Language and academic leadership: exploring and evaluating the narratives

This paper draws on a study of academic chairpersons’ experiences in one research‐intensive university in New Zealand. The research goal was see if there were recurring threads in chairpersons’ narratives about their experience and management of conflict and challenge. The research revealed that one of the most pervasive stories concerned a set of beliefs about the nature of academia. This tale that was interpreted in a variety of different even contradictory ways was the notion that academia was or should be based on collegiality. This idea was often presented in conjunction with other stories about academia such as autonomy and professionalism and in opposition to the concept of managerialism. A second significant thread was a range of perspectives about the expectation that chairpersons should be managers of resources. This paper discusses these findings in relation to the literature and argues that we need to find new ways of expressing and enacting the values that the term collegiality attempts to capture and a means of integrating them into the current demand for performance, stringent resource management and accountability.