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Organization and Administration in Higher Education Essay

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1. Satisficing: describes any situation in which people settle with a solution that is rationally just “good enough" to a problem. In a rational decision-making process, it is assumed that individuals seek the best result; however, it is often rational to seek to satisfice if the process of searching for better option involves risks, prolonged effort, or is costly. Individual and organizations, therefore, satisfice when they seek, or accept choices or judgments that are rationally 'good enough' for their purposes, but the same situation could still be optimized (Interaction-Design.org ,2004). The conventional wisdom is that, it is better to satisfice than to be seen as not taking a decision at all. Higher educational institutions …show more content…

Appointment of adjunct or part-time faculty is to ensure that course work, especially teaching, does not grind to a halt when there are vacancies. These appointments are alternatives to a practical most obvious solution of making a permanent appointment. The temporary appointment guarantees that there is no vacuum either in the discharge of academic administrative duties or teaching. While satisficing may be appealing in the short-run, conversely, it does not guarantee commitment and loyalty to the system, as the individual and their colleagues do not treat or see such appointment as permanent. The implication in the long run is that it projects a picture of an indecisive management, and an institution that is unstable. 2. Organizations such as universities, general hospitals, school systems, public accounting firms, etc., are termed professional bureaucracy because of their structural configurations. In such organizations, duly trained professionals form the operating core, and they are given considerable control over their work, but the prime coordinating mechanism is he standardization of skills, training, and indoctrination which lies mainly in the hands of self-governing professional associations (Mintzberg, 1979/2000). Professional bureaucracy is complex, but predictable, and so must be controlled directly by those who perform the job (i.e. the operating core) to produce standard products and

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