THE TRANSACTIONAL CONTEXT OF U.S. TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE IN EDUCATIONAL PLANNING: AN ANALYSIS OF THREE A.I.D.-UNIVERSITY PROJECTS

The thesis focuses on the organizational origins of the conditions which facilitate or hamper successful U.S. technical assistance efforts to initiate educational planning in Third World countries.;Three analytical perspectives were used to evaluate organizational dynamics in the cases. First, the analysis concentrated on the organizational context of educational planning using the organizational frameworks of Warwick, March and Olsen to look at the interrelationship of actors and organizations and the conditions of the organizational environment--uncertainty and ambiguity. In educational planning projects the major finding was that University planning tended to concentrate on technical aspects of their job and to be less conscious of the importance of institution building concerns.;Secondly, the metaphor of human development periods or stages was applied to technical assistance and the idea of a project life cycle was introduced as a way of understanding why certain problems cluster in particular time periods. At the beginning, most problems center on expectations which are unreasonably high because they are based on the belief that change is easy, the solution already in hand and the future trouble free. If these expectations are not reduced, the gap between performance and expectations becomes so wide that the project is declared a failure before it has had a chance to mature.;The third perspective asks why AID and University teams consistently have the same set of conflicts. Or, more generally, what are the barriers to organizational learning? On AID-University projects, the answer is that each organization has to respond to quite different demands in its respective task environments. . . . (Author's abstract exceeds stipulated maximum length. Discontinued here with permission of school.) UMI.;Traditionally, the planning and foreign assistance literature has not shown much interest in the organizational dynamics of technical assistance. However, difficulties in implementing plans and in doing technical assistance have renewed interest in the subject as shown in recent studies by Judith Tendler and Jeffrey Pressman. In order to see the technical assistance process in detail, three case studies based on primary documents have been developed from projects sponsored by U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) and run by U.S. universities. Two projects, one in Thailand and one in Turkey were run by Michigan State University, the third, in Peru, was run by Teachers College, Columbia University.