Interpretive Sociologies and the Study of Higher Education Organizations

INTERPRETIVE SOCIOLOGIES AND THE STUDY OF HIGHER EDUCATION ORGANIZATIONS Harland G. Bloland University of Miami Those who study and do research on higher education organizations, like scholars in other fields, have evidenced a growing selfconsciousness about ways to conceptualize their field of inquiry. Among the areas of concern are (a) how to think about higher education organizations so that better questions can be asked, (b) how to more accurately and systematically gather and treat data, and (c) how to make more profound and useful applications of knowledge. From time to time scholars in the field do a summing up, making statements concerning where we have been, where we are, and where we are going or ought to go. For example, Algo Henderson (1963) and T. R. McConnell (1963) viewed the study of higher education in the 1960's as consisting primarily of des­ cription and personal histories, and they called for more theory development and research. Paul Dressel and Lewis Mayhew (1974) devoted considerable at­ tention to the state of higher education as an area of inquiry, finding it lacking in a sufficient theory base and in universally acceptable methods of research. Walter Hobbs and John Bruce Francis in the 1970's called for a re­ focus in higher education scholarship from, "analysis and recommendation" to "theory and testing" (1973, p. 56). They also deplored what they saw as the unfortunate distance between higher education researchers and the social sci­ ence disciplines (1974). In his very fine overview of organizational studies in higher education, Marvin Peterson (1974) concluded that "In general the research reflects little development or testing of theoretical models and only limited applications of diverse concepts borrowed from other academic perspectives" (1974, p. 327). One persistent theme that has emerged from these reviews has been that higher education is not a discipline and has no single "paradigm." That is, higher education has no consistent collection of assumptions, beliefs, methods and perceptions which define it as á field, and which indicate what to study, how to assess what is studied, and what constitutes the development and accumulation of knowledge in the field.1 As Dressel and Mayhew write: "One commonly accepted criterion of a discipline is a general body of knowledge which can at least be forced into some reasonable logical taxonomy, so that scholars can tell, at least quantitatively where gaps in accepted knowledge exist . . . Moreover, a discipline commonly involves some generally accepted body of theory and some generally understood techniques for theory testing and revision. Here the literature of higher education appears decidedly lacking (1974, p. 3). In addition, and perhaps in response to this theme, there is a strong drive toward catching up with the more respectable disciplines, and the • ’ ■"Paradigm" is a somewhat slippery term even to its most quoted user, Thomas Kuhn. As Kuhn himself has noted in his 1970 postscript to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, "One sympathetic reader who shares my conviction that 'paradigm' names the philosophical elements of the book, prepared a partial analytic index, and concluded that the term is used in at least twenty-two different ways" (1970, p. 181). George Ritzer's definition of paradigm, which reflects some of Kuhn's ear­ lier, rather than later, ideas on this concept, is close to what I mean by the term in this paper. "A 'paradigm' is a fundamental image of the subject matter within a science. It serves to define what should be studied, what questions should be asked, how they should be asked, and what rules should be followed in interpreting the answers obtained . . . It subsumes, defines and interrelates the examples, theories, and methods and instruments that exist within it" (1975, p. 157). 2 means most often pressed for doing this have been to encourage researchers and writers in the field to develop theory and adopt certain kinds of methods. What is needed, in the view of many, is an emulation of the harder, older social and behavioral sciences, especially those aspects of the disci­ plines which emphasize, "explanatory, empirically verifiable, theoretical generalization(s) about . . . causes, conditions and expected outcomes . . ." (Francis and Hobbs, 1974). The hope is that development in this direction will result in the accumulation of knowledge...