Välimaa / Ylijoki Cultural Perspectives on Higher Education

1. Auflage 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4020-6604-7
Verlag: Springer Netherland
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 278 Seiten, eBook

This book analyses higher education from cultural perspectives and also to reflect on the uses of intellectual devices developed in the cultural studies of higher education over the last decades.The first part of the book presents fresh perspectives to integrate cultural studies in higher education with wider societal processes. Professor William G. Tierney speaks about trust and culture in higher education, whereas Professor Imanol Ordorika opens a political perspective to higher education institutions.The second part of the book studies the internal life of higher education. Relying on a variety of cultural perspectives, the chapters explore the actual day-to-day practices taking place in higher education, ranging from student socialisation, student consumerism, tensions in combining academic and market-oriented targets in knowledge production to the formation of academic identities in different disciplinary and organisational cultures.The focus in the third part of the book is to use cultural perspectives developed in previous studies on disciplinary and organisational cultures as a framework to understand a variety of processes and reforms taking place at the institutional level of high education. The chapters in this part of the book analyse the Bologna Process, the evolution of scientific fields in American universities, organisational cultures in Chinese post-merger universities, and doctoral education and cooperation with industry.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Välimaa, Jussi

Ylijoki, Oili-Helena

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Culture, Society and Higher Education.- to the Book and Its Contents.- Cultural Studies in Higher Education Research.- Trust and Organizational Culture in Higher Education.- Building or Eroding Intellectual Capital? Student Consumerism as a Cultural Force in the Context of Knowledge Economy.- Academic Practices and Identities.- The Moral Order of Business Studying.- A Clash of Academic Cultures: The Case of Dr. X.- Academic Work and Academic Identities: A Comparison between Four Disciplines.- Culture in Interaction: Academic Identities in Laboratory Work.- Caught in the Science Trap? A Case Study of the Relationship between Nurses and “Their” Science.- Determining the Norms of Science: From Epistemological Criteria to Local Struggle on Organizational Rules?.- Higher Education Institutions and Reforms in Cultural Frameworks.- Doctoral Education and Doctoral Theses — Changing Assessment Practices.- Challenging Traditional Research Training Culture: Industry-oriented Doctoral Programs in Australian Cooperative Research Centres.- The Evolution of American Scientific Fields: Disciplinary Differences Versus Institutional Isomorphism.- Quantitative Assessment of Organisational Cultures in Post-merger Universities.- The Bologna Process in Academic Basic Units: Finnish Universities and Competitive Horizons.- How Does the Bologna Process Challenge the National Traditions of Higher Education Institutions?.- Future Challenges.

Leseproben

"Chapter 5 The Moral Order of Business Studying (S. 59-60)

Hanna Päiviö

5.1 Introduction

Business schools provide an interesting context for studies from cultural perspectives. Both outsiders and insiders to these universities maintain distinctive stereotypes that are supposed to describe business students’ and teachers’ orientations and values. This chapter looks back and reflects on a narrative study on businessschool culture (Leppälä and Päiviö 2001). In the end, the study in question became an intervention into the local culture of a business school.2

My account of the project will present an example of how university studying, and more particularly, business studying, can be approached both culturally and in the spirit of participative research. There are no generally accepted criteria for what can be considered a cultural approach to higher education or university studying (Välimaa 1995, see also Mäntylä 2007). In this project, cultural approach has meant mainly two things.

Firstly, we proceeded from the studies of disciplinary cultures, and conceptualized business education itself as a process in which the students become socialized into different disciplinary and work cultures (e.g., Becher 1989, Clark 1987, Ylijoki 1998). We focused not only on how this process actually becomes realized in business education, but also on what kind of cultures and communities are actually meaningful in the everyday life of the business students. Secondly, in this project cultural approach meant that we were studying our own university, that is, we were doing research ""from within"".

We have participated in this study first as students, and later on as teachers at this university. As we were participants in this project prior to, during, and after our thesis project3, it is difficult to put a clear end to it (cf. Swepson 1999, Katila and Meriläinen 2002). In fact, its aftermath still continues. Our research strategy can be called participatory in the sense that we intervened into the local, social process of cultural knowledge production (Maguire 1987).

We constructed reality as we went along with the students that we lived and worked with. In this approach culture is thus not only something that the researcher describes or something that the students need to learn and become socialized to, but it is something we continuously do. Narrating, be it oral or written, is a basic and an ancient form of participation in ""cultural affairs"". At least in our case, a research report written by the insiders generated responses from many other people working or studying at the university.

5.2 A Narrative Study in Business-School Culture and Moral Order

What is good business education? What is virtuous and vicious about studying business? In our thesis project we were interested in these questions from the students’ point of view. As we were business students ourselves, our motivation sprang from our own experiences. During our studies in the HSE we had often felt like being outsiders among the business students. Although we were enthusiastic about our own discipline, organization and management, we felt that we were not allowed to show it publicly. "