CASE STUDY

Case Study: “Anarchical Institutions”



Case Study: “Anarchical Institutions”

Introduction

A faculty member in our department has decided to leave our formerly collegial institution, and has landed a job at an institution much like Birnbaum's Flagship University. The faculty member's new institution is much larger and more complex than he is used to, and he asks for help in making sense of this new situation. In particular, the faculty member has always been involved in the faculty senate, and is not sure of the best way to get involved in governance at his new institution. To help him, some information is to be gathered for him on the unique characteristics of a complex, anarchical institution (Birnbaum, 1991). Therefore, this paper identifies which of Minor's faculty senate models best fits with the anarchical organization in which the faculty member now works and what he should look for in his institution to determine if the institution in fact has this type of faculty senate.

Discussion

Shared Governance in Anarchical Institutions

The two concepts are not without interest for the interpretation of the actions of management in education and in many respects, they can be characterized, to varying degrees, the operation of any educational institution. The first notion is that of anarchy in which universities are organized according to the researchers, a perfect example (Birnbaum, 1991). This term refers to organizations:

Not really consistent and objectives shared by all.

Where the production process is a complex technology and is not material (eg the learning process).

Where most of the staff has a "private" response directly from "clients" of the organization (the case of education) it is not possible and realistic to assume constant supervision of the tasks performed.

Whose members are involved on an intermittent and more or less active or even really interested in the various decisions that affect the entire organization (Birnbaum, 1991).

The image of organized anarchy has always had great resonance with the various institutional leaders with whom I had the opportunity to work. For my part, as a director of a training institution, I often feel that being "modest Admiral" a flotilla of master mariners who were the only master after God in the control of their class.

The second concept is the model of the trash that describes a style of decision that can be found particularly in the organized anarchy. This model challenges the theoretical approaches where decisions result from a scholarly confrontation between the objectives identified, solutions ...