The purpose of this article is to present an instructional innovation called the Structure-Culture Alignment Activity, which leads students through the process of aligning cultural values pertaining to diversity, equity, and inclusiveness (DEI) to two important structural elements, formalization and centralization. Using decision making, team…

Academic interdisciplinarity has become a powerful means of addressing challenges facing contemporary society as well as offering opportunities to advance knowledge. To better understand the role of university interdisciplinary organizations (IDOs), the authors studied 18 IDOs at Stanford University in the USA. They propose that IDOs not only…

The purpose of this study was to investigate participant involvement in community wind bands through the lens of organizational theory to inform the music education profession about community wind bands as an "expressive" voluntary association with potential for lifelong participation. Twenty-eight informants were drawn from three…

As the definition of organization has evolved, so have the approaches used to evaluate organizational performance. During the past 60 years, organizational theorists and management scholars have developed a comprehensive line of thinking with respect to organizational assessment that serves to inform and be informed by the evaluation discipline.…

In today's modern business world, most organizations use information as a critical business asset to gain competitive advantage and create market value. Increasingly, an organization's ability to protect information assets plays a critical role in its ability to meet regulatory compliance requirements, increase customer trust, preserve brand…

This article is intended to spark a discussion between two research communities--scholars who study learning and scholars who study educational organizations. A secondary purpose is to encourage researchers to look beyond schools to examine learning in other types of educational organizations. The authors outline a framework to guide research on…

Previous qualitative studies show that when the formal organization of a school and patterns of informal interaction are aligned, faculty and leaders in a school are better able to coordinate instructional change. This article combines social network analysis with interview data to analyze how well the formal and informal aspects of a school's…

This article proposes some specific new guidelines for organizational taxonimizing that deliberately circumvent the problems of previous attempts, discusses the problem of selecting subgrouping dimensions for the formation of a taxonomy of organizations and proposes one possible set of such dimensions. (Author)

This document explores the relationship between ambiguity and the ambiguous concept of culture which is of fundamental interest to organizational culture researchers. After an overview of the topic, a matrix framework for understanding different approaches to studying cultures is presented. The matrix framework is used to contrast two paradigms…

Using educational organizations as a case in point, it is argued that the concept of loose coupling incorporates a surprising number of disparate observations about organizations, suggests novel functions, creates stubborn problems for methodologists, and generates intriguing questions for scholars. (Author)

In this introduction to a series of articles on educational bureaucracy, the author writes that for a bureaucracy to develop, the following elements must first have evolved: (1) a concept of guided authority; (2) a system of written records documenting function, place, and status of persons at various levels; and (3) employment and advancement…

Many argue that work should meet individual needs for fulfillment (humanism) while meeting needs for personal income and organizational productivity (materialism). The authors side with those arguing that the two modes are incompatible and that the dominant paradigm of materialism must be abandoned. (Author/IRT)

Organizations seek stability in the policy environment, initially through direct control mechanism, but depending on risk propensity and uncertainty of the environment, through other means as well. A repertoire of seven such means are described and discussed. (Author/IRT)

This document reports on how formative evaluation was used by the National Institute for Science Education (NISE) to achieve its stated goals and to develop an institute from an amorphous group. It was found that formative evaluation should provide ideas, information, models, and language that an emerging interdisciplinary organization can use to…