The purposes of this study were to describe how an elementary school made sense of the impending succession of its principal and to extend Gephart's attempt to derive a grounded theory of leader succession. Gephart found that the faculty collectively degraded the status of the departing principal. In contrast, we found patterns that characterized teachers' individual thinking about the impending succession. We describe possible explanations for the discrepancy and discuss an alternative that focuses on norms rooted outside of the school. We describe a number of questions raised by the findings thatfuture research might address.
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