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‘You do not have to be the boss tobe a leader’: contested meanings ofleadership in higher educationAdisorn Juntrasooka

a Contemplative Education Center, Mahidol University, NakornPathom, ThailandPublished online: 31 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: Adisorn Juntrasook (2014) ‘You do not have to be the boss to be a leader’:contested meanings of leadership in higher education, Higher Education Research & Development,33:1, 19-31, DOI: 10.1080/07294360.2013.864610

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‘You do not have to be the boss to be a leader’: contested meaningsof leadership in higher education

Adisorn Juntrasook*

Contemplative Education Center, Mahidol University, Nakorn Pathom, Thailand

In this article, I explore some of the contested meanings of leadership coexistingwithin the context of higher education. I report from my study about howacademics at one university in Aotearoa/New Zealand experience and understandthemselves as leaders in their everyday working contexts. From the participants’accounts and their institution’s documents, four particular meanings of leadershippredominated. These meanings were ‘position’, ‘performance’, ‘practice’ and‘professional role model’. Employing a poststructuralist approach, I examine thediscursive and material effects of these meanings, focusing on how theyconstitute certain ways of thinking, practising and ‘becoming’ for individualacademics. My findings offer a way to critically understand leadership beyondpositional and instrumental paradigms which, I argue, is necessary for creatingmore inclusive higher education institutions.

Keywords: academic leadership; discourse; higher education; identity

Introduction

Reviews of leadership studies in higher education often reveal the contestation of exist-ing knowledge, especially the nature and meaning of leadership across institutional andcultural contexts (see, e.g., Bensimon,Neumann,&Birnbaum, 1989;Kezar,Carducci,&Contreras-McGavin, 2006). Broadly speaking, there are two overlapping categories ofleaders predominant in the scholarly literature. The first category is associated with insti-tutional and departmental management positions. These studies tend to focus on the pre-ferred characteristics, or approaches of institutional and departmental managers forresponding to institutional changes, including ‘how to’management tips and strategies.The second category,which dealswith themore traditionalwork of academics (includingteaching and research), is often discussedwithin themanagement discourse of ‘effective-ness’. In these latter studies, leadership is perceived as an instrument to support ‘plan-ning’, ‘development’, ‘implementation’ and ‘evaluation’ of academic work in order toachieve ‘excellent’ performance. Understood in this way, it is the role of leaders tolead their academic colleagues to achieve ‘excellent teaching’ or ‘productive research’,which ultimately echoes the focus or purpose of institutional and departmental leadershipin the first category. While these positional and instrumental orientations to leadershipmay be the prevailing discourses in institutions and scholarly literature, this articleshows that individual academics interpret ‘leadership’ in many different ways.

As Middlehurst, Goreham, and Woodfield (2009) point out, different meanings(including forms and levels) of leadership coexist in higher education contexts. This

© 2014 HERDSA

*Email: adisorn.jun@mahidol.ac.th

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resonates with recent studies of leadership that have expanded the focus beyond man-agerial leadership to include intellectual leadership (see Macfarlane, 2012; Rayner,Fuller, McEven, & Roberts, 2010) and distributed leadership (see Bolden, Petrov, &Gosling, 2009; Gosling, Bolden, & Petrov, 2009). While the inclusion of differentmeanings is important to the future of leadership in the academy, what remainslargely overlooked is how these meanings may constitute particular discursive andmaterial effects in individuals’ lives.

In this article, I examine some of the contested meanings of leadership expressed bythe academics in my study. My analysis focuses on the different ways in which theseacademics drew on, articulated and brought particular meanings of leadership intoexistence in their talk, and how these might conflict with their institution’s expectations.Following this, I explore the discursive and material effects of these contested mean-ings, especially how they enabled individual academics to construct and claim theiridentities as leaders despite constraints within their institution.

Contested meanings of leadership in higher education

In his book, Leadership: limits and possibilities, Grint (2005) suggests that leadershipis an ‘essentially contested concept’. Its meanings continue to multiply, and perplex us,despite ongoing and detailed attempts to resolve this dilemma from within scholarlyand public domains. Considering the increasing number of academic and populartexts about ‘leadership’ in the global market, it might not surprise us that its meaningshave not, or perhaps cannot, been consolidated. In the academic context, this term hasits own historical, material and discursive background (Middlehurst, 2008). It has beenconceptualised and defined in various, often contradictory, ways by scholars and prac-titioners holding different perspectives and values (Middlehurst et al., 2009). For thatmatter, there have already been a number of attempts to map the meanings of leadershipin the context of higher education (see, e.g., Kekäle, 1999; Middlehurst, 1993).

While the existing research on leadership in higher education offers considerableinsights and valuable contributions to the field, the majority of these studies are yetto attend to issues of power within institutional and broader contexts (but, for excep-tions, see Allan, Gordon, & Iverson, 2006; Blackmore & Sachs, 2000; Fitzgerald,2006). Alvesson and Sveningsson (2012) propose that we should understand leadershipas individuals’ constructions about themselves and their world; informed and shaped byorganisational and sociocultural meanings and perspectives. Leadership in this light isalways embedded in a field of power relations which shapes how individuals come tothink of and practise leadership in their everyday lives. Applying this understanding tohigher education means not only exploring how academics construct themselves andtheir leadership within the contexts from which they speak, but also questioningwhat they have come to know and accept as ‘reality’ about leadership in theacademy. By engaging with academia as a space of power relations, I hope to bringnew insights to the micro-politics of leadership in higher education.

Studying the contested meanings of leadership in academia: a poststructuralistapproach

This article draws on data gathered for my study exploring narratives of leadership inacademia. The main research questions centred on how academics at a university inAotearoa/New Zealand experience and make sense of their leadership, and how

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institutional, sociocultural and political contexts may have shaped their sense-making(see also Juntrasook, 2013; Juntrasook, Nairn, Bond, & Spronken-Smith, 2013). I con-ducted semi-structured interviews in 2010 with 19 academics from Health Sciences,Sciences, Business Studies, Social Sciences and Humanities. Their positions rangedfrom lecturer to professor and included those who held formal headship/administrativepositions, and those who did not. The interview questions focused on academics’ careertrajectories, and their experiences and understandings of their own and others’ leader-ship. Instead of taking their experiences and understandings at face value, in my analy-sis I asked what made it possible for these academics to think and talk about leadershipin the ways they did and what discourses of leadership did they draw on to constructand claim themselves as certain kinds of leaders in academia.

In this article, I chose four academics’ narratives to illustrate how these individualsdrew on competing meanings of leadership to construct and claim their identities as par-ticular kinds of leaders. Alongside the narrative accounts, I also draw on some of theinstitution’s documents in order to explore the ‘official’ use of the terms ‘leader’ and‘leadership’ within the institutional context in which these academics worked. Thesedocuments include resources derived from the academic leadership development pro-gramme, the academic staff promotion policy and job advertisements for academic pos-itions. They were chosen purposefully because they provide different traces of how theinstitution defined ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ in their official documents.

For my analysis, I employed poststructuralist theory as an analytical tool. Central tothis theory are concerns with language, discourse and power relations (Henriques,Hollway, Urwin, Venn, & Walkerdine, 1984). From a poststructuralist perspective,‘language has been used to construct binaries, hierarchies, categories, tables, grids,and complex classification schemes that are said to reflect an innate, intrinsic orderin the world’ (St. Pierre, 2000, p. 480). Following Foucault’s (1980) work on knowl-edge and power relations, poststructuralist scholars have theorised the concept of dis-course as a form of knowledge which enables and constrains us to think and act incertain ways (St. Pierre, 2000). Each discourse constitutes an intelligible way of think-ing about social reality and a certain way of being in the world. When individuals drawon a certain discourse to make sense of their experience and understanding, they alsoassume a position of seeing the world from the vantage point of that particular discourse(Davies & Harré, 1990).

In this study, I understand each meaning of leadership as a discourse that rendershow we accept certain ways of thinking, practising and ‘becoming’ in relation to leader-ship as intelligible, and not others. As I will show in my analysis, however, individualacademics are never totally determined by any particular discourse but rather arelocated within a network of competing discourses available to them in their institutions(Davies, 2000). Their identities, in this light, are continuously (re)constructed accord-ing to what they perceive as intelligible within their specific social, cultural and histori-cal contexts, and also in relation to me as their audience, in the context of the researchinterview. Employing poststructuralist theory as an analytical tool enabled me toexplore the constitutive effects of the contested meanings of leadership, which areoften taken for granted as the reality in both popular and scholarly literature.

Following the analytic procedure of discourse analysis (see Taylor, 2001), I beganreading and re-reading interview transcripts, searching through participants’ accountsfor themes. In my reading, there was differing evidence of how these individualsdefined, negotiated and rejected different meanings of leadership in their talk. Theirdirect responses to my interview question, ‘in terms of academia, what does leadership

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mean to you?’ were frequently replete with keywords such as ‘vision’, ‘guidance’,‘responsibility’ and ‘role model’. These keywords are regularly espoused in the litera-ture of effective leadership in higher education and beyond (Bryman, 2007; Yukl,1999). Apart from these direct responses, I also included, as part of my analysis,implied meanings of leadership when participants talked about their personal and pro-fessional lives.

In combination with the academics’ narratives, I explored how their institutiondefined leadership in its institutional documents. This analysis was important in thesense that it enables an understanding of the discursive context within which the insti-tution ‘officially’ recognised, supported and rewarded particular kinds of leadershipwhile potentially neglecting others. I explored how these documents produce certainways of thinking about leadership, and hence tend to consolidate certain discursivepractices within the institution. Analysing these documents enabled me to identify insti-tutional discourses and the subject positions made available within these discourses(Marston, 2002). It also provided a tool to investigate ‘how power operates [withinthe institution] and the consequences of this operation’ for individual academics(Altheide, Coyle, DeVriese, & Schneider, 2008, p. 133). This analytical approachhelped me understand and compare different meanings of leadership from both insti-tutional and academics’ perspectives, highlighting the congruencies and discrepanciesbetween the institution and its members’ understandings and expectations ofleadership.

Navigating multiple meanings of leadership in academia

From my analysis, I identified at least four overarching meanings of leadership com-monly espoused by the academics in my study. These meanings were ‘leadership asposition’, ‘leadership as performance’, ‘leadership as practice’ and ‘leadership as pro-fessional role model’. These four meanings of leadership were overlapping but dis-tinguishable, employing distinctive tropes, metaphors and statements. They aresimilar to the different ways in which leadership is often defined by scholars and prac-titioners (Grint, 2005), but they are unique because of their situatedness in this particu-lar academic context. In what follows, I explore each of the four meanings of leadershipin academia and examine their constitutive effects on academics’ identity constructionduring the interviews, and more broadly within the institution-at-large. I focus on theextended narratives of four academics to provide a snapshot of the competing meaningsidentified in my study. Each narrative illustrates the characteristics of a particularmeaning, and together they typify the diversity of leadership experience represented.

Leadership as position

Leadership as position is one of the most prevalent discourses in scholarly literature andinstitutional policies. Within this meaning, to be a leader (or to be entitled to lead) is totake on a formal role in a headship position. In general, scholars and institutions oftenuse the term ‘leader’ in higher education or ‘academic leader’ to refer to any academicwho holds a formal headship position in their working context. This implies that aca-demics are generally not leaders until they are given a leadership role within theirdepartment or institution.

One example of how the university espoused this particular meaning was evident inthe content of professional development programmes offered by the Human Resources

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Division. Their website listed a programme titled ‘Academic Leadership Development’with a link to its own information webpage. On this webpage, the main information wasa list of activities funded by the university. The criteria of these activities made its targetaudience apparent – they were aimed at heads of academic departments only. Myreading of this webpage suggested that the university mainly recognised and supported(professionally and financially) the leadership development of academics with headshippositions. In this way, the university produced and sustained the notion of who was(and who was not) a legitimate leader, which the institution was willing to recogniseand, importantly, invest in. It excluded (and occluded) many academics from accessinginstitutional resources because they were not defined as leaders within this particularinstitutional policy.

Interestingly, the meaning of leadership as position, which appears so commonly ininstitutional documents, did not come up often in the academics’ narratives in my study.The majority of my participants, who used this particular meaning to make sense oftheir leadership, to my surprise, were ‘early-career’ academics. This group of aca-demics often drew on this meaning to talk about their lack of legitimacy to exercise lea-dership. One of them said: ‘In terms of where I am in the hierarchy of a department orthe university at the moment, I wouldn’t class myself particularly as a leader because… I’m a lecturer in a department.’

Apart from the early-career academic group, a few academics with formal headshippositions also referred to this meaning when talking about their work. In their talk, theyoften referred to themselves as leaders because of their formal headship or administra-tive positions. One example comes from a senior academic. He held a formal headshipposition at the time of our interview. In the following narrative, he talked about theresponsibility of his job as a Head of the Department.

I like the collegial nature of academic decision making. Having said that, at the end ofthe day, it has to be me that makes certain decisions and it’s me that has to wear the con-sequences because I am a leader of this department. I certainly don’t say to somebody,what do you think about this and they say, oh, I think you should do that and I do thatand it goes wrong and I turn around and say to them, oh, well, you told me to do that.That’s not what you can do at all and I certainly don’t do that because I am a head ofthis department. It’s my leadership. I have to be a leader who takes responsibility formy own decisions.

In his narrative, this academic used the terms ‘head’ and ‘leader’ interchangeably. Hisrationale that he had to ‘make certain decisions’ and ‘wear the consequences’ becausehe was ‘a leader of this department’ – instead of saying head of this department – is oneexample of how ‘leader’ and ‘head’ have the same meaning in his utterance. Within thelogic of this utterance, being a head means being a leader by default. Moreover, it is alsointeresting to note his choice of words, which seemed to indicate the necessity of theway in which he exercised his leadership (‘has to be me’, ‘has to wear consequences’and ‘have to be a leader’), which could be read in a number of ways. On the one hand,his narrative suggested that he believed that the way he exercised his leadership was theonly possible way leadership could be exercised, that is, he expected himself to takesole responsibility for making decisions within his department. There were no alterna-tives to how he understood and exercised leadership at work. On the other hand, hisnarrative may imply that he did not necessarily agree or want to act in this way if hecould choose otherwise. Indeed, he was forced to exercise leadership this waybecause it was his responsibility – as a leader – to do so.

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Accordingly, the unique subject position constituted through his narrative mayenable him to assume an identity as a leader – or to be precise, a responsible leader –as part of his ongoing identities. Yet, the very same discourse he drew on may also con-strain his capacity and/or desire to think and act otherwise. He may regard alternativepractices of leadership as unintelligible or even impossible in his institution. This dis-cursive practice, to a certain extent, may explain feelings of stress experienced by manyacademics in headship positions due to taking sole responsibility in making decisionsfor others (Gmelch & Burns, 1993). The stress of leadership was also evident, althoughin different ways, in the narratives of the academics that espoused leadership asperformance.

Leadership as performance

The second meaning of leadership focuses on an academic’s performance at work. Tobe a leader within this meaning, one must demonstrate competency and accomplish-ment in professional contexts. Individuals’ leadership is, therefore, ‘measured’ inrelation to how they perform within the institution and their disciplinary communities.Such a performance can be either official or unofficial, depending on the context inwhich it is constructed.

An example of how the institution espoused the meaning of leadership as perform-ance comes from the university’s Academic Staff Promotions Policy. In this document,leadership was predominantly referred to as performance. Throughout this document,the university repeatedly advises that academics should ‘demonstrate’, ‘sustain’ and‘perform’ their leadership in order to be considered for promotion. In a more specificway, all academics who apply for promotion ‘must’ be ‘assessed’ and ‘assign[ed] a per-formance rating’ by the institutional committees. The ratings highlight ‘sustained out-standing leadership’ as the highest performance to be achieved and assessed.

From my reading, the vocabularies and statements deployed in this document implythat leadership is observable, and more importantly, measurable. The document pos-itions the institutional committees as a group of people who are able and entitled tojudge individuals’ performance, including what counts as evidence, and what levelof performance counts as leadership. At the same time, it positions academics as poten-tial leaders who are responsible for their own performance and achievement. Within thelogic of this document, every academic is entitled and encouraged to achieve or aim for‘sustained outstanding leadership and sustained outstanding competence’ as the highestmeasure of performance, provided that they can prove their (trust)worthiness to theinstitutional committees.

Hey (2011) notes that this institutional practice is common under neoliberal policiesin which academics are expected to do more second-order labour (such as performanceevaluation reports) that often entails less actual academic work. In other words, aca-demics now have to focus their time and energy on figuring out what they haveachieved academically and representing it in an auditable form, in exchange for recog-nition and reward from their institution. Ironically, as Butterwick and Dawson (2005)argue, this ‘impression management’ has become counter-productive to academics’own work and achievements, thus contradicting the intentions of neoliberal policies,which is ostensibly to increase research productivity.

The meaning of leadership as performance was often espoused by the academics Iinterviewed in relation to their research involvement, publication and recognitionwithin a wider disciplinary community. A good example comes from a senior

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academic. Her narrative typifies the way in which the academics drew on this particularmeaning to make sense of leadership in their talk. In what follows I asked whether sheconsidered herself as a leader in academia, she replied:

I do consider myself a leader and that’s a sort of competence thing, the sort of performancething that you have experience and I would say that of me since I’ve done [the nationalcollaborative project], that it made me realise that I actually had stepped up to the mark.We did a good job and so I have the background to say I’m a leader, basically.

From her narrative, this academic drew on the meaning of leadership as ‘a sort of com-petence thing, the sort of performance thing’ to explain why she considered herself as aleader. She used past success in her career (the national collaborative project) to providestrong and tangible evidence to support her entitlement to leadership. Her remark, ‘Iactually had stepped up to the mark’, implied there is a certain level of achievementthat can be agreed upon and recognised in public, and she felt entitled to positionherself as a legitimate leader within those terms.

It is interesting to note the use of metaphor by this academic in relation to her per-formance. The way she spoke of ‘step[ping] up to the mark’ suggested linear pro-gression towards the status of leadership. A sense of pride is evoked in how sheinterpreted her achievements against this linear progression. This phenomenon isechoed in the literature of higher education reporting how many academics feel press-ured by their institutions to attain a ‘high’ performance, especially in relation to theirresearch profiles (Alexander, 2000). Such an institutional expectation generally doesnot recognise individuals’ personal situations and other relevant factors such as the dif-ficulty of gaining funding for certain research areas or other commitments academicshave in their working lives.

Leadership as practice

The thirdmeaning of leadership in academia centres on professional practice in everydaycontexts. Within this meaning, leadership is regarded as (inter)actions or activities thatinvolve other(s) – including colleagues, students and team members –who are oftenpositioned as ‘follower(s)’ or ‘junior(s)’. In this light, it is what academics practisewith other people, rather than their formal position or their performance, that entitlesthem to claim their leadership identities. This particular meaning of leadership is alsoadvocated in the scholarly literature, as an alternative to formal leadership positions,within the movement of distributed leadership (Spillane, 2006). Despite its inclusiveinterpretation of what leadership is or could be, this particular meaning still begs thequestion: which kinds of relational practices count as leadership, and which do not?

Within the institution at the centre of this study, the meaning of leadership as prac-tice is often espoused in a rather ambiguous fashion compared to the two meaningsalready discussed. One of the institutional documents that best exemplifies thisnotion can be found in job advertisements for academic positions. Of the 30 vacanciesthat I accessed through the university’s website, there were 21, mostly senior positions,that mentioned the term ‘leadership’. The most common phrase used was ‘to provide/tooffer leadership in…’ followed by the specific tasks (such as teaching, supervision,research collaboration, curriculum development and other professional activities).Such a sentence, although indicating leadership as practice, does not specify whatthese prospective academics are supposed to do in their everyday contexts.

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The ambiguity of what counts as leadership practice was often taken for granted inthese job advertisements. For instance, what counts as leadership in teaching, what doesit look like and how is it different from what academics already do in terms of theirteaching in everyday contexts? These questions are not easily answered, let aloneagreed upon among academics and leadership researchers. This ambiguity ofmeaning, on the one hand, may enable multiple interpretations for academics tomake sense of their leadership practice at work. On the other hand, such a practicemay or may not be regarded as leadership by others, especially those who make depart-mental or institutional decisions. This (mis)understanding can result in material conse-quences such as departmental/institutional recognition and promotion for individualswho are expected to ‘provide’ or ‘offer’ leadership in certain ways as part of theirjob descriptions.

Moreover, what is also noticeable from these advertisements is how this particularuniversity appears to expect leadership from certain groups of academics (includingsenior lecturers and higher positions). The institutional discourse, therefore, prescribeswho is (and who is not) expected to practise leadership. As a result, many academics,especially those who are in early-career positions, may remain overlooked, undervaluedand, to some extent, marginalised from being recognised as leaders within their owninstitution.

Leadership as practice appeared to be the most prevalent meaning that participantsdrew on in their talk. Their interpretations of leadership practice ranged from sitting ondepartmental committees, supervising students, mentoring young colleagues, organis-ing conferences, coordinating research projects, securing grants, overseeing scientificlabs, finding resources for students and colleagues, mediating conflicts among studentsand staff, and so on. These practices are similar to the qualities of intellectual leadershipdescribed by Macfarlane (2011, 2012). Although the participants in Macfarlane’s studywere full professors, many academics in my study, especially those early- and mid-career, also talked about these qualities as part of their everyday practice at work.

One example comes from a narrative of an early-career academic. Her narrativetypified how some of the academics in my study used the meaning of leadership aspractice to transgress the prescribed boundary of who is (and who is not) entitled topractise leadership within the institution:

I do believe you don’t have to be the boss to be a leader. You can lead from wherever youare. So even though I’m a junior person, whatever committees I sit on, I still take it reallyseriously and still see it as leadership because I feel like there are things that I’m meant tobe saying and to support the people who are there as well. So even though you’re a newperson, you can be the driving force who helps make difference or be the person who putsup the important bits. I mean there are a million different ways to be a leader.

This academic drew on the meaning of leadership as practice to talk about her own lea-dership at work. The opening line, ‘I do believe you do not have to be the boss to be aleader’ in combination with her repeated linguistic device (‘So even though I’m a juniorperson…’ and ‘So even though you’re a new person…’) signalled what Billig (1987)calls ‘rhetorical work’. Billig argues that when people talk about their perspectives onany topic, they are also positioning themselves in relation to the topic. In this case, thisacademic’s rhetorical work implied that she was aware of the prevalent meaning of lea-dership as position, and she drew on the meaning of leadership as practice to counter it.

For this academic, being positioned as ‘junior’ or ‘new’ does not mean that shecould not practise leadership in her work. Rather, it is what she does that is more

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important than where she is positioned. The meaning of leadership as practice seemedto enable this academic to construct herself as a leader in a more meaningful way,despite the possible absence of formal recognition of her leadership within the insti-tution (as discussed earlier). Her remarks, ‘You can lead from wherever you are’ and‘there are a million different ways to be a leader’, implied multiple interpretations avail-able within this particular meaning of leadership. Such interpretations open up otherpossible ways of thinking and becoming for academics to make sense of themselves,and their ‘leadership’.

Leadership as professional role model

The fourth meaning of leadership in academia focuses on academics as role models forothers (such as their students or younger colleagues). Within this meaning, academicsare always already leaders by virtue of their profession. It implies that academics aresupposed to lead an exemplary life, a life that others can appreciate and, perhaps,follow. Although the literature of leadership in higher education often includes beinga role model as part of leadership practice (Macfarlane, 2011; Middlehurst, 1993), Iargue here that these two meanings are somewhat different. While leadership as prac-tice focuses on certain professional practices that are interpreted as leadership, leader-ship as professional role model focuses more on the professional being of academics intheir everyday context. The latter meaning implies that the way academics think, talkand act in their professional lives is supposed to inspire others in academia.

Despite acknowledgement of how important leadership as a role model is,especially for the well-being of higher education institutions (Macfarlane, 2007), Ifound no evidence that this particular university espoused this meaning of leadershipwithin their institutional documents. The lack of evidence implied that this institutiondid not officially recognise this particular meaning of leadership, hence its invisibilitywithin the institution. One possible explanation for such an absence might be that it isdifficult for the institution to recognise, demand, evaluate or support this particularmeaning of leadership given that it is already part of academics’ everyday identities.

In contrast to the lack of institutional recognition of leadership as professional rolemodel, more than half of the academics in my study drew on this particular meaning ofleadership in their talk, many of whom constructed themselves as always alreadyleaders because of their professional identities. One example comes from a senior aca-demic. He told me that he always considered himself as a leader. When I asked him toexplain this further, he replied:

For my leadership, I serve as a role model or an example, not that someone has to followit. But that they can see what I have done. So some of them choose to follow in the samepaths as I do. Others decide that’s not for them and they want to do something else. That’sfine with me because my goal is not to make more of me but to allow them to develop fullyinto what they need to be themselves, to make their own choices. I didn’t follow anyoneelse’s career. I was allowed to find my own and that’s what I’m allowing others to do aswell. So that, in a way, would be a form of leadership. Leadership by getting out of theway and allowing people to find themselves. Not by going in front of them and saying,this is the way.

This academic constructed his identity as a leader because he was living an academiclife, a life that was supposed to be an exemplar for others. During the interview, he toldme that he always considered himself as a leader because of his profession as an

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academic. In this way, being an academic for him means leading others to see how hehas lived his working life. This particular meaning of leadership enabled him to makesense of his professional identity as valuable for others to see and, perhaps, to aspire to.It also constituted a subject position of an exemplary leader for him to take up in histalk.

What I also noticed in this narrative was his hands-off approach to leadership. Forthis academic, being a role model (and a leader) meant ‘getting out of the way andallowing people to find themselves’. This approach seemed to resemble some tra-ditional values of academia, such as intellectual autonomy and academic freedom.His ‘hands-off’ approach, in the extreme, implied that academics do not have to do any-thing but be themselves in order to become leaders. It also suggested, however, thatthere is no one way to be an academic and, by implication, many ways to be(come)an academic leader.

Considering the micro-politics of leadership in higher education

So far, I have presented the four meanings of leadership espoused by my participantsand their institution. The first two meanings (leadership as position and performance)underline the hierarchical nature of departmental, institutional and disciplinary commu-nity contexts in relation to individuals’ leadership. Within these meanings, leadership isunderstood as official and public recognition of headship positions and individualachievements at work. Universities tend to draw on these meanings for recognition,support and rewards for certain groups of academics. These institutional discursivepractices seem to marginalise other individuals and groups of academics who do notsubscribe to such categorisations.

The last two meanings (leadership as practice and professional role model) under-line the everyday context of higher education and are less bounded. They are likely tobe found (or espoused) in personal narratives and broader contexts such as scholarlyliterature and popular media. Such discourses emphasise personal recognition andopen-ended interpretation of how individuals practise and be(come) a leader in theirprofessional contexts. They are, however, less obvious and difficult to measure,which may explain why higher education institutions place more value on the firsttwo meanings. Despite the lack of institutional recognition, most academics in mystudy drew on these last two meanings extensively when talking about their leadership.

This article illustrates what the micro-politics of leadership in higher educationlooks like at both institutional and individual levels. My analysis suggests a divisionbetween official and personal meanings attributed to leadership within higher educationinstitutions. On the one hand, universities never fully control how academics makesense of, and talk about their leadership, in spite of their institutional documents. Onthe other hand, it is naïve to underestimate the material effects of such institutionaldocuments upon academics’ lives, especially when it comes to individuals’ concernsabout career promotion and professional development. The gap between the insti-tution’s and individuals’ espoused meanings of leadership should never be underesti-mated or taken for granted because it inevitably affects the way the institutionrecognises, supports and rewards individuals for their leadership.

To secure more inclusive conceptualisations of leadership in higher education, weneed to begin by taking stock of our own taken-for-granted assumptions about whatcounts as leadership and who counts as a leader. Despite recognition among leadershipscholars that leadership can appear in many forms and levels within the context of higher

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education (Middlehurst et al., 2009), institutions need to keep up by recognising and inte-grating broader conceptualisations into their policies. One possible way would be toinitiate multiple leadership development programmes that extend beyond formal leader-ship positions, such as leadership for early-career academics. Along this line, institutionsmay set up a systemwhere different forms and practices of leadership are acknowledgedand supportedwithout being categorised as personal or voluntary practices. This could bedone by asking individual academics to identify what forms and practices of leadershipthey consider important for their contexts, which could be included as part of their per-formance evaluation (also see Kezar & Lester, 2009; Bolden, Gosling, & O’Brien, inpress, for examples of proposed institutional strategies).

The future of leadership in higher education, I argue, depends very much on howacademics, as members of collectives, communicate and negotiate with their insti-tutions in order to be recognised and supported for their multiple understandings andpractices of leadership. In order to move higher education institutions towards moreinclusive and socially just environments, we need to create a space of dialoguewhere we can openly communicate with one another about what ‘leadership’ meansto us and how we can practise it, as individuals and as collectives. One space couldbe a collaboratively designed forum for sharing our experiences about ‘leading’ and‘being-led’ as well as articulating what we want for and from ‘leaders’ in academia.Indeed, engaging in a conversation about our and others’ leadership may enable usto apprehend our own versions of ‘reality’, which often prevent us from seeking alterna-tives. In doing so, we may become more mindful of other ways of thinking and practis-ing of leadership – ways that would help us create better environments for working inthe academy.

AcknowledgementsI would like to express my sincere gratitude to the anonymous reviewers, Karen Nairn, LisetteBurrows, Rachel Spronken-Smith, James Burford and Lee Adams for their generous feedbackand advice on this article.

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