Controversial debates about workforce nationalisation: Perspectives from the Qatari higher education industry

ABSTRACT

Workforce nationalisation in the Gulf Corporation Council (GCC) countries is a crucial challenge for their development plans. The current study explores controversial debates about workforce nationalisation to understand the existing threats from the views of less examined key stakeholders, namely, educators and senior students. The study argues that the identified obstacles relate not only to policy flaws but also to the education – employability gap, phantom employment, and detrimental social and community perceptions. Given its exploratory nature, the study adopts a qualitative approach and uses 28 semi-structured interviews to identify critical obstacles to effective workforce nationalisation from human development, legal development, and socio-cultural perspectives. The findings contribute to the literature on GCC workforce nationalisation by unpacking educators’ and senior students’ views.

KEYWORDS:

• Workforce nationalisation
• Qatarisation
• Ecosystem perspective theory
• Gulf cooperation council
• Qatar

Acknowledgements

Open Access funding provided by the Qatar National Library and London South Bank Univesrity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This paper was made possible by NPRP grant # [12S-0311-190314] from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of Qatar Foundation). The statements made herein are solely the responsibility of the authors.