This chapter extends the argument that K-12 urban teachers learn through organizational socialization to adopt shared cultural meanings about their students that inform the individual actions they use to manage cultural differences between themselves and their students. It argues that these actions operate to increase, maintain, or decrease relational distance – or the perception that there is psychological status and structural distance amongst individuals within an organization – between teachers and their students. It also begins to develop the argument that urban-teacher actions may vary based on the nature of their organizational commitment – in particular how the type of commitment they have for their work informs their perceptions and management of various role stressors in their workplace environments.

The chapter outlines standardization efforts in Romani, where geographical dispersion and the absence of strong community institutions pose challenges to efforts towards unification, status regulation and domain expansion. Initial standardization efforts were localized and partly state sponsored, while others were promoted by networks of activists and supported by civil society initiatives as well as by European governance institutions. Transnational mobility since the mid-1990s, the expansion of electronic communication and the proliferation of both political networking and religious missionary activities among Romani communities have provided incentives and means for domain expansion. Romani literacy is characterized by the use of multiple variants in the choice of dialect and orthography. I show how the key features of ‘standardization beyond the state’, such as the role of networking among multiple actors and pluralism of form, are reinforced through the growing role of multinational institutions, increased mobility and the rise of electronic communication.