The Impact of CMC on the Political Dimensions of Organizational Life To adopt a political perspective on schools as organizations is to acknowledge the presence of abiding differences in values, priorities and beliefs among individuals and groups within the school community. In important ways, a CMC network, like any other communication system, is about relationships. The relationships in question are a reflection of choices made about system access. Political issues arise around access to the system, through the system and from the system to resources beyond school boundaries. When the choice is made to limit access, access becomes a scarce organizational resource.
Communities define themselves by access.
Who may be admitted and who may be excluded comprise the foundation of community identity. Moreover, the story of special education in America demonstrates that when technology is employed to mitigate participation barriers, the scope of what we consider to be arbitrary exclusion broadens. People always seem to want to be included themselves, but they don't always necessarily want to include others. It seems easy to justify exclusion of some individuals from some parts and processes of organizational life when questions of individual privacy and institutional security are at stake. It's hard to imagine a school system extending read-write access to transcript records, for example, to parents or to students.