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…

Purpose: Teachers unions in the United States are increasingly taking up issues of equity and justice. While there is a growing and robust body of scholarship on leading for equity, unions are rarely included as sources of education leadership. This creates an opportunity to not only consider unions in these equity efforts, but also re-shape our…

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…

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…

Over the past 10-15 years, the Volunteer Program at the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County has undergone an immense transition. This program overhaul tackled historical methodology that had been creating barriers to participation, addressed the changing needs of modern volunteer audiences, and worked to highlight access and inclusion in…

The purpose of this phenomenological study is to understand the key factors of K-12 administrators' emotional intelligence as they lead their staff through creating sustainable systems as they navigate organizational change. The theoretical framework used was Daniel Goleman's theory on Emotional Intelligence and how EQ impacts administrators as…

Research of the main university stakeholders has only been of a cross-sectional or short-term nature thereby limiting our understanding of how universities have evolved as a result of stakeholder influence. Indeed, neglect of stakeholders in strategic planning may result in both companies and universities becoming less successful and less…

Mergers in higher education are large-scale, complex organisational change processes seeking to integrate former independent institutions into a new organisational entity. Mergers are often justified by reference to broad overarching goals such as quality, relevance, and efficiency. In practice, mergers entail attempts at organisational…

Mergers among public HEI's in the United States are occurring with regular frequency, but with little research to understand the impact that mergers have on value outcomes at the micro, meso, and macro level. Previous research suggests that there needs to be a more robust way of assessing merger outcomes both quantitatively and longitudinally…

Historically, teachers had been delegated the primary responsibility for the organization and management of classroom instruction in US public schools. While this delegation afforded teachers professional autonomy in their work, it has also resulted in disparities in students' educational experiences and outcomes within and between classrooms,…

This phenomenological research study explores the lived experiences of full-time faculty experiencing both organizational and instructional changes within their institution. Higher education organizations are facing increased challenges to sustainability, forcing them to make structural changes within the organization. When organizations adopt new…

This article explores the implementation of cross-functional professional learning communities (PLCs) involving faculty, staff and administrators at three different institutional types -- research, urban regional, and rural regional universities -- with the goal of learning about and then implementing a culture change approach to support academic…

As interest increases in the educational quality of higher education institutions (HEIs), less is known about how the mergers and acquisitions (M&As) of these HEIs affect educational quality. In this study, we investigate the association of M&As on the educational quality of HEIs and the role of institutional incentives in this relation.…

Institutions, including universities, adapt to the environment in which they operate. By expanding overseas to support study abroad participation, the globalized university is required to adapt to new international environments. This instrumental case study explores the use of international institutional study away sites owned and operated by New…

Academic drift has been a central concept in the study of higher education for the past half-century, with higher education scholarship locating the phenomenon in fieldwide status competition dynamics stemming from the postwar massification and neoliberalization of higher education. In this paper, I explore the origins and evolution of academic…