The “Many Faces” and Complexities of Continuing Education units within today’s Higher Education Organizations: An Empirical Study

A qualitative methodology was used to identify higher education leaders’ understanding of continuing education units’ organization and program development. Using various metaphors, the study reveals that the way administrators conceptualize their units symbolically often determine their administrative strategies relative to organizational development and program planning issues within their parent organization. Background and Purpose of the Study Regardless of the growing responsibilities for continuing education units, they are still often regarded as “simply marketing” arenas for higher education institutions (Bok, 2003; Breneman, 2005). Yet continuing education is constantly in an organizational architecture mode where the structures, systems, and resources are being translated into strategies, programs, activities, tasks, and ultimately into people’s competencies, capabilities, and attitudes. Serving as corroborator and catalyst, linking needs to stakeholders and programs, yet doing so within their traditional setting, is the crucial “story” of continuing higher education. Hence, inquiries related to the reevaluation of the historical mission and value of continuing higher education, in the changing political-economic climate of higher education, are necessary. This study examined how university administrators conceptualize their continuing education units’ organizational dynamics, and model elements in such unconventional settings. Specifically, what are the various metaphoric models of continuing education that administrators construe as key organizational approaches to program planning and development? The questions guiding the study were: (1) How do university administrators identify their role, responsibilities, and connections to continuing education? (2) How do these administrators metaphorically categorize the organizational structure of the continuing education units within these universities? (3) How do these metaphorical frameworks relate to program planning and development? Theoretical Framework Higher education history shows that universities play a very important role in the education and development of human beings, both socially and economically and also that the history of continuing education is inexorably linked to the history of higher education (Gessner, 1987). However, while it is also a concern that universities are [might be] losing their historic mission (Bok, 2003; Shapiro, 2005), continuing educators proffer that higher education leverage continuing education when offering higher education benefits to the society at large (Breneman, 2005; Edelson, 2006; Offerman, 2002). Continuing higher education, once considered on the periphery of higher education’s academic activities, is becoming main-stream, an important component of the main academic activities within many high caliber universities (Donaldson, 1991; Gessner, 1987; UCEA, 2006a). However, there is not one defined template of organizational structure that defines continuing education in general. Drawing on social and cultural anthropology, Bolman and Deal (2003) espoused a fourframe model to “make sense of organizations” (p. 12). One part of the four-frame model is the