Suchergebnisse

School districts have made several attempts at decentralizing. However, decentralization in school districts can mean so many different things that the term has nearly lost its meaning. This paper reports a study of three large urban school districts that, over almost 30 years, adopted nearly identical approaches to decentralizing, granting control to principals and expanding freedom of choice for families. In all three cases, the goal of improving student achievement was achieved, although with a very small sample. These three districts are compared to the three largest public districts in North America. The comparisons reveal that the three decentralized districts attained a high level of principal control over school budgets, staffing, schedule, and teaching methods.

The contemporary study of organizational culture reflects mainline concerns of the organizational sociologist. Though anthropology and cognitive psychology have made significant contributions to this new field, the study of organizational culture may be seen as a return to some of the most basic concerns about the nature of organizations and the appropriate methods for analyzing them. We review current work on theory, empirical studies, and contributions—both theoretical and empirical—o the understanding of planned change of organizations. The contemporary study of organizational culture reflects several hotly contested concerns, among which are the following: Can culture be intentionally managed? Must culture be studied using the tools of the phenomenologist or the ethnographer, or does the use of multivariate statistics also have a place? Which social science paradigm is most appropriate for understanding organizational culture: phenomenology, symbolic interaction, semiotics, structural-functional anthropology, cognitive psychology?