The Bureaucratization of a County Schools Office [microform] : An Historical Field Study of the County Superintendent of Schools Office in Riverside County, California / William Edward Hendrick

The bureaucratic nature of school organizations is now commonly acknowledged. According to Carlson's description of four types of service organizations, school organizations are "domestic" rather than "wild" in that they do not have to compete with peer organizations for their own survival. To investigate the historical development and bureaucratization of the Riverside County (California) Superintendent of Schools Office since its creation in 1893, this study collected data from 26 interviews and from historical and scholarly works, documents, and empirical studies. The data were analyzed to determine the process of the county office's bureaucratization, and the data's implications for school administration. Findings indicate that the county office has evolved as a "wild" organization creating new services to meet its clients' needs. Once external societal pressures had established the need to provide educational support services to rural school districts and the county office had been set up to deliver these services, an internal bureaucratic, administratively hierarchized structure began to develop. The findings further suggest the need both for school administrator training in organizational differences between school types and for a comparative research project involving two county offices. (JBM)