A bibliography on strategic management is presented to assist both practitioners and researchers. Criteria for inclusion were as follows: (1) general in scope, providing introductory information on a variety of subtopics within strategic management; (2) indications that the work is becoming a classic (i.e., frequent citations by other authors);…

Interviews with 25 Georgia elementary school principals provided data that could be used to test an application of Max Weber's ideal type methodology to decision-making. Alfred Schuetz's model of the rational act, based on one of Weber's ideal types, was analyzed and translated into describable acts and behaviors. Interview procedures were…

Without feasible integration strategies, the institutional researcher and decision maker remain isolated from each other, to the ultimate disadvantage of the higher education institution. Practical and achievable strategies for the researcher include knowledge of the institutional climate and norms, developing communication skills, and practicing…

This report presents the highlights of a United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) conference that was convened to give impetus to and encourage research programs, to analyze research policy formation, and to establish research priorities in the field of educational planning and administration. The document…

The key to the success of decision support systems will be the way that institutional researchers integrate the variety of specific and personal systems into a viable and coordinated institutionwide system. (Author/MLW)

An overview of educational evaluation literature is followed by summaries of research on both the perceptions of school principals about their awareness and use of evaluation in decision-making and their evaluation behavior. New lines of research on evaluation for decision-making as a learning process are offered. (MLF)

Administrators in higher education feel mounting pressure to link planning and budgeting as resources become more scarce and environments more uncertain. Instead of turning to theoretically prescribed planning/budgeting systems as solutions, microeconomics provides a means of thinking about individual consumption that helps shed light on the…

Tests the effect of school and school district size on a model of the process used by elementary school principals to allocate teachers. Finds that the decision-making model was appropriate across all sizes of schools and for small- and medium-size districts, but not for large school districts. (FMW)

Five criteria for judging college or university performance indicators (PIs) used to guide strategic decision making are outlined. The criteria address: purpose; alignment of PIs throughout the organization or system; alignment of PIs across inputs, processes, and outcomes; capacity to accommodate a variety of evaluation methods; and utility in…

One promising avenue for increasing the utilization of institutional research data is the informal action research model. While formal action research stresses the involvement of researchers throughout the decision-making process, the informal model stresses participation in the later stages of decision making. Informal action research requires…

Organizational systematics were applied to a classification scheme for postsecondary institutions using a combined phyletic-phenetic approach. Nine characteristics of organizational structure were operationalized for the college setting: institutional autonomy, centralized decision making, functional specialization, effective participation,…

Perceptions of college institutional research directors concerning the quality of executive decision making at their institutions were studied. Perceptions were assessed using a theoretical model of Groupthink developed by Janis, who postulates that a high amount of environmental stress should lead to a greater degree of…

Discusses the characteristics and development of a computer simulation laboratory for educational administration research at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and reviews an experimental study performed at the laboratory on stress in decision-making. Explores how simulations provide researchers access to experimental conditions unavailable…

Paralleling the interest among researchers in naturalistic inquiry is a resurgence in action research, and particularly in research which involves the collaboration of researchers and research subjects. This paper locates the negotiation of research outcomes between researcher and subject on a continuum, with the separation of researcher and…

Planning the activities for an instructional development unit and evaluating how well it has performed requires a set of standards against which the unit can be compared. This paper proposes a set of standards developed from a variety of references and personal experiences with instructional development units from across the country. Thirty-eight…