Neopatrimonialism and Institutional Culture

EditorialEditoria

Determining and navigating institutional culture

Purpose – This column seeks to address library personnel issues. This particular installment discusses the challenges of determining an organization’s culture and the culture of any parent or supporting organizations. It also discusses some strategies for navigating organizational culture. Design/methodology/approach – The column is based on the author’s substantial experience dealing with personnel matters in academic, public, and special libraries, including hiring for all types of positions. It is personal opinion, based on lengthy experience. Findings – This article discusses the challenges inherent in learning about an organization’s culture and the culture of any parent or supporting organizations. It also discusses a variety of strategies for navigating organizational culture, in order to foster success. Originality/value – The column is intended to help people to deal with all types of personnel issues overall; this specific column is intended to help librarians deal with the challenges of determining the nature of an organization’s culture, and of navigating this culture successfully

Institutional Culture in Christian Schools

This action research project investigated the institutional culture of Christian schools and its impact on faith formation. The research was a mixed method study with Sioux Center Christian School serving as a case study for the project. A careful literature review was conducted to identify the characteristics of healthy institutional culture in education, business and religious institutions. This list was vetted and prioritized using a focus group of Sioux Center Christian School teachers as well as interviews with several experts on institutional culture and faith formation. These characteristics were then used to develop a survey using the Four Building Blocks of Faith as the framework for the survey. Completed surveys were received from teachers at SCCS and students from the 8th grade class. The results showed a strong correlation between the scores of the teachers and students, indicating the pervasiveness of institutional culture for the entire school community. The data was also able to identify strengths and weaknesses in the culture of SCCS. The results indicate that the survey tool is an effective instrument that can be used by Christian schools to identify their current institutional culture. Suggestions for improving institutional culture in order to positively impact the faith formation of Christian school students were also included in the research project

Values, institutional culture and recognition of prior learning

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I draw a link between values, institutional culture and the Stellenbosch University (SU) Regulation for Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) and Credit Accumulation Transfer (CAT). I do this because the Regulation endorses the values of lifelong learning and the redress of inequalities. In turn, values form an important part of institutional culture. I use the ‘values’ element of a four-part theoretical framework developed in a conceptual analytic study of institutional culture in higher education to analyse the SU Regulation for RPL and CAT. The study employed critical hermeneutics as research methodology, which exposed the hidden meanings of and revealed other ideas of ‘institutional culture’. My analysis confirms a gap between the intentions of RPL and the way in which it plays out in practice. There is little evidence of significant strategies to address the challenges of RPL. Values related to RPL need to find expression in concrete strategies; otherwise, RPL will remain a challenging process. My analysis highlights the important role of institutional culture in RPL and CAT. Cultural systems (including institutional culture) shape the nature of practice concerning and attitudes towards RPL.Keywords: values, higher education, policy, institutional culture, RPL, CA

Relationship between transformtion and institutional culture

Transformation of higher education (HE) is presently a buzzword in the higher education globally and in South Africa. Government policy has suggested a system of higher education relevant to the new South Africa. Since 1994 elections not enough transformation took place in South Africa. This was affirmed by violent student protests two years ago at universities sparked by fees’ hikes. In South Africa, institutional transformation and institutional culture have been approached as different phenomena, and recently it was demonstrated that the one cannot exist without the other. The turmoil at South African HE institutions in 2015 and early 2016 highlighted the issues of institutional transformation and institutional culture. The student protests were linked to lack of transformation and an institutional culture that alienates black students. This article explores the concepts of transformation and institutional culture, in the context of HE institutions. I conclude that these concepts are intertwined, therefore we cannot have a completely transformed HE in South Africa until the institutional culture also changes.

Community College Culture and Faculty of Color

This investigation examines and explains the ways in which community college faculty of color construct their understandings of institutional culture. We investigate four community colleges in California through interviews with 31 full-time faculty of color. This faculty group expresses identity conflicts between their professional roles and their cultural identities. Their understandings of their institutions suggest that the culture of the community college is more complex and multi-faceted than that portrayed in the scholarly literature, which often portrays the institution as homogeneous and the faculty body as uniform. © The Author(s) 2013

Correlations between national psychology and institutional culture

In Psycholinguistics, there are obvious linguistic relations between the tradition of a nation and its attitude towards the state institution, concerning the obedience to the laws and the respect for orders of the political institutions representing the state authorities. The special path of history of a nation, fulfilled with continuous fights for liberation has also impacted the lack of use of the vocabulary related to the institutional culture, whereas the nations that didn’t need to fight for their freedom, but in the contrary, they have fought to conquer lands and spread their civilizations, have a rich vocabulary regarding to the Institutional culture. The first ones considered the institutions of a foreign state to be strange and imposed for them, as they have been representing the institutional culture of the occupier or the invader. Therefore, they refused the obedience to these rules, even far later after the national liberation. The lack of vocabulary related to the culture of law and politics, later filled with borrowings and international words, is another proof for the lack of the words related to the state institutions and for the mindset of the inhabitants. For these reasons, there is an evident psychological confusion related to loss of the primary meaning of the foreign words and their later use for special needs in the native vocabulary, is the consequence of the lack of the institutional culture in the national psychology, e.g. order, law, instructions, judgments, concession, context, contest, etc

Diversity Climate Survey Results: Changing Institutional Culture

Purpose: To gather and analyze data at two points in time on perceptions of institutional values connected to a wide range of diversity issues. This study gauges student, faculty, and staff views on institutional support of diversity with results guiding future inclusion and training efforts within the organization. Presented at the AAMC (Association of American Colleges) Annual Meeting, RIME (Research in Medical Education) Program, November 2008

Moving Mountains: Institutional Culture and Transformational Change

Our institutions are changing all the time but for the most part these changes do not make a big difference, either because the results are confined to an isolated segment of the organization or because the environment is not responsive. To be considered truly transformational, the initiative must alter the culture of the institutions by changing select underlying assumptions and institutional behaviors, processes, and products; it must be deep and pervasive, affecting the whole institution; it must be intentional; and it must occur consistently over time (Eckel, Hill, & Green, 1998)