Institutional Culture Change

Abstract

The purpose of the paper is to explore the architecture of the institutional culture with the aim of proposing a programmatic template to use to implement culture change initiatives in the higher education (HE) sector in South Africa. The need for institutional culture change has been flagged in numerous studies as a barrier in the implementation of substantive and qualitative transformation. Through document analysis, this paper argues that the problem in implementing institutional culture change interventions aligned with the humanising mission of the sector is related to the failure to adopt a social inclusion approach that is based on a systems thinking paradigm. The paradigm is a holistic analysis of a system with the purpose of identifying elements of that system, which this research manifests and explicates. The findings of the research show that changing institutional culture is inextricably linked to the objectives of transformation. Second, the article highlights the significance of adopting the social inclusion framework, including understanding the politics and practices of social inclusion.