Change in an Unanchored Enterprise: Colleges of Education

Substantive and theoretical concerns guide this exploration of organizational conditions underlying patterns of change in colleges of education. After reviewing the history of these colleges, the author explains their chronic instability using several strands of organization theory. In comparing colleges of education to colleges of letters and science, the author advances the application of organization theory to higher education in three ways: (1) he directs attention to differentiation within universities, embedding intraorganizational contrasts in the propositions, (2) he specifies propositions of comparisons across different types of post-secondary settings, and (3) he considers the combined and interactive effects of different organizational models.