Conceptual Necessities and Methodological Requirements in Academic Culture Studies

Studying the culture of every community, because of identity characteristics and borders distinguishing different communities, is one of the main requirements for understanding that community. Although researchers from different fields have carried out studies on the culture of university as an important community, unlike other studies on universities, numerous shortcomings and gaps can be found in these studies, leaving studies on academic culture at an immature stage. The present article aims to analyze concepts, views and theories related to this field in order to deal with these problems. The analysis carried out here shows that failure in the conceptual and methodological development of studies on ‘university culture’, regardless of the complexity of the concepts of culture, organization and university, has three main reasons: failure to distinguish between “culture of university” and “academic culture”, failure to recognize that studies on university culture belong to interdisciplinary fields, and failure to methodologically distinguish between the ‘has approach’ (culture as a variable) and ‘is approach’ (culture as a root metaphor).