State-level postsecondary education governance has experienced a lull in successful reform efforts since the turn of the century. However, in 2020, the Utah System of Higher Education and Utah System of Technical Colleges were formally merged following a multi-year effort by state legislators and higher education officials. Framed by the theory of…

As rankings have become increasingly institutionalized in higher education, so too have the strategic responses adopted by universities to address them. A key component of these responses is the development of new expertise, embodied in personnel and organizational units, dedicated to managing quantitative assessments. We draw on a qualitative…

Purpose: This paper aims to discuss the practical dilemmas of institutional change to tackle the climate crisis in a UK university, identifying key assumptions and issues that block meaningful change. The research was part of an initiative to define a theory of change (ToC) to meet the university's institutional climate commitments.…

Acting as a governmental tool to enhance competitiveness and integrate research and education by merging a local university and a provincial academy of sciences, this case study provides an example of a novel cross-sectoral complementary merger in higher education in China. Through a qualitative analysis of its three-stage process and the factors…

The decrease in public funding and the subsequent increase in temporary employment in academia are often viewed as crisis symptoms. While the crisis rhetoric may be premature, the turn towards hyper-competitive qualification systems that generate unfixed career advancement models may indeed mark a break from the tenure-oriented career structure.…

Purpose: In the era of hyper-competitiveness, firms, especially project-based management structures, have to focus on ideas for both new and existing sets of products and services, i.e. ambidextrous innovation. The ambidextrous innovation can be helpful, but achieving such a level is a problem to be solved. This study aims to yield ambidextrous…

Purpose: Organizations will be key to realizing the "transformative change for humanity" now being called for. However, the complexity calls for new ways of facilitating change and organizational learning; it also calls for moving beyond sustainability to develop practices that restore and regenerate the world in which we live. Above…

The practices of a departmental action team (DAT) are examined to characterize their change effort in their undergraduate program. The DAT's effort was guided by the DAT model's six core principles. The core principles are grounded in best practices for higher education and organizational change literature. Meeting minutes, facilitator journal…

School choice policies seek to increase access to educational opportunities and stimulate innovations in schooling. This study examines the early stages of one such innovation--school-wide curricular specialization--in three Catholic elementary schools adopting a STEM focus and uses interviews to consider how and why different levels of support…

Aviation is one of the most severely affected global industries by the COVID-19 pandemic, including passenger traffic, airport workforce, and operational processes: the total number of seats offered by airlines in 2020 decreased by about 50%, the number of passengers fell by about 60%, and this resulted in an estimated 371 billion USD loss in 2020…

Following the refugee influx of 2015 and 2016, many German higher education organisations (HEOs) responded with support programmes for refugee students. In this context, refugees became formally and discursively differentiated from other international students. During later stages of the programmes, this differentiation became blurred, and…

The author describes and analyzes the application of an Appreciative Inquiry initiative in a student success unit called University College, an academic unit with approximately 60 staff members. The article addresses the decision to adopt Appreciative Inquiry as part of the change process; the introduction of AI to the staff; the enactment of the…

This ethnographic case study provides authentic insights into the intertextual negotiation processes for a particular merger-and-acquisition (M&A) transaction in the context of international legal practice, involving interdisciplinary legal and business professionals. Using genre and discourse analytical methodology, this study focuses on the…

In today's competitive and complex environment, school leaders require social influencing skills to mobilize schools to enable them to adapt to change. The schools' openness to change (SOC) is affected by the direction and strength of relationships between teachers and principals in the school. In particular, the political skills of school…

Purpose: The methods and procedures in which teachers are trained and supported are rapidly changing. While the COVID-19 pandemic undoubtedly disrupted education and exacerbated a growing teacher shortage, these problems are not new, they stretch back decades and are the result of underfunding and political machinations among many other factors.…