A Comparative Study of Administrative Principles and Practices in Adult Education Units

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Abstract
Adult education units exist in various types of organizations. The administrators of the different units attempt to achieve their or ganizational goals by applying principles, either explicitly or implicity. One source of the principles is the writings of those who study adult education phenomena. Little effort has been made to utilize some model dealing with organizations for analyz ing and explaining various principles and practices. An effort has been made in this paper to demonstrate the fruitfulness of one such model-the compliance model formulated by Etzioni. Two examples were presented to demonstrate the value of this model. One example showed that principles dealing with ad ministrative processes must be applied differentially to organiza tions, based upon their compliance structure. The second ex ample utilized the model to explain why the adult education unit in the public school is unable to prescribe the task requirements of its students as rigorously as the adult education unit in the university. The analysis of these two examples also provides further evidence that the model is a valid one since the predictions made on the basis of the model were supported by the data. On the basis of this evidence, further application of the model to the an alysis of adult education units would probably yield fruitful results.