ABSTRACT
Reviewing the sociological literature on education from 1945 to 1955, Gross (1956, p. 64) commented that a systematic study of the school as an organization had yet to be made. His comment is still true. Few students of organizations have turned their attention to schools, and few students of schools have been sensitive to their organizational attributes. To understand what schools are like as organizations—what their characteristic structures, processes, and functional problems are—we now must rely on empirical work, much of which either was not explicitly directed toward these questions or was narrowly focussed on some subsystem, process, or activity within the school, without being informed by a more general conception of the school as an organization.
