A Structurationist Interpretation of Community Activism during School Closures

Abstract

Structuration theory is applied to produce a typology of rules and resources that community representatives could use in their activism to keep open a facility slated for closure. This typology is compared with the rules and the resources that the community representatives used during a school-closure review in Essex County, Ontario, Canada, as inferred from a computerized content analysis of 138 letters published in the local daily newspaper. The community representatives' primary authoritative resource was their knowledge about the students' education and their communities. Their primary rules were the political ones for influencing the local and the provincial politicians. This structurationist interpretation clarifies the point that their community activism with these resources and rules did not solely explain the reprieve of the schools from closure.