Dr. Abeles asks:
>1) What is the "organization" that is supposed to be modeled in higher
>education? Does it differ from the generic form found in the corporate
>world and to which Senge's model is being applied? If so, where and if
>not, why?
To begin with a summary conclusion:
the organizational form of the typical accredited college or university in
the US or anywhere in the world that has postsecondary institutions whose
ancestry is the medieval Western university is "yes: the generic form of
the university is radically different from the generic form of the Western
corporation."
Those like Drucker who have studied the university's organization rather
than assumed it point to these features, among others:
Power and governance is radically different than the common command and
control power hierarchy of the corporate world.
Leadership, often by contract as well as tradition, shares power with the
knowledge workers: the faculty. Power is drastically diffused: there are
limits and constraints on what the board of trustees and the college
president and administration can do, and substantial control of the major
work of the organization is vested by contgract as well as tradition in
the knowledge workers--in the Faculty Senate (which shares governance with
the administration) and the teaching departments. Thus, the knowledge
workers have substantial control over the curriculum, which , along with
research, is the work of the institution.
Students, too, have a budget of power vested in the student government,
and zones of activity which they control.
Critics have long satirized the "anarchy" of the college organization,
calling it, for example "a collection of fiefdoms united by a common
parking lot."
Students of organization like Drucker see the university's form--the
division of a large organization into small self-governing units,
decentered and decentralist--and its diffusion of power from the top to
the periphery, so that the knowledge workers engaged in the work of the
organization have the power they need to do the work as a model that other
large organizations might well emulate.
What puzzles some here, I believe, is despite such an organizational form,
ideal for a " learning organization," the universities have by and large
refused to learn what the critics think they should learn, such as
abandoning the lecture and competitive grading, "co-learning," "learning
styles," and all the "newer" pedagogies which the critics think superior
to what the universities now do.
Steve Eskow
--Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>