dc.description.abstract |
This study attempts to depict the home predominant organizational culture of the
American University of Beirut (AUB) and then to examine the extent to which an
academic department, as a subculture in the School of Arts and Sciences, aligns with the
institutional culture by being enhancing, contrasting, or orthogonal to it. The purpose of
this study is twofold. First, the delineation of the organizational culture, whether at the
level of the institution or that of the academic department, provides the benefit of
understanding the behaviors and motivations of institutional and departmental
individuals as well as the way they process information and approach decision-making.
Second, through the comparison between them, this study attempts to weigh the
influence of the interplay of the various cultures in the academic department, the latter
being the confluence of various cultures such as institutional, disciplinary, and student
ones. Using an embedded case study design and an anthropological- symbolic lens to
the cultural investigation, this cultural inquiry utilized a six-dimension cultural
framework developed by Tierney (1988). The six dimensions in this framework are
Environment, Mission, Socialization, Information, Strategy, and Leadership.
Institutional data consisted of an in-depth survey of 155 institutional documents
collected through the institution's website. Aligned with the symbolic perspective, the
analysis of the institutional data used Schultz’s (1994) framework that consists of
identifying associated key symbolic expressions as an analytical point of entry, their
symbolic representations as well as the shared meanings attributed to them by
individuals. These cultural constituents paved the way for the determination of the more
general cultural landscape as they constituted a cultural perimeter that allowed for the
emergence of cultural worldviews representing individuals’ cognitive image of their
reality, and allowed to develop cultural tables that were used as guidelines for the
determination of the academic department’s culture and used later in the comparison
process. Departmental data relied on in-depth interviews with three key departmental
stakeholders. The findings revealed that in every dimension of Tierney’s (1988)
framework, the organizational culture of the institution and the academic department as
a subculture align in some aspects but are also orthogonal in other ones. In the
Environment dimension, institutional rhetoric seems to value cross-unit collaborations
as a means to enhance the institution’s engagement with the external environment.
Partnerships are seen as an opportunity for synergies that paves the way for the growth
of partners and allows them to sustain their relationships with the environment.
Departmentally, individual professionalism is rather valued as a means to develop
relationships externally and warrant the professional growth of departmental
stakeholders. In the Mission dimension, institutional rhetoric emphasizes research
competencies that are primarily the product of collaborative and interdisciplinary
structures as a means to fulfill the service component of the institution, whereas
disciplinary specialism predominates the service aspect of the academic department’s
mission. Additionally, institutional rhetoric emphasizes civic engagement as a means to
graduate leaders engaged in addressing contextual problems, whereas the development
of graduates’ leadership skills seems to be closely related to their acquisition of
disciplinary skills warranted by the expertise of faculty members in the academic
department. Institutionally, assessment is a learning opportunity meant to refine
institutional performance in the accomplishment of its purpose, whereas assessment in
the academic department is rather a means to satisfy institutional requirements. In the
Socialization dimension, the values in both the institution and the academic department
reveal that faculty members’ development of a professional identity is an attribute of
disciplinary expertise; however, institutional rhetoric emphasizes professional platforms
as a means to refine and develop this expertise. Additionally, within socialization, the
mentoring of novice faculty members is a journey underlain by mutual learning and
growth, whereas departmentally, the process seems more to be a solitary journey of
searching individually for cues of survival and success. In the Information dimension,
information is a strategic resource needed for the institution’s survival and gathered and
refined through a collaborative effort that facilitates decision-making. Departmentally,
information is rather a resource that warrants the individual survival of members who
rely on their disciplinary expertise to make sense of it. Additionally, both formal and
informal communication is institutionally valued as a means to develop shared
objectives and communicate external competence, whereas formal communication
seems to dominate departmental performances with sparse use of web-based social
platforms to relay competence externally. In the Strategy dimension, the development of
strategy in institutional rhetoric is a collaborative, multifaceted, and monitored process
considered essential to face unstable environments. Curriculum that integrates
knowledge from various disciplines, as well as civic engagement components, is at the
heart of strategy development. Strategy development as a departmental value is faculty
members’ privilege and dominated by a single approach to strategy setting meant
primarily to ensure the survival of the academic department. Curriculum in the
academic department is also at the center of strategy-setting but is only shaped by
disciplinary influences. In the Leadership dimension, inclusiveness is a value that
transpires institutional rhetoric in the governance aspect as it sustains decisions and
promotes trust. Institutionally, the enactment of leadership is both a position privilege
and the strategic manipulation of symbols. Departmentally, governance is an exclusive
system reserved for specific groups, and leadership is mainly considered as a positionrelated attribute. The orthogonal values between the institution and the academic
department can be attributed to the disciplinary influences in the academic department.
This study concludes with recommendations for further research and practice. |