Faculty subcultures in engineering and their implications for organizational change

Abstract

Background Prior efforts to understand faculty culture have largely described monoliths where individuals are differentiated by their productivity. Little prior work provides rich faculty subcultural descriptions and their connections to specific activities, including disposition to change. Purpose/Hypothesis This article describes the goals, assumptions, methods, and inferences made about faculty culture within an engineering department at a large university with very high research activity, with the potential to enrich future discussions about change among the target audience of engineering faculty, administrators, and researchers. Design/Method We employ cultural consensus theory (CCT) to characterize faculty culture, based upon a detailed survey, analysis, and member checking. We use the academic ratchet—as a theoretical framework to interpret CCT results, and extend our understanding using previously published change theories. Results We discovered two faculty subcultures of roughly equal membership: (a) change‐oriented and (b) continuity‐embracing. Members of each subculture agree on the primacy of research but differ in their views of change, leadership, and trust. Members of the change‐oriented subculture seek large‐scale changes but feel disempowered to pursue them, while members of the continuity‐embracing subculture seek modest changes and feel empowered to enact them. Conclusions We introduce a scalable, person‐centered culture characterization approach (CCT) to the engineering education research community. This approach deepens our understanding of faculty culture, and our results reinforce the central role of the academic ratchet in shaping faculty activities. This analysis illustrates the potential roles of each subculture in enacting change of various types and magnitudes.

Constructing a comprehensive and adaptive survey for cultural analysis of engineering departments

“…In previous work (Berger et al, 2021), our team of engineering education researchers and anthropologists described a process for understanding faculty culture within a single academic department. In brief, we used data from a wide range of sources to construct a final group of 40 cultural statements.…”

“…The survey development approach unfolds in phases and leverages our prior experiences (Berger et al, 2021). As detailed in the next three subsections, these three developmental phases provide a sound foundation on which to build the CCT survey and interpret its results.…”

“…Our experience has been positive in this regard, and most constituents seem quite willing to discuss their department and its operations. The semi-structured interview protocol may be informed by on-site observations, and our protocol generally targets common features of academic cultures (Godfrey & Parker, 2010;Merton et al, 2009) and leverages our prior work (Berger et al, 2021) such as: resources (funding, space, time), relationships (collaboration, student-staff relations), leadership (trust, effectiveness, decision making), change (educational/pedagogical), scale (enrolment, staff), day-to-day life (work-life balance, priorities). When considered as a whole, the interview data generally reveal specific issues on which respondents hold differing views.…”

“…We then construct candidate items according to several important criteria derived from the literature or from our prior experience (Berger et al, 2021). CCT items should:…”

“…Because the CCT items are short (a single sentence), and the answers dichotomous), our research team has deployed CCT surveys with as many as 60 items. To be sure, the completion rate decreases as the survey length increases, but our experience with surveys of this length has been reasonably positive, with response rates above 60% on a 40-item faculty survey (Berger et al, 2021) and nearly 20% on a 60-item student survey (unpublished).…”