UC San Diego

A great deal of sociological literature seeks to understand how and why students pursue-and achieve-school success differently. To further our understanding of inequality in achievement, this dissertation investigates students' beliefs about what it takes to succeed in school. Through a comparison of three high schools in California, I examine the ways in which understandings of school success differ across the three school sites. While I find that students articulate some combination of effort and intelligence in their explanations of what school success entails, I also find that each high school in the study fosters a distinct, local understanding of the relationship among intelligence, effort, and school success. I identify two cultural schemas that are relevant to school success : the Effort Schema and the Intelligence Schema. Following a recent literature stream in organization theory, I demonstrate that each of the three schools has adapted and modified these two cultural schemas differently, to fit the circumstances and the sensibilities of the actors in the local school organization. Thus each of the three schools has its own local beliefs about school success. I argue that these local school beliefs serve to reinforce and perpetuate existing inequalities in higher education. Intersecting organization theory with symbolic interaction theory enables us to see how these local beliefs about school success have consequences for students' sense of self. I focus on an aspect of self that I call "success identity"; Students construct their success identities in the context of their local school environments. Their school's local understanding of what it takes to succeed becomes a powerful framework for individual students' understandings of their own school success. However, students do not passively adopt these ideas into their identities, they also adapt and modify them to fit their own sensibilities. This dissertation investigates three levels of culture's multidimensionality : 1. Society shared cultural schemas; 2. Organizations' local modifications of those cultural schemas; and 3. Individuals' identity construction vis-á- vis those locally modified versions of cultural schemas. My research shows how both schools (organizations) and students (individuals) refine and adapt cultural ideas that are passed down to them from above.