Garbage Can Model Research Articles

Academic Profession in Academic Organization

An analysis of the properties of university organization will tell us about important aspects of academic life, but only an analysis of the academic profession will give us the whole story of academic work. External and internal life in academia is a function of the interplay between academic organization and academic man(woman). It is vital to an understanding of academic life to recognize the distinction in perspective between the organization and the individual, because academic organization is mainly passive whereas academic man(woman) is active. The two entities—the university and the academic profession—are fundamentally dissimilar from an action perspective. What academic man(woman) is—rational, evaluative, coordinating, goal oriented—the university cannot be; and what the university as an organization amounts to—satisfying a garbage-can model's properties—would spell disaster for academic man(woman). What unites the university and the academic profession is that both entities have to act in an e...