Dependence, Legitimation and Power in Academic Decision-Making

Abstract

Baldridge (1971) and his colleagues (1977) have suggested that academic policy making can be best understood as a political process, ie a bargaining process through which various interest groups attempt to affect the decision outcome mainly by the use of influence. The present article focuses on two issues that are somewhat overlooked in the original political model, namely the forms of the political activity that can be found in academic policy making, and the conditions that affect both the intensity and the forms ofthat activity. After having examined another author's (Pfeffer, 1981) contribution to these issues, we discuss some of the theoretical conclusions of a case study conducted by Bourgeois (1990). On the basis of this study and a review of the literature, the author suggested a theoretical model that distinguishes between two basic forms of influence (pressure and legitimation) and establishes causal relationships between the forms and intensity of the use of influence and a set of organizational conditions (actors' interdependence and divergences in goals and beliefs about technology, perceived importance of the decision issue, power distribution across actors, and resource scarcity) that were originally highlighted by Pfeffer (1981).