Why The Shadow Educational Institutions CAN Exist?

With the increasing competition of the entrance and marketization of education process,the shadow education present a spreading tendency of the development of education institutions,and even started to replace public school to become an important place for students to learn.But a lot of problems also appeared,such as false advertising,‘with a capital flight' and so on education.The government published a series of policies and put constraints on the development of shadow education,but the mess continues.How do shadow educational institutions survive and develop under the increasing state control and regulation? Does the chaos have its unique “logics”? This paper adopts the perspective of organizational legitimacy,taking Z county of Jinan city as the site of field survey,and explores the strategies to realize the organizational legitimacy of shadow educational institutions.Based on previous studies,this paper provides an analytical framework of organizational legitimacy to reveal the possible mechanism of shadow educational institutions.This analytical framework takes the government and parents as evaluators to evaluate the internal operation and external actions of the shadow education institutions respectively,while the institutions obtain specific legitimacy(including regulatory legitimacy,effective legitimacy,normative legitimacy and cognitive legitimacy)through different coping strategies.The study found that the absence of policy constraints makes the shadow educational institutions always in a “free” state.In order to be recognized by evaluators,shadow educational institutions adopt different action strategies to build their organizational legitimacy.Among them,the legitimacy of regulation and effectiveness achieved by the action strategy is based on the organizational structure imitating the public school and the differentiation and exclusion of teachers and students.On this basis,the normative legitimacy and cognitive legitimacy realized through the role positioning of meeting the requirements and the construction of industry benchmark image promote the expansion of shadow education institutions.Finally,the study also finds that the collusive coping between educational competent departments and shadow educational institutions in the context of duty isomorphism and pressure-type institutional environment enables the existence of “small workshop” institutions lacking regulatory and normative legitimacy in shadow education.At the same time,the perspective of organizational legitimacy provides new ideas for the study of shadow educational institutions,which have not yet completed the institutionalization.