Organisationales Lernen ‚vom Kinde aus’? Eine organisationsethnografische Fallstudie zum secondary adjustment einer frühpädagogischen Einrichtung.

The article reconstructs the initial institutionalisation of a Luxembourgian Maison Relais pour Enfants by analysing its coping with a crisis as a process of organisational learning. The case encompasses the complex relationships between a child (who triggers the crisis), the child’s parents and the childcare centre as an organisation under change. First, some pertinent organisation-sociological references (change; “loose coupling”) are worked up theoretically, discussed in the light of ethnographies of pedagogical organisations, and criticised with respect to applications in pedagogical fields (organisation development). These discussions lead to tentative outlines of an organisational ethnographic methodology. The following processual presentation of the organisational ethnographic case study yields, finally, the basis for some analytic abstractions which elaborate organisation-sociological theorems with regard to early childcare institutions and connect them with questions of the sociology of childhood. Thereby, both the organisation’s adaptive performances, which are integrated into the everyday life by way of institutional practices, and the constitutive contribution of the children to the success (or failure, respectively) of the organisation become apparent.