Strategic Management Thought

Discovering University Culture: Theoretical Reinvestigation and Typology of Academic Culture Studies

Authors

1 Ph.D. Student of Management, Tehran University, Tehran

2 Associate Professor of Management, Tehran University, Tehran

3 Professor of Management, Tehran University, Tehran

Abstract

University as the symbol of higher education is an effective institution in society’s culture. Therefore culture in university organization takes on great importance. While it is just about one decade that “academic culture” has been considered in our literature, foreign scholars have researched multiple aspects of this object for about four decades. Also these few domestic studies are extremely suffering from lack of coherent theoretical foundations. So, at first it’s necessary to closely reinvestigate the foreign works to prepare reliable theoretical basics for our own researches which will be suitable for developing theories. This article has reviewed external and a few internal studies to achieve the mentioned goal and by using the typology method as a unique form of theory development has categorized them from two perspectives: (1) The object of interest in 7 categories, (2) Theoretical assumptions about university culture in 3 categories (integration, differentiation and fragmentation). The result of this theoretical reinvestigation and typology is a better understanding of multiple, and interesting features of academic culture leading to present a “conceptual framework” about culture in university for academic managers and researchers. Disciplinary cultures, students’ subcultures, comparative studies, studies of cultural change processes, administrative vs. professional subcultures, the effect of inquiry paradigms on faculty cultures and other cultural differences of them from differentiation and fragmentation perspectives, are the most important research gaps in our domestic studies.

Keywords

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Strategic Management Thought
Volume 5, Issue 1 - Serial Number 1
April 2011
Pages 45-97
  • Receive Date: 02 July 2011
  • Revise Date: 21 March 2011
  • Accept Date: 04 September 2011