Narrative Research of the Issues Related to Faculty Members (Case Study: An Organizational University)

The gap between the academic atmosphere of universities and the requirements of the related organizations has always made important challenges for organizational universities. Moreover, faculty members, as the heart of the universities and the main factor of achieving organization goals, have always been considered as the main concentration of higher education administrators. The main problem and challenge of this study is the mismatch between the abilities, activities and outputs of the faculty members with the requirements of the reference organizations. As the evidences confirmed the presence of complicated problems, the researchers decided to select problem-oriented narrative method to understand the status quo of the organization being studied and suggest solutions to improve the situation. Hence, the internal understanding of the main actors is carried out through a phenomenological approach, and the behaviors, structures and ideas of each of them are extracted, and the common world among them is identified. In the next step, the researchers propose the narrative presentation of the problem through a critical perspective by the collected data. In the first phase, three main actors (faculty members, university administrators, and deputies and managers of the reference organization) were identified. In the second step, 25 people who were involved in the problem were identified and in-depth interviews were done with them resulting in the identification of the common world among the main actors being presented in the form of a three-layered model. Having fulfilled the external understanding and having discovered the blind spots, the researchers narrated the problems in the last phase. Finally, suggestions were presented for improving the situation.