Businesses face growing instability due to disruptive innovative technologies and economic crises arising from stressed supply chains or rising price uncertainty. An ambidextrous approach to resilience helps companies to prepare for and manage this uncertainty to become steadfast against crises. However, resilience can be achieved on multiple…

Feeling the exhaustion of multiple disability-related violations occurring in the classroom, staff from the Office of Disability Access at Heneton College have begun to feel isolated and hopeless. When the opportunity for collaborative, college-wide disability-centered training becomes available, it is met with mixed reviews and lots of opinions…

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…

To leverage the research development expertise of its members and address the national inequity in funding between the top 150 institutions of higher education (IHEs by total research expenditures) and the broader cohort of IHEs, including all Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), emerging research institutions (ERIs), and other…

Change always catalyzes organizational members to challenge, reframe, and revisit the assumptions that preside over the work they do. But how do recent changes affect individual and collective organizational transformations? More fundamentally, how can we think about learning and transformation in an organizational environment in perpetual…

Anecdotal evidence suggests that there is growing concern about increasing administrative burden within universities around the world. At the same time, the literature explicitly devoted to the issue of administrative burden within universities remains relatively scant. Drawing on various bodies of literature and reflections on the situation at…

This study examines how leaders of career services units manage organizational change to meet the evolving needs of their internal and external stakeholders. These leaders are increasingly required to spearhead significant changes within their teams and across their institutions to adapt to rapid changes in the higher education sector and the…

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…

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…

Higher education culture is steeped in institutional identity and ties to history. But what happens when that history is challenged, and an institution must change its name? While a merger was not initially intended for Kearney State College, merging into the University of Nebraska system was the only way to reflect the change and growth that…

The purpose of study was to examine how frontline employees make sense of a planned organizational change. The voices of frontline employees, the group of employees responsible for making the product or delivering the service, have frequently been ignored or neglected during planned change efforts. In this study, attention was focused on the…

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…