Purpose: In this study the relationship between school leadership and teachers' organizational commitment is examined by taking into account a distributed leadership perspective. The relation between teachers' organizational commitment and contextual variables of teachers' perceptions of the quality and the source of the supportive and supervisory…

Although professionalism has been an important concept to American journalists for over a century, no consensus exists regarding what concepts like profession, professionalism, and professionalization mean. Three basic traditions have dominated the sociological literature on professionalism: (1) the phenomenological approach, which advocates…

Examines two models of social control processes in computerized work settings, management control and professional negotiations, and introduces a third: institutional control. Discusses the value of these models in light of an intensive study of one complex organization. Asserts that the institutional control model helps explain crucial social…

Two structures of authority coexist in colleges and universities: one that manages the supporting functional services and one that deals with the production areas of scholarship, teaching, and learning. This literature review defines organizational structure, discusses traditional organization models such as bureaucratic models, and outlines the…

This paper presents a model of how organizations adapt to the uncertainty in their environment by making changes in the way they structure themselves for decisionmaking. The research reported here indicates that it is not just a single change in organizational structure, but rather a shifting between a more rigid and more flexible decision…

Discussion of the future of educational technology focuses on an organizational analysis of the scenarios presented in the articles in this issue. Categories of organizational dynamics include the environment; goals, including values and objectives; structures, including authority and finance; methods, or technologies; and personnel issues,…

Used factors identified in the literature as predictors of centralization/decentralization as potential discriminating variables among several decision making configurations in university affiliated professional schools. The model developed from multiple discriminant analysis had reasonable success in classifying correctly only the decentralized…

Proposes sociological models about dominance and intergroup dynamics as feasible theoretical supplements to psychological models to explain the sources and significance of organizational-level change. Proposes substantive sharing of power with diverse or nontraditional employees hitherto marginalized in U.S. organizations as one potentially…

A study tested a model of intraorganizational power in the libraries of 256 liberal arts colleges, focusing on power variables, environmental variables, technology level, and bases of power variables. Results indicate that technology has a direct, yet slight, influence on the bases of power. However, the overall model was not statistically…

The organizational and decision-making characteristics of four school-based management models being developed in Dade County, Florida; Chicago; Los Angeles; and Spain are compared in this paper. The key differences lie in the origin of and reasons for change, and the common focal point is the creation and empowerment of a local school council at…

This report describes efforts to test a model of leadership effectiveness that centers on "macro variables" and "discretionary leadership." Macro variables were represented by the complexity of the environment, context, and structure of a unit. Discretionary leadership was defined as influence over and above that typically…

This study examined the impact of institutional culture on the change process within colleges and universities. It used an ethnographic approach and two tiered cultural frameworks to investigate comprehensive change at six institutions. The conceptual frameworks of culture used were Berquist's theory of institutional archetypes of culture and…

This study develops a framework for transformational change in institutions of higher education that is both theoretically and empirically grounded and is context based. It reports on six ethnographic case studies of six institutions over a four year period. The six institutions in the study and their change initiatives included one research…