ABSTRACT
Social behaviorism in an attempt to sidestep the entire problem of values and norms, makes no assumptions about legitimacy, consensus or internalization. Any social system is a balance of cooperation and conflict, of continuity and change. Having attempted to answer how a heterogeneous social system achieves a measure of order and stability, we must also examine how it changes. At a slightly higher level of theoretical sophistication would be the normative model used by a number of sociologists in dealing with “complex organizations” in industrial societies. While the behavior of actors at the University is clearly regulated by norms, any attempt to explain the continuance of that social system by reference to normative consensus and mutuality of expectations is at best unconvincing. The relative lack of adaptability of the University to the country has been coupled by a considerable adaptation of the country to the kind of social system that the University helped create.
