Sample Essay On Organizations And Institutions

1) Three concrete strategies to reduce external control federal agencies and private industry have on campus activities at UC Berkeley:
a) Importance of Resource: Provide substantial incentives for STEM students to take on faculty/paid TA positions at UC Berkeley upon graduation. This would reduce the ability of private industry and federal agencies to benefit from the resources of skilled graduates in their own programs by funneling more of these graduates back into the campus program. This keeps these resources localized, and deincentivizes federal agencies and private industry from exerting the same level of control over funding of these fields (e.g. chemistry, biology, etc.)
b) Discretion of Other Org. Over Resource Allocation: Pass legislation in the school bylaws that any federal or private funding provided to UC Berkeley cannot be restricted to specific departments, and must be distributed equally among all departments. This would reduce the dictation of where these particular resources would go, thus making these funding efforts motivated increasingly by a belief in the overall system of the school rather than the ability to crank out skilled graduates in desired fields.
c) Alternatives Available: Create initiatives that provide further funding from public non-profits, including international education funding organizations, to simply find alternative sources of extramural funding that would have less national control on how the money is spent, or at least would ask for fewer conditions as a result.
Question Two. Of the two traditional booksellers in the last quarter century in the U.S., one (Borders) is already out of business, as mentioned above. The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the remaining one, Barnes & Noble, recently resigned amid poor company results. Even more recently, the company abandoned its Nook e-reader and may not be long for this world.
Construct a population ecology interpretation for why traditional booksellers have struggled so greatly and appear on the verge of extinction as a population. Decide which of the three principal dimensions of population ecology theory (selection, density dependence, resource partitioning) are appropriate for this question and apply them. You do not have to spend time formally re-defining key terms. However, your response must demonstrate a working understanding of relevant population ecology concepts.
Population ecology can be defined as the position of an organization in the social and physical spaces that affect the business’ ability to act, for good or ill. In the case of traditional brick-and-mortar booksellers, the age of the Internet and global shipping of books, as well as the advent of ebooks, has led to physical bookstores becoming a thing of the past. The most important dimension of population ecology theory is density dependence, in which organization births/deaths depend on how dense organizations are within social spaces. Because of the aforementioned new developments, brick-and-mortar booksellers are no longer necessary to sell to a specific neighborhood area; people can either buy their books for much cheaper online and have them shipped for even cheaper, or download them in an instant onto an e-reader.
Online booksellers have oversaturated the market for booksellers, leaving many traditional bookstores redundant. These locations can only serve their specific neighborhoods, and must carry a substantial inventory which they most often do not sell the vast majority of. The incredible competition that traditional booksellers has endured with companies like Amazon, which can serve a national (or global) audience with a comparatively more controlled inventory, increases their legitimacy at the expense of traditional booksellers.
Question Three. The big box retailers and even the traditional booksellers have massive size advantages over local/independent booksellers. Drawing specifically on resource partitioning theory, explain why local/independent booksellers can stably survive (i.e., carve out a niche).
According to resource partitioning theory, certain conditions can allow social spaces to be partitioned out so that some organizations can establish a niche. In the wake of the death of traditional booksellers like Borders, and the impending failure of chains like Barnes & Noble, resource partitioning dictates the survival of niche bookstores like used, local and independent booksellers. Online stores and Barnes & Noble will compete for the ‘middle’ of the market; however, local and independent booksellers keep their overhead low by simply catering to their immediate area and providing used books for cheap.
Profits are then increased by maximizing quality of their bookstores through initiatives such as locally published books, rarities, providing unique local ambience, and benefiting from a personal relationship with the community. Because the local and independent bookstores are centrally located to one single location, they bank on familiarity, novelty, exclusivity and authenticity rather than mass-produced standard products. In essence, these booksellers form their own ‘specialist identity,’ which they can then leverage into a unique brand that can be found nowhere else. As a result, they can maintain their status in the community as one of the only local/independent booksellers in town. They are not trying to compete with Amazon, as they sell a different type of book with a different experience attached to it. In this way, resource partitioning allows them to succeed by not shooting for the middle and focusing on a niche market they can monopolize.