Delegation Of Control Research Articles

Collective negotiations and the principalship

Students of organizations know that the descriptive value of an organizational chart is limited. The flow of power and control within a school system is often a result of informal associations rather than the product of strict definitions of formal line and staff relationships. Such charts often have limited value. They depict control, or what we might better call authority, only in legal or formal terms. There are actually several authority structures in a school system-the formal and legal delegation of authority to an office by reason of its placement in the organization; the informal and extra-legal delegation of power and control to an individual above and beyond the formal limitations of his office; and the collegial or professional authority structure, which will be discussed later in this presentation. Officers at the top of the formal organization have more legal authority than those who follow, consider, for example, the broad discretionary powers granted a board of education or superintendent. In contrast to such formal or legal authority, there is that wondrous phenomenon where individuals such as the school custodian wield power far out of proportion to his formal office. If one has any doubts about this comment, he need only read Willard Waller's Sociology

Social Images in East and West Germany: A Comparative Study of Matched Newspapers in Two Social Systems

I NTERACTING social systems must base their interaction on images or conceptions which each has of the other. The social scientist who wishes to be able to predict the nature of any social interaction must come to know and understand the images which are current in the given systems. Social images are developed from information obtained through first-hand contact, by word of mouth, and from the mass communication media. The following paradigm will serve as a point of departure for this paper: 1. People form social images on the basis of information available to them. 2. Newspapers are a significant form of mass communication in a literate social system. 3. Newspapers present only selected information. 4. Such a selection narrows the range within which individual members of a social system can construct their own social images. 5. A systematic analysis of newspapers in a given social system can reveal the implicit and explicit image structure with which readers are confronted in this medium of mass communication. Events of recent world politics have served to create what may be considered a natural situation for the study of the processes of social image construction. The partition of Germany and the delegation of control of the different sectors to the Western powers and to Russia were sociologically significant events in the sense that a single social system with a unified background was arbitrarily divided and assigned to the control of other systems. Thus, new sets of norms were externally imposed on newly-created systems. This experimental situation appeared in its clearest form in the partition of a single city, Berlin. It was decided to make a systematic study of newspapers published in Berlin following this partition, for the purpose of discovering and describing the social images which they presented to their readers.