Engineering Bureaucracy: The Genesis of Formal Policies, Positions, and Structures in High-Technology Firms

[Excerpt] This article examines the impact of organizational founding conditions on several facets of bureaucratization—managerial intensity, the proliferation of specialized managerial and administrative roles, and formalization of employment relations. Analyzing information on a sample of technology start-ups in California\u27s Silicon Valley, we characterize the organizational models or blueprints espoused by founders in creating new enterprises. We find that those models and the social composition of the labor force at the time of founding had enduring effects on growth in managerial intensity (i.e., reliance on managerial and administrative specialists) over time. Our analyses thus provide compelling evidence of path dependence in the evolution of bureaucracy—even in a context in which firms face intense selection pressures—and underscore the importance of the logics of organizing that founders bring to new enterprises. We find less evidence that founding models exert persistent effects on the formalization of employment relations or on the proliferation of specialized senior management titles. Rather, consistent with neo-institutional perspectives on organizations, those superficial facets of bureaucracy appear to be shaped by the need to satisfy external gatekeepers (venture capitalists and the constituents of public corporations), as well as by exigencies of organizational scale, growth, and aging. We discuss some implications of these results for efforts to understand the varieties, determinants, and consequences of bureaucracy

Optimizing a Law School’s Course Schedule

[Excerpt] “Just like other educational institutions, law schools must schedule courses by taking into consideration student needs, faculty resources, and logistical support such as classroom size and equipment needs. Course scheduling is an administrative function, typically handled by an Assistant Dean or an Associate Dean, who works with the faculty and the registrar to balance these considerations in advance of the registration process. Usually, the entire academic year is scheduled in advance, although the spring semester may be labeled tentative until registration begins for that semester. It’s hard to imagine, but some schools even publish a two-year schedule of upper-division courses so that students can plan their entire law school career in advance. In order to give assistance to those academics involved for the first time in the scheduling process, this article discusses the law school scheduling process and how a scheduling software package has worked to successfully automate what has been seen as one of the most abysmal administrative tasks of an Associate Dean. We first provide a background to course scheduling at a typical law school. We then present a review of the tools for, and literature on, course scheduling, followed by a discussion of how technology can be applied to course scheduling in general, and our outcomes of applying this technology in a law school environment. We close with a brief summary.