Privatising educational leadership through technology in the Trumpian era

This article focuses on the changes that the election of Donald Trump enables in education policy domestically and in education discourse internationally. I argue that Trump’s own charismatic leadership style is a distraction from the privatisation that it is facilitating through Betsy DeVos, Trump’s appointment as US Education Secretary. I draw on two contemporary examples of technology-enabled privatisation in education – cyber charters and predictive analytics using big data – to argue that in the Trumpian era, educational leadership may be shifting from corporatised forms, where professionals understood as ‘school leaders’ fulfil corporate objectives through corporatised means. Instead, Trumpian-era privatised educational leadership retreats fully behind the technology boardroom door, where it renders superfluous lead professionals in education institutions, and where its objectives are to generate profit through re-conceptualising learners as data providers. This analysis highlights the need for new tools and methods to describe and explain what is happening, and to help develop understandings of what educational leadership in this new landscape might be, do or achieve.     

Leadership and gender in higher education: a case study

Literature concerning leadership styles in HE provides no distinct view on whether style relates to gender. Transformational styles are regarded by some as particularly suited to times of change, and likely to be adopted by women; but others argue such styles are unsuited to HE. In a study of leadership within an institute of higher education undergoing change, transformational and transactional leadership behaviours were identified in all senior managers, male and female. However, when official communications were plotted over time, transformational attitudes were superseded by transactional. Women managers apparently identified more with male gender paradigms and displayed male-type leadership behaviours, whilst men showed female paradigm identification and female-type leadership. Additionally, managers indicated that past experience of ‘poor’ management and their subject training had greatly influenced their leadership approaches.     

The ‘good life’ and the ‘rich portfolio’: young women,schooling and neoliberal subjectification

This paper explores the ways two young women, living in Australia, make sense of themselves, their activities, and futures. The two young women come from two different schooling contexts—a prestigious private school and a government school. We analyse their self‐narratives in relation to neoliberal discourse, and consider how, and with what effects, their school contexts privilege and make available neoliberal discourses, and work to produce different subjectivities and notions of ‘worthwhile’ or ‘good’ lives. Conceptualising schools as sites of subjection, we analyse the discourses that their respective schools make available to the young women, and how they have appropriated them. We suggest that the different exposure and access to neoliberal discourses position the women very differently in terms of future possibilities and work‐life scenarios in the neoliberal economy. In that way, the article seeks to make a contribution towards understanding schools as implicated in social (re)production and in the (re)production of classed subjectivities.     

The Secret Sauce: How Developmental Relationships Shape the Leadership Journeys of Women Leaders in Christian Higher Education

Although women are now graduating in greater percentages then men at all degree levels—associate through doctorate—the senior-level leadership on most postsecondary campuses in the United States continues to be predominantly White and male. Numerous internal, institutional, and systemic barriers have been identified that hinder women from aspiring to leadership and advancing into senior-level roles. However, new streams of research in the leadership literature are addressing the motivations, encouragers, and discouragers that influence women’s leadership aspirations and experiences, including a growing body of scholarship focused on the process of leadership identity development rather than simply leadership development. This article presents the relevant literature and discusses the findings of interviews with 30 emerging and current women leaders in the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities; the interview questions focused on the extent to which various kinds of developmental relationships (specifically mentoring, coaching, and sponsorship) have been experienced by the participants. Three primary themes emerged from the data analysis of developmental relationships vis-à-vis the participants’ leadership journeys: (a) the value of having a network of influential relationships was key in the leadership journey; (b) the perceived benefits of distinct developmental relationships, either present or desired; and (c) the contribution of developmental relationships in navigating women leaders’ professional challenges. Although many of the 30 participants reported having benefited from mentoring of various types in the past, only a few reported having been coached or sponsored. Notably, such developmental relationships were not only desired but also viewed as potentially critical to professional advancement. Recognizing that the influence of developmental relationships (particularly coaching and sponsorship) in later career stages merits greater research attention, this article proposes a slightly modified version of a Women’s Leadership Development Model in which developmental relationships are recognized as a motivator for women to aspire to or step into leadership, with coaching and sponsorship playing a larger role in the later stages of women’s career development.     

Developing leadership in higher education: perspectives from the USA,the UK and Australia

It is broadly acknowledged that leaders in the twenty-first century are required to navigate an increasingly complex landscape and that the types of challenges individuals and organisations face in the knowledge era require the capacity to adapt and respond to continual fluctuations and change. Outcomes from previous leadership research, combined with the perspectives of colleagues and observation over the past decade, prompted concern that leadership in higher education (HE) institutions was, in the main, not demonstrating the level of readiness or capability to effectively respond to the challenges embodied in the transition to the knowledge era. In seeking to establish how well founded this concern was, this study, supported by a Peter Karmel International Travel Grant, investigated leadership development thinking, programmes and practices within the HE sector in the United States of America and the United Kingdom, and explored how this applies within the Australian context. A number of themes emerged that support the idea that the work of leadership will ideally be based on relationships rather than the ‘command and control’ models of the past and on distributed leadership processes and practices throughout the organisation.     

西部地区女性领导发展的现状调查与问题分析

随着经济的发展以及现代女性社会地位的上升，许多女性逐步走上了领导岗位。但由于我国地域之间经济、文化、教育等诸多方面的发展不平衡，导致了不同地区之间女性领导的发展不平衡。西部地区的女性走上领导岗位．需要克服更多的困难，付出更艰辛的努力。因此，本文从西部地区女性领导发展的现状调查着手，探析女性领导发展中存在的深层次问题，以期为推进西部地区女性领导的发展提供参考。     

Feminist scholars working around the neoliberal university

A considerable scholarship now describes the increasing neoliberalization of universities and the accompanying impacts on academic research and researchers. However, less attention has been devoted to issues of research project leadership, especially for academics with feminist commitments. This article reports results of a qualitative study of 12 senior academic women from 6 countries who are known for feminist research and explores how they pursue their projects in the context of contemporary changes and challenges. Rather than positioning faculty as passive participants, this study acknowledges their agency within institutional structures, albeit somewhat constrained. The results reveal the range of strategies employed by feminist researchers in various national contexts that enable them to maintain their critical focus despite increasing pressures to conform to neoliberal agendas.     

Inadequacies in the concept of neutrality 1

While the need for humanising education is pressing in neoliberal societies, the conditions for its possibility in formal institutions have become particularly cramped. A constellation of factors – the strength of neoliberal ideologies, the corporatisation of universities, the conflation of human freedom with consumer satisfaction and a wider crisis of hope in the possibility or desirability of social change – make it difficult to apply classical theories of subject-transformation to new work in critical pedagogy. In particular, the growth of interest in pedagogies of comfort (as illustrated in certain forms of ‘therapeutic’ education and concerns about student ‘satisfaction’ in universities) and resistance to critical pedagogies suggest that subjectivty has become a primary site of political struggle in education. However, it can no longer be assumed that educators can (or should) liberate students' repressed desires for humanisation by politicising curricula, pedagogy or institutions. Rather, we must work to understand the new meanings and affective conditions of critical subjectivity itself. Bringing critical theories of subject transformation together with new work on ‘pedagogies of discomfort’, I suggest we can create new ways of opening up possibilities for critical education that respond to neoliberal subjectivities without corresponding to or affirming them.     

Faculty Governance in Neoliberal Educational Contexts: Challenges for Democratic Decision Making

Few faculty members are immune from the deleterious impact of neoliberal values, policies and practices that have resulted in the “corporatization” of universities, with the reduction of teaching and research to “products” and faculty to “producers,” and students to “clients.” The role of faculty governance in this process has been debated yielding diverse perspectives on its effectiveness in challenging this influence, particularly, in regard to the role of democratic decision making at the college-level of governance where administrators may push for furthering market-driven agendas. This critical action research project highlights how two faculty assembly leaders facilitated participatory decision making as they re-conceptualized their leadership roles as team-based representatives, and developed multiple communicative networks that supported faculty voice and leadership listening at the grassroots level—two processes that may thwart corporatization and marketization at the college-level. This article highlights how characteristics of desired communication practices for more democratic decision making at the college-level lay the groundwork for building the collective faculty capacity to respond in a timely manner to neoliberal agendas.     

Executive power and scaled-up gender subtexts in Australian entrepreneurial universities

Deputy Vice Chancellor and Pro Vice Chancellor positions have proliferated in response to the global, corporatised university landscape [Scott, G., S. Bell, H. Coates, and L. Grebennikov. 2010. “Australian Higher Education Leaders in Times of Change: The Role of Pro Vice Chancellor and Deputy Vice Chancellor.” Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management 32 (4): 401–418]. Senior leadership is the sphere where academic and management identities are negotiated and values around the role of the university are decided. This paper examines the changing and gendered nature of the senior leadership setting and its implications for diversity in and of university leadership. The analysis draws from a three-year empirical study funded by the Australian Research Council on leadership in Australian universities. It focuses on executive leaders in three universities – one which is research-intensive, the second, in a regional site, and the third, university of technology. The article argues that the university landscape and its management systems are being restructured in gendered ways. It utilises the notion of organisational gender subtexts to make explicit how gender works through structural and cultural reform.     

Governing the potentials of life itself? Interrogating the promises in affective educational leadership

This article critically explores how educational leadership is becoming increasingly affective in order to cultivate pupil potential and thereby meet the challenge of creating the best schools in the world. It critically analyses policy and handbook approaches to affective educational leadership technologies by showing the difficulty in keeping promises and by introducing the Massumian distinction between possibilities and potentiality. The analysis draws upon the notion of governmentality and the ‘affective turn’, and highlights affective, educational, leadership technologies as they appear in contemporary leadership handbooks in Denmark using four examples: (1) How school becomes the managed core of society. This reshapes educational leadership as onto-power, which means governing through ideas and materialities of perception and neurons. (2) How affectivity becomes synonymous with positive feelings, while more indeterminate parts of affectivity are neglected. (3) How educational leadership becomes a matter of governing the future through simulation and imagination. (4) How affective leadership is energised by a temporally and spatially structured bio-morality. I argue that such discourses tend to maintain the status quo rather than challenge basic premises and thereby, the edifying nature of the technologies paradoxically overshadows the possibilities promised by the technologies.     

From ‘no’ to ‘yes’: postcolonial perspectives on resistance to neoliberal higher education

Various scholars have suggested ways to resist neoliberal conditions in higher education (HE). In analysing current neoliberal policies and practices in HE, I suggest that postcolonial theories of resistance can enhance our ability as faculty and administrators to understand and ‘resist’ these policies and practices. In this article, I review four modes of postcolonial resistance as described by David Jeffress (2008), mobilizing a critique of resistance as writing and cultural practice and challenging the reactionary nature of subversion and opposition. I argue that we need to place emphasis on transformational resistance, or the creation of new ways of being, knowing and doing in HE in order to transform the academy.     

Neoliberalism,internationalisation and higher education: connections,contradictions and alternatives

ABSTRACT

We explore the role of neoliberalism within portrayals of internationalisation in higher education (HE). Through an analysis of four features of internationalisation, we suggest that they embody a complex entanglement of neoliberal categories and assumptions with other, primarily progressive humanitarian ideals. This framing of internationalisation has three affects. One, humanitarian ideals coupled with neoliberal categories normalise inequalities, turning internationalisation into a meritocratic global race, focusing on celebrating the possibility of the few who can achieve, instead of the embedded inequalities within the system, which disadvantage the many. Two, this allows neoliberal practices to be advanced through the discourse of internationalisation and its association with progressive humanitarian values. Three, this neoliberal framing does not explain the nature of internationalisation of HE in many nations; we demonstrate this by analysing internationalisation in China, Israel and Cuba. We suggest that internationalisation in HE cannot be adequately explained by analyses which rely on neoliberalism.     

Mother tongues: the Opt Out movement’s vocal response to patriarchal,neoliberal education reform

ABSTRACT

This article explores the widespread and growing public backlash against high-stakes standardised testing in the United States, following the parent-led Opt Out movement’s quest to dismantle neoliberal educational policy by coaching children to boycott standardised tests. We analyse how our participants, mothers and female teachers in Opt Out Florida, use Facebook group pages as on-going critical sites of consciousness development where connected learning, knowing, and action occur. We illustrate how our participants, perceiving their children’s teachers as muzzled by neoliberal, patriarchal education reform, banded together to collectively attack a corporatised and violent system of American public education. Our focus on the role of mothers, their defence of teachers, and their attack on patriarchal neoliberalism fits within the larger history of the feminisation of the teaching profession and reveals how mothers in the domestic sphere have organised to wrest teaching from neoliberal reformers.     

Employee wellbeing in the higher education workplace: a role for emotion scholarship

This article has dual aims. First, it proposes an explicit focus on emotion as a means of enriching thinking about employee health and wellbeing in the higher education (HE) sector. Second, in order to bring conceptual clarity to a highly complex area, it presents and illustrates (using a fictional scenario) a framework for understanding emotion. The article begins with an overview of recent published research relevant to the HE workplace as an affective domain and argues that research with an explicit focus on emotion is a so far little exploited means of investigating aspects of working life in HE that have implications for health and professional practice. It then presents a conceptualisation that views emotion as a system within which individual and environmental factors interact in highly intricate ways in emotional experience (Lazarus in Emotion and adaptation. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1991, 1999). Viewed from this perspective ‘emotions’, as opposed to less powerful ‘affects’ (such as attitudes, beliefs and opinions), are uniquely relevant to physical and mental health. The article concludes by considering implications arising from this perspective on emotion for researchers and other practitioners in HE with an interest in how the university workplace impacts on the wellbeing of an increasingly diverse workforce.     

Hybrid configurations of leadership in higher education employer engagement

Recent literature has emphasised the distributed nature of leadership in higher education (HE) and the multitude of actors and factors that contribute towards organisational outcomes. Gronn suggests, however, that rather than using such evidence to provide broad, normative accounts of leadership practice, greater attention should be directed to mapping the ‘hybrid configurations’ through which leadership practice emerges. This article responds to this call through an analysis of employer engagement activities in UK HE. Using a qualitative case study approach, it illustrates the complex, interdependent and contested nature of leadership practice in cross-boundary environments. The article concludes by suggesting how a hybrid perspective may enhance leadership theory and practice in tertiary education.     

Corporate practices and ethical tensions: Researching social justice values and neoliberal paradoxes in a ‘no excuses’ charter school

In recent years, there has been growing debate over the corporatisation of schooling, specifically the managerial practices of expanding charter school networks in the USA, often referred to as charter management organisations (CMOs). By definition, CMOs are consistently high-performing, well-financed networks of small schools operating in urban spaces, which adhere to a very specific ‘no excuses’ (NE) model of education in serving primarily students of colour living in poverty. This article is an autoethnographic account of my work as a leader in a CMO, which I theorise as a neoliberal project. We know very little of how neoliberal policies and ideologies are enacted in daily school life. I consider how the ethical responsibility of an educator is positioned within the daily practices and lived experience of leaders and educators working in a CMO. In focusing on my own ethical tensions, the article captures how this corporatised model of schooling influenced my values as an educator, my conflicted sense of social justice and the emotional labour of enacting a model of schooling founded on surveillance and accountability.     

Developing a comprehensive leadership development model in higher education context: A co-design approach

Higher education (HE) in the changing context requires leadership training and development as a vital element for university governance and innovation. While there are several theoretical frameworks on leadership development, most of them are outcome evaluation-oriented. Consequently, there is a lack of a leadership development model which emphasises both design process and expected outcomes. In addition to this, HE leadership development has been gradually transformed toward complexity and flexibility due to the volatile external environment of the 21st century. Thus, instead of having a development programme that simply focuses on individual skill enhancement, a comprehensive leadership development programme that equally fosters leaders' competencies (leader development) and develops collective leadership (leadership development) is increasingly utilised. Unfortunately, previous theoretical frameworks fail to take into consideration these new features. The main aim of this study was to develop a comprehensive theoretical model for academic leadership development (ALD) that promotes both leader development and leadership development. In the present study, 24 academic leaders, lecturers and researchers from five European and six Chinese HE institutions co-designed the ALD model. The constructed model consists of four main dimensions: theoretical core, types of training and providers, training format and ultimate goals. The results contribute to developing, promoting and enhancing leadership development in academic settings.     

The dark side of teaching: destructive instructor leadership and its association with students’ affect,behaviour, and cognition

Leadership theory can provide a route for investigating teaching via the concept of instructor leadership. Instructor leadership is defined as a process whereby instructors exert intentional influence over students to guide, structure and facilitate classroom activities and relationships in a class. Instructor leadership in higher education research has focused primarily on constructive leadership. However, the classroom context is also conducive to destructive leadership. The objectives of this study are to (a) conceptualize destructive instructor leadership and (b) investigate the association between destructive instructor leadership and student reactions. Using 13 in-depth semistructured student interviews at management schools across various universities worldwide, the results of a thematic analysis indicate that destructive instructor leadership can be conceptualized as three dimensions, including callous communication, chaotic carelessness and irresponsibility. The interview data are then used to demonstrate that destructive instructor leadership is associated with students’ affective, behavioural and cognitive reactions. Theoretically, this study (a) contributes the concept of destructive instructor leadership, (b) extends previous organizational behaviour research on destructive leadership by offering a multidimensional concept and (c) examines the reactions of two manifestations of destructive leadership. Limitations, suggestions for future research and practical implications are discussed.     

Neoliberalism,new public management and the sustainable development agenda of higher education: history,contradictions and synergies

This paper explores the ideological and the practical relationship between neoliberalism and New Public Management (NPM) and the sustainable development agenda of western higher education. Using the United Kingdom and specifically English universities as an example, it investigates the contradictions and the synergies between neoliberal and NPM ideologies and the pursuit and practice of the sustainability agenda, focusing in particular on education for sustainable development (ESD) and ESD research. This paper reveals a range of challenges and opportunities in respect of advancing sustainability in higher education, within the prevailing neoliberal context. It illustrates using examples how neoliberal and managerialist control mechanisms, which govern institutional, departmental and individual academic, as well as student behaviour, are working conversely to both drive and limit the sustainability education agenda. The case is made for further exploration of how ‘nudging’ and ‘steering’ mechanisms within English HE might provide further leverage for ESD developments in the near future, and the implications of this for sustainability educators.