Efficient Organizational Structure Research Articles

The Principal in the Year 2000: A Teacher's Wish

he public school system in America is in midst of a managerial revolution. Americans have begun to agree that classic corporate hierarchy model, developed in early twentieth century and dominant in theory and practice for postwar period, is no longer most efficient organizational structure for public schools. The traditional high school organization, a tightly integrated hierarchy with a clear functional division of labor, was designed to produce several basic, standardized products: honors graduates destined for professional careers, academically oriented students prepared for twoand four-year colleges, and vocationally trained students ready to begin work after graduation or upon completion of brief sojourns in trade schools. The principal was seen as a heroic captain of a ship. The position called for authoritarian leadership; life was lonely at top . But those with the right stuff would get job done by seeing to it that students, teachers, and parents behaved properly. Through example and firm control principal ensured that nothing interfered with accomplishment of directives from superintendent's office. Educational reformers currently advocate changes that, by year 2000, will create a much more flexible organizational structure, capable of graduating a much wider variety of students, of innovating more quickly and easily, and of smoothly adjusting distribution of staff and resources to take advantage of educational research and shifting societal needs. We have begun to see decentralization of power and responsibility, blurring of old organizational and professional divisions through team management, creation of new forms of collaboration between teachers, students, and administrators (symbolized by implementation of town meeting for-

AUSTRALIA RECONSTRUCTED: THE IMPLICATIONS FOR THE CREATION OF EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY

The article examines the relationship between equal employment opportunity and the search for more efficient organisational and industrial structures in Australia.

The Conflict Between the Scientific‐Technological Process and Malignant Ceremonialism*

Abstract. A technological revolution may be seen as the process when more flexible or warranted technological relations break through destructive forces so decisively that the institutional‐technological structure is transformed into what Clarence Ayres called a set of “efficient organizational structures.” Growing flexibility of such relations can lead to broader public access to the means of life This creates conflict because ceremonial forces are expressed through repressive. obstructive and exploitative institutions in technology and science so that there is a greater benefit to those rested powers than to society, and because the vested interests ability to withhold or charge heavily for access to economic opportunity would be reduced. Two processes are at loggerheads: encapsulation vs. liberation. A ‘general trust’ in ‘technology’(used as an euphemism for the anti‐consumer business power system) abandons the main thrust of the ceremonial instrumental dichotomy: the scientific‐technological process is the social context in which the forces of warranted or warrantable knowledge are expressed through community institutions enlarging accessibility and participation on a peer‐to‐peer basis. Thus the reconstructed dichotomy is both a coinflict theory and a conflict resolution theory.

The cost-output relationship of banks revisited

This paper offers a different method for the analysis of economies to scale in banks. It concentrates on the characteristics of the cost surface rather than on those of the cost function. This facilitates a direct test for the existence of interproduct complementarity in banks. The paper suggests that the interest charges should be examined as part of the banks' operating costs. This study offers two main empirical results regarding a more efficient growth pattern and organizational structure of banks. First, it shows that a proportionate increase in bank outputs does not reduce the average costs of production, and secondly, it reveals that the production process of banks involves interproduct complementarity.