The abstract and complex nature of decision-making processes and structure in colleges and universities is discussed from the perspective of organizational behavior theory developed in the industrial sector. After an introductory discussion of the history of organizational problems in higher education, the two main sections of the book are…

The university as a system of formal authority is considered in the Canadian context. The structure of the 27 largest Canadian universities (ranked by operating income) is analyzed with reference to their organizational charts. It is assumed that the structure symbolizes an official style of authority and responsibility reflected by the number of…

Family headship has not been systematically investigated in the sociology of the family, yet "head of the family" is a meaningful phrase to most people. A survey of adults (N=464) in Ontario revealed that only two percent of the respondents did not understand the term. Other data showed that traditional male-dominated authority patterns…

A study was conducted to investigate some basic power communication factors among American male and female executives in middle and top level management. Variables of primary interest were perceptions of personal power and communication effectiveness within the organization, and some power communication techniques employed by the two genders to…

The accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant resulted from a communication failure. Following an incident at an Ohio plant a year and a half earlier, B. M. Dunn, manager of Emergency Core Cooling Systems Analysis at Babcock and Wilcox (engineers), wrote a memorandum making specific recommendations on written instructions for nuclear…

The framework for public school social workers offered in this article is based on the systems approach. The ideas presented might also be useful to social workers in general, and to secondary school social workers in particular. The article deals with the idea of a boundary, which is a line forming a circle around selected variables.…

Faculty meetings are frequently attended by school consultants and, in all probability, are utilized for diagnostic, training, and evaluation purposes. In order to formalize what many psychologists may already be doing, this paper considers the means for analyzing faculty meetings to further (1) consultation activity; (2) consultation training;…

A study was made of the campus governance experience at the University of California at Berkeley during the turbulent decade of 1966 through 1975. In addition to an overview of Berkeley's institutional mission and its structure of governance, the study considered the matters of: (1) whether dual jurisdiction (one for faculty and one for…

A 1975 study of decision-making in three university departments was designed to generate theory about the decision-making process in academic departments. The primary method of data collection was semistructured interviews with faculty members. Results show that members of the three departments shared general professional norms of: (1) individual…

Examines Black students selection of professional careers and maintains that Black Americans must begin to exploit the political, economic, social and psychological gains that are tied to certain professional occupations. (Author)

By adapting the theoretical framework and tools of several organizational researchers, hypotheses are formulated and tested related to the problem of compatibility between student personality needs and the authority structure of schools. (Author/ND)

The derivation of the concept of participative management from a variety of complementary managerial and motivational theories, and its acceptance and use as a managerial technique in library administration are reviewed in detail. The major contributions to the development of the concept of participative management, including Maslow's hierarchy of…

A study of why disproportionate numbers of male and black high school students are suspended or expelled examines student and school characteristics and teacher attitudes. This document reports results on student characteristics. In eleven high schools in two large, urban, midwestern school districts, researchers used interviews, student records,…

Data on a sample of 98 Lebanese secondary schools--representative of the country's urban, rural, public, private, Moslem, and Christian schools--were used to test F. E. Fiedler's hypothesis that school effectiveness is related to the match between the principal's style and his or her school's "situational favorableness." School…