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Date Available

7-29-2026

Year of Publication

2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College

Arts and Sciences

Department/School/Program

Sociology

Faculty

Edward Morris

Faculty

Zitsi Mirakhur

Abstract

How do teachers’ social backgrounds and professional orientations shape the disciplinary and relational dimensions of their work? This dissertation takes up that question across three related but self-contained studies in the sociology of education, set in Central School District, a public school district in the southeastern United States. Each study examines a different facet of how teachers establish authority, manage behavior, and exercise care: the social origins of their orientations toward classroom management, the experience of becoming professionally competent in the early career, and the use of digital tools that increasingly govern how school discipline is recorded. Drawing broadly on Bourdieu’s theory of practice, the dissertation treats teachers not as neutral institutional actors but as professionals whose biographies and orientations inform how they interpret and carry out the disciplinary work of teaching, with consequences that may bear on educational inequality.

The first study draws on surveys and interviews with 41 second-stage teachers to show that teachers’ classed social origins are associated with patterned dispositions toward classroom management, which it organizes into four ideal types: Institutional Loyalists, Practical Disciplinarians, Field-Dissonant Progressives, and Critical Empaths. The second study, using portraiture and abductive analysis of interviews with 13 teachers, reframes the near-universal sense of unpreparedness in early-career teaching as a structural condition of professional field entry rather than a failure of preparation; it finds that this unpreparedness is more emotional and relational than technical, that teachers work through it via four adaptation strategies, relational, structured, collegial, and identity-based, and that where institutional support is weak, it can deepen and contribute to early attrition. The third study draws on interviews with 20 teachers to examine their use of READY, a district-mandated digital behavior management platform, finding that such platforms standardize how discipline is reported without standardizing how it is carried out: teachers exercise meaningful discretion, shaped by professional judgment, relational priorities, and situational assessment, over what gets formally recorded, and this variation may encode existing disciplinary inequalities in more durable institutional form.

Together, these studies contribute to the sociology of education on three fronts. The first develops a social-origins account of classroom management that situates teacher practice within the biographical trajectories that precede formal training. The second reframes early-career unpreparedness as a structural and a largely emotional condition of professional entry, with implications for how teachers are supported and retained. The third extends research on the datafication of education and on street-level bureaucracy by showing that teacher discretion persists, and remains consequential for disciplinary inequality, even within digitally mediated accountability systems. Across all three, the dissertation advances a broadly Bourdieusian view in which teachers’ social backgrounds and professional orientations inform the disciplinary dimension of their work. The findings carry implications for teacher preparation, school organizational culture, and the governance of digital disciplinary technologies in contemporary schools.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2026.370

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