Abstract

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Title:: The Emergence of and Changes in Middle School’s Discipline Departmentin Modern China: From Idealistic Legitimacy to Regulative Legitimacy

Keywords:: middle schools in modern China; discipline department; department of teaching and discipline; idealistic legitimacy; regulative legitimacy; isomorphism

Abstract:: It is in the early 1920s that discipline departments began to appear in most middle schools in modern China. At the beginning of the 1930s, the department of teaching and discipline began to replace the original single-functional discipline department. The root reason why modern middle schools universally set discipline organs was not because of the size of organization and the needs of strengthening discipline work but because of the effect of legitimacy factors. Corresponding to the political structure of different times, the appearance of discipline department in the early 1920s was due to the idealistic legitimacy and the establishment of the department of teaching and discipline in the early 1930s to the regulative legitimacy. Though the idealistic and regulative legitimacies were quite different factors, both of them led to the isomorphism of discipline organization. This reminds us that we should be prudent when dealing with the issue of how middle schools achieve diversified developments with their own characteristics.