Internships in an Instant Bureaucracy: Some Organizational Lessons

Abstract

Internships are viewed as interorganizational arrangements in which the academy and the agency each identify their interests and make their procedures and boundary resources flexible enough to accommodate each other's interests. Relatively open organizations meet these conditions more easily than closed systems do. This study analyzes faculty assessments of the Experimental Student Intern Program (ESIP) co-sponsored by the U.S. Bureau of the Census and 47 American colleges and universities during the 1980 decennial census. These assessments relate the degree of integration of classroom and field portions of the course. Severe problems with the internships arose, partly because the national staff failed to implement the ESIP by legitimizing it at the local level. The authors also discuss structural problems unrelated to the ESIP in the local census office. Neither the interests of the federal agency nor those of the academy were satisfied because the local agency lacked information, legitimation, and shared interests concerning the internship and was organized as a closed system rather than an open one.