Search results

The term “loose coupling” has been widely employed in higher education research. Building partly on the “garbage can model” of decision-making, it proposed an alternative to rational and linear views on organizing and governing, emphasizing instead ambiguity and complexity. The review of higher education research literature presented in this chapter demonstrates that the concept of loose coupling has frequently been used as a background concept, often taken for-granted either as a point of departure for studies of organizational processes in higher education or as a diagnosis of the complexity of higher education organization that inhibits implementation of reforms. This chapter provides systematization and critical examination of how the term “loose coupling”/“loosely coupled systems” has been employed in journal articles focusing on higher education in the last 40 years. It presents a broad mapping of 209 articles and a more detailed qualitative review of 22 articles, which employed loose coupling as more than a background concept.

The purpose of this paper is to review and synthesize the attributes of loose and tight coupling in educational organizations. In addition, it is aimed to determine whether this phenomenon has value and strategies to offer for the current educational administration and research.

Integrative literature review and content analysis, assisted by Atlas.ti software, were used as the methods of this paper. Review data included 32 articles from peer reviewed journals.

Conceptual framework of continuum of organizational couplings in educational organizations was generated. Elements of the framework include the features of coupling concepts within the continuum, components of couplings, contributory types of organizational couplings and the elements of leadership and change process with emerging strategies, as well as the element of cultural context. In this paper, elements of continuum of couplings and leadership will be emphasized.

Findings have practical implications for the management and leadership in educational organizations, and for the researchers in the field for future research purposes.

Findings have social implications for both teaching staff and administration in educational organizations, by highlighting the attributes of loose and tight coupling, and their connections with leadership, change process and cultural context.

The paper presents a distinctive synopsis of the educational administration literature, in the context of loose and tight coupling, with the time span of four decades.

The knowledge of inhibitors of internal customer knowledge transfer in b‐to‐b professional service organizations is still in its infancy. Previous literature on professional service organizations has focused on knowledge processes on a general level without paying closer attention to inhibitors of internal knowledge transfer. This study aims to contribute by increasing the knowledge of various inhibitors of customer‐related knowledge transfer and their influence on customer‐related knowledge utilization in collaborative customer relationships.

The present empirical article is based on a case study of two professional service organizations in the field of business‐to‐business education and consultancy services. An in‐depth analysis of organizations developing collaborative relationships was conducted.

This paper shows that internal fragmentation seems to be inherent in this type of organization, and may cause many problems in customer‐related knowledge transfer among individuals, collegial groups and hierarchical levels in a professional service organization. All these problems in collective knowledge utilization influence both the service offering creation and general relationship coordination in the collaborative relationship.

This paper provides managerial suggestions for how to deal with the inhibitors of customer knowledge transfer. This includes developing unified goals, strengthening cultural cohesion and cooperation in the organization, building forums of dialogue between individuals and subgroups, and structuring relationship coordination systems (i.e. key account management systems), keeping customer‐related knowledge transfer in mind.

During the past 25 years, many researchers and scholars have suggested that schools and school organizations often operate with a structural looseness much different from that of the rational bureaucracy. Coupling and linkage are two metaphors which have been developed to describe the intricacies of life in schools and school organizations. Briefly reviews some of the developments of the linkage metaphor, the relationships between coupling and linkage, and illustrates how the linkage metaphor might be useful in developing greater understanding of change processes in schools and school organizations.

Explores the relationships between teacher perceptions of the structural coupling in their schools and their perceptions of school robustness and effectiveness in a research study of 73 participating schools. Pearson product‐moment correlations of mean scores from each school produced significant relationships, suggesting that teacher perceptions of relatively tight coupling of goal direction/vision and work supervision structures, and relatively loose coupling of manipulative control structures, are associated with their positive perceptions of school robustness and effectiveness as well as student achievement and attendance.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the recursive perspective that emphasizes bureaucracy as a source of officers’ stress, explain officers’ stress as a loosely coupled effect, examine the positive effects of loose coupling and legitimize the necessity of improving context management as a stress-reduction factor.

The research methodology uses a quantitative perspective; the members of two police forces constituted the universe; the sampling technique was not random and accidental; and an exploratory factor analysis and an invariance measure were performed.

The stress phenomenon is common and similar in both police forces, which means that it is indifferent to their organizational differences and has common causes. Loose coupling is present in both police work settings and entails significant stress; and the search for an explanation of the stress caused by loosely coupled elements should focus on both the value chain and the processes.

Addressing this phenomenon should entail a twofold improvement strategy: the correction of loosely coupled organizational factors by revising the management processes that cause stress and the prevention of loosely coupled effects by using professional training to enhance adaptive behavior within specific contexts.

Police organizations are addressed as loosely coupled (anarchic organized) systems instead of tightly coupled (bureaucratic) systems. The loosely coupled factors that emerge inside bureaucratic organizations cause significant stress among officers and complementary research is necessary to analyze the fallacious nature of the recursive attribution of police stress to bureaucratic characteristics.

This paper investigates how an externally imposed programme with the objective of improving the income of the poor is measured and managed by a public agency in Malaysia.

A qualitative case study approach is used in this research. The data were collected over a three-year period with interviews conducted with key officers at various levels ranging from the Ministry to the agency responsible for implementing the programme.

The introduction of the programme into the organisation's activity was loosely coupled, reflected by the way in which the programme was being implemented. There was some inter-dependency between the three hierarchical levels in terms of their performance measures and targets, responsibilities and reporting. There were no significant changes to the organisation's practices and weak linkages between the programme's objective, the formulation of indicators and the way the information was used in performance assessment. The lack of integration of the programme resulted in high importance being attached to measurement and reporting, rather than focusing on the achievement of the programme objective.

This paper contributes to understanding the performance management issue regarding the vertical and horizontal coupling of a system in relation to an externally derived programme.

In this paper, which was presented at a Conference for Lecturers in Educational Administration held in Melbourne in August 1981, the author expands upon past criticisms of the phenomenological and Marxist perspectives, provides an extensive analysis of the concept of loose coupling and puts forward a philosophical alternative to the phenomenological and positivistic positions. The interplay of philosophical viewpoints with issues in theory, research and preparation in educational administration is emphasized.

As part of a major study, an attempt was made to examine the organizational values of secondary schools in Hong Kong with a self‐constructed, standardised instrument, the School Values Inventory. Values are chosen, because organizations are not only theory‐laden, but are also value‐laden and the sharing of organizational values are the binding forces that hold an organization together. Using LISREL confirmatory factor analytic modelling techniques and based on a sample of 554 teachers from 44 secondary schools in Hong Kong, a four‐factor model of organizational values was developed. The model which, precisely and concisely, concludes binding forces in Hong Kong schools as bureaucratic linkage, cultural linkage, tight coupling, and loose coupling provides an insight to understand school administration and organizational cultures.

This paper aims to deliberate about the problem of tight and seamless integration in a supply chain by conceptualising and understanding how looseness and its creation represent an effective supply chain design.

This research is grounded in system theory and industrial network research, while the case study of a textile and garment supply network coordinated by a third party in Mexico empirically illustrates how looseness in the supply chain may be created. The information gathered through in-depth interviews with critical informants at Aztex and three of their suppliers, visits in situ and secondary information, was organised with the template analysis technique and interpreted from three different but complementary perspectives, system theory, supply chain coordination modes and industrial networks, to establish the particularities of the triad model.

The study shows that supply chain integration may take place in a variety of forms, and that new theoretical perspectives are required to understand how the looseness in the connections among actors contributes to the flexibility and efficiency of the chain. Additionally, the analysis of the case puts forward the trader’s crucial role as linking pin between suppliers and customers in the specific context of the garment sector.

Additional cases and triangulation of information from traders, suppliers and customers would contribute to explore in more detail how integration takes place not only in the textile and garment industry sector but also in other industries.

A rational explanation of why establish full integration across several tiers of suppliers and customers is too difficult to attain is given to managers. They may recognise that tight couplings will be necessary and possible only with strategic counterparts; meanwhile, others are more suitable to be delegated to a third party.

The economic and industrial stability and progress of low-cost sourcing countries depends on the selection of international purchasers. The advancement of triangle manufacturing facilitated by a trader may become another criterion to drive the selection towards a region. In the case of Mexico, this adds to the near sourcing advantages of the country.

The research confirms that there is no unique global mode of supplier integration and suggests that different approaches are viable as long as the objectives of operational efficiency, good customer service and flexibility are satisfied.