Ahmed Ali Alhazmi

This research scrutinises the fear-driven management of Arabs. It conceptualises fear as a structural component of Arab society through a sociological lens and, by drawing upon the reflections of 28 Arab experts, philosophises on the potential of fear to develop into a well-configured managerial system (‘feararchy’) that regulates public and private lives. This research finds this system to rest upon a foundation of three forms of fear: ontological (the normalisation of fear), epistemological (the utilisation of fear to shape knowledge) and axiological (the influence of fear on acceptability). This article makes five contributions. First, it shows how, through turning fear into a collective status, Arab managers exploit fear for social control. Second, it demonstrates the institutional nature of Arabs’ fear, making it worthy of attention from the field of management. Third, it investigates fear as an individually internalised, socially constructed feeling that is psychologically manipulative. Fourth, it presents fear as not merely a natural psychological sensation but a managerially distorted contextual frame within which current (and future) members think and operate. Fifth and finally, it exposes the contextuality of fear: sources of fear in one context may not be sources of fear in another.

This article tackles the question: To what domains did education go when it left school buildings due to the coronavirus pandemic? To answer this question, 1184 observations of online activity, 1132 observations of face-to-face activity, 118 focus groups and 1110 individual interviews were undertaken. In addition, 1290 witticisms were collected, utilising humour to inform research. Data analysis reveals the relocation of education to three domains: the domestic, digital and political. Its relocation to the domestic domain has meant increased familial responsibility, fuelling domestic tensions and conflicting with home-based distractions. Its relocation to the digital domain has involved reduced physical interaction, rituality, social merit, mobility and student health. Its relocation to the political domain has given rise to issues of participation and reshaped the power, institutional fabrication and societal support of education. The conclusion introduces the concept of “coronian education”—a hybrid of the domestic, digital and political domains. Whereas pre-coronian education was limited to a single domain, the school, coronian education is fragmented across three domains. Although coronian education research is feasible in the digital and political domains, it is challenging to conduct such research in the domestic domain, as an enquiry into domesticity entails invading the private spaces of homes.

Sex segregation is a socio-cultural norm associated with symbolic, rhetorical, and institutional power in Saudi Arabia. It was established by the extremist discourses prevalent in the Kingdom from the 1970s to 2010s. This study argues that the public pedagogy of patriarchal sex-segregated society transforms into a biased form of identity, referred to as ‘sexagogy’ in this study. While individuals in a sex-segregated society are born, raised, and publicly ‘pedagogized’ to fear the opposite sex, some individuals have been exposed to educational and technological opportunities, whereby they can interact freely with each other and cross boundaries intended to segregate the sexes. This study investigates how members of Saudi academia relate to gender segregation and how the Sahwa—an extreme religious discourse preventing Saudi women from any natural interaction and socialization—has faded amidst the recent changes in the Saudi Kingdom’s vision. The researcher used qualitative methodology and snowball sampling, interviewing 72 Saudi academics who have lived through the Sahwa period and witnessed the recent changes in the Kingdom. The interviews revealed that the power of the Sahwa discourse has been fading and that the younger generations’ thinking aligns with the recent reforms in Saudi Arabia.

Emergency transition to online due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic has created unprecedented challenges in schooling. There is a dearth of information on the perception of Arab high school students and parents regarding the negative effects of online learning during Covid-19. Qualitative analysis of data from a multisite ethnographic-centered study collected in nine Arab countries. Data presented are only the ones recorded from students and parents. Raw data were abstracted using a mind-mapping software and coded using words. The perceived negative effects of students and parents on several aspects of the transition to online learning such as the needed technical adjustments, impact on parents, perceptions of learning online versus face to face, pedagogical drawbacks, and psychological effects are described and discussed in light of results of previous studies. In spite of cultural differences, Arab high school students and parents face the same challenges and difficulties reported in other parts of the world. The overarching theme that emerges both for parents and children is the perceived superiority of face-to-face learning in the structured environment of the school for a more holistic learning and socialization experience of students and for better long-term outcomes.

The qualitative method of phenomenology provides a theoretical tool for educational research as it allows researchers to engage in flexible activities that can describe and help to understand complex phenomena, such as various aspects of human social experience. This article explains how to apply the framework of phenomenological qualitative analysis to educational research. The discussion within this article is relevant to those researchers interested in doing cross-cultural qualitative research and in adapting phenomenological investigations to understand students’ cross-cultural lived experiences in different social educational contexts.

The power of rumours is that they can be broadly exchanged, generating a ‘public temper’ (which is everybody’s temper without being anybody’s temper in particular). This article, therefore, describes an approach to measuring the public temper, examining particularly the public temper of an Arab society, namely Saudi Arabia. It addresses the following research question: is it possible to analyse existing (scholarly) rumours to see if they can be used as informants of the public temper of the culture in which they exist? This question is answered ethnographically by analysing 579 Arabic online rumours collected by students as part of their critical engagement with educational technology. Having analysed the data, four categories emerged: theconcerns,interests,attitudesandvaluesof Saudi Arabia. According to the literature, these four categories, taken together, constitute theemotionaldomain (i.e., the public temper) of a society. Thus, a theoretical proposition (and contribution to the existing literature regarding sociology) is that rumours mirror the public temper of a culture, reflecting a range of emotions from simple to complex (from concerns, interests and attitudes to values). Simpler emotions (e.g., concerns) appear to be more easily affected by rumours than more complex emotions (e.g., values). An implication of this study is that rumours have ‘biographies’, which detail public tempers across space and time. Rumours are ‘records’ of public tempers that should be read in the same way archaeologists read landscapes and remains. Although rumours entailill-definedinformation, it is feasible towell definesociety through such ill-defined information, meaning that something can come out of its opposite. This study offers ethnographers a new method of understanding public tempers through rumours, alongside conventional meaning-making symbols (e.g., poems).