Power Tension Sample Clauses

Power Tension. This theme captures the poles of power that push and pull faculty members within Bahraini HE. Three main parties emerged as salient players in the employment relationship: the student, the department head, and the top management. In fact, a basic NVivo word frequency search of the ten interview transcripts revealed that the word “student/students” was mentioned 241times in the data, “Department Head” was mentioned 189 times, “Xxxx” was mentioned 59 times, “Management” was mentioned 35 times, and “President” was only mentioned 20 times. It can be said that faculty members are student-centred. They consider the student to be the centre of what they do and assess their own success and failure based on students’ performance and achievement. Students also represent a source of emotional conflict for faculty. As much as they love and enjoy teaching them, faculty members feel that students may overstep them and interfere in the relationship that they have with the institution. Department heads or chairs are also focal to the employment relationship. They have a huge impact on the faculty’s satisfaction as they assign tasks to them, evaluate their performance, and recommend them for training or promotion. Xxxxx were not mentioned as much but were recognised as key representatives of the institution. When asked, “who do you consider as your employer?” four of the participants named the department head as the employer, four named the xxxx, and two named the student. Unfortunately, the direction of the communication within the Bahraini institutions seems to be top-down. Faculty rely on policies, procedures, and manuals to find information and understand their rights and obligations. Accordingly, participants described institutions to be bureaucratic and hierarchical. Participant no. 6 gave an account of how suggestions and decisions are made at her institution, stating: “You can discuss your ideas in the Departmental Council headed by the Head of Department, but to a certain extent we don’t get to say much because at the end of the day, the Head of Department is the person in charge of taking the decision… we follow the big book rule; if the Head of Department feels this is against the university policy, then you don’t get to change it. You can raise your objections, it will be minuted but no serious action will be taken unless all the departments agree on certain points, then if it’s that serious maybe the Head of Department will take it to the College Council. But ...