their defining criteria, thus identifying certain types of hybrid forms that impede synergy and fusion, we find that all the school principals in our study consider glocality to be inevitable – even if they welcome it and practise it in varying forms and to varying degrees. In other words, Israeli educators may differ in their orientations towards the global or may feel pressured to pay attention to what they regard as global practices and ideas, but they all accept such global matters to some degree; none expresses explicit alienation from or rejection of globality, and none explicitly ignores the Israeliness of their school. It seems, therefore, that outright rejections of globality or locality are not within the realm of education; in this era, education is a pervasive global institution, and its practice is genuinely glocal.

Third, we propose that glocal role perception combines glocal orientations and senses of practice. As is evident in the strong association between orientation and sense of practice, school principals express an overall sense of glocal principalship; their administrative duties, their command over curricular and pedagogical matters, and their perspectives on matters such as autonomy and role models, all express a glocal sense of their professional roles. While others recognise the importance of individuals interpreting and even exploiting the ambiguity inherent in a multiplicity of logics as a political skill (Pache & Santos, 2013b, p. 27), we regard their expression of role commitments and duties as enactments of school principalship. From an institutionalist perspective, Israeli school principals describe their glocal role perceptions in accordance with the expectations of mid-level educators in their formal positions. Indeed, the 32 interviews followed similar patterns of conversation, with certain topics introduced and discussed by the principals and a certain vocabulary used to describe the scopes of their professional roles and formal positions. For example, the school principals invariably expressed concern for the welfare of their students and of the school community, describing their professional roles as guardians of the community; they consistently used a specific terminology of accountability and autonomy to discuss their systemic positions and administrative duties. As described earlier, they also consistently defined global and local in similar ways, referring to STEM and English as typically global and to Jewish history and Israeli culture as typically local. We expect that this script of principalship originated from the culture of the education system; it is likely that the principals’ prior experiences in the education system, their tenures as school principals, and their shared training for this role (in programmes such as Avney Rosha)⁷ helped them formulate role expectations and thus accounted for the shared scheme of glocal role perceptions.

Last, and most central to the theme of this special issue, we engage with recent calls to reconsider glocalisation using analytic tools and to add agents’ perspectives to such a discussion. Robertson’s (2014) historical account of glocalisation discussions; Drori et al.’s (2014a) proposal for multiple analytic axes of glocal synergy; and Roudometof’s (2016) theorisation of disciplinary interpretations of glocalisation all neglect to account for the perspectives of the agents of glocalisation. By tuning in to the perceptions of middle managers in a complex glocal system (namely school principals in a highly institutionalised field of education that is under pressure from both international initiatives and neighbourhood constituents), we show that managers possess a universe of understanding regarding their global–local experiences. Taking their perspective, we come to (1) redefine glocality as a matter of orientation and (2) extract a typology of the practice of glocalisation, differentiating between hybrid glocality and strategic glocality. These abstract categories of glocality are, we argue, relevant for other social spheres that are stretched between global and local agendas or constituents. Future studies should explore the conditionality of terms for such glocal role perceptions and senses of agency by comparing perceptions of glocality across institutional fields, across locales, or across managerial levels.

Overall, the similarity of school principals’ views on glocality confirms the importance of agents of glocalisation and of their role perceptions in discussions of glocalisation. School principals in Israel are proficient in describing their roles as experts and professionals in the glocalisation of education; they commonly articulate that their role is involved in, if not responsible for, the diffusion and translation of ideas, structures, practices, and behaviour within their schools’ domains. Still, the highly structured character of the education sector spurs them to wrestle too with their senses of agency and to question their own autonomy as they seek ways to mitigate expectations within the overall system or to translate the global to the local. This calls for future analysis that focuses not on glocality but on agency, and that considers not only the agents’ role perceptions, but also their actions and behaviours.

The authors thank John W. Meyer and Julia Resnik, as well as the two anonymous reviewers, for their most helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.