AJE February 2021 Issue | The Language of Leaders: Executive Sensegiving Strategies in Higher Education by Joshua Travis Brown
The full-length American Journal of Education article “The Language of Leaders: Executive Sensegiving Strategies in Higher Education” by Joshua Travis Brown can be accessed here.
How do university leaders strategically negotiate complex and competing social norms? For example, how do they expand enrollment without being labeled a diploma mill, or find new revenues without being accused of profit seeking, or strengthen the endowment without being deemed selfish? The complex challenges that confront most university leaders today come with significant risk and involve competing social and economic factors that must be thoughtfully balanced.
In the recently published AJE article, “The Language of Leaders: Executive Sensegiving Strategies in Higher Education,” I attempt to shed further light on how university presidents developed strategies to further legitimate, or frame, their actions and events in complex environments. Framing an action or event is often necessary when members of the community need to “make sense” of a situation that challenges the core values or brings uncertainty (Gioia & Thomas 1996; Kezar 2013; Weick et al. 2005). In these instances, it is common for people to look to leaders to frame a situation, or “give sense” (Degn 2015; Fiss & Zajac 2006; Smerek 2011). For example, university leaders drew on multiple frames to “give sense” to the academic community and broader public to legitimate their institutional response to the recent COVID pandemic. This research offers a valuable resource for understanding & mapping the various sensegiving strategies that leaders employ.
Leaders establish multiple sensegiving strategies because the environments in which colleges and universities are embedded are complex, comprised of multiple competing social norms, or logics (Brown 2017, 2018). The leaders of different college and university types must balance market & professional logics with their core logic: regional comprehensives (community logic), publics (state logic), HBCU/MSI/HSI (racial equality logic), denomination (religious logic), and women’s (feminist logic), to name a few (Bastedo 2009; Gonzales & Ayers 2018; McPherson & Sauder 2013; Thornton et al. 2012). To further understand how leaders balance competing social norms, I examined 15 years of presidential communiques (2000-2014) from eight religious universities embedded in complex environments where leaders had to balance three conflicting logics: market, profession, & religion. The universities in the study varied by growth rate (negative, low, med, & high) & religion (Catholic/Protestant). Selecting a single institutional type reduced alternative explanations – or noise – that differences among the schools could be attributed to their type (Eisenhardt 1989; Eisenhardt & Graebner 2007; Yin 2017).
In my analysis of the data, I found university executives developed three strategies to frame their actions, to “give sense” to constituents: Foundational, Configurational, and Transformational. In each strategy, leaders linguistically configured variations of their dominant logics (i.e., market, profession, and religion) with cues (i.e., events, ideas, and actions).
In the Foundational Sensegiving Strategy, presidents connected a traditional event with one of the three dominant logics. Traditional events or actions were the core taken-for-granted activities that readily “fit” with a logic like research (profession logic) or enrollment growth (market logic). This strategy provided executives with the opportunity to emphasize the traditional elements of the university that constituents would expect to see, such as athletics, academics, alumni, tuition, and student life, among others.
In the Configurational Sensegiving Strategy leaders connected a new emergent event with two different logics. New events or actions had not been previously experienced such as innovative enrollment strategies, launch of academic programs, or new financial resources. Presidents used this strategy when confronted with possible competing normative expectations regarding university events and actions. In some instances, executives integrated the components of two logics to frame an emergent event and in other instances they intentionally differentiated the components of two logics to accomplish the same.
In the Transformational Sensegiving Strategy, leaders tried in entrepreneurial ways to change the meaning of a logic over time to connect it with a divergent event. The divergent event contradicted the social norms & expectations of the university and did not readily “fit.” To encompass the divergent event within a given logic, executives made repeated attempts over multiple years to change the meaning of the constitutive elements of a logic, specifically its symbols and language. These repeated efforts were an entrepreneurial form of boundary work with the aim of transforming or expanding an institutional logic – again either to integrate with another logic or differentiate from it.
Two presidents in the study took a reactive approach and rarely made public statements, except in instances of “coming out for the crisis” where the event challenged the university identity & necessitated the president “give sense” to the academic community. In these instances when leaders were compelled to emerge from years of absence, they drew on various logics in an attempt to help the university community make sense of major events that seemingly conflicted with core organizational tenets.
This study draws heavily on management and organizational theory for its insights. In doing so, the findings challenge a concept in the literature known as “embedded agency” (Battilana
2006; Cardinale 2018; Greenwood & Suddaby 2006; Harmon et al. 2019; Seo & Creed 2002). This research underscores that “embedded agency” resembles a continuum comprised of multiple social structures & possible strategies for action in complex environments rather than a structure-agency dichotomy, or what I call the “Continuum of Embedded Agency” rather than the “Paradox of Embedded Agency.”
Most importantly, this research has direct implications for leaders of universities. As many institutions face intensified sustainability challenges, leaders are turning to emergent & divergent approaches to revenues that may not “fit” with existing social norms. Since actions can be interpreted differently, it is vital that leaders establish sensegiving strategies as part of strategy implementation. Moreover, university leaders understand the perceptions of individuals have very real consequences for organizational legitimacy & access to resources. Thus, proactive strategies to frame the discourse are important now and in the future.
References:
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