Engaging the Six Cultures of the Academy (review)

Reviewed by: Engaging the Six Cultures of the Academy Jay R. Dee William H. Bergquist and Kenneth Pawlak. Engaging the Six Cultures of the Academy. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008. 304 pp. Cloth: 45. 00. ISBN 13: 978-0-7879-9519-5. Current frameworks for studying organizational culture in higher education are insufficient for advancing our understanding of the complex forces that shape behaviors, actions, and outcomes in colleges and universities. Some higher education studies seek to categorize an institution into a particular organizational culture type and then assess whether that cultural type contributes to organizational effectiveness (e. g. , Smart Martin, 1992). Strong cultural values may also be associated with a rigid defense of the status quo, which blocks needed change. Further, strong cultures can also isolate and marginalize organizational members, whose belief systems are not congruent with the dominant ideology of the institution, thus depriving the organization of new sources of talent and ideas for growth and development. As an alternative to the "strong culture" hypothesis, Bergquist and Pawlak encourage leaders to understand and develop skills to work within the multiple cultures that comprise their institutions. Specifically, the authors describe six sets of cultural values that permeate all higher education institutions to varying degrees: collegial, managerial, developmental, advocacy, virtual, and tangible. The collegial culture, linked historically to the rise of the modern research university, values autonomy and academic freedom, and assigns a high level of importance to scholarly work within the academic disciplines. Managerial culture, in contrast, developed in conjunction with the rise of large statewide higher education systems, values efficiency, accountability, and rational planning. Bergquist and Pawlak argue that the developmental culture arose in response to limitations in the collegial culture, which neglected the learning that occurs outside the parameters of academic disciplines. The developmental culture values affective and moral development for students, as well as ongoing professional development for faculty and staff. Similarly, the advocacy culture emerged as a response to concerns about the growing influence of the managerial culture. Linked historically with the rise of faculty and staff unions, the advocacy culture values equity, social justice, and collective action. The authors trace the rise of the virtual culture to innovations in communications technology, which have had profound effects not only on instructional delivery mechanisms (online learning), but also on epistemology and. . .