Socialized scholarship: the role of departmental socialization on the institutionalization of Boyer\u27s scholarship at one large research institution

ABSTRACT The intent of this study was to build on previous works in an effort to establish new methods and frameworks to help understand why little has changed in faculty scholarship more than twenty years after Scholarship Reconsidered. A premise of this study is that the institutionalization of new domains of faculty scholarship in a university or college is a function of what scholarly domains the faculty are socialized in their departments to conduct. The study revised the instrument used in Institutionalizing a Broader View of Scholarship Through Boyer\u27s Four Domains, and implemented the new instrument with all full-time faculty at a large, research-intensive, land-grant institution. Interestingly, the demographic analysis of those faculty who want to conduct the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) and the Scholarship of Extension/Professional Practice (SEPP) in the future revealed that these two subsets had little to no differentiation in demographic profile. The most revealing difference was the twenty-eight percentage point difference in the percentage of faculty who are conducting the scholarship of extension/professional practice as opposed to the percentage of faculty who desire to conduct SEPP in the future. It was posited this was due to the perception of what actually constitutes SEPP by Iowa State University faculty. Descriptive and inferential analyses were conducted on gender with regard to tenure status and rank. The non-tenured status ratio was 2:1 for females (42%) as compared to males (20%). Also in the full dataset, professors were more than three times likely to be male than female. The results from this study held in a statistically significant manner with the literature regarding gender in relation to rank and tenure status. Two hierarchical multiple regression analyses were conducted to determine the influence of departmental socialization on faculty desire to conduct the two scholarly domains, with three blocks in each model: faculty\u27s background characteristics, faculty\u27s institutional characteristics, and departmental socialization. The departmental socialization proxy was a significant positive predictor of faculty desire to conduct both scholarly domains. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, the new construct of perceived departmental reward was a significant negative predictor of faculty desire to pursue both scholarly domains. Consistent with the literature related to the importance of promotion and tenure in scholarship influence, faculty are not likely to want to pursue scholarly domains for which they perceive they will not be rewarded