Ontological Views of the Course Coordinator at a Hong Kong University

: Some Explorations of Identity, Power and Ideology through the Lens of Workplace Inequality via Critical Narrative Analysis

Abstract

Workplace inequality is a social phenomenon. This thesis is an enquiry into how it impacts the course coordinator’s identities at a Hong Kong university with a critical approach. The public expressions of selves are examined from two directions. First, this research explores the institutional effects of workplace practices and policies on the discursive construction of identities, the social relations of power and hence course coordinators’ ideological positionings and second, investigates how course coordinator leadership is enacted. I draw on managerialism, distributed leadership and Critical Discourse Analysis to guide data collection and analysis. Literature review contains some studies on programme coordinators but they provided little critically and discursively on identity, ideology formation as well as leadership enactment through the lens of workplace inequality. This research is thus able to fill such a literature gap and becomes part of the fledging course coordinator landscape.

Rooted in a critical realist ontology with a constructivist epistemology, the current study takes interpretivist positioning. Following on from the pilot interviews drawing on from Habermasian interpretation of constructionism in the co-construction of knowledge (Habermas, 1984), which suggests that both course coordinators and tutors co-construct workplace identities, this study uses critical narrative analysis (CNA) as a hybrid methodology that informs focus groups and individual interviews as data collection methods, which facilitate data triangulation. To analyse the discourses in this study, I adopt Fairclough’s (1992) approach to discourse analysis and Fairclough’s (2003) framing, and Mulderrig’s (2011) grammar of governance, along with critical reflection principles proposed by Fook & Gardner (2007) involving the deconstruction and reconstruction of their assumptions and beliefs about the role of the course coordinator.

The key findings show that workplace identities constantly traverse around the discourses of a top-down approach, administrative obligation and student power, showing institutional dominance and participant subordination. As such, work assignments are prescriptive and transactional leadership becomes an inherent feature of the work culture, in which organisational goals through conformity and its sub-categories of compliance and obedience are emphasised in the context of managerialism. In Habermas’s terms, communication and the role were distorted (Fairtlough, 1991). As to leadership enactment, the notion of symbiosis between course coordinators and tutors for job survival was salient. At the end of this thesis, I present specific recommendations that aim to effect change to make the institution a fairer workplace.

Date of Award	1 Oct 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Leon P Tikly (Supervisor) & Robert Sharples (Supervisor)