Public school teachers often work in "classroom cells" that are "symbols and predictive of their relative isolation from one another and from sources of ideas beyond their own background of experience." This type of environment, where teachers rarely join in collaborative endeavors and spend little of their professional time with other adult…

Institutional vitality, a broad measure of the quality of organizational life at colleges and universities, has not been systematically addressed in the literature. To identify management and personnel practices which contribute to institutional vitality within student affairs divisions, a two-stage methodology was employed. First, an…

In the spring of 1976, a questionnaire was sent to a sample of UCLA upperclassmen. The purpose was to determine how much agreement there was about various features of the university environment and whether students perceptions differed by major fields, campus or off-campus residence, and by other aspects of their experience at the university. This…

A theory of organizational development is developed from turn-of-the-century geopolitical studies by combining the following: Smithian and Darwinian perspectives; the firmer concepts of management; and strategic planning views. An attempt is made to explore natural organizational processes by considering geopolitical, economic, biological, and…

Distinguished scholars, through various theoretical and research approaches, provide their findings about the deanships in schools of education. Designed for administrators and students of higher education, this book defines problems and issues of deanship. Various types are outlined: liberal arts, professional school, business, and education…

The environments that seem to have the most impact on higher education are identified: demographic, economic, political, organizational, social, and technological. Insights from studies of institutions that were not successful in coping are presented. The part strategic planning can play in enabling institutions to cope with pressures is…

Using ethnographic research methods, semistructured interviews were conducted with three women involved with a gay/lesbian/bisexual student organization. All three individuals were sophomores at an urban university in a large metropolitan area. The students discussed the fluid nature of the definitions of lesbian, gay, and bisexual, noting that…

The prison college classroom exists in an environment cut off from the outside world, where the debate over the prison classroom's very existence is fueled by public perceptions and media-generated ideas. The violent Lucasville riots in Ohio in 1994 are fresh in the minds of the public, and movies like "Shawshank Redemption" and…

This research draws on the experiences of two new teacher educators to sketch the beginning of a theory accounting for a process of transition from classroom teacher to teacher educator. As these two educators negotiated the transition from the world of classroom teaching to that of the university-based teacher educator, attention was focused on…

This paper reviews and synthesizes the literature on institutional support for student assessment, offering an organizing framework for using this information to shape institutional policies, processes, and practices in ways that lead to both improved student performance and institutional functioning. The framework, first, involves the overall…

Livingston College, a branch of Rutgers University in New Jersey, was established to provide working class and disadvantaged ethnic groups with access to an innovative and socially oriented higher education curriculum. Contradictory values in the dominant society, however, led to the college's failure to realize its goals, and its eventual…

A framework and a derivative course of action to higher education institutions as they move through transition from an industrial to technological society are presented with reference to Alvin Toffler's "The Third Wave." The concept of equilibrium/disequilibrium is the theoretical basis of the framework. Three models demonstrate the…

Effective leaders require a state of mind without which skills and information become ineffective. Leading-edge leaders idealize, imagine, and predict; they are sensitive to the cultural environment and attempt to escape mechanistic organizational norms. (RC)

Compares the transition from elite to mass higher education in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, and discusses implications for a similar developing trend in China. Examines female participation, relative emphasis on science and technology education, balance of four-year and shorter programs, and extent of private higher education. Contrasts…

This paper considers, from a British perspective, organizational theory as it applies to colleges, and provides theoretical background for people involved in curriculum-led institutional development, as well as anyone concerned with college organization. Among the topics discussed are the following: (1) institutional resistance to change; (2) the…