How useful is the American Educational Bureaucracy?
| Autor: | Robert M. Bjork |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 1977 |
| Předmět: |
business.industry
media_common.quotation_subject Organizational studies Public relations Theory X and Theory Y Education Truism Argument Political science Organizational safety Developmental and Educational Psychology Organizational structure Bureaucracy Organizational theory business Law and economics media_common |
| Zdroj: | Peabody Journal of Education. 55:51-55 |
| ISSN: | 1532-7930 0161-956X |
| DOI: | 10.1080/01619567709538162 |
| Popis: | We have been told that large and numerous bureaucracies, governmental and nongovernmental, remain absolutely essential to survival of modern, urbanized, densely populated societies. On the other hand, bureaucracies have been characterized as inherently wasteful, self-serving, inefficient, soulless, undemocratic, rigid, and certainly unnecessary. And some even argue that bureaucracy tends toward these bad things and yet is, all the same, essential to modern society. Perhaps we cannot answer the question of the helpful or harmful nature of bureaucracy without considering its role in specific areas. It might be useful to attempt an analysis of bureaucracy in modern life by specifying some scale of essentialness for this organizational form in relation to particular processes in moder life. For example, moder military establishments almost certainly need such an organizational form. For example, if ten is the highest point on some such scale of essentialness for bureaucracy, then we would expect the bureaucratic form is at least nine points essential to the U. S. Navy. To move, equip, train, and discipline vast numbers of men and ships calls for exactly the kind of organization which bureaucracy is. A modern Navy which attempted to organize things on a collegial, or an informal avocational mode, would inevitably be at a serious if not fatal disadvantage. Modern navies must be highly specialized, disciplined, and impersonal; and relations between their subsystems must be formal and rigidly channeled. I perceive but scant reason to insist further on the high usefulness of the bureaucratic form to the Navy-only superficial argument on such a truism is possible. As one of its purposes, this paper argues that the usefulness of bureaucratic form to education is not high. Perhaps only one or two on our ten-point scale of essentialness. In fact, bureaucracy does characterize, and increasingly so, educational enterprises in the United States. That this has happened to such a high degree is unfortunate. The foremost problem in imposing bureaucratic form on education is that this organizational form possesses a pyramidal structure in which those at the bottom enjoy far fewer rewards and, more importantly, less power. This fact may lead, in practice, to some tendency on the part of those at the base to "soldier' on the job. In the Navy, ordinary seamen at the bottom of the pyramid |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
| Externí odkaz: |
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