Organization metaphors as they apply in the school systems
Introduction
In organizations and organizational behavior, the organization seems to take on a form of its own where it dictates the behavior of the individuals within the organization. In this paper, the various metaphors of the organization are applied and tested in the school system with regards to; schools as psychic prisons; schools as instruments of domination; schools as a brain; schools as a political system. This metaphorical analysis will explore all the aspects of the school system and show how it relates to the metaphors of organization.
Organization as a psychic prison in relation to school system
People hold ideas, after the incubation of these ideas; they evaluate their applicability in their current situations and if they deem them worth of their attention seek ways of making these ideas materialize into reality. These ideas are in most instances actualize in the form of organizations, some mechanism towards the realization of a certain goal. As these organizations grow, attachment to its functioning and its ability of producing the required results every time becomes an idea entrenched into the people working in the organization. The organization is now not held up in an individual’s imagination, but is an actual visible product that can be seen by all the people interacting with it. In the conception stages of the organization, the organization is a prisoner in the imagination of its originator. When the organization is actually established, the tables are turned and the individuals working for the organization become prisoner to it and strive for nothing less than its success. This blind following of the organizational goals for the sake of achieving them or for the promise of a reward is a form where thinking of the people within the organization becomes clouded and they see nothing more outside of the organization. The school system is a victim of this kind of thinking in many aspects. The current schooling systems developed initially among the aristocrats and served the purpose of maintaining knowledge within the privileged few of the society. The marriages organized in those days are testament to that fact, as a prince would have to transverse kingdoms if he had to marry a princess who was equally educated as he was. However, with the setting in of industrialization and economies of scale, the royalty had to make available their preserve to the common-man in order to obtained qualified labor en masse to run the emerging industries. The poor person realized that education was a way of escaping poverty by landing a plum job in the industry of aristocrat and made it their duty to get educated together with all their generations. Many years, and after the education of millions of people, the formal sector cannot take up the spew of skill from school for much longer. However, people have insisted on following the same route through and through, not for not seeing the danger signs already, but for a psychic phenomena imposed upon them by the school system. People fear trying out anything new because the school has established itself in their minds as the only proven way to success.
Organization as a tool of domination in relation to the school system
Organizations are distinct individuals in the eyes of the law and are such capable of having their own individual characteristics distinct from that of individuals. According to Morgan, organizations put profits before human welfare. People’s labor craft has been transformed into a commodity that can be exchanged in a market where indigenous ways of production have been replaced and streamlined into multinational corporations making people dependent on the wage system. The modern way of domination has therefore become domination by reason, where strict adherence of rules and the quest for efficiency through impersonal principles is the norm.
While schools do not require learners to achieve extra ordinary levels of comprehension, the domination within the work place is first perpetuated in the school scenario. Schools work towards producing competent individuals who are able to fit in to the work place and produce the highest level of efficiency. Corporations select the highest performing individuals at school in the faith that they will mirror the same kind of performance in the work place. This makes the students to work extremely hard in trying to achieve that goal. The school therefore, successfully achieves the domination of the students in striving towards beating its standards.
Organization as a machine in relation to the school system
The organization works a lot like clockwork, methodically and predictably. The metaphor of the machine as an organization requires that the organization is the machine while the workers are the parts. In this relation, each individual has to fulfill their role in trying to achieve organization goals. Organizations require that each individual perform their role in the expected manner. Machine organizations are designed to achieve the purpose of the people who create them.
In this relation, machines organization of the school system requires that teachers for instance, have to impart the laid down curriculum and have no room for tweaking the syllabus for instance to mirror their own ideas. They are expected to teach specified curricula universally in order to achieve the labor requirements. Indigenous knowledge is not acknowledged in the school system, as it does not add value to the machine organization requirement of producing identical professionally modeled individuals. In this way, the school system is able to turn teachers into coordinated machine parts working to produce perfectly modeled products ready for use in the labor market.
Organizations as political systems
Organizations as political organizations relate to the tendency of organizations to take the freedoms of the individuals working in them. Organizations have the ability to dominate over the individual rights of the people working in them in the sense that they are not in a position to demand their rights in the way they would normally do in a democratic state in their capacity as citizens. The idea of power and authority, senior/ subordinate are the norm in most organizations. Decision-making is from top down and a subordinate has no right to question the decisions of their superiors, but rather implement them without question. The original concept of politics is that when divergent views emerge, people solve them using consultations and negotiations. The modern organization has trampled that standard and replaced it with autocratic managers who seldom take instructions.
Schools apply the organization as a political system by having a top down system of administration. In the learning process, the teacher has the authority on what to teach the students, the teacher then derives this authority from the education board, which further model the school learning curriculum according to the needs of the organizations. In this tree of authority, each subsequent level of has complete authority over the level below it. in this way the school system closely mirrors the organization as a political system.
Analysis
Organizations are the creation of human beings in the conduct of their day-to-day activities of daily living. The creation of organizations results from the need to do things more effectively, achieve higher production, and reduce the costs of doing thing etcetera. In this regard, organizations mirror the society in many ways. The traits exhibited by an organization are traceable back to either of the following factors, the people/ person who created it, the intent/ purpose of the organization/ the social environment the organization operates. These factors also happen to shape the characteristics of an individual human being. Our parents bring us into the world and are the first people who impart ideas into us on what is wrong and what is right, what is moral what is immoral. Our parents in the context of the organization are the founders of the organization. As we develop into our own individual beings, we begin to acquire needs either out of necessity or out of a need to fit in to the society. A child would not desire a bike for instance without having to go out and witnessing the other kids playing with their bikes. The other kids in this analogy act as the environment. Similarly, organizations interact with their environments such as legal restrictions competition from other organizations and such factors t6o acquire their distinct identities. Human beings after the fulfillment of the basic desires, seek extra challenges in life and set forth to achieve certain goals in life before the expiry of their life. Organizations in the same way form to achieve specific ends in the absence of which, the organization is no longer useful to the owners.
After creation of organizations, they acquire a life of their own similar to our existence but distinct to them and vital in their existence. This paper takes a similar perspective taken by Morgan where he uses various metaphors in explaining organizational behavior. The metaphors applied by Morgan in relation to the organization relate with other facets of human life amiably owing to the similarities between the organization and human beings outlined in the previous paragraph. In this consideration, four metaphors and their relation to school life
Conclusion
While the school system is an important pillar of the society, it does not escape from being a typical organization depicting all the images of the typical organization. The basic fact that it is made by people to meet a certain need, makes it evolve into its own being, greater than all the individual components comprising it. In this position therefore, the school is able to influence the way people relate with it, and ultimately shaping their very way of life.
