Towards The Development Of Contextually Relevant And Industry-Responsive Graduate Information Systems Curricula For Sub-Saharan Africa.
| dc.contributor.author | Mark-Oliver, K. | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2024-04-22T11:46:32Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2024-04-22T11:46:32Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2023-02 | |
| dc.description | PhD. Information Systems | en_US |
| dc.description.abstract | The relevance of academic programmes, including information systems (IS), to meeting stakeholder expectations, continues to be a concern for both researchers and practitioners. For example, on one hand, industries expect IS graduates to acquire the relevant competencies needed for organisational performance. This expectation is congruent with governments‘ expectation of graduates acquiring the necessary knowledge and skills that make them employable and also solving national socio-economic challenges. On the other hand, IS academics focus on independent autonomous research and further knowledge that is not necessarily focused on vocation. This, for example, conflicts with government, industry and students‘ expectations of graduates being employed after obtaining degrees. Furthermore, new societal challenges emerging as a result of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, call for disruption-responsive IS curricula. These multiple, and sometimes conflicting expectations, from different actors, constitute an institutional complexity which currently confronts IS curriculum innovation in SSA. IS departments in SSA are expected to navigate this institutional complexity in their efforts to develop or revise contextually relevant and responsive IS curricula. However, empirical evidence and theoretical explanations of how relevant academic programmes in IS respond to the SSA context have not been adequately explored. A review of the information systems curriculum and the institutional complexity literature delineates, among others, four interlinked research gaps, which have also been echoed in practice and somewhat by the global IS body, the Association of Information Systems (AIS). First, there is the need to explore the IS competencies required of mid-level management IS professionals relevant to organisations in SSA. Mid-level IS managers occupy positions between entry-level and the Chief Information Officer (CIO) position. Second, there is the need to explain how institutional logics and agent actions influence IS curriculum innovation in SSA. Third, there is the need to explain the consequences of the influences of institutional logics and agent actions on the responsiveness of IS curricula in SSA. Lastly, there is the need to explore the nature of graduate IS programme offerings in SSA. Consequently, the overarching purpose of this doctoral study is to develop a framework for the development of contextually relevant and industry-responsive graduate information systems curricula for Sub-Saharan Africa. To explore the nature of graduate IS programme offerings and mid-level management IS competencies, the study adopted the MSIS 2016 global IS competency model to guide the collection and analysis of data. Again, the study also adopted the institutional theory, and specifically the institutional logics perspective, to explain the influences of institutional logics and agents‘ actions on the development of IS curricula. The curriculum responsiveness perspective was used to examine the responsiveness of graduate IS curricula in SSA. This study, based on the critical realism paradigm, adopted a mixed-method research approach (Delphi study with 56 experts, a case study and a survey of 200 university websites) because the different research questions required different methods. For the first research objective, this study found that, in SSA, mid-level management IS professionals, play a hybrid of technical and non-technical roles and require individual foundation competencies (IFC), IS-specific competencies and competencies in a domain of practice. In addition, organisations emphasise IFCs more than IS-specific skills for mid-level IS management positions in SSA. IFCs, though difficult to develop through education and training are essential to look out for during hiring. For example, in this study, a trait like ―ability to be flexible and adapt to change‖ which is a lower competency, was identified to be important for mid-level IS managers. Hitherto silent in literature, this study is the first to focus on mid-level management IS competencies, particularly from an SSA and a socio- technical perspective. For the second research objective, this study captured the influence of new institutional logics, such as the development and the de-colonialism logics, at the societal level on graduate IS curriculum innovation in SSA. Previous studies had only identified the state, the market, the corporation, the religion, the community, the family, and the professionalism as enduring institutional logics of western societies that influence social behaviour. The church logic and the decolonisation logic, though existing at the societal and organisational levels respectively, do not influence graduate IS curriculum innovation. In addition, this study captured the academic logic at the field level, the interdisciplinary logic at the organisational level, and the Computer Science and IS logics at the individual level, to influence graduate IS curriculum innovation in SSA. Furthermore, these societal, field, university and individual level institutional logics contradicted each other presenting an institutional complexity to graduate IS curriculum innovation in SSA. However, the IS department resolved conflicting logics through mechanisms such as decoupling practices, faithful appropriation of congruent logics, hybridisation of logics and pursuit of dominant logics. For the third research objective, this study found that: First, graduate IS curricula in SSA are economically responsive by responding to the university's economic needs, and students’ economic needs. Second, graduate IS curricula in SSA are disciplinary responsive by responding to the local and global IS disciplinary identity. Third, graduate IS curricula in SSA are pedagogically responsive by accommodating IS entry experiences and IS learning resources. Fourth, graduate IS curricula in SSA are culturally responsive by accommodating the internal organisational culture and the culture of dependent organisations. Fifth, the technological and disruptive responsiveness are new dimensions uncovered in this study. Graduate IS curricula in SSA are technologically responsive, by accommodating ICT trends and the institutional ICTs and also disruptively responsive by being resilient to emergencies such as global pandemics and disasters and planned changes. For the fourth research objective, the following findings were discovered. First, graduate IS programmes in SSA are hybrid and are focused on providing generalist, domain-driven specialist or technology-driven specialist competencies and are more dominant in public universities than private universities. In addition, graduate IS course offerings provide IS-specific, individual foundational and domain of practice competencies such as business, computing, health, education, public policy, development, geography, government and mining reflecting the immediate local contextual needs in SSA. Prior to this research, there had been the general belief that academic programmes in IS, just like IS developed in the west, carry the values, aspirations, and interests of western societies. There have, therefore, been calls for IS curriculum researchers and practitioners in SSA to focus on ―decolonising‖ IS, and in particular ―Africanise‖ IS curricula, in SSA universities. In response, the study contributes theoretically and empirically to the understanding of graduate IS curriculum innovation in SSA in a number of ways. First, the study, arguably the first, extends the institutional logic perspective to IS curriculum innovation in SSA and uncovered beyond the existing seven institutional orders of western societies, the role of the logics of development and possibly de-colonialism in shaping IS curriculum decisions in SSA. These findings open the need to explore how the development and de-colonialism logics, specific to the SSA region and other developing countries, influence the development, implementation, adoption and use and consequences of information systems. Second, the study also explains how other institutional logics at different levels influence IS curriculum innovation. Such a socio-technical multi-level analysis of IS curriculum innovation is uncommon in extant literature. These contributions, among others, have been published in two book chapters and a conference proceeding. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh:8080/handle/123456789/41640 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | en_US |
| dc.publisher | University Of Ghana | en_US |
| dc.subject | Africa | en_US |
| dc.subject | Information Systems | en_US |
| dc.subject | Industry-Responsive | en_US |
| dc.subject | Curricula | en_US |
| dc.title | Towards The Development Of Contextually Relevant And Industry-Responsive Graduate Information Systems Curricula For Sub-Saharan Africa. | en_US |
| dc.type | Thesis | en_US |
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