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A University is an exact example of an organic and evolving set of disciplines and functions
Introduction :
A University is an exact example of an organic and evolving set of disciplines and functions. Though the University exhibits organic structure in some parts of functioning, an ideal from of system would be a mix of the mechanist structure and the organic structure.
Definitions:
Mechanist form of management refers to those activities in an organization which are stable and groups though dynamically evolving need a stable form of management to carry out their duties. Though management deals with people, groups need communication and in this from its vertical communication between group and leader. The group also relates to this form of management through actively involving in task making defining and allotting instructions and decisions are issued by superiors and group adheres to it very strictly. In a mechanist form of government the knowledge that the group has is considered to be more important than the knowledge possessed by the generic structure. The translation of tights becomes a functional role and group has to strictly adhere t it.
Organic structure of organization depend on the man power resources where commitment to the tasks is viewed as more important than the task itself .the discharge of functions is expected to be holistic and individual competencies are used to make the system more evolving and possessing
The University as being a mixture of both as a rational organization where the conglomeration of human resources is sought to bring about the most efficient form of structure where the human resource interacts very intensely with the other functions to bring about a form of organization which closely resembles a beauracracy but still has functional independence in terms of departmental functioning.
The University as a mechanist system:
The University is a stable form of organization and has different functional tasks which are broken down into different departments like administration human resources, different departments of study so on and so forth and all these have their own heads or Deans who then report to the director academics and so on .Though these departments function as distinct their functions are rather abstract and hence as a whole the functions are very clear .The departments are clearly designated by strict level of hierarchies and every officers is responsible for the performance of his tasks and those tasks that are relevant to him .Every functional role has a good definition of rights and obligations and these in turn translate into responsibilities held by a functional head. The communication patterns, control and authority parity are purely hierarchical. The communication channels and accountability and chain of command are top down and vertical. Every instruction and working behavior is governed by directions from the superior. These kinds of organizations rely very heavily on obedience and loyalty to superiors. The importance of knowing the local and specific knowledge is what makes a mechanist structure work well. The University in fact works on all these attributes that make it mechanist in functioning
The University as an organic system:
An organic system is always evolving and adapting itself to new environment sand changes as needed. When evolutions and changes happen it becomes difficult to allot tasks and functions in a credible and perfect manner .this is because Unforeseen requirements crop up and the rate of changes happen very fast. This takes time for assimilations and so the functional roles within a hierarchical structure cannot be defined .The organic structure comes from the stemming of special knowledge to the common tasks and all individual tasks are set by the common task so observed .Continual interaction with everyone in the system reiterates the individual tasks and shelving of responsibility to others is rather limited . Rights obligations and methods are tightly given responsibility to the owners and cannot be displaced. There is no technical definition for commitment as every work is task oriented. The structure of control and authority arises from the individual conduct in his work environment and less from contractual relationship. The worker treats the organization as non personal and the relationship is derived between the worker and his superior. The head of the organization is not considered to be omniscient and so the knowledge can be found anywhere in the network and this becomes the adhoc centre of control communication and chain of command .The communication networks are lateral making it more consultative than commanding . Information and advice is what communication so all about rather than information and decisions. Material progress and expansion is given precedence over loyalty and obedience. Cosmopolitan knowledge is given more importance than expertise in specific fields.
The University exhibits great features of the mechanist system as it is typically beauracratic in function and heavy emphasis is laid on knowledge acquisition and in learning organizations. Though the system is typically stratified, the chain of command makes one look at the dichotomy of power centers. There are very specific power nodes and typical organizational communication which cannot in any way be changed. Everything follows a perfect order and has to be followed that way.
Flexibility in individual task is give at the department level only. The superior can give that flexibility to his sub ordinates to function the way he wants provided the limiting dresses for order are seriously maintained In the University every person works on his own functionally isolated . Every man does his job and they do not relate to the macrocosm of the University on the whole .For example the admission department is only concerned with admission routines and procedures least bothered about the costs involved in getting these admissions. The library works on its own impartial to the needs of what is actually required and just shows acquisitions whatever be it. This has created a responsibility barrier in Universities where one department hands over the responsibility to another and then absolves itself totally from commitment to it.
Though Universities are now trying to innovate to new forms of organizational structure the very nature of a cohesive whole and the bonding given to all functional heads falling under the aegis of one responsible officer, the organic structure may not be suitable in all aspects.
Conclusion:
Management for innovation is needed for every set up and may be true for Universities too where innovation has to be managed but Universities are not product oriented where design and production is interrelated, the product here is a human being who cannot be limited to task heads and communication channels. Knowing how tight the controls are in a University it is much needed that communication coordination and control are centralized to a very great extent and partial decentralization is given to functional heads to carry out their tasks committed with responsibility.
References:
Burns and Stalker, the Management of Innovation
Breach of Informal Norms Informal norms are casual behaviors that society members conform to provide guidance and direct beha
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Breach of Informal Norms
Informal norms are casual behaviors that society members conform to provide guidance and direct behavior, thus bringing order in society. Informal norms are an essential part of society because they allow members to understand each other and create predictable social relationships. Reactions to a breach of informal norms vary depending on the relationship between the two parties in play. The OpenStax textbook states, “First, consider the
elements of a relationship. One is attachment, or the bond that people form with each
other. (OpenStax chapter 4, section 1). For the breaching of informal norms experiment, I decided to take the lift while facing the opposite direction from everybody in the lift. Normally elevator etiquette dictates that people fill it starting from the back as they face the door. I choose the school resource center’s elevator on a Monday because it is usually full of students. People got into the lift and faced the door as they waited for it to move and reach their respective floors. Additionally, people in an elevator tend to maintain silence throughout unless they share s special connection like a friendship. I got into the lift last and faced people in the lift. To make it more interesting, I decided to take another step and plug my earphones and dance like it was commonplace for the activity. However, no music was playing on my phone the whole time. I identified two individuals in the lift and tried to maintain steady eye contact by persistently staring at them and watching their reactions.
The elevator consisted of a total of ten individuals of different genders. Two individuals expressed amusement in my actions. On the other hand, five people, particularly those close to me, expressed discomfort. According to the OpenStax textbook, “what is considered deviant is determined not so much by the behaviors themselves or the people who commit them, but by the reactions of others to these behaviors” (OpenStax chapter 4, section 3). The lady right in front of me removed her phone from her purse started scrolling to distract herself from whatever I was doing and avoid eye contact. The man next to her covered his face with his hands in disbelief and looked down the whole time in the elevator. He avoided eye contact with me because it made him uncomfortable. In this experiment, I broke the informal norm that requires people to face the same direction and not interfere with personal space since it’s a small cubicle and is for a short while. The discomfort and amusement of people in the elevator made my actions feel awkward and out of place.
Shifting the social context and introducing this informal norm in a different physical setting. The breach of the informal norm in the elevator opened my mind and allowed me to realize how society, mainly human behavior, is guided and controlled by unspoken rules. The reactions from the people in the elevator made me feel a little embarrassed. However, I had to see it through and gather as much information as possible through their reactions. It helped me appreciate the presence of unspoken rules in society.
A Unified Front Against AIDS
A Unified Front Against AIDS?
The current number of world-wide cases of HIV infection is estimated at 20 million. In the United States, 362,000 people have died because of AIDS or AIDS related illnesses, while over 581,000 are currently infected. These numbers are startling, but in the United States alone, a country often recognized as the supposed world-leader in health care, between 40,000 and 80,000 new cases of HIV infection are reported each year. This statistic moves beyond startling and into the realm of frightening. The consensus among most physicians, and indeed among most Americans is that AIDS rapidly approaches or has already attained the status of a health crisis. These same people often agree that not enough action is taken to resolve this crisis. Seemingly, a widely recognized crisis of this sort should receive its due attention from all aspects of society, including medicine, biological research, and the government.
Unfortunately, AIDS remains an overwhelming crisis because it in fact does not receive its due attention. The reasons behind the lack of attention brought to bear upon the AIDS health crisis involve a number of invariably linked problems in the response to AIDS when it was first discovered. Essentially, the response to AIDS was not unified, and therefore weakened. This early weakness has plagued the entirety of the struggle against the spread of HIV and AIDS since that time of initial discovery. The response to the AIDS crisis was disjointed because of an early lack of knowledge and interest in the disease; because of ethical and political problems concerning the research, diagnosis, and spread of the illness; and, most importantly, because of the flaws inherent in the structure of the public health care system. These difficult issues, present in the early struggle against the disease, have shaped and molded the character of the struggle that was to follow.
Similar problems have manifested themselves throughout the history of the cause against AIDS, even in the present day. The earliest research into AIDS and HIV suffered the same difficulties that any new field of research would—a lack of direction. Since so little was known about the disease and its causative factors, a wide variety of research endeavors were undertaken to explore the multitude of possibilities concerning the origin and progression of the illness. This lack of direction stems from the implications of the scientific process, which dictates that upon initial exploratory research, a hypothesis is formulated and then tested to determine its validity.
This methodology is taught from the grade school level onward, to individuals participating in even the most rudimentary of science courses. It represents the backbone of modern science by installing a guideline for efficient and thorough research, experimentation, and documentation. In the case of a new field such as AIDS research in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, a certain amount of misdirection and dead-end research is to be expected and even encouraged because of the many paths that this semi-random research reveals. The lack of initial research available makes direction in early AIDS research unfeasible and undesirable. How can science take direction without some initial knowledge to light the way?
Without this knowledge, any direction imposed on the research would be misguided, and the situation would rapidly become a case of the blind leading the blind. The true problems in the response to the discovery of AIDS, however, occurred after research illuminated the nature of the disease, providing goals and direction toward which further research could strive. Upon receiving the first reports of Kaposi’s sarcoma, an opportunistic infection common to immuno-suppressed individuals, in New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, most physicians viewed the phenomenon as localized to the population of homosexual men. This perception served as an impediment for inciting interest in AIDS research. The homosexual community also received little attention from the media because of a lack of interest in a disease confined to a marginalized group.
The minute proportion of media attention allotted to the early AIDS crisis produced a two-fold effect: it did little to encourage research on a disease in which no one seemed interested, and it also did not engender a great deal of public support for the cause against AIDS. In effect, the problem was cyclical. The public did not receive enough exposure to the disease to create an outcry over the lack of research, and researchers did not see enough interest in the disease to warrant involvement. Add to this the fact that the primary group of infected individuals were homosexual men—a group that carried enormous social stigmas even before their association with AIDS—and the problem of engendering research interest seems daunting, indeed. The social stigmas revealed in the discussion concerning the lack of interest in research lead directly into a discussion of the role of ethics and social politics in the response to the early AIDS crisis.
Once the agent of infection was determined to be a virus, and the virus was localized to certain high-risk groups, the effects of ethics and social pressures on the course of public response to the disease became clear. Most notably, the manner of AIDS transmission created a problem concerning potential violations of civil rights and personal privacy. This problem proved even more daunting before an accurate and reliable test for the presence of the HIV virus (or, as in current testing, for the viral antibodies) was developed and made widely available. Before the advent of the HIV test, researchers understood the blood-borne nature of the virus. Its presence in the blood posed a serious threat to the nation’s blood supply. To screen against potentially infected blood in the early 1980’s, blood banks began to screen donors through interviews and questionnaires intended to eliminate potential high-risk donors from the pool of applicants.
This screening presented a number of difficulties. The probe into the lives and behaviors of individuals attempting to donate blood seemed to violate a certain level of personal privacy, discouraging potential donors. It would prove difficult for a potential donor to admit to certain lifestyle choices and behaviors which were, if not legally, then at least socially punishable through discrimination and alienation. This difficulty in admission leads to a further, more grave problem: the unreliability of the information from the screenings. If the admission of certain behaviors is recognized as socially unacceptable, the propensity to falsify information greatly increases. Potentially contaminated blood would enter the blood pool, seemingly regardless of screening processes, without a conclusive test for HIV. In some cases, this fear of contamination from high-risk groups took an extreme form. In January of 1983, a Texas-based group proposed legislation to criminalize homosexual behavior on the grounds that this behavior jeopardized public health. This group also pressured the White House to move to criminalize the donation of contaminated blood. Any donor who’s blood was found to be contaminated with the AIDS virus could be held legally responsible. While this legislation was suggested under the guise of the protection of public health, it seems that its result would have been highly counter-productive. Anyone who might volunteer to donate blood would be seriously dissuaded by the threat of potential legal action in the event that they, even unknowingly, carried the virus. Without any test to detect the presence of the virus, blood donation would present a no-win situation for the donor: he or she would undergo the inconvenient and uncomfortable process of donating blood, and then wait to find out if legal charges would be brought against him or her. Any humanitarian gain is lost in the threat of criminal repercussion.
As an aside, it seems difficult to believe that without a test, the presence of the virus could be reliably detected to the point where the identification of an individual donor would be possible, yielding criminal prosecution. This further exposes the Texas group’s position as a proponent of the public good, and reveals their position as a merely a stance against certain behaviors they found unseemly. Unfortunately, the problems concerning civil rights and privacy did not end with the development of a reliable HIV test. A positive HIV test often carries with it social prejudices concerning the means of contraction of the virus. Issues of fault and blame pervade a positive diagnosis, making the dissemination of knowledge concerning infected individuals a controversial subject. While knowledge and record of infected individuals is necessary for the study and research of the disease, this notion is countered by the myriad social problems an HIV-positive individual may encounter in the future by virtue of being identified as infected.
The greatest impediment to a unified response to the AIDS crisis involved the response of the institutionalized public health system. The two most important groups involved were the Centers for Disease Control (herein CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (herein NIH). The public health system, at its very heart, exists as an uncoordinated entity, structurally unable to present a unified response to any health crisis, let alone one with the complexity of AIDS. In a health emergency, distinct roles must be defined in order to conserve time and resources. Along with a rapid response, the public health system should avoid duplicating research, and should employ the knowledge available in both the public and private spheres of research. These necessities in a health crisis require coordination. This level of coordination seems impossible under the current system for three integral reasons: assigning roles is contrary to the American scientific spirit, the identification of a crisis proceeds at a slow and haphazard pace, and, most importantly, a lack of central authority prevents the flexibility and fluidity necessary to maintain coordination throughout the shifting environments that an expanding health crisis creates. As discussed above, a certain chaos exists inherently in the scientific process, especially when little initial information is available to direct research.
Even when information becomes available, however, scientists are often unwilling to accept assigned research tasks. Scientific freedom serves as a major attraction in becoming a scientist—individual interest dictates research. Under the structure of the current system, if a scientist did, for some reason, want to abandon a project already in progress for one more integral to the cause, the transition of funding and laboratory configuration becomes enormously difficult logistically. New funding, usually in the form of grants, must be approved, and new facilities must be configured to support the new research objective. This clearly points to a lack of a central coordinating authority, which would ease the transition. Even with the facilitation of research objective transition, the decision to change remains in the hands of the individual researcher. The debate may come to an impasse at the point where the struggle balances between personal scientific freedom and the public good. The lack of central authority greatly slows the process of crisis identification. The collection of disease data operates primarily on an anecdotal system. Only individual states can make a disease “reportable.” In other words, the state must request that physicians, laboratories, and hospitals in that state report every case of a certain disease they come across to state officials, in order to facilitate its tracking and future research. The CDC, NIH or any other federal body cannot demand any data, or even the collection of data. At most, the federal institutions can merely request the report of data.
These requests, even though they originate from a federal body, are rather toothless. If requests are not honored by the states or private institutions, the CDC and NIH have no sanctioning power, no punitive recourse against the private sector. One inherent problem that results is that fifty states have fifty reporting procedures, further complicating and slowing the collection of information. Another involves the fact that a private health care organization rarely knows the prevalence of the disease unless it is given broader statistics from a more central source which has compiled them. Circuitously, it is these private institutions that initially notify the state that a disease is worth reporting. Not only does this circular and anecdotal method of reporting slow the process of potential crisis recognition, but so too does the weak relationship between the states and the federal government slow the collection of data by the supposedly most central authority—the federal government. The question of the current relevance of these problems now arises. Have changes been made since the advent of the AIDS crisis? The answer seems to be a hesitant “yes.” The hesitancy stems from the fact that although the inadequacy of the national response to AIDS is widely recognized, few concrete changes have taken effect to resolve the inadequacy.
On July 2, 1992, the Human Resources and Intergovernmental Relations Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations in the House of Representatives heard testimony concerning the politics of AIDS prevention at the CDC. The issues that were addressed included the allocation of resources between prevention research and cure research, and the need for an increase of allocation to the former. The hearing includes a discussion of the difficulties within the federal government, specifically within the CDC, in assessing the most efficient use of funds. The lack of coordination amongst public and private research serves as one of the main obstacles—again, a lack of coordination. In a NIH AIDS Research Program Evaluation concluded in 1997, the Working Group, responsible for this study, reported a need for the better integration and coordination of private and public researchers. The report also calls for a rededication to basic research initiatives, and with them a redistribution of funds. Research to prevent HIV transmission is also stressed.
It quickly becomes clear that there are similarities between problems within the CDC and the NIH themselves, let alone the problems in communication and cooperation between the two institutions. The original problems in presenting a united front against AIDS when it first appeared still haunt the health care community. Education can change prejudices and social stigmas that interfere with the prevention of HIV transmission, but the coordination necessary for this education must come from a strong, centralized public health organization, in order to ensure maximum efficiency and expediency in addressing the complex and varying issues in a health care crisis such as AIDS. Unfortunately, no such organization exists. This does not bode well for the future, where the possibility of a new health crisis is ever-present, while the health care system remains unprepared.
A Unified Front Against AIDS? Feldman, Douglas A.. Global AIDS Policy. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1994. House of Representatives. Hearing Before the Human Resources and Intergovernmental Relations Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations,
The Politics of AIDS Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control. Washington: U. S. Printing Office, 1993.
Murphy, Timothy F.. Ethics in an Epidemic. Los Angeles: U. of California Press, 1994. Panem, Sandra. The AIDS Bureaucracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988.
Philipson, Tomas J. and Posner, Richard A.. Private Choices and Public Health. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993. “Report of the NIH AIDS Research Program Evaluation Working Group.” NIH AIDS Research Program Evaluation Working Group Report. 1997.