Passive Conformism in Academia: Saudi Organization, Education, and Technology

Abstract

Academia is expected to act as a cognitive arena in which members intellectually challenge one another, problematize social structures, and destabilize dominant ideologies. It is, supposedly, a cognitively unstable environment wherein intellectualism pushes social boundaries and acts as an agent for social change. It is a training camp wherein people come to be trained in the practice of critical thinking. Hence, one would imagine that academia would be the last place to find passive conformism. However, does this image reflect reality? Having interviewed four groups of 50 students, 47 academics, and 28 support staff in three Saudi universities, passive conformism (be it unethical, managerial, or in the form of logistical conformism) appears to be a necessity in Saudi academia. This suggests that, although academia acts as an authority in regard to critical thinking, it may not internalize this philosophy or expose its own organizational activities to such thinking. Passive conformism in Saudi academic organizations is enhanced by wider Saudi culture which promotes conformism among its citizens and directs every aspect of public and private lives, including the lives of its academic organizations. A theoretical proposition could be therefore that passive conformism in a society could be transmitted to its organizations.Conformismo pasivo en el ambito acad emico: organizaci on, educaci on y tecnología saudí Resumen Se supone que el ambito acad emico tiene que actuar como una arena cognitiva en la que los miembros se retan intelectualmente los unos a los otros, problematizan estructuras sociales y desestabilizan ideologías dominantes. Supuestamente es un ambiente cognitivamente inestable en el que el intelectualismo expande los límites

L2MSS in the Saudi Arabian context: item, scale, and external validity analysis

“…This is the main reason for our participants agreeing with most items. Interestingly, this is possibly another example of high conformism that characterizes Saudi Arabia (Gahwaji, 2008;Al-Rasheed, 2013;Al Lily and Alhazmi, 2017). For instance, scholars found that Saudi students have high conformity with the Communicative Language Teaching approach (Wajid and Saleem, 2017) despite having continually low English proficiency.…”

Navigating the Social Media Landscape: A Guide for Special Education Teachers and Parents

“…The ubiquitous nature of social media sites affords users extraordinary opportunities for participation, collaboration, and access to information. According to studies by Al Lily & Alhazmi (2017), a sizable percentage of Jordanians use Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and WhatsApp regularly.…”