Burton R. Clark

The Organizational Saga in Higher Education.

An organizational saga is a collective understanding of a unique accomplishment based on historical exploits of a formal organization, offering strong normative bonds within and outside the organization. Believers give loyalty to the organization and take pride and identity from it. A saga begins as strong purpose, introduced by a man (or small group) with a mission, and is fulfilled as it is embodied in organizational practices and the values of dominant organizational cadres, usually taking decades to develop. Examples of the initiation and fulfillment of sagas in academic organizations are presented from research on Antioch, Reed, and Swarthmore.1

Sustaining change in universities: Continuities in case studies and concepts

Abstract My book, Creating Entrepreneurial Universities, based on mid‐1990s research in five European universities, set forth five “pathways of transformation” by which public universities assume a highly proactive stance. On the basis of further research that tracks developments in these institutions during the late 1990s, this paper presents a conceptual transition from transformation to sustainability. How is change institutionally sustained after much transformation has taken place? Enduring components are found in a steady state of change that includes a bureaucracy of change. Further analysis suggests three dynamics of sustained change: reenforcing interaction among transforming elements; perpetual momentum resulting from steady accummulation of incremental changes; and ambitious volition embedded in the university as collective commitment and institutional will. A longer manuscript under preparation will explore the utility of the old pathways and the new sustaining features in case studies of entr...

Perspectives on higher education : eight disciplinary and comparative views

(1986). Perspectives on Higher Education: Eight Disciplinary and Comparative Views. The Journal of Higher Education: Vol. 57, No. 2, pp. 214-217.

Substantive Growth and Innovative Organization: New Categories for Higher Education Research.

The existing international literature on higher education centers on the transition from elite to mass higher education, the changing relationship between governments and universities, and the differentiation of the institutional fabric of national systems. These important institutionalized concerns lead to an unbalanced research agenda if other basic features are not pursued. Two additional fundamental features need expanded attention: substantive academic growth, with its roots in the research imperative and the dynamics of disciplines; and innovative university organization, a sharply growing concern among practitioners as universities seek greater capacity to change.Proliferating at a rapid rate, modern academic knowledge changes fields of study from within, alters universities from the bottom-up, and increases the benefits and costs of decisions on the inclusion and exclusion of various specialties. The long-term trend from simple to complex knowledge, arguably more important than the trend from elite to mass higher education, forces universities to position themselves between knowledge expansion and student expansion, with emphasis increasingly placed on the knowledge dimension. Innovative universities explore new ways of organizing knowledge and of more effectively exploiting the fields in which they are already engaged. Greater awareness of new means of knowledge organization will help universities make wiser choices in the twenty-first century.

Interorganizational Patterns in Education

Educational structure in the United States is changing under the impact of modern economic, demographic and political forces that generate national interests and condition the self-interest of colleges and school systems. With control formally located in state and local units, much of the alteration takes the form of influence exerted from the center through voluntary relations among public agencies and private groups. The relations that emerged around the Physical Science Study Committee formed a new pattern in which action is concerted by the leverage of money and prestige and the limited confluence of independent interests. Other schemes are also developing rapidly, e.g., the federation of private colleges, in which co-operation is brought about by the search for competitive advantage. These patterns of partial linkage can be compared with bureaucratic processes to move toward a theory of confederative organization. This theory will connect with or become part of a theory of influence that has thus far largely developed in the study of politics. Burton R. Clark is research sociologist at the Center for the Study of Higher Education and professor of education at the University of California, Berkeley.

Development of the Sociology of Higher Education

A sociology of higher education has emerged in the quarter-century since World War II. It is now a field with several important streams of interest: the two major foci of educational inequality beyond the secondary level and the social-psychological effects of college on students; and smaller literatures on the academic profession and governance and organization. In the 1970s, some parts of the field face the danger of expensive trivialization, others of substituting playful journalism for scholarly discipline. Encouraging prospects for the near future include more extensive development of comparative studies and analyses with historical depth. A useful additional step would be to counter the dominant instrumental definitions of education with approaches that center on the values, traditions, and identities-the expressive components-of educational social systems.

The contradictions of change in academic systems[1]

A systematic approach to change in established academic systems requires an internal analysis of the predispositions or response sets of the primary structures of work, belief, and authority. Existing forms shape change by impelling as well as constraining it. Different forms push action in different directions, loading a national system with contradictions. Four sets of contradictions are explored in which order and disorder are in tension: between the disciplinary bottom and the administrative top; among units within administrative superstructures; within the understructure or operating levels; and over time in a reversal of orderly and disorderly tendencies. In societys principal knowledge institution, change will continue to take unusual forms, despite the imposition of state administrative machinery.

Collegical Entrepreneurialism In Proactive Universities: Lessons From Europe

hould universities-particularly public universities in this country and elsewhere in the world-transform themselves and change the ways they operate? Based on my recent research in Europe, I wish to argue that indeed many universities ought to become much more proactive, even entrepreneurial. If they do not, they will put themselves at considerable risk during the first decades of the 21st century. In a nutshell, modern universities are developing a disturbing imbalance with their environments. They face an overload of de-

Listening to the Professoriate.

academic profession has long been a gathering of disparate fields. Even in the beginning, some eight centuries ago in Bologna, Paris, and Oxford, the universities were composites of law and medicine and theology and administrative training for state and church. Now within the academic estate there are molecular biology and high-energy physics and Renaissance literature and childhood learning and computer science, in a never-ending stream of specialties within a wide array of disciplines and professional areas of study. Beginning in the last half of the nineteenth century, the American system of higher education moved rapidly into a luxuriant garden of subjects, as Walter Metzger has pointed out, generous to a fault in admitting to the curriculum even the arts of the home and the bat-

The New University

Editors’ Preface ... The papers collected here share a concern with the problem of authority in the university its changing bases, uses, emergent forms, and prospects. On the orle hand, the relation of the university to society is changing; on the other hand, the internal constitution, the character of the university, is also changing. The main question is: Can a form of authority be found which will at once accommodate these changes and insure the freedom essential to teaching, learning, innovation, and communication? The authors offer no