Zelda F. Gamson

Collaborative Learning Comes of Age.

them. I started creating all sorts of exercises for the seminar when I taught it again. It was fun for me and fun for the students. They seemed to be more involved and learning more. So I just kept doing it with my graduate courses. But I never talked to anyone about it. Then when I started teaching undergraduates at the Residential College (RC), a small innovative college at Michigan, I tried using groups with undergraduates. The students took to working together immediately, especially in a course I taught on social science research methods. RC students

Disciplinary Adaptations to Research Culture in Comprehensive Institutions

When institutions of higher education imitate the cultural models of other institutions, successful adoption requires adequate and apposite resources. This qualitative study documents the adoption of the research culture within four comprehensive universities, analyzes the manner by which faculty in the English and mathematics departments have adapted the model differentially, and demonstrates a reinforcing relationship between the two disciplinary-related adaptations and the resources available to support the adaptations.

Organizational responses to the labor market

Shifts in the labor market require adaptive responses on the part of formal organizations. Such organizational responses are shown in changes in recruitment strategies. This study examines how departments in comprehensive colleges and universities formulate their faculty recruitment strategies and set standards for new faculty personnel. Comprehensive institutions are neither research universities nor liberal arts colleges. Even though most offer graduate degrees at the masters level in such areas as teacher training and business programs, they are predominantly devoted to undergraduate education. Lacking strong ties to distinctive beliefs and identities, these institutions have become increasingly vulnerable to environmental changes.Based on extensive fieldwork at four institutions, this paper focuses on twenty faculty searches conducted over a period of substantial changes in academic labor markets. Several common search episodes are identified.The general pattern of recruitment strategies is shaped by the rule of status competition in a prestige hierarchy: less prestigious organizations compete for institutional legitimacy by adopting the norms of more prestigious organizations. Search-related practices in these comprehensive institutions are, therefore, organized around the institutional rituals that conform to the standards of more prestigious research universities and elite liberal arts colleges. Search and recruitment practices often reflect a ritualized form of preoccupation with credentials, specialities, and procedures. Despite their initial emphasis on specific goals, those involved in the search were less concerned about search outcomes than about processes.

This Fine Place So Far From Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class.@@@The Academic Man: A Study in the Sociology of a Profession.

When it was originally published, The Academic Man was the first full-scale social science-based study on the American academic profession. The issues identified by Logan Wilson in 1942 remain central to any consideration of the American professoriate. Wilson demonstrates the usefulness of a historical perspective in understanding the present, as well as the considerable continuity in higher education. His acute observations remain a critical base for contemporary studies of higher education. The Academic Man explores three mam aspects of higher education: the academic hierarchy, academic status, and academic processes and functions. He discusses the difficulty college graduates have in finding jobs, a problem still prevalent today. He also examines the small number of publications produced by graduates with Ph.Ds, showing that only a few account for the greatest percentage of publications, as well as the ratio of teaching activities to non-teaching activities performed by faculty members. In his new introduction, Philip G. Altbach discusses the changes that have occurred in the college community during the past half-century, including the expansion of universities and the increasing diversity of students and faculty hi terms of gender, ethnicity, and religious background. At the same tune, he shows how Wilsons basic tenets continue to hold true for contemporary academic life. The timelessness of The Academic Man will make it a valuable resource for students, professors, university administrators, and sociologists.