This paper comments on and assesses the power of the research of six studies presented at the American Educational Research Association symposium, "Linking Behavioral Research and Administrative Science." Three of the studies (Jordan, Koehler and Ismail, Bredo) are classified in terms of organizations as formal structures, and as instruments of…

Patterns of problem-solving activity in one middle-class urban high school are examined and a problem solving model rooted in a conceptual framework of contingency theory is presented. Contingency theory stresses that as political, economic, and social conditions in an organization's environment become problematic, the internal structures of the…