Cultural Symbols as Boundary Objects: How Chinese Elementary Schools Navigate External Cooperation Through Strategic Culture Construction

School-organization collaboration has become an increasingly hot topic in educational governance as schools seek to integrate external resources, enhance educational innovation, and build institutional capacity. In China, the New High-Quality School Project has specifically promoted partnerships between primary schools and diverse social organizations to overcome educational uniformity and achieve differentiated development. However, existing research has focused on superficial outcomes of resource integration and has failed to explore the specific cultural mechanisms underlying successful partnerships in Chinese primary education. This has led to difficulties for schools in establishing and maintaining effective collaboration. Similarly, Chinese literature often emphasizes policy frameworks or "ideal" collaboration models while neglecting how schools navigate specific cultural differences and coordinate with organizations from diverse professional backgrounds. Through a qualitative case study of a public primary school implementing the New High-Quality School Project, this study employs boundary objects theory to explain how school culture facilitates sustainable inter-organizational cooperation. The research demonstrates that strategically designed cultural symbols can function as boundary objects, enabling organizations with different motivations and expertise to coordinate educational activities. They provide a shared thematic framework while allowing flexible interpretations across organizational boundaries. The school's hierarchical management system concentrates coordination responsibilities in leadership while protecting teachers' core instructional functions, thereby creating a sustainable model that ensures educational quality. The findings extend boundary objects theory to primary education settings, demonstrating how Chinese schools can leverage cultural construction to transform institutional diversity into sustainable educational resources.