Work in the Academic

Organization
By Kamaga Edward
 Modes of Academic Activities
Academic activities are divided and grouped in two basic ways:
• The Enterprise Mode
• The Discipline Mode
 The Enterprise Mode

• The Enterprise mode looks at the system of higher education as a set of

institutions that links together such disparate specialists as Chemists,
Psychologists and Historians, specialists and non – specialists, professors,
students and administrators
• The Enterprise or Individual institution is commonly a comprehensive grouping
• Its widely coverage typically expands as it grows older
• Occasionally, its scope is limited to a small set of fields as in technological
universities
 The Enterprise Mode Cont’d

• All Enterprises specialize by locality and limited by geographical space

• The Enterprise mode is also defined by a set of buildings either
concentrated or locally scattered making the individual University a
definite or sizable physical entity, something that can be seen and touched.
• Basic data is easily about higher Education is basically collected on this
basis I.e. listing the Enterprises and the number of students, faculties and
resources
 The Discipline Mode

• The Discipline mode looks at the national system of higher education as a set
of disciplines and professions.
• This is a specialized form of organization that rotates around a subject or
knowledge domain.
• It brings together chemists and chemists, psychologists and psychologists,
historians and historians, lawyers and lawyers
• It pulls together a community of interests across territories, institutions,
national boundaries linking specialists in one to specialists in another.
 The Discipline Mode Cont’d
• Disciplines are not limited by boundaries of national systems.
• Academics in a particular discipline find it easy to practice across nations with
counterpart specialists “who speak the language” than with others outside the
specialty at home.
• It is the discipline mode that has rendered higher education basically meta-
national and international much more than elementary or secondary education.
• Give the academic worker the choice of leaving the discipline or the
institution and he/she will typically leave the institution
 The Discipline Mode Cont’d
• In short, the discipline rather than the institution tends to become the dominant force in
the working lives of academics.
• In international business firms, for example, managers of worldwide product lines have
responsibility for operations that crisscross those of managers of geographical regions.
• Similarly, in the academic world, the disciplines are “product lines” and the enterprises
are geographically centered. The representatives of the first crisscross the
representatives of the second.
• Professors paid to push physics come face to face with administrators responsible for
developing a university or a set of universities.