During the library centralization effort at a large telecommunications company, certain middle managers balked at giving up their library collections. A consultant was hired to determine library goals and objectives, and a survey of middle managers was conducted. Once support for centralized library services was demonstrated, an official decision…

Views centralization/decentralization from four perspectives: historical, as an outgrowth of professionalism, in the culture of higher education, and management theory. Suggests that some form of centralized control will always be necessary if continuing education is to function in a larger organization, but smaller units may be the wave of the…

Describes the sharp swing toward devolution at one South African University, followed by a sharper swing back toward centralization, discussing factors to consider, in terms of the national context of South Africa's higher education and the university's institutional dynamics, to explain these swings. The reasoning behind recommendations for this…

Traditionally, the high-performance computing (HPC) systems used to conduct research at universities have amounted to silos of technology scattered across the campus and falling under the purview of the researchers themselves. This article reports that a growing number of universities are now taking over the management of those systems and…

Although many school districts eagerly embrace site-based management to resolve some fundamental problems facing education, it is wise to consider what effects this decentralization can realistically have. Since procedures vary from school to school, the literature cannot yet furnish guidelines for ensuring a particular program's success. To help…

Describes the procedures that were developed to create a union catalog and to centralize technical services for a school of medicine library and a school of nursing library. (Author/PF)

The author's discussion of the relationship of educational administration to educational planning and research begins by considering the development of administrative theory in general and reviewing the functional, institutional, and social approaches to analyzing educational administration. He briefly describes educational administration in the…

This article discusses the relationship between politics and education in the light of the recent reform of local government in England. Three topics are examined: 1) efficiency and the size of the local education authorities; 2) party politics in local government; and 3) local administration of education vs. administration by a central…

Conflict is analyzed as a function of the organizational conditions of school size, teaching specialization, and the centralization of authority. (Author)

All supply and maintenance facilities have been consolidated in a single new structure for the Wichita, Kansas, Unified School District. (Author)

Views recent educational reforms as "galloping centralization" resulting from states' excessive rationalism in legislating school improvement policy. A Vermont study shows that policymakers did not act in accord with a user perspective concerning local schools' policy environments and that Public School Approval, as a state policy,…

Proposes establishing a central office as the focus for generating university cooperation in Europe, particularly in continuing engineering education. Also suggests that this office could become the nucleus for more general cooperation between European universities, especially in contributions they make to the research and development needs of…

Develops a model for analyzing the centralized/decentralized nature of decision-making in American colleges and universities. (Author)

Current administration of French education is failing in its managerial function, not in the sense that it mediates inefficiently between the teacher and the external situation in the form of the public or political interest, but that its excessive rigidity runs contrary to the spirit of current reform and mitigates against greater freedom in all…