This paper describes a study of teachers in an elementary school, how they constructed and viewed their understandings of social and professional organization, how these understandings were modified as the central values of the organization, and how its social and political context underwent significant changes. The report focuses on the values held by the teachers and how these values are not constant in people, time, and place. The study was qualitative, using participant-observer techniques, and approached the topic from a grounded-theory perspective. From the data, three categories of teachers emerged: social groupings, ideological orientations, and proximity to power. These three perspectives by which teachers viewed each other and themselves were interrelated and significantly affected the school's formal organization and the manner in which the participants responded to conflict and change. Some of these informal groups were based around a common teaching ideology, and some groups were primarily social in their basis. Ideology led some teachers, who had taught in the school for many years, to resist the school's change to site-based management, whereas other teachers, who were ideologically grouped, embraced change. (Contains 17 references and 3 figures.)(RJM)