From "loose Coupling" To "tight Management"? Making Sense Of The Changing Landscape In Management And Organization Theory

Two decades ago, Allison (1984) wrote an article asking whether public administration and business administration were ‘‘fundamentally alike in all unimportant respects’’ (the answer was a qualified yes and no). This special issue of the Journal of Education Administration began with a similarly broad question concerning changes in organizational thought in the field of education organizations in general and the relationship between organizational thinking in the world of private enterprise and the world of education in particular. On closer inspection, it turned out that the question could usefully be broken down into three more specific ones pertaining to the theoretical, practical, and normative level of analysis. Concerning the dominant theoretical models and assumptions in contemporary research in organization and administration there is evidence that education plays a different role than it did during the field’s early stages some 40 years ago. After all, many of today’s education scholars and policy makers were reared on intellectual fare replete with concepts like ‘‘organized anarchy’’, ‘‘ambiguity of leadership’’, ‘‘loose coupling’’, ‘‘institutionalization’’, and ‘‘organization culture’’, almost all of which were developed through a sustained analytical engagement with educational organizations. In many ways, schools and universities were the paradigm-generating organizations of an entire school of thought, associated with the work of scholars like James March, Karl Weick, John Meyer, and Brian Rowan. By contrast, educational organizations today seem a good deal less visible in organization theory and the discourse among the different groups of organization scholars appears more insular today than 30 or 40 years ago. For example, while the 1965 Handbook of Organizations (Bidwell, 1965) had a substantial chapter dedicated to the organization of schools, the recently published Handbook of Organizations Studies (Clegg et al., 1996) does not. Also, the leading organization studies journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, has published 12 full length articles on education (higher education and k12) during the 1980s, but only one during the 1990s. On the practical level we notice a similar turn of events. During the 1970s and 1980s it seemed that organization theory was telling practitioners in education that they, literally, needed to ‘‘loosen up’’. They were asked to embrace (rather than fight or resist) ambiguity and loose coupling in their organizations; and they were exhorted to learn the art of symbolic leadership appropriate to a pervasively institutionalized organization, rather than using hierarchical, top-down management styles appropriate to more tightly coupled structures. Weick’s (1976) seminal paper on the ‘‘loose coupling of educational organizations’’