Ronald G. Corwin

Organizational Barriers to the Utilization of Research.

We would like to express our appreciation to Michael Kane, John Egermeier, Bob Herriott, Sheila Rosenblum, Bob Dentler, Jack Fowler, Tom Mangione, and to several anonymousASQ reviewers of an earlier draft of this paper. Research findings frequently do not seem to have a discernible influence on administrative practice. We propose that a key reason is that research is often conducted in a policy vacuum. Policy vacuums occur in the absence of: an organized constituency of policy makers, identifiable policy issues and research questions, consistent policies and clear policy options, coordination among the independent agencies responsible for a policy area, and an ongoing, operational program that can make use of the findings. Examples of each feature are drawn from two demonstration programs operating in the National Institute of Education. Numerous organizational properties are identified that inhibited the utility of the research connected with the programs.0

7: Models of Educational Organizations

In attempting to understand the almost bewildering diversity of organizations that present themselves for study, sociologists have built various models; these models have explicitly or implicitly guided research on organizations in education. This chapter reflects the belief that institutional organizations, such as those in education, constitute an important subject matter in themselves and are not to be regarded merely as production systems. A fundamental task to which research must address itself is to identify available models of social organization and determine the priorities to be given to each of the many variables whereby organizations can be studied-including not only those variables that have been most frequently considered in the literature, but also those that have been generally neglected despite their possible relevance. Until this task is completed, researchers will continue to be diverted by often senseless debates about whether or not the characteristics of

Strategies of Organizational Survival: The Case of a National Program for Educational Reform

A small number of case studies describing how organizations adapt to changing or hostile environments by means of goal adaptation, selection of membership and audience, and reinforcement of organizational structure has accumulated. (For example, see Clark, 1956, 1960; Gusfield, 1955; Marris & Rein, 1967, Messinger, 1955; Moynihan, 1969; Selznick, 1949; Sills, 1957; Watson, 1968; Zald, 1970.) This literature is comprehensive, in that most aspects of the problem have been considered by one writer or another; however, at least two critical dimensions have not been given the full attention they deserve. First, with notable exceptions (e.g., Moynihan, 1969; Selznick, 1949; Zald, 1970), these studies concentrate on a single organization or view large sets of organizations as a collective, with only incidental attention to their internal dynamics. Analysis of interorganizational relationships would, however, illuminate the processes by which organizations are able to adapt and survive. Second, recent syntheses of political, economic, and sociological perspectives (Hirschman, 1970) bring into focus the essentially political nature of the process by which goals and structure are adapted to external and internal constraints. Zald (1970), for one, has demonstrated the utility of focusing on the political economy of organizations; i.e., the interplay of power and goals and productive exchange systems. This approach calls attention to the importance of external funding sources, internal allocations of resources, internal and external group conflict, and dominating elites.