SOME EMPIRICAL ISSUES IN RESEARCH ON ACADEMIC DEPARTMENTS: HOMOGENEITY, AGGREGATION, AND LEVEL OF ANALYSIS

This study investigated the appropriateness of the academic departmental level of analysis. Homogeneity of faculty members ' responses to measures of organiza-tional structure, environmental uncertainty, and task routineness was examined to determine the legitimacy of aggregating those responses to create departmental level variables. Analysis of variance suggested that the structure and environ-mental uncertainty subscales were measuring departmental level phenomena, but that the task routineness scales were not. Results demonstrate the importance of empirically testing, rather than assuming, levels of analysis in studies of academic departments. It is generally agreed that academic departments are the basic organiza-tional unit in which most faculty pursue their disciplinary and professional interests and execute the teaching, research, and service function of the uni-versity (cf. Peterson, 1976). Departments exert the principal force in the operational definitions of goals and purposes of the university, largely con-trol faculty reward mechanisms, and through both formal and informal mechanisms, are the primary focus of institutional progress and academic achievement (Ikenberry and Friedman, 1972). Despite the importance of the department asa basic element in the univer-sity organizational structure, Peterson (1976) points out that the literature on academic departments is "voluminous, " but most is nontheorefical and not empirically based. Dressel et al. (1970) also note that the discussion of the department and its structure in the literature greatly exceeds the facts and generalizations based on systematically gathered evidence