The school as a social system: Indicators for change

In systems analysis, the school may be viewed as a functionally differentiated subsystem of the broader social system in which it is embedded. To maintain a viable relationship with that social system, the school is subject to continual changes to meet the shifting social, economic, political, and technological forces in its environment. However, the more successful the school organization is in assessing accurately changing environmental forces, and in making appropriate adjustments to those forces, the more successful will it be in resisting temporary pressures and transitory movements and in controlling its own directions.

A major research problem is to identify those organizational properties that enable the school to assess accurately new demands and to adjust appropriately to those demands. Theoretically, those properties might be expected to include: (1) operationalized statements of instrumental goals; (2) a work structure that involves interdependence in task performance; (3) participation in decision making; (4) an incentive system that utilizes performance criteria rather than expressive relationships; (5) personnel practices that encourage a cosmopolitan orientation; and (6) institutionalized provisions for change advocacy.

The specification of the relationships among these properties, or variables, and the determination of means for assessing them quantitatively, are tasks that remain to be accomplished.     

A Cost Indirect Evaluation of Productivity Change in UK Universities

The study provides an empirical analysis of productivity change in publicly-funded UK universities, against a background of government policy specifically designed to enhance the productive efficiency of universities in the provision of teaching and research. The nonparametric analysis employs a cost indirect approach to measuring productivity change, taking explicit account of the quality of research output and decomposing productivity change into technical change and efficiency change. The latter is also decomposed into changes in pure technical efficiency, scale efficiency and output congestion. Changes in size efficiency are also computed. On average, productivity declined by 4% over 1989–92, mainly as a result of regressive technical change. Evidence of biased technological change was found, with the frontier shifting out in favour of the teaching outputs and in relative to the research output.     

The Mundane Economics of the Austrian School

The Austrian School of economics—the causal-realist, marginalist, subjectivist tradition established by Carl Menger in 1871—has experienced a remarkable renaissance over the last five decades. It is not always clear, however, exactly what distinguishes the Austrian School from other traditions, schools of thought, approaches, or movements within economics and its sister disciplines. This paper argues that Austrian economics, while part of a broader tradition emphasizing the coordination of the market order, is nonetheless a distinct kind of economic analysis, and that its essence is not subjectivism, the market process, or spontaneous order, but what I call “mundane economics”—price theory, capital theory, monetary theory, business-cycle theory, and the theory of interventionism. Call this the “hard core” of Austrian economics. I argue that this hard core is (1) distinct, and not merely a verbal rendition of mid-twentieth-century neoclassical economics; (2) the unique foundation for applied Austrian analysis (political economy, social theory, business administration, and the like); and (3) a living, evolving body of knowledge, rooted in classic contributions of the past but not bound by them. Most Austrian economists from Menger to Rothbard devoted their energies to developing and communicating the principles of mundane economics, not because they failed to grasp the importance of time, uncertainty, knowledge, expectations, institutions, and market processes, but because they regarded these issues as subordinate to the main task of economic science, namely the construction of a more satisfactory theory of value, production, exchange, price, money, capital, and intervention.     

ESTIMATING SOURCES OF FLUCTUATIONS IN THE AUSTRALIAN WOOL MARKET: AN APPLICATION OF VAR METHODS

Vector autoregression (VAR) methods are used to analyse the contribution of supply, demand and policy shocks to unpredictable fluctuations in the market for Australian wool. VAR procedures are compared with conventional structural econometric models as methods for decomposing sources of instability. While each has advantages and disadvantages, VAR procedures might be viewed as preferable when the underlying market structure is complex and uncertain, as it is in the case of wool. Based on the results obtained, demand shocks are the dominant source of uncertainty in the wool market in the absence of Australian Wool Corporation intervention, but intervention has blunted their effects, reducing market uncertainty and increasing the average level of prices and revenues.