This book asks how modern universities are organized and managed, and questions whether 30 years of university reforms have resulted in stronger managerial structures and leadership control. It further asks whether current organisational and decision-making structures can be explained by public reform policies. The book offers a coherent,…

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book "Outliers," describes how studies of expertise consistently show that 10,000 hours of practice in a discipline is required for true mastery. This is problematic for those who become independent school trustees--bringing with them a passion for their school and for education in general, but not much else. Many…

Post-Compulsory Education and Lifelong Learning across the United Kingdom brings together the perspectives of researchers, policy-makers and practitioners from across England, Wales and Scotland to produce a rich, up-to-date and highly textured source of evidence about this under-researched sector. The contributors analyse how each country's…

The authors of this monograph assert that by assisting school systems to more closely resemble "high reliability" organizations (HROs) that already exist in other industries and benchmarking against top-performing education systems from around the globe, America's school systems can transform themselves from compliance-driven…

This article focuses on responses of higher education institutions to governmental policy. We investigate the influence of organisational characteristics on the implementation of quality management in Hungarian higher education institutions. Our theoretical framework is based on organisational theories (resource dependency and…

The paper examines the results of a study of strategic plans in community colleges in Ontario, Canada between 1995 and 2005. The system was very similar to centralized systems in many jurisdictions including China. The study found that (1) the strategies of those colleges were more alike than different; (2) the strategic content of the plans as…

Higher education institutions are facing major challenges requiring traditional leadership and administrative policies and practices to be rethought and renewed. These challenges concern the whole academic community but mostly the institutions' administrative leaders. This article suggests how applying the democratic principles of…

How should universities manage their research function? Today, research-based knowledge is viewed widely as fundamental to economic advancement. As a result, universities everywhere are facing pressure to rethink their research activities. A general model of the research process is presented here. Linkages are drawn between that process, other…

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has provoked more controversy than any previous education legislation in recent decades. Our conceptual analysis was guided by three questions: What do we see happening in the schools? What does the law seem to mean in terms of accountability to different people in the schools? Where is the justice in these…

Administrators, particularly those who engage in instructional leadership, play a key role in school improvement. Past research describes the types of activities instructional leaders engage in but has paid little attention to how they do it. The authors use the case of one school to unpack instructional leadership as a practice, paying close…

Discusses forces behind restructuring schooling and the implications for planning. Four distinct yet interactive forces have emerged: (1) shifts in compelling state interests in education; (2) realignments of conventional principles of government; (3) a "systems break" in political ideology; and (4) an emerging new organizational…

The purpose of this paper is to propose the "management team"--in which the entire administrative staff influences policy making--as the means for administering Ohio's public schools. Included in the paper are a statement of the problem, underlying propositions, some general principles, recommendations for action, necessary commitments,…

Management theory as a morally neutral science aiming to improve educational institutions is doomed to failure. School administration is inescapably bound up with ethical values and depends on democratic decision making by staff with high self-esteem. Staff with little confidence or pride in their work cannot make good decisions. Includes 13…

Current attitudes and practices in business information courses are described, and the need for an approach that incorporates the organizational environment and the needs of the business community is discussed. A shift in curriculum from the library perspective to the user perspective is proposed. (10 notes with references) (CLB)

This paper describes the Tri-Partite Theory of institutional change, which proposes that organizations in general and educational institutions in particular pass through three phases, each dominated by a specific personality type: person-orientation (loyalty to a charismatic leader as the basis of motivation); plan-orientation (functions…