Stability and change of mentoring practices in a capricious policy environment. Opening the 'black box of institutionalization'

This article addresses how institutional logics are translated, maintained, or disrupted by actors and their (inter)actions within schools. The changing policy environment for mentoring beginning teachers in Flanders (Belgium) provides a fertile context for answering this question. Combining neoinstitutional and sensemaking lenses and analyzing the mentoring practices in one school, we investigated the role of mentors’ sensemaking in shaping responses to changes in the broader institutional environment. Based on semistructured interviews, observations, and document analyses, the study identifies how the introduction, and later withdrawal, of direct financial support for mentoring installed a new logic of mentoring as a professionalized job and how mentors creatively employed elements of this new logic in their daily interactions. The study contributes to the recent research on inhabited institutionalism by demonstrating that organizations are not only the instantiation of institutional logics, but are sites where people and groups make sense of and creatively use institutional logics