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Educational administration still relics greatly on “wise” generalizations from the experiences of outstanding practitioners. Hence, a great many decisions in educational practice are still at the “professional lore” level. With the rapid expansion in knowledge, emphasis has tended to shift to the expert and the technician. Nevertheless, value decisions should not be permitted to be eroded. The educational decision‐maker needs to be both humanist and scientist. A rational basis exists for such a nexus. There is need for the joint operation of knowledge and value systems in decision‐making Both systems pass from the rather uncritical “Common Sense Stage” through the Empirical to the Scientific Stage. Self‐conscious rational action becomes possible only at the Scientific Stage. It is only within comparatively recent times that decision‐making in education has begun to move into the Scientific Stage, primarily because scientific knowledge about human behaviour is largely a product of this century. A decision is seen to be concerned primarily with predictions of future events that are desirable to people. The decision process involves (1) monitoring, (2) control (diagnosis, selection, transformation) and (3) action.

Administration and philosophy are seen as having to do with human behavior. Philosophy, in its concern for interpretation of human behavior, provides a useful method in hemeneutics. Praxiology, as the study of goal‐oriented practice, lends itself to the study of administrative behavior. The two areas of analytic study provide a nexus between administration and philosophy. Human experience is seen as having two components, the one objective (signness) and the other subjective (symbolic). The symbolic aspect is an integral part of culture and provides the basis for social control through ideology which constitutes a patterned symbolic belief‐value system. The continuing creation of a symbolic representation of “reality” may be seen as social creation of text. Interpretation of that text is the task of hermeneutic method. Since goals are, by their very nature, primarily symbolic, praxiology needs to focus upon the role of symbolism in administrative behavior, particularly as it relates to organizational legitimacy and compliance. Issues that cut across the two fields included the nature of man, the nature of freedom and necessity, and the nature of the good society.

This study attempted to clarify the relationship of power of school heads and participation of English teachers in school decisions. A deliberate sample of eight schools was drawn from the schools in the northwest of England. The major criteria for selection were: size (medium to large); location(urban‐suburban and reasonably accessible from Manchester); and representatives of the types of schools found in that geographic area. A descriptive analysis indicated that English teachers do perceive themselves participating in most decision areas. At a second level of analysis the relationship between status and intensity of participation was computed with r = .544 for the 103 members of staff (p<.001). An implication is that competence is a criterion for status position, leading to involvement and hence power in the social system. The final analysis dealt with implications of use of power from a description of participation patterns. The clusterings found lend credence to the belief that English heads are controlling those areas of power where tangible rewards and punishments are evident. They appear to be supporting participatory management in such other areas as those where teachers do not desire involvement or those which carry minimal expenditure of organizational resources.

Talk of “macrofoundations” helps foreground the constitutive and contextualizing powers of institutions – dynamics that are inadvertently obscured by the imagery of microfoundations. Highlighting these aspects of institutions in turn opens intriguing lines of inquiry into institutional reproduction and change, lived experience of institutions, and tectonic shifts in institutional configurations. However, there is a twist: taking these themes seriously ultimately challenges any naïve division of micro and macro, and undermines the claim of either to a genuinely foundational role in social analysis. The authors propose an alternative “optometric” imagery – positioning the micro and the macro as arrays of associated lenses, which bring certain things into focus at the cost of others. The authors argue that this imagery should not only encourage analytic reflexivity (“a more optometric institutionalism”) but also draw attention to the use of such lenses in everyday life, as an underexplored but critical phenomenon for institutional theory and research (“an institutionalist optometry”).

The core goal of the “micro-foundational” agenda appears to be less an institutionalism founded in the micro, or reduced to the micro, and more some form of integrative institutionalism: that is, an institutionalism that does justice to the perpetual, co-constitutive interplay of local activities (the micro) and trans-local patterns (the macro). In this chapter, thus, the authors argue for a conscious, explicit embrace of integrative institutionalism; and of the broader agenda that this terminology opens up. Based on this overdue rewording the authors highlight additional problems and possibilities – providing a constructive reformulation and elaboration of the “micro-foundational” agenda as it currently stands.

This chapter provides an overview of two generally applicable frameworks relating to the use of technology-enhanced learning – ‘affordances’ and multimedia learning effects. First, the concept of ‘affordances’ as action potentials of technologies is identified as a way to think through technology-enhanced learning design possibilities, so as to help make technology selection decisions. Second, multimedia learning effects including the multimedia effect, the modality effect, the redundancy effect, the split-attention effect, and the personalization effect are presented as a scientific basis for understanding how to create cognitively effective learning experiences using text, images, sound, and video. Both affordances and multimedia learning effects are characterized as ongoing areas of research that are somewhat related, with the successful utilization of each depending on critical application by the designer.

Corporate reputation is a strategic asset leading to numerous positive firm-level outcomes. Motivated by the prediction that the translation of customer-based corporate reputation to customer-level outcomes (trust, customer–company identification, and word-of-mouth intentions) might be highly context-dependent, we investigate the moderating role of national culture (particularly, individualism–collectivism dimension) and individual trait (self-construal) in the association between reputational dimensions (product and service efficacy, market prominence, and societal ethicality) and their outcomes. Using survey data from two countries (US and India, N = 812), we estimate the effects of corporate reputation on focal outcomes, moderated by country as a proxy for individualism/collectivism and independent self-construal (IND)/interdependent self-construal (INTER). The results strongly suggest that when individual-level variables are taken into account, the country-level variable does not affect the translation of reputational dimensions to customer-level outcomes. Moreover, individuals high on IND are more responsive to utilitarian (egoistic) reputational dimensions of product and service efficacy, whereas individuals high on INTER are more sensitive to the group-oriented reputation for market prominence and society-oriented reputation for social ethicality. The reported findings have major implications for cross-country reputational research and global reputation management strategies.