Looking for Legitimacy in Music Education

Ski-Berg and Røyseng perform a comparative case study of two higher education music conservatories through analyzing strategic plans and interview transcripts. The findings show that institutions experience overarching pressures to implement educational content about entrepreneurship and innovation. The authors suggest that studying the variables of context and timeline within a respective institution may help uncover necessary practices during times of growth and change.

The study uses organizational research to see how organizational legitimacy, or how an institution is in relationship with both general social norms and formal laws. Higher music education institutions find that they need buy-in from students, faculty, and staff to navigate the pressures felt to adjust to increasing globalization. They feel compelled to reflect societal changes to educate flexible career workers through student-centered teaching strategies.

How a higher music education organization conforms to legitimatizing rules can affect the extent to which it can make changes from within. One risk is that gaps may arise between formal policies and the actual implementation of practices if leaders say one thing but do another. If an organization is chasing legitimacy, then its means for change should have a central shared vision to respond to institutional pressures.

We all know that change is hard. What is even harder is getting everyone in the same institution to agree on how to implement change. One of the fascinating aspects of this study is the idea of an organization contextualizing their own nuanced responses to having to innovate their curriculum in order to respond to global pressures to sustain the conditions for a competitive economic market.