new topic/ organizations as organisms

I have changed my topic. My new topic is the law that allows illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition in California. When I applied the organization as organisms assumptions to my new problem there are a lot of possible applications or perspectives. Specifically, the assumption of interacting components can be seen on multiple levels from the community, state government, universities, departments, students etc. The assumption dealing with boundaries, for example, involves a clear division between state government and universities. Finally if I understand the last assumption correctly (Systems receive inputs from the environment, transform them in some way and then return them to the environment) that would mean that the state government received inputs regarding the illegal immigrant student population and then the government transformed the input and introduced the in-state tuition law. I know we are going to talk more about organizations as organisms in class. I guess I am just thinking out loud, but I welcome any thoughts on this topic.

Organizational problem as an organism

After reading the organism chapter I have started to think more about the outside environmental influences that might have an impact on the current graduation ceremony policy. Many students at George Mason are communters so maybe the university felt as thought only offering one graduation ceremony per year would be fine considering many of the students live in the area and could return to the university in the furture to participate in the ceremony. However, the university now has a lot of international students and communter students. I don't think the status quo of only one ceremony is working for a large number of the students who attend.

I attended Radford University which only had about 10,000 students. Hardly any of which were communters. We had two graduation ceremonies per year. Mason has almost 30,000 students and only offer one ceremony. The communter student is a whole new player that I hadn't considered befor reading this chapter.

Nevermind

Okay - disregard my blog (duh) - I found the place to search for articles. We had a pipe break in our house so I had to drive with Mike to Front Royal to get a part - replaced the part while we watched the debate, ate too much butter pecan ice cream, went to bed at 2am and am now doing my homework. Two cups of coffee later - I can see and comprehend!!! Have a restful weekend.

The mechanics of our problem statements and archives...

Looking forward to the class discussion on how to approach our "problems" from an organism perspective.

By the way, does anyone know how to search the archives of Inside Education? Maybe it's too early in the morning, but I am not seeing it. Also, has anyone had problems subscribing to Higher Education? The site wants my $$ but if I can get it for free - that's the way I want to go!

Organism v. Structure

I'm only a few pages in to ready Birnbaum, chapter 2, but is it just me or is "organizations as organism" similar to "organizations as structure" - only maybe a little more intense. Anyway it's not what I was expecting.

Another side to the international students posts

There is an interesting article in the Chronicle (Emirates Look to the West for Prestige, Sept 22, 2008). The article is about the United Arab Emirates trying to boost their status as Universities. They are hiring a lot of people from US institutions and making large scale changes to their universities. A lot of money is being poured into the programs over there.

It would be interesting to look at all the changes they are making from some of the organizational frameworks we are looking at in class.

Also as another note. If these universities are spending so much money on faculty and administration over there it could have two outcomes- a drain on top staff here in the US and also fewer international students coming to the US for school. Why would international students come to the US if they can get the equivalent of a US education in the United Arab Emirates?

fine arts college from a human resource perspective

In looking at my problem (integrating the community into other sectors of a fine arts college) through the human resources perspective. I came to a realization. I focused on a definition from the Bolman book that said that the HR framework focuses on "how characteristics of organizations and people shape what they do for one another". I realized that the college has many of the characteristics of a HR framework. For example, one of the assumptions of the HR framework is creating an environment that the organization exploits the talents of its employees and vice versa. The college benefits from the talents of the employees by attracting donors, patrons from the community and students. The employees benefit by having an outlet to further their career and share their talents.

My point of all this is that since the college has many of the basic assumptions of the HR framework, why do they have trouble integrating the community into all aspects of the college? I am starting to think that maybe the college needs to use a blend of a few different organizational frameworks to solve the problem.