Bridging the Divide between Faculty and Administration: A Guide to Understanding Conflict in the Academy [1 ed.] 0415842719, 9780415842716

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Bridging the Divide between Faculty and Administration

Conflicts between faculty and administration have become particularly virulent and disruptive in recent years, as institutions have struggled to adapt to intensifying pressures for efficiency and accountability. Analyzing common sources of conflict and challenges on campus that impede attempts to address these conflicts, Bridging the Divide between Faculty and Administration provides a theory-driven and research-based approach for authentic discourse between faculty and administration. This important resource presents a wealth of strategies for improving communication in colleges and universities, ultimately enhancing organizational effectiveness and institutional performance. Special features: n n n

End-of-chapter “Implications for Practice” that provide practical tips and advice for faculty and administrators to use in their own contexts. Analysis of actual conflicts based on extensive interviews with administrators and faculty across a variety of college and university settings. Exploration of creative ways for faculty and administrators to work across differences in their belief systems and to address the underlying sources of conflict.

James L. Bess is Professor Emeritus at New York University, USA. Jay R. Dee is Associate Professor of Higher Education and Director of the Higher Education Doctoral Program at the University of Massachusetts Boston, USA.

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Bridging the Divide between Faculty and Administration A Guide to Understanding Conflict in the Academy

James L. Bess Professor Emeritus, New York University

Jay R. Dee Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts Boston

First published 2014 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2014 Taylor & Francis The right of James L. Bess and Jay R. Dee to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Bess, James L. Bridging the divide between faculty and administration: a guide to understanding conflict in the academy/by James L. Bess and Jay R. Dee. pages cm 1. Universities and colleges—Administration. 2. Universities and colleges—Faculty. 3. Teacher-administrator relationships. 4. Communication in education. I. Dee, Jay R. II. Title. LB2341.B4765 2014 378.12—dc23 2013050548 ISBN: 978-0-415-84271-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-84273-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-75845-8 (ebk) Typeset in Perpetua and Bell Gothic by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK

Contents

Foreword Acknowledgments Preface

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1

Perennial Conflicts between Faculty and Administration

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Paradigm Differences as the Underlying Sources of Conflict between Faculty and Administrators

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Communication and Conflict in the Academy

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Faculty-Administration Conflict and Institutional Effectiveness

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5

When Time is of the Essence: The Temporal Dimensions of Conflict in the Academy

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Enhancing Communication and Collaboration between Faculty and Administration

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Summary and Conclusions: Toward Improved Understanding, Cooperation, and Effectiveness

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References Index

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Foreword Mari Koerner Dean, Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University

“I don’t think you understand!” In many meetings, there are faculty who cannot believe that my cognitive ability was not fully lost when I became a dean. Of course, there are days when I might readily agree with that assessment! When I became the Dean of the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College in 2006, friends and colleagues warned me that I was going over to the “dark” side. But I thought I knew better, or maybe I hoped that I would never feel as if I had. I hoped that in this new leadership role, I could help steer the ship of a college to make it a credible and powerful force in the community. I always knew, of course, that it would be faculty and staff who would achieve that. I had been a faculty member with myriad deans, provosts, and presidents, many of whom were irrelevant, some minimally effective, a few super, but others who were actually destructive. Yet, I was committed to the work of the college, and to K-12 schools in a broad view, and I thought (and still think) that we can be in the world of a university with strong community partnerships and make a difference in the lives of our students. I also knew that becoming a dean meant not taking “sides” around issues, but rather seeing faculty and staff as allies, compadres, and respected colleagues. Sometimes, I was right about that assumption, and sometimes, I was woefully naive. Still today, I am learning how to talk to people—to faculty, staff, students, donors, K-12 school administrators, teachers, and community members.This book offers ways to analyze how these discourses happen. James Bess and Jay Dee explain and describe the models or paradigms that we use to screen and “see” better what is happening in order to make our organizations effective, but not at the cost of estrangement or alienation. Today, we are living in a world that has become skeptical of mostly everything, including universities. A model of academics that is hundreds of years old is beginning to be seriously questioned as to its effectiveness in preparing workers and citizens for the twenty-first century.The higher education system in the United States is perhaps the most admired in the world, but the costs are so astronomical that its value is being scrutinized and reassessed.We have been fortunate at Arizona

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State to have had leaders whose feet are firmly planted in the reality of administering a public institution in a time when resources have dwindled, while holding fast to believing in the benefits of research, scholarship, and education, and also of being embedded in the community. Old internal struggles, adversaries, and arguments seem, to me, outdated and dangerous. We need to make the places where we do our work harmonious, respectful, and safe so that we can all pull together to move our important agendas forward. Having been a dean who has been through one of the worst financial crises of our time, much internal tumult, and increasingly loud external voices claiming that colleges of education are obsolete, I am actually more optimistic that we have the intelligence and caring to do this. Bess and Dee have written a thoughtful and thought-provoking book to help us think and rethink how we come together as a community. They encourage us to readjust our perspectives, examine our language, and think about what we say, how we say it, and to whom we communicate. This book takes the perspective that supporting administrators and faculty, through understanding and meaning making, can move them toward collaboration and happier endings—or at least be happier getting to those endings. Bess and Dee propose that there are ways to begin with the positive, with individual strengths, and move toward group goals and policies through, for example, appreciative inquiry. Central to any such “method” is to fully humanize faculty and administrators, to get rid of ideas of evil intent on anyone’s part, and to move in the best direction for the benefit of students, society, and, dare I say, democracy! Jim Gee (2013), in his book The Anti-Education Era, talks about the need for humans to find comfort through stories. People seek to establish a beginningmiddle-end to their narratives in order to explain and to find reasons or causes that could reassure them that they, as individuals, have some control over their life circumstances. It strikes me that a college or university is exactly the place where stories are spun. But sometimes, they spin out of control, especially since the structure of the organization allows little time or space for meaningful dialogue and interaction. Administrators construct their stories to explain faculty disagreeing with them or stopping “progress.” Faculty (and often staff) put together their stories to explain seemingly frivolous and ill-thought-out decisions, especially when those decisions are high stakes and non-reversible. And pressures for accountability—often without clear or measurable outcomes—can lead to unfounded suspicions, motives, and stories. Sometimes, knowing individuals’ hidden actions and advocacy, I often see odd alliances formed and even odder adversarial stances. It may be that these stories are healthy ways to explain, understand, and eventually move on. I do know that such stories can recount change and the processes of change that were painful with the accompanying grief of loss— something that we all face over time in our professional lives. And then there is

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the element of being in a community, where the subcultures and subtexts take on their own stories and “truths.” My college underwent a huge reorganization over three years ago. There had been three colleges of education at Arizona State on three separate, but in close proximity, campuses. Two of the colleges were disestablished to form a new one, which combined personnel, programs, and students from all three. Although I was not in on the decision, I, as the Dean of the newly reconstituted college, was told all kinds of stories from uninformed people about why and how this happened and the “factual” underlying causes—almost none of which I knew to be true. But there were important, common themes in those stories: a villain, a victim, and predictions of the evil to come. Even today, after this decision has brought about a new and great college that has been built upon the work and legacy of many faculty and staff, I still hear “facts,” which are not true in an objective sense, but still based on someone’s personally constructed reality. And these stories give people some sense of control and provide some opportunities for sensemaking. I have also seen many of the stories fall to the wayside, as faculty and staff in the college have come to realize that they still have control over their professional lives, there are still great students coming to the institution, and there are administrators who are there to support them. But it has been a long process, which included reestablishing trust. Authentic communication cannot happen without trust. Our college has done much of this through appreciative inquiry, where we have brought all of the faculty and staff together at annual “summits.” Here, we have created a compelling vision for the college and a way to communicate through hierarchy and day-to-day “busy-ness.” But it has not been without pain, hard work, and leadership. I do know that coming to understanding is difficult, and takes time and patience. And some differences may never be reconcilable. I have had faculty resign from positions that were important to me and to the college with no forewarning (that I was aware of), and I would call that “bad timing.” I think they would call it the only timing that made sense; that is, their sense of survival, health, and sanity came first, and that higher education institutions will persevere no matter who is there (I say this seemingly easily now, but it has taken time for me to even begin to see this other perspective). And, in truth, I may never get over the impact that those episodes had on me.There are some things from which full recovery is simply not possible. Many contradictions exist in the higher education workplace. Bess and Dee point this out through an analysis of the time-temporal element where, for example, administrators need to respond to a demanding external world quickly, while faculty need to make the process inclusive and figure out the consequences. Time and the rhythm of jobs may not be understood, because they are attached to prioritization and sense of importance. Faculty have a different sense of time, because their primary responsibilities are often stretched out—resolved only over a long span of time, as with publications, dissertations, and the impact of their

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teaching. Autonomy created by controlling one’s own time is powerful and differentiates the faculty job within the higher education hierarchy. Another example of contradiction is the need for a strong central bureaucracy to manage the institution, on the one hand. The central administration employs many staff who are obligated to follow somewhat rigid schedules and adhere to rather precise job descriptions. On the other hand, another group of employees, the faculty, are socialized to believe that they manage their own time and define their own responsibilities. Struggling with looming potential and then real financial constraints, and in the middle of the worldwide financial crisis when Arizona State lost $200 million in state revenue, there were faculty who thought there was a magic source of money, which would mean special raises for them or the hiring of new staff to support their departments. And yet, they could see that people were indeed getting laid off. On dark days, I am often puzzled by this contradiction, because, to me, the reality that these individuals see is at odds with data that are readily available and observable to anyone at the institution. As such, I am compelled to agree with Bess and Dee’s assertion, based on Rescher (1991), that colleges and universities are indeed afflicted with “baffling phenomena.” So, how can smart, articulate, well-educated people, who typically are deeply invested in their jobs and even in their colleges and universities, come to some agreements that could have a positive impact? Agreement requires understanding: what is the other person talking about? Are there underlying reasons? What does time mean to them? What do power and authority mean to them? Is my very presence as an administrator enough to stop meaningful communication or engagement? In higher education, there must be a sense of purpose, overriding and beyond self-interests. This usually has to do with the nonnegotiable goal of educating students. There has to be the agreed upon value that students’ success can only be achieved through mutual respect and cooperation—a strong and powerful belief that, basically, people work in colleges and universities to change the world; that change comes through research, teaching, and service, and it may look a bit different for each person, but, in the end, it has to benefit the students and their families and communities. Perhaps faculty (and staff) and administrators have drifted apart, but they certainly have the capacity to (and often do) come together around students. We are fortunate to work in colleges and universities where our goals are to create knowledge, construct knowledge with our students, sustain our democracy, and forge the future—no small task. And like any huge undertaking, it is not easy. So we can step back and take a look at what people mean, what we mean, and what we need as academics and as human beings. We can find what will make us happy, reframe our mistakes in terms of forgiveness, and turn disrespect into kindness. December 2013

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to acknowledge with deep thanks the significant contributions to the book by our respected colleagues. We are especially grateful for the continued support and insightful suggestions from Heather Jarrow of Routledge Publishing. Her belief in this project did not waiver, and we will always be grateful for the patience, wisdom, and kindness that she has shared with us. A special note of acknowledgment goes to Yi Shiuan Chin and Kate Bresonis, doctoral students in the Higher Education Program at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Both provided significant support for the collection and analysis of the case study data that are presented in this book.Yi Shiuan assisted in analyzing the data from the four state university cases, and she helped us identify portions of the manuscript that warranted further explanation or clarification. Kate conducted the interviews with administrators and faculty at the two community colleges that served as case study sites for the project. We also thank the Office of Graduate Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, which provided the funding to hire Yi Shiuan and Kate as graduate assistants. Also deserving acknowledgment are the administrators and faculty who participated in the interviews at the four state universities and two community colleges that served as case study sites for this project. Their stories highlighted the significant challenges that administrators and faculty confront in a rapidly changing higher education landscape. Despite those challenges, their dedication to students and to their institutions provides a strong sense of optimism that colleges and universities will continue to advance the public good and improve the human condition. We are especially grateful to Mari Koerner for sharing her personal story in the foreword. Her reflections on administrative and faculty life reinforce the necessity to repair damaged relations, to treat each other with kindness and respect, and to move forward as colleagues in pursuit of a better world. Finally, we thank Jim’s spouse, Nancy Moore Bess, and Jay’s partner, Steve Backhaus, for their patience and support.

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Preface

Between 2009 and 2011, faculty and administrators at Idaho State University clashed over a proposed restructuring plan to address budget challenges. Faculty indicated that their input was ignored in the development of the cost-cutting plan, which was approved by the state board. As a result, the faculty voted “no confidence” in the provost and the president. The administration and the state board then disbanded the faculty senate, and had campus security officers change the locks on the senate office door (Berrett 2011, May 26).

Conflicts between faculty and administrators are prevalent and pervasive on college campuses. Tensions have long characterized this relationship, as the expectations of faculty have collided with the formal authority of administrators. Faculty and administrators have clashed over program closures and expansions, strategic priorities, budget cuts, reorganizations, and personnel decisions. They have also engaged in bitter disagreements about who should make key decisions for the institution. These conflicts have become more bitter and protracted in the current context of limited resources, significant pressures for accountability, and intense competition from other institutions. The rising tide of conflict between faculty and administration can be attributed to many factors. First, higher education institutions operate in an environment of intense competition for resources.The drive for competitive advantage in the chase for prestige and revenues has heightened the stakes for institutional decisionmaking. In response, trustees and state governing boards have empowered campus administrators to make strategic decisions that enhance the competitiveness of their institutions. These decisions may be driven by a desire for revenue generation, and only secondarily include academic considerations. As a result, the interests and concerns of faculty may be downplayed in efforts to make quick, revenuedriven decisions. Second, increasing demands for accountability have led to the

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development of numerous performance monitoring systems that subject faculty to more extensive oversight from administrators. However, when institutions seek to develop standardized mechanisms for evaluating academic work, faculty may feel that their autonomy as professionals has been compromised. Furthermore, pressures to improve undergraduate education, provide access for diverse students, promote technology transfer, foster economic development, and solve social problems challenge the ability of administrators and faculty to pursue multiple goals simultaneously. In the context of multiple competing demands, faculty and administrators are likely to differ in how they prioritize these expectations. Faculty-administrator conflicts often have negative repercussions for higher education institutions. While conflict is to be expected in complex organizations whose members have a wide range of perspectives and goals, unexamined and ungoverned conflict can be highly disruptive of the efficient and effective conduct of academic affairs. In particular, conflict between faculty and administration can stall change initiatives, impede effective decision-making, and damage comity and trust. As a result of these conflicts, some of the effectiveness of these institutions is often vitiated. Ultimately, the failure to manage conflict intelligently diminishes the capacity of higher education institutions to address the needs of students and faculty and the interests of society. This book will offer a critical assessment of current decision-making and governance practices, which often fail to address the deep, underlying philosophical sources of conflict between faculty and administrators. Too often, the approach to addressing faculty-administrator conflict is either superficial (for example, delegating the issue to a toothless task force) or highly formalized (such as grievance procedures or other bureaucratic mechanisms for resolving disputes). Equally problematic are instances in which conflict is avoided or smoothed over by administrators who are under significant pressure to maintain harmony and prevent negative publicity. Furthermore, conflict may be suppressed in organizations where faculty and staff members fear retribution if they speak too forcefully in opposition to an administrative initiative. A primary deficiency in the current approach to conflict management in colleges and universities is the failure of institutional stakeholders to consider the underlying assumptions and beliefs that lead to conflict in the first place. We argue that the current modes and forms of communication in the academic workplace need to be reformulated in order to permit and encourage faculty and administrators to bring to the surface their deep-seated, differing perspectives and values. Specifically, higher education institutions need to adopt new forms of communication, which promote authentic discourse between faculty and administrators. Other researchers have also issued calls for improving communication between faculty and administration. Needed improvements are often framed in terms of a desire for more open and participatory forms of communication (Del Favero,

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2003; Kezar, 2004; Schuster, Smith, Corak, &Yamada, 1994;Tierney, 2006).These recommendations, however, are somewhat limited in our view. Fostering more communication does not necessarily lead to more effective communication. Including more participants in communication processes does not necessarily lead to higher levels of commitment to related decisions and actions. Our analysis of organizational communication is distinctly different from other approaches to conflict in general and to conflict specifically in the higher education literature. We do not argue simply for “more” communication. Our analysis, moreover, does not emphasize the elimination of conflict, nor does it focus on skills and tactics associated with convincing the other “side” to change its position. Instead, we shift the focus from adjudicating specific conflicts and disagreements, to a more general approach that has as its goal the improvement of communication efficacy itself. What is required, we argue, is a more sophisticated understanding by all participants of alternative communication philosophies, goals, and processes before faculty and administrators will be able to interact effectively. Throughout this book, we have included examples of faculty-administrator conflict that have appeared in the higher education news media. These examples illustrate the common pathways and consequences of faculty-administrator conflict. We supplement these examples with findings from research conducted by the second author, who studied faculty-administrator relations in four public comprehensive universities. Based on interviews with 40 administrators, 40 full-time faculty, and 20 part-time faculty, we identified episodes of conflict that emerged around a variety of issues, including budgets, assessment, and campus policies.Through our analysis of these data, we also identified patterns of communication that tended to escalate the conflict, as well as practices that enabled faculty and administrators to work through their differences and develop new courses of action to improve their institutions. To help ensure the confidentiality of study participants, and to simplify the presentation of the examples, we have aggregated the data from these four institutions into one case, which we will call Discordia State University (DSU)—a name that reflects the level of tension between administrators and faculty at these institutions. In subsequent chapters, when you see a case example from DSU, you will know that the data came from this fourinstitution study. Finally, specifically for this book, we carried out interviews with six administrators and six faculty members at two community colleges, where appreciative inquiry had been used for institutional strategic planning and other college-wide initiatives intended to foster individual and organizational development. The goal of these interviews was to understand more thoroughly how administrators and faculty can transcend the underlying differences that tend to divide them. Again, we have aggregated the data from both community colleges into a composite case, which we will call Appreciative Community College (ACC).

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OVERVIEW OF THE BOOK In a broad sense, we understand why conflicts emerge between faculty and administrators. Colleges and universities typically operate in the context of competing demands and limited resources. Under those conditions, conflict may be inevitable. Resource constraints and competing priorities, however, may simply be the triggering mechanisms that bring conflict to the surface. What we lack is a more fundamental understanding of the underlying sources of conflict between faculty and administrators.Why do they tend to differ in their responses to resource constraints? Why do they tend to have different priorities for their institutions? And why are the conflicts between faculty and administrators so pernicious and so difficult to address and clarify? Confronting these questions is the purpose of this book. While there have been many attempts to examine conflict phenomena in organizations, there is still a serious gap in understanding conflict in higher education institutions, particularly in terms of conflicts that emerge between faculty and administration. Most authors who write about the subject of conflict in higher education deal with it, in our opinion, rather superficially. They fail to inquire into the basic philosophical issues that generate significant conflicts between faculty and administration. This failure limits the range of possible solutions— which require deep theoretical analysis of the issues that generate and shape the expression of conflict. This book seeks to illustrate the themes, concepts, and ideas that are associated with the sources, forms, and outcomes of conflict between faculty and administration. Our most innovative contribution to the literature is our analysis of the sources of conflict. Our contention is that the origins of conflict lie in the deep, philosophic premises that are consciously and unconsciously employed in the everyday practices of faculty and administrators. Furthermore, it is our belief that these contrasting philosophies shape how faculty and administrators communicate with each other. The rigid boundaries between these contrasting philosophies often result in communications between faculty and administrators that are perceived as “incommensurable”—that is, the practices and perspectives of faculty and administration are viewed as inherently irreconcilable. These underlying philosophic premises prohibit the communication of meaning and thus result in conflicting policies and practices that impede effectiveness in both faculty and administrative matters. The reasons for conflict lie not only in the structural boundaries between faculty and administrators, but, more importantly, in the dramatically different belief systems of each group. Approaches to conflict management that address only the perceived pragmatic needs of each side (which are frequently short-term) will ultimately fail to address the differences in belief systems that lead to conflict in the first place. Our thesis is that a better way to understand and address conflicts

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between faculty and administrators is to get behind the differences by examining the underlying paradigms of each group. As Costantino and Merchant (1996) note, it is important to “get on the table what is under it” (p. 199). We argue that the different paradigms of faculty and administration need to be on the table for discussion. A further goal of this book is to describe new modes of communication—such as appreciative inquiry—that can enable faculty and administrators to move beyond incommensurable positions, and instead come to view differing paradigms as institutional assets that can improve decision-making and enhance organizational effectiveness. In fact, building cognitive complexity (the ability of organizations to move flexibly among different ways of thinking) may be a prerequisite for organizational effectiveness in a fast-paced, rapidly changing environment. Thus, new approaches toward communication and conflict may be necessary if higher education institutions are to remain effective in complex and uncertain times. In Chapter 1, we begin with a discussion of the nature of organizational conflict in general and of conflict on college and university campuses.We discuss the belief systems that are held by faculty and administrators, as well as the blind spots to alternative perspectives that these belief systems create. Researchers have proposed many reforms in structure and changes in organizational culture to improve the effectiveness of governance—a decision-making system on college campuses that is unique to these complex organizations. Of particular note is the focus on the problems of shared governance, which requires not only formal participation by constituents, but also a set of supporting norms and values in the system as a whole. We consider why current decision-making structures and processes are inadequate for addressing the deeper underlying sources of conflict between faculty and administration—and why a fundamentally different sort of thinking is required. Chapter 2 begins with a discussion of the concept of paradigms—the deepseated belief systems that guide cognition and behavior for a particular social group (Lewis & Grimes, 1999). Our analysis reveals how faculty and administrators have constructed competing paradigms that are often deemed “incommensurable”— that is, impossible to reconcile because, in part, of the very language and meanings associated with them. The idea of incommensurability suggests that differences between competing paradigms cannot be resolved through rational discourse. Given diametrically opposed belief systems, the different groups cannot arrive at an agreement regarding the criteria by which they would resolve their dispute. Specifically, if the groups employ vastly different systems of orientation and interpretation, then conflict between them is unlikely to be resolved, because there are no “standards of comparison with which a problem or conflict can rationally be solved” (Scherer & Steinmann, 1999, p. 521).We argue that paradigm differences are the root causes of many of the conflicts between faculty and administration. Not all conflicts, however, are incommensurable. Faculty and administrators, for example, may arrive at agreed upon criteria for resolving their

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disagreement. But more often than not, faculty and administrators cannot even agree about the criteria for resolving disputes. Their incommensurable paradigms prohibit effective communication about the conflicts that emerge in colleges and universities. In Chapter 2, we argue that incommensurable paradigms not only make conflicts difficult to address, but also constitute the original source of many conflicts between faculty and administration. When two groups adhere to diametrically opposed paradigms, they will attribute different meanings to events and circumstances in their organizations, and they will use different language and word meanings to refer to their socially constructed versions of reality. These opposed interpretations of the organization will result in conflict between the groups. Furthermore, the different language systems of the opposing parties will make it difficult (perhaps even impossible) for the two parties to communicate effectively about their differences. In Chapter 3, we examine how paradigm differences shape everyday communications between faculty and administration. As the French literary critic Jacques Derrida (1976) noted, word meanings are constantly in flux; therefore, even when messages are communicated clearly and accurately according to the sender, they may still be misunderstood because the parties involved in the communication have constructed different meanings and interpretations of those messages. Unless administrators and faculty members can come to understand and appreciate the meanings and interpretations of the other party, effective communication between the two is unlikely. It is our belief that until the basic belief systems of different groups are included in discussions between those groups, the dialogues between them will be limited to superficial issues, and sharp conflicts are bound to recur. Relatively little scholarship has been conducted that uses communication theories and their underlying philosophic premises to analyze the difficulties of shared governance in higher education institutions and the related conflicts between faculty and administration. In Chapter 3, we address this need by using selected theories of organizational, inter-group, and interpersonal communication to describe and analyze the challenges that impede attempts to address conflict and improve institutional performance. We acknowledge that communication is not a panacea and that prior calls for improving communication between faculty and administration have been somewhat naive in not acknowledging the significant complexities and challenges that this entails. Specifically, we highlight the complexities and contradictions inherent in the use of dialogue to address conflict in higher education organizations. We argue that calls for more dialogue between faculty and administration may not empower individuals or improve organizational effectiveness. From the perspective of faculty members, dialogue may contribute to further marginalization and exploitation. For administrators, dialogue may generate ambiguity and confusion, rather than clarity and consensus.

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In Chapter 4, we discuss the underlying reasons why faculty and administrators differ in their goals and priorities for their institutions. Specifically, these differences emerge because faculty and administrators have differing beliefs and assumptions about what constitutes an “effective” higher education institution. Thus, efforts to improve organizational performance are likely to generate even more conflict, as faculty and administrators conceptualize and define effectiveness in different ways. A central argument in our analysis is that each of the many and legitimate criteria of organizational effectiveness is premised on different paradigms. Conflicts in the evaluation of organizational effectiveness invariably arise in colleges and universities, especially when more than one constituency is responsible for decisions (as is commonly the case in systems of shared governance). We argue, therefore, that approaches to conflict across institutional constituencies must be managed first by identifying the paradigms that predominate for each party, since the paradigms are the philosophic foundations of the effectiveness measures that are invoked by the different parties. In Chapter 4, we discuss the paradigms that underlie the prominent models of organizational effectiveness. Then, we explain how these paradigm-based differences lead faculty and administrators to use different models and criteria for evaluating effectiveness. Furthermore, our analysis considers how the application of different effectiveness criteria leads to significant conflict between faculty and administration regarding the appropriate aims and purposes of higher education. Another theme of the book asserts that the differing assumptions and belief systems of faculty and administrators lead them to develop opposing conceptualizations of time, authority, and productivity. In Chapter 5, we argue that time and orientations toward time are critical organizational constructs that frequently result in conflict between faculty and administrators. Both administrative and faculty subcultures employ quite different conceptualizations of time in their work. Significant organizational problems may arise when there are large differences among individuals in their habits, beliefs, and orientations toward time. Orientations toward time reflect individual and collective beliefs about authority, power, and productivity in the organization. The question of who gets to control the organizational clock, and thereby control worker behavior, has been a focal point in labor-management disputes that date back at least to the introduction of scientific management in manufacturing at the turn of the twentieth century (Taylor, 1911). These time-based pressures are also prevalent within academic organizations. Pressures to document and demonstrate instructional and research productivity have heightened tensions between faculty and administration (and trustees) regarding who controls the pace and timing of academic work. We argue that an understanding of the temporal pace of others’ work is critical to being an effective communicator, especially in complex organizations where

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highly professionalized workers are engaged in many difficult tasks and projects simultaneously. Faculty and administrators can develop communication skills for accommodating different temporal frames (also known as “timescapes”— Adam, 1998). Moreover, institutional decision-making systems can include venues and structures that utilize multiple “timescapes.” These forms of temporal flexibility can address concerns for continuity and stability, as well as for adaptability and change in organizations. Rather than attempt to “fix” existing structures, we argue in Chapter 6 that administrators and faculty should focus instead on improving communication in the academic workplace.Through the development of new approaches and modes of communication, faculty and administrators can strengthen the governance and decision-making systems of their institutions.These new forms of communication, however, must incorporate opportunities for dialogue regarding the paradigm differences between faculty and administrators. If paradigm differences are not engaged at a deep level, then the participants in a conflict will continue to talk past each other. Each side will believe that it has communicated clearly, but each side will leave the conversation with a very different interpretation of events. Chapter 6 proposes that appreciative inquiry can substantially reform communication practices in higher education organizations. Specifically, appreciative inquiry is a mode of communication that can enable conflicting parties to transcend their philosophical and practical differences, and move toward authentic and affirming dialogue. This transition, in turn, expands the range of possibilities for collaboration, innovation, and collective action in organizations (Cockell & McArthur-Blair, 2012; Cooperrider & Avital, 2004; Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987). We suggest that appreciative inquiry can provide a language for communicating across multiple paradigms. More specifically, when people from different organizational subcultures attempt to communicate, they automatically employ norms for the kinds of language that they use, as well as for the stances that they expect others to take. These norms and perceived stances can foster solidarity within groups, but can complicate communication across group boundaries. We argue that appreciative inquiry can engage each participant in a consideration of the deep-seated assumptions and values of the other party and thereby permit a congruence of belief in and value for diverse paradigmatic perspectives. In the final chapter, we conclude the text by arguing that conflict can be viewed as an organizing principle in higher education institutions. Rather than viewing conflict as dysfunctional, the expression of conflict can often serve as an indicator of organizational health.The goal of institutional governance and decision-making systems, we argue, should not be only to solve problems. These systems should also surface new problems and promote the expression of even more conflict. Conflict can empower faculty and administrators to engage in innovative and creative processes to improve their institutions.

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Chapter 1

Perennial Conflicts between Faculty and Administration

INTRODUCTION Human societies comprise individuals with unique needs, desires, and sources of frustration and satisfaction. Consensus about goals and the means to achieve them is difficult to attain as groups of individuals associate themselves in social and economic settings such as organizations, where attitudes and values are usually already deep-seated. Hence, conflict is a likely and understandable characteristic of most organizations. Significant conflict is known to exist in most organizational systems. Left unchecked, conflict can spiral out of control and diminish individual and organizational performance.Yet, the expression of conflict is also associated with higher levels of organizational innovation, growth, and development (Brown, 1983; Coser, 1956; Jehn, 1995). The absence of overt conflict, in fact, usually means that the organization is moribund or in decline. Thus, conflict can have positive effects on the organization via stimulating change and challenging the status quo. Problems associated with conflict tend to arise when such disputes remain formally unrecognized or denied by most constituents or their organizations. However, even when organizational members seek to avoid or downplay its significance, conflict may still lie virulently latent in the system until issues demand attention (Barsky, 2002; Bartunek, Kolb, & Lewicki, 1992; Holton, 1995). Though unregulated conflict can be quite disruptive, it often is ignored for organizational and personal reasons—either to “save face” or to maintain the illusion of organizational harmony.Thus, conflict is often inadequately understood by organizational members, and, as a result, may be poorly managed (Brown, 1983). The topic of conflict has been especially salient in recent years as higher education has undergone significant changes in goals, structure, and staffing. In addition, the nature of higher education in general has seen important changes in its mission, its personnel, its relationships to other social organizations, such

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as business, industry, and especially government, and, finally, in its support from the general public (Bok, 2003; Geiger, 2004; Morphew & Eckel, 2009; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). Public colleges and universities in particular, suffer from generic underfunding that puts special pressures on both administrators and faculty members. All of these changes make it imperative that higher education leaders make concerted efforts to examine and perhaps reconsider goals, modes of operation, personnel, and interactions both within the institution and across organizational boundaries with other institutions. In this chapter, we explain how changes in the external environments of colleges and universities have created a context in which faculty-administrator conflicts are likely to occur. We then turn to an examination of organizational structure, and suggest that the highly differentiated and complex structures of colleges and universities complicate communications and interactions between faculty and administrators, and thus make conflicts more likely to arise and more

DO NOT MINIMIZE CONFLICT Conflict in higher education organizations is frequently dismissed or trivialized. Henry Kissinger, reflecting on his days as a Harvard professor, is widely credited with having joked that academic conflicts are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so low (New Republic, 1977, August 20). The image is that of a petty professor raising a ruckus over a minor policy dispute, or that of a vindictive administrator withholding a resource merely out of spite. While some conflicts in higher education are indeed about trivial matters, others are rooted in fundamental differences regarding the purpose and future of the entire higher education enterprise. Moreover, what might seem to be a minor dispute may, in fact, be connected to important values, such as academic freedom or institutional accountability. Avoiding or dismissing a conflict is seldom an appropriate course of action, especially if the conflicting parties must continue to work together on future tasks and initiatives. When administrators dismiss the concerns of faculty members, the faculty may come to believe that the institution does not value their expertise. When faculty dismiss the concerns of administrators, the administrators may come to believe that faculty are self-interested and do not care about improving the institution as a whole. When these beliefs become prevalent, the culture of the institution is likely to become less trusting and more adversarial. Instead of dismissing conflict, faculty and administrators should find ways to discuss their differences openly and without fear of retribution. Throughout this book, we will offer suggestions for carrying out those types of faculty-administrator conversations.

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difficult to manage. Next, we discuss shared governance as both a decisionmaking structure and as a constellation of values and beliefs regarding consultation, collaboration, and shared authority. Governance bodies, such as senates and committees, are often venues in which faculty-administrator conflicts break out, but they can also serve as forums in which differences are discussed and common understandings are forged. Finally, in this chapter, we suggest that the distinct identities and occupational subcultures of faculty and administrators comprise another barrier to effective communication. When faculty and administrators construct their professional identities in opposition to each other, they are also producing a context in which inter-group conflict is inevitable. EXTERNAL PRESSURES Of late, it appears that conflict in higher education institutions has become both more salient and more virulent in organizational problem-solving and related decision-making processes. This is partly due to a number of influential social factors: 1. the increase in competition for funding and prestige, which has led to a proverbial “arms race” among colleges and universities; 2. the reduction in the relative share of higher education budgets provided by state and national governments; 3. the adoption of practices and values from the business/commercial world into higher education, also known as managerialism (Deem, Hillyard, & Reed, 2007); and 4. the growing public expectations for higher education to provide greater access to postsecondary opportunities, improve student learning outcomes, contribute to economic development, and produce scientific breakthroughs that improve the human condition. Competition in the higher education market. All higher education institutions operate in highly competitive environments that have generated new pressures and expectations for faculty and administrators. While colleges and universities have long been in competition with each other, the current level of heightened competition can be traced to the 1980s, when governments began to reduce their relative share of higher education funding (Hearn, 2003; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). This reduction in public funding compelled institutions to turn to other sources of revenue, namely student tuition dollars, research grants, and philanthropic contributions. As larger numbers of institutions began to pursue the same types of resources, the competition among them intensified. The forms of competition look somewhat different in the various sectors of higher education. Nearly every research university is engaged in a global race

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for resources and prestige (Etzkowitz & Leydesdorff, 1997; Geiger, 2004). Universities around the world have expanded their research infrastructures and hired faculty who can attract external funding. Trustees and other university stakeholders are keenly attuned to the status of institutions in various national and international rankings. In this environment, administrators are under significant pressure to advance the institution to higher positions in these rankings. Failure to move an institution to the “next level” may be viewed by trustees as cause to dismiss presidents and other senior administrators. Faculty in universities also feel pressure to produce more research, attract more funding, and maintain or expand their engagement with teaching (Schuster & Finkelstein, 2006). At liberal arts institutions, the competition often focuses on attracting undergraduate students with high levels of academic achievement, as demonstrated by scores on college entrance exams such as the SAT. To attract these students, liberal arts institutions have added an array of amenities to make campus life more enticing, including luxury suite residence halls, health clubs, state-of-the-art entertainment venues, and boutique academic experiences such as study abroad programs and high-profile internships. Administrators in this setting are constantly under pressure to raise more funds to fulfill grander ambitions, while faculty encounter students who increasingly expect them to be available at a moment’s notice, via e-mail or text message. For institutions that compete on the basis of cost and convenience, such as community colleges and less selective four-year institutions, the competition from for-profit and online providers has reshaped the set of institutions with which they compete for enrollments, thus compelling faculty and administrators to develop new programs and adopt new technologies to extend their reach into additional markets. To compete successfully for vital resources, many higher education leaders believe that they need to adopt market-oriented strategies to guide organizational behavior (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). These strategies seek to enhance the reputation of the institution among key constituency groups, including prospective students, research funding agencies, and business and industry (Hearn, 2003). Tactics related to these strategies include building the institution’s research capacity, growing the institution’s fundraising operations, recruiting academically strong students, and hiring “star” faculty, all of which can serve as attractors for even more resource acquisition (Leisyte & Dee, 2012). In addition, universities have become more heavily engaged in the commercialization of research outputs, particularly following the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which allowed U.S. universities to retain the intellectual property rights to discoveries that emerged from federally sponsored research. This legislation paved the way toward patenting and licensing agreements between universities and industry. To implement these tactics, institutions have created technology transfer offices to manage relations with industry, research centers and institutes to serve as catalysts for large-scale grant-

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funded work, and online and corporate education divisions to respond to emerging occupational training needs (Geiger, 2006; Mallon, 2006; Toma, 2007). Slaughter and Rhoades (2004) have characterized the market-oriented behaviors of higher education institutions as academic capitalism, which they define as the engagement of administrators, faculty, and students in entrepreneurial activities aimed at revenue generation. The prominence of academic capitalism in shaping the strategies and actions of colleges and universities has led some scholars to question whether so many institutional decisions should be guided by a profit motive. The focus on revenue generation may displace other noble aims of higher education, including endeavors that are designed to advance the public good (Rhoads & Szelényi, 2011). Academic capitalism also exacerbates an internal stratification of academic disciplines based on their ability to generate revenue, and this stratification can generate tensions among faculty and between faculty and administrators. Administrators may allocate more institutional resources to departments that have greater capacity to attract external funding. Faculty in disciplines that have revenuegenerating potential, such as science and technology, may, therefore, receive higher salaries, lower teaching loads, and better facilities than their colleagues in disciplines without strong ties to the market, such as the liberal arts (Leisyte & Dee, 2012). Similarly, administrators may allocate more institutional resources to academic programs that have high national or international rankings. Such investments may enable highly ranked programs to keep pace with their competitors and thus maintain the institution’s overall reputation (Bastedo & Bowman, 2011). But this aspect of academic capitalism also generates further disparities in the work environments of faculty. As the gap between the academic haves and the have-nots widens, resentment is likely to grow, and the lesssupported faculty may direct their frustrations toward administrators. As Esterberg and Wooding (2012) note: This stratification in the academy leads to disaffection among faculty members. For those who do not or cannot compete in this highly competitive universe, there is greater dissatisfaction and, we believe, willingness to blame the administration for failing to protect the privileges faculty had—or are imagined to have had—in an earlier time. (p. 26) Faculty may also resist the pull of the market because they believe that an emphasis on revenue generation conflicts with other deeply held academic values. Some academics have expressed concerns regarding whether the values of openness and disinterestedness—long-standing pillars of academic science—can be maintained in an environment where teaching and research agendas are shaped by what can attract the largest amount of funding. Can science truly be open if

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research findings are held in secret until their commercial potential can be exploited? Can science truly be disinterested if industrial firms have a financial stake in the outcomes of research? Here, conflicts may emerge between administrators seeking to advance revenue-generating strategies and faculty seeking to maintain control over their work (Campbell & Slaughter, 1999). The ascendancy of academic capitalism may also erode the level of faculty influence in institutional decision-making (Mallon, 2006). Trustees and policymakers have criticized the slow pace of campus decision-making and have issued calls for streamlining procedures so that institutions can respond more rapidly to emerging opportunities in the higher education marketplace (Association of Governing Boards, 1996). Other observers have called for bypassing existing faculty committees to rely instead on administratively appointed planning groups (Keller, 1983; Schuster et al., 1994). For example, colleges and universities are rapidly developing academic programs that exist outside the structures of academic departments. These programs are often located in online or continuing education divisions where curricula may be developed and approved by academic managers, rather than by faculty (Toma, 2007). Accountability, efficiency, and effectiveness. External pressures from policymakers, advocacy groups, government agencies, and accreditation associations have generated many positive changes in the operations of colleges and universities. Attention to diversity, a stronger focus on student learning, and an increasing civic engagement by colleges and universities can each be attributed, in part, to external influences. In fact, Kezar and Lester (2009) found that external pressures were one of the most important driving forces for collaboration and change on the college campuses that they studied. External pressures for accountability, however, can also be a source of tension between faculty and administrators. Accountability can be viewed as an institution’s efforts to demonstrate to external entities that organizational activities are effective, efficient, and relevant to the institution’s mission and goals (Alexander, 2000). Administrators are charged with the tasks of documenting the effectiveness of their institutions and ensuring the efficient use of resources. Efforts to document effectiveness typically focus on quantitative benchmarks of performance. Faculty, however, may resist efforts to quantify many of the intangible aspects of their work. Similarly, efforts to ensure efficiency may lead to the adoption of cumbersome resource allocation procedures that compel organizational members to align the purpose of their request with specific organizational objectives. Faculty may complain that such systems stifle creativity and innovation, because they create disincentives for doing anything new or different. For public institutions in particular, the pressures for demonstrating efficiency and effectiveness are acute (Morphew & Eckel, 2009). State governments may allocate funding to community colleges and public universities on the basis of institutional performance on a set of effectiveness benchmarks.These benchmarks

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ACCOUNTABILITY, EFFICIENCY, AND FACULTY POWER Some scholars have argued that pressures for accountability and efficiency from trustees and government officials have resulted in gains in administrative authority at the expense of faculty power (Burgan, 2006; Rhoades, 1998). Administrative efficiency initiatives, which seek to streamline academic decisionmaking, may also have the residual effect of diminishing faculty involvement in institutional governance. For example, Kean University in New Jersey eliminated nearly all of its academic departments and consolidated the programs into 18 schools, which would be led by administrators rather than by faculty members serving as department chairs. Administrators described the change as a costsaving move, while faculty characterized the effort as an attempt to weaken faculty participation in governance (Wilson, 2010, November 7). The growth in power of administration, which some scholars have labeled managerialism, is likely to widen the gap between the perspectives of faculty and those of administrators (Bess, 2006).

may include measures of graduation rates, student achievement, and faculty productivity. In some states, these efforts have led to enhanced scrutiny of faculty workloads. The Texas A&M system, for example, calculated an efficiency index for each faculty member. The index sought to determine whether faculty are generating more revenue than their payroll costs. The university calculated the total value of tuition generated by the classes taught by a faculty member, and then subtracted that faculty member’s salary and benefits from that amount (Mangan, 2010, September 15). Other states have required universities to document the amount of time that faculty spend teaching (Fairweather & Beach, 2002).These accountability initiatives are often viewed by faculty as simplistic and misleading ways to measure the impact of their work. Rhoades (1998), for example, argues that administrative oversight has transformed faculty teaching and research from autonomous professionalism to organizationally regulated work. Pressures associated with accountability and limited resources are coupled with increasing societal expectations that higher education institutions will provide greater access for student populations, serve as engines for economic development, and advance the public good through research discoveries and practical applications that improve the human condition.Thus, while resources are limited, expectations for higher education institutions are practically limitless. The inability to be “all things to all people” compels higher education leaders to establish priorities among competing goals and allocate resources accordingly. Disagreements, however, are likely to emerge regarding which organizational goals will be prioritized and funded.

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FACULTY AND ADMINISTRATOR CONFLICT OVER ASSESSMENT AT DSU Assessments of institutional quality, including those conducted through accreditation, have shifted in emphasis from inputs to outputs. Rather than equate quality with particular inputs to the organization (such as the percentage of faculty with terminal degrees or the SAT scores of entering students), those who evaluate colleges and universities are seeking to measure the outputs produced by the organization. Accreditation associations, for example, have been especially focused on the methods by which colleges and universities assess student learning outcomes. Faculty at our composite case study institution (DSU) described an increasing emphasis from university administrators for academic departments to develop more extensive systems to assess student learning outcomes. While faculty in programs with external accreditation had already been active in assessment, faculty in many liberal arts and sciences departments were unfamiliar with assessment practices. An administrator explained that: “In the past few years, every program in arts and sciences has documented intended learning outcomes and program objectives. The next phase is the development of objectives at the course level. This process has been intense, because only chemistry and secondary teacher education have external accrediting bodies that have established program-level learning objectives and standards.” Administrators typically viewed assessment as an extension of good teaching practice that should not greatly extend faculty workloads. One administrator noted that “the administration’s expectation is for faculty to embed assessment into their work such that it is not an add-on that would increase workload significantly.” Similarly, another administrator argued that: “I am always amazed when people react to assessment as something new. We’ve been doing assessment forever in higher education, but perhaps people were not paying as much attention to it. The difference is that now we are using assessment to improve what we are doing, rather than blaming the student. To some extent, the faculty member has to bear some responsibility if students are not learning, and we have to figure out why they are not learning.” In contrast, faculty generally viewed assessment as an administrative mandate that was accompanied by little support or training. A department chair in a

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professional field, for example, argued that “the administration sends down edicts [regarding assessment], but they haven’t been helpful in thinking through the systems and processes.” Likewise, a faculty member in the liberal arts, who serves as a departmental coordinator for assessment, argued that: “The charge by the administration is to show that you’ve got measurable outcomes. But this isn’t a good use of faculty time, because faculty are assessing students all the time through exams and other methods. Faculty have the time either to do the assessment, or to document how they do it, but not both.”

External relations. The increasing engagement of colleges and universities in the higher education marketplace and the growing need to document institutional effectiveness and efficiency have placed a premium on maintaining good external relations with key constituency groups. College and university presidents, in fact, spend most of their workdays interacting with actors beyond the institutional boundary. Deans, provosts, department chairs, and faculty are also spanning institutional boundaries to solidify the external standing of their respective academic units.While these external relationships can attract significant resources and fulfill important public service missions, these far-flung interactions have become increasingly difficult to manage, and have become a source of tension between faculty and administrators (Anderson, 2001; Campbell & Slaughter, 1999). As boundary spanners, administrators are likely to be in communication with a larger number of external stakeholders than faculty members are. Administrators meet with trustees, state policymakers, business and civic leaders, and administrators at other institutions. In this boundary-spanning role, administrators have a privileged position from which to assess and interpret the external environment. They can provide key information to decision-making groups, and shape how others in the organization make sense of complex and rapidly changing external conditions. But this boundary-spanning role also generates information asymmetries within the organization. Specifically, administrators will have more information about relevant external conditions than will faculty members. When information about the external environment is not shared, then faculty may come to believe that the administration has something to hide (White, Vanc, & Stafford, 2010). But when information is shared, it becomes subject to interpretation, and faculty may interpret the same information quite differently than administrators. Furthermore, if administrators seek to change how faculty interpret information, then they will encounter resistance from faculty who are likely to hold that their own interpretations are equally valid, or in fact more

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prescient and knowledgeable than the perspectives of administrators. Rather than try to change the perspectives of faculty after they have already formed, administrators can share information, withhold their own judgments, and collectively construct an interpretation with faculty. For example, administrators could share with faculty data on college outcomes for students from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups. If inequalities based on race or ethnicity are identified, then faculty and administrators can collectively interpret the data and design strategies for improving those outcomes. Bensimon’s (2004) Diversity Scorecard Project, in fact, uses those techniques to engage administrators and faculty in the ongoing work needed to ensure equitable outcomes in higher education. ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURES In this section, we explore some structural characteristics of colleges and universities that might explain why faculty-administrator interactions are so difficult, complicated, and potentially contentious. The structures of colleges and universities partake of the general trend toward a division of labor leading to more specialization of functions among departments and personnel. In turn, the division of labor engenders more parochial interests and demands, and, hence, potentially more conflict between and among the separated departments (Baldridge, 1971). Faculty and administrators play complementary social and functional roles in colleges and universities. The faculty are generally responsible for the production of outputs that allow the organization to fulfill its missions vis-à-vis various constituency groups (including students and research funding agencies). Faculty perform specialized research and teaching roles that generate innovations in thinking and practice. Administrators, on the other hand, usually play important supportive roles for their institutions. They are responsible for providing services that assure that faculty, students, and staff members can perform their roles efficiently and effectively. Faculty and administrative roles are broken down into sub-roles, some of which are at least partially self-defined and executed (as with faculty disciplinary specializations) and others of which are part of an administrative network guided by hierarchical controls. Top-level administrators are also empowered to set organizational policies and make many strategic decisions on behalf of the institution. In public and private higher education institutions, trustees delegate leadership authority to top-level administrators, who, by custom, permit faculty members to make decisions regarding key academic matters, including curriculum, teaching practices, and research agendas.This arrangement provides faculty with a high level of professional autonomy in their work. Conflicts arise, however, when the bureaucratic authority of administrators clashes with the professional autonomy of faculty members (Birnbaum, 2004).

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Structural differentiation. Colleges and universities are characterized by high levels of structural differentiation. A common expression is that higher education institutions are divided into distinct silos that have few connections among them (Benjamin & Carroll, 1998). Faculty are organized into structurally differentiated departments that are based on disciplinary traditions. These departmental groupings allow faculty with similar expertise and training to work together on matters pertaining to teaching, learning, and research. Efforts to get faculty to work together in interdisciplinary teams, however, often conflict with the bureaucratic imperatives of academic departments (Holley, 2009). Department chairs, for example, may not want faculty to participate in interdisciplinary initiatives that leave the department short-staffed to teach required courses in the discipline. If a faculty member teaches an interdisciplinary course, she might create a gap in her department’s curriculum. Administrative units are also highly differentiated by function, and linkages across divisions (for example, between academic affairs and student affairs) tend to be somewhat limited (Kezar & Lester, 2009). Structural differentiation presents a paradox for higher education institutions. High levels of structural differentiation are associated with work environments that foster innovation and creativity. Highly specialized personnel can focus on specific tasks, develop significant expertise in those areas, and generate high-quality outcomes (Damanpour, 1991). On the other hand, structural differentiation can generate significant coordination challenges for organizations (Leonard-Barton, 1992). Any initiative that requires collaboration across divisions or departments may be exceedingly difficult to carry out. Each specialized unit develops its own norms, values, and preferences, which might not be consistent with those that emerge in other units. Faculty in a chemistry department, for example, are likely to view the undergraduate curriculum differently than faculty in an English department. Furthermore, specialized units have a tendency to prioritize their own goals over those of the organization as a whole. This phenomenon, known as sub-optimization (Hitch, 1953), can generate conflict when departments resist calls to align their practices with institution-wide priorities. Faculty in a psychology department, for instance, may not invest much effort in a new university-wide assessment system, and instead focus their efforts on writing articles for journals. The journal articles may advance the reputation of the department, but the institutional goal of improving student learning is neglected. Organized anarchy. The coordination challenges brought about by structural differentiation have led some scholars to characterize higher education institutions as organized anarchies (Cohen, March, & Olsen, 1972). An organized anarchy functions as an organization (that is, it produces outputs consistent with its mission), but lacks a system of rational coordination to direct and guide unit and individual behavior. In such organizations, institution-wide planning and related strategic change initiatives may have little impact on faculty work or student learning (Birnbaum, 1988).

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Three characteristics define an organized anarchy: problematic goals, unclear technology, and fluid participation (Cohen et al., 1972). First, the goals of higher education institutions are problematic because they are often framed broadly, and therefore are vague and subject to debate and disagreement. Many institutions, for example, profess a goal for providing students with a “liberal education,” but people may disagree about what liberal education means, or how it can be measured. How does a college know when a student has been liberally educated? When goals are difficult to define and operationalize, significant conflict may emerge about the strategies and priorities of the institution. Second, technology refers to the processes that an organization uses to transform inputs (for example, students, ideas, and grant funding) into outputs (for example, educated citizens, new theories, and innovative research findings). Choices about which technology to use—such as which books to teach and whether to use online resources—are often left to individuals or their respective departments. Without an institution-wide agreement on a standardized technology, organizational members are likely to disagree regarding which technologies should be used. Some faculty, for example, will prefer large lecture classes, while others will want to teach small classes engaged in collaborative learning projects. Organizations with limited resources may struggle to accommodate and support the use of multiple technologies. Finally, fluid participation refers to patterns of involvement in campus committees and other decision-making groups. The membership of a campus committee may change dramatically over the course of an academic year, as new members are added and as other members lose interest and stop attending. Moreover, people who are not members of a particular committee may show up for a meeting, if an agenda item is relevant to their interests. This fluidity allows the organization to incorporate new perspectives into decision-making on a continuous basis, but the resulting discontinuity in committee membership and participation may make it difficult for the group to arrive at a consensus or to engage in collective action. Organized anarchy presents another paradox for higher education institutions. Broad goals enable the institution to pursue multiple aims simultaneously, but the lack of precision in goals leads to conflict over priorities.The lack of a standardized technology allows faculty to experiment and customize their approaches for specific courses and individual student needs, but the institution may not be able to support, financially or technically, the wide array of practices that organizational members want to implement. Fluid participation permits new ideas and perspectives to inform institutional decision-making, but can also delay or disrupt the decisions, if relevant information is not available when choices need to be made. Loose coupling. Loose coupling is another concept that can explain the structural challenges of higher education institutions, as well as reveal potential fault lines for conflict between faculty and administrators. Coupling refers to the level of connectedness that has been established between different components of the same

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organization (Orton & Weick, 1990; Weick, 1976). This level of connectedness reflects not only formal structural linkages, such as reporting lines on an organizational chart, but also informal structures and norms that characterize the relationship between the units. Consider, for example, the level of connectedness between an English department and an academic writing center. A formal structural connection might not exist between these units.The English department might report to a dean of arts and sciences, while the writing center might report to a dean or vice president for student services. However, these units might share a large number of informal linkages. Not only would English department faculty refer their undergraduate students to the writing center, but graduate students in the English department may work as writing tutors at that center. English department faculty might serve on an advisory committee for the writing center, given their expertise in composition. English department faculty and writing center staff might conduct research together or attend some of the same conferences and workshops. As a result, the level of coupling between these units would be stronger than the organizational chart would suggest. Loose coupling occurs when components of the same organization are responsive to each other in the absence of formal structures that require such responsiveness (Orton & Weick, 1990). In the example above, the English department and the writing center are loosely coupled. Given their informal linkages, the English department faculty and the writing center staff are likely in frequent communication with each other to share ideas and to improve services for students. The writing center would be responsive to the suggestions of the English department faculty, and the English department would be willing to modify its practices in composition courses if the writing center staff identified some promising practices. Note that these connections are not prescribed by the college’s organizational structure. The dean of arts and sciences is not requiring the English department to work with the writing center, nor is the vice president for student services mandating that writing center staff respond to suggestions from the English department. Instead, the coupling between the units has emerged primarily through informal norms and interpersonal relationships. In addition to loose coupling, two other forms of coupling are possible: tight coupling and decoupling. Under conditions of tight coupling, components of the same organization are responsive to each other due to a system of control. This system of control may be a formal structural hierarchy, or be the result of informal power dynamics that compel less powerful units to obey the commands of more powerful units, regardless of their position in the organizational hierarchy. The budgeting process on a campus might be tightly coupled to the institution’s strategic plan. In this case, all budget requests would be required to be justified in relation to priorities specified in the plan; if a budget request is not aligned with a strategic priority, then it will not be considered. Another possibility is decoupling, in which the organizational components are not responsive at all.There

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are no prescribed linkages, nor are there any informal norms or relationships that sustain an ongoing responsiveness. Academic departments, for example, may be decoupled from strategic initiatives implemented by administrators. Faculty in a chemistry department, for example, may not participate in (or even be aware of) a university-wide initiative to promote internationalization in the curriculum.That department is decoupled from the internationalization initiative. All three types of coupling present some challenges for faculty and administrators. Tight coupling tends to violate faculty preferences for autonomy and flexibility. Given their high level of professional expertise, faculty expect to be granted significant freedom in how they carry out their role. Norms of academic freedom and professional autonomy would conflict with the heavy-handed control systems of tight coupling. In our example, faculty members would want to be able to make the case for a particular resource request, even if it did not align with a particular strategic planning goal. A unique opportunity, which was not anticipated in the strategic plan, might emerge for the department and faculty would want the flexibility to pursue the new endeavor. Furthermore, tight coupling might cause an institution to “freeze” in uncertain times, as organizational members wait for top-level leaders to sort out the uncertainty and tell them how to proceed (Birnbaum, 1988; Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978). Decoupling leads to a lack of responsiveness that calls into question the accountability of the institution. If too many academic departments defect from an institution-wide initiative, then that effort is likely to fail. If too many departments defect from all institution-wide initiatives, then the institution ceases to function as an organization. Instead, each department operates as its own separate organization with little regard for the needs of other units. In this scenario, sub-optimization runs rampant, organizational goals are ignored, and overall effectiveness and accountability are compromised. Administrators may then seek to pull the reigns more tightly, and require departments to comply with formal policies, but this tighter coupling would likely be resisted by faculty. Not only would the tighter coupling generate faculty-administrator conflict, but the associated reduction in structural flexibility could also damage the capacity of the institution to engage in creative and innovative activity. Loose coupling can provide the interdepartmental responsiveness needed for successful change initiatives without compromising the autonomy of the respective departments (Dee, 2006). The potential downside, however, is unevenness and inconsistency across the organization. While the English department and the writing center might be responsive to each other, the math department might be decoupled from institutional efforts to provide instruction in basic math skills to entering students who are not ready for college-level math. Loosely coupled structures emerge informally, through frequent interactions that foster the growth of interpersonal relationships and shared interests. A loosely coupled structure cannot be created by a top-level administrator; such an attempt would be viewed

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as an imposition of a control system, and hence tight coupling. Instead, the role of top-level leaders is to create an “energizing context” in which loose couplings can emerge (Spender & Grinyer, 1995, p. 921). Administrators can create venues for informal communication or provide seed money for pilot projects; these initiatives could then spark the interactions and relationships needed to build loosely coupled structures. Proximity. Two structures of colleges and universities—the academic calendar and the physical location of offices—tend to limit the proximity of faculty and administrators, thus making consultation and collaboration somewhat difficult.The academic calendar typically contains a lengthy summer break and a hiatus between semesters, both of which can interrupt faculty-administrator collaboration and delay decision-making and related organizational change initiatives. Moreover, the physical layout of campus offices typically separates faculty and administrators into different buildings (Esterberg & Wooding, 2012), which limits opportunities for informal interactions and casual conversations in the hallway or around the water cooler. Despite significant changes in modes and processes of delivering higher education, colleges and universities still tend to abide by an academic calendar based in agrarian traditions. Institutional activity slows considerably during the summer months. Faculty tend to have nine-month employment contracts, and thus they tend not to be available during the summer to participate in institutional decision-making. Administrators, therefore, may believe that they need to delay key decisions until faculty return, or they may feel compelled to make decisions without faculty consultation. While some decisions can wait until the faculty return, other matters must be addressed during the summer. For budget purposes, the new fiscal year commonly begins on July 1, weeks after many faculty depart for the summer; therefore, faculty may not be available to provide input on final budget decisions. Employment and Reward Structures The resolution of conflict is difficult partly because many faculty members have long-term appointments, often secured by tenure or other contracts. Tenured faculty may be somewhat intractable with respect to change (Trower, 2006).They may be comfortable with the status quo and do not want to risk the benefits of their job security. As a result, tenured faculty may decide to “wait out” administrators whose attention might shift to other issues or who might leave the institution altogether. If tenured faculty can delay decision-making processes long enough, then the initiative may never be implemented, because administrative attention has been directed elsewhere. In fact, given that the average term in office for a provost is less than five years, the “wait-it-out” strategy may be highly rational for tenured faculty who oppose administrative plans for change (Esterberg &

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Wooding, 2012). The relatively brief terms in office of senior administrators can produce other negative effects on faculty-administrator relations. Faculty who want to collaborate on change initiatives may be wary in their interactions with administrators whom they think may be using their college as a stepping stone to a more lucrative or prestigious administrative post elsewhere. Faculty may question whether an administrator is more concerned about improving the institution or about enhancing his or her future job prospects. Institutional reward systems may also play a role in heightening tensions between faculty and administrators. Faculty rewards, including tenure, focus on individual accomplishment, rather than collective contributions to the institution. Administrators, therefore, will encounter difficulties in building collaboration for change; faculty will perceive few incentives for participating in such timeconsuming efforts. Thus, higher education encounters a paradox: tenured faculty are long-term employees but they are generally not focused on the organization as a whole, while administrators are focused on the total institution but they seldom stay in the role for very long. The tenure system, however, has been eroded to some extent by the proliferation of part-time and non-tenure faculty appointments (Schuster & Finkelstein, 2006). These contingent appointments advance the aims of academic capitalism, because faculty employment contracts can be initiated or terminated quickly based on revenue growth or decline. Colleges and universities can experiment with new academic offerings without the long-term investment associated with hiring tenure-track faculty. On the other hand, this trend suggests that an increasing number of faculty will not have the same academic freedom protections as previous generations of faculty. Without the protection of tenure, contingent faculty may be unwilling to speak out or challenge an administrative policy for fear of losing their job. Meanwhile, responsibilities for academic decision-making fall to a relatively smaller core of tenure-eligible faculty. In this context, rather than become engaged in potentially overwhelming committee service, faculty may defect from governance responsibilities and focus their efforts instead on teaching and research (Tierney & Minor, 2003). A further consideration in understanding conflict between faculty and administrators is the growth in appointments of non-academic administrators and consultants. Many academic administrators are former faculty members, and, therefore, they share a common professional background and perhaps some mutual understandings with faculty. Non-academic administrators, in units such as information technology, finance, and enrollment management, may have little understanding of the day-to-day challenges of being a faculty member. As a result, they may have little appreciation for academic freedom, shared governance, or faculty autonomy. Faculty may find their communications to be particularly challenging with non-academic administrators, and they may expect academic administrators to intervene on their behalf. But academic and non-academic

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administrators are linked together through the same administrative hierarchy, and they might be seeking to obtain similar types of compliance from the faculty. SHARED GOVERNANCE IN COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES Faculty and administrators have come to be responsible generally for quite different organizational tasks, though, in certain circumstances, defined by academic governance policies, they have joint jurisdiction over particular domains. The system that defines those tasks and that conjoins faculty and administration in a shared governance model is set out formally in the joint statement by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP, 2001). Unfortunately, the system of formal sharing of governance is imperfect, unwieldy, and slow, and it breaks down under certain circumstances. As in all organizations, an informal system of decision-making emerges in parallel with the formal system. This informal system operates on the basis of interpersonal trust, rather than through formal organizational structures (Kezar, 2004; Rousseau, Sitkin, Burt, & Camerer, 1998). Informal systems of governance, however, are somewhat unreliable (Leslie, 1975), in part because these systems may lack strong unifying norms given the dispersion of faculty interests. Specifically, the division of labor in academia encumbers different groups of faculty with stronger parochial interests than interests in the commons (Ostrom, 1990), and because trust itself as a norm and value must be assiduously promulgated, especially in organizational systems that are complex and decentralized (Tierney, 2006). Researchers have proposed many reforms in structure and changes in organizational culture to improve the effectiveness of governance. Of particular note is the focus on the problems of shared governance, which requires not only formal participation by constituents, but also a set of supporting norms and values in the system as a whole (Association of Governing Boards, 2000; Keller, 1983; Kezar, 2004; Schuster et al., 1994; Tierney, 2006; Tierney & Minor, 2003). Although much time and effort are spent by members of colleges and universities on refining governance procedures and policies, often the same persistent facultyadministrator conflicts recur in much the same forms and stem from issues that are reasonably well known—such as institutional priorities, budgets, and personnel policies. To understand fully the dynamics of the relationships between faculty and administration, we must examine the typical formal organizational structure of both groups. While formal structures may provide an incomplete portrait of organizational reality, they do constitute one of the more stable and predictable avenues of communication between faculty and administration.The most common formal structural manifestation of shared power and responsibility for elements of decision-making has been constituted across the academic world as a

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representative senate. Some senates are institution-wide and command representation by democratically elected organizational members. Institution-wide senates are often made up of representatives from most of the constituencies on a campus, including the faculty, the administration, the student body, the union (if one exists), and others. The domain of their activities extends to a wide variety of decisions that the institution makes (that is, not just to faculty matters). Administrative representatives to institution-wide senates are sometimes appointed by upper-level leaders (for example, the president) and sometimes elected by administrative staff in proportion to their numbers in the institution. Other senates are more formally called faculty senates. The domain of their power is limited to faculty matters, and their members are exclusively faculty. In addition to individual membership and representation on the various decision-making bodies noted above, decisions in higher education are also made by numerous standing committees, comprising representatives from the formal bodies or departments that correspond to functions performed for the institution as a whole. Thus, there are committees responsible for attending to, for example, fiscal matters, curricular issues, long-term planning, and ceremonial functions. Membership on a senate, or on another institutional decision-making committee, is often conveyed with the expectation that individuals will act in the interest of the institution as a whole, rather than seek to advance the more parochial interests of their particular department or office (Rosovsky, 1990).The assumption is that senate members will be able to set aside their self-interests for the good of the organization. If faculty have a long-term interest in the overall health and prestige of the institution in which they work, then they likely can be trusted to make decisions that advance the goals of the organization as a whole (Eckel, 2000). Consultation is a hallmark of shared governance, but also comprises a source of tension between faculty and administrators. The AAUP (2001) statement on

CONFLICTS OVER SENATE MEMBERSHIP Issues regarding senate membership are often contentious. A long-standing effort to gain representation for clinical (non-tenure) faculty on the faculty senate at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), for example, was overturned by administrators who argued that only tenure-eligible faculty can be entrusted to guide the governance of the institution. The conflict exposed a more fundamental issue regarding who had the authority to change the constitution of the faculty senate. After failure to reach an agreement, the administration suspended the faculty senate and replaced it with an interim governance system, which faculty argued put too much power in the hands of administrators (Berrett, 2011, February 2).

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governance proclaims that faculty should be consulted on all matters of academic policy and that faculty should have authority to determine the curriculum. Administrators, however, may develop forms of consultation that faculty view as inadequate. For example, campus administrators might create a review committee to examine a new policy proposal, or they might refer the proposal to the faculty senate. While faculty on the committee or the senate might feel engaged in the process, other faculty might feel as if they were not consulted. They might complain that the committee members were handpicked by the administration, so that supporters of the policy populated the committee, while known opponents were excluded. Or faculty might claim that they were not consulted because their colleagues on these committees and senates never conveyed the information back to them. Administrators might also experience frustration when they attempt to consult faculty. In their study of faculty-administrator communication, Esterberg and Wooding (2012) found that administrators became frustrated when faculty did not respond to e-mails that sought their input, when faculty did not attend informational meetings, and when faculty did not respond when their opinions were solicited.

CONCERNS ABOUT CONSULTATION AT DSU University administrators have advanced numerous organizational changes at our case study institution (DSU) in recent years. These initiatives have focused on student advising, the first-year experience, the assessment of student learning outcomes, and internationalization, to name just a few. While faculty generally agreed with administrators that changes in university practices were needed, they expressed concerns regarding a lack of consultation for these types of decisions. Faculty indicated that the administration tends to issue new policies and develop new structures without involving faculty in the decision-making process in a meaningful way. A department chair in arts and sciences stated that “the administration’s biggest problem is that it tends to announce a new policy or plan without including faculty in the decision-making process.” Faculty offered several examples of administrative decisions that were made, in their view, without appropriate consultation. A faculty member in arts and sciences noted that: “The administration does come across as heavy-handed at times. For example, they went ahead and started using a voluntary undergraduate assessment tool that they did not consult the faculty about. The faculty probably would not have supported it, but at least they should have been consulted.”

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PERENNIAL CONFLICTS Faculty offered two contrasting examples of consultation at DSU: a first-year experience program that was developed with extensive faculty involvement and support, and an unpopular advising initiative that moved forward without sufficient consultation. Regarding the first-year experience program, a faculty member explained that: “[Administrators] went to us with a plan that we didn’t like. It was a little too touchy-feely. Faculty wanted a little more of an academic focus in the first-year seminars. So they went back and reworked the plan more to our liking. Now, lots of faculty want to teach first-year seminar. If they had gone forward with that other proposal, there is no way they would have gotten that many of us on board.” Another faculty member drew a contrast between the consultation that occurred around the development of the first-year experience program and the lack of faculty involvement in establishing the new advising system: “The firstyear experience program is an example of a faculty-supported initiative that has worked well, but the advising center is an initiative that is not popular among the faculty.” A department chair in a professional field described how student advising was restructured at DSU: “Under the new model, freshmen and sophomores will be advised at the advising center. After their sophomore year, students are moved to a school-based advising center . . . The administration made the decision to restructure advising without consulting with everyone.” A department chair in arts and sciences identified the decision to create a university-wide advising center as “an example of administration’s unilateral decision-making.”

As McConnell and Mortimer (1971) observed decades ago: The governance of colleges and universities is a delicate and often fragile pattern of authority, power, and influence. The framework of governance is rapidly changing. Many constituencies—governing boards, faculties, students, and, in many cases, government agencies—are vying for stronger voices in decisions that profoundly affect the character of their institutions, and the outcome of this contest is difficult to predict. (p. 1) Despite the predictions of McConnell and Mortimer, we see, in hindsight, that many of the basic structural elements in faculty and administrative decision-making have not changed significantly. The enduring components of shared governance

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are partially a function of isomorphism. Most colleges and universities tend to replicate the governance systems and practices of their peer institutions. The formats for collective decision-making continue to reflect the institutional prerequisite for communication and reassurance of the status quo, as well as the necessity for constituent input into new ideas that need to be considered by the entire organization—ideas that capture the emerging structure and power of the environments external and internal to the institution. The implication of this configuration, however, is that there is a huge potential for conflict—conflict over jurisdiction, conflict over substance, conflict over institutional goals, and conflict over timing. In most higher education institutions, faculty and administrators each lay claim to the authority to govern—that is, to exercise legitimate (formal) authority to make decisions, either alone or in shared procedures. In this context, it is easy to appreciate why there is conflict over the legitimacy of the power to decide. Often, groups that have vested interests in certain decisions feel that they must use power or must bargain for the right to participate in institutional decisions. The power for each group frequently is drawn from different bases. Birnbaum (2004) notes that the authority of trustees and administration is based on legal authority, while faculty power rests, at least in part, on the professional authority of its members, both individually and collectively. Conflict in colleges and universities often emerges over the subject of legitimacy or jurisdiction over goals, priorities, and budget allocations. Jurisdictional conflicts are likely to arise when administrators use their authority to exclude or minimize the involvement of faculty in institutional decision-making processes. In these scenarios, faculty are likely to claim that the norms and principles of shared governance have been violated, while administrators are likely to counter that faculty are not capable of acting as disinterested stewards of the institution. Administrators may claim that faculty would simply seek to protect their own departments and individual interests, especially when the issue of retrenchment is on the table (Eckel, 2000).

CONFLICT OVER RETRENCHMENT PLANS In 2010, conflicts over program closures emerged at Florida State University, where 10 undergraduate and three graduate programs were terminated or suspended. Sixty-two faculty members, including 21 with tenure, were dismissed. Faculty governance leaders said that they were shut out of the decision-making process, while administrators argued that placing the decision in the hands of the faculty senate would have resulted in a highly politicized process (Glenn & Schmidt, 2010, March 28).

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Decisions about which new academic programs should be developed constitute another arena in which administrative authority is likely to conflict with the professional autonomy of faculty. For example, administrators may propose the development of a new academic program to capture an emerging enrollment market (for example, a degree program in homeland security), but faculty may counter that the proposed curriculum lacks sufficient intellectual rigor and/or lacks a sufficient number of full-time faculty to provide intellectual leadership for the program. In many instances, higher education institutions have dealt with this conflict by creating new academic structures that exist outside the purview of academic departments and faculty governance committees. New programs, for example, may be implemented by continuing education divisions or online education units, where curricula are developed by academic managers, rather than by faculty, and where the courses are taught by part-time faculty on limited-term contracts (Toma, 2007). These arrangements, however, do not mitigate the underlying tensions between administrative authority and faculty autonomy, and similar conflicts between these groups are likely to re-erupt. While above we observed that the current nominal configuration of decisionmaking bodies in colleges and universities has changed relatively little in recent years, the fact is that there has been a large shift in the definitions and power of the sub-functions of the different groups. The two constituencies do not have equal status or power in organizational matters. In faculty-administration communication, there is inevitably an imbalance in power, though the nature and extent of that imbalance are often unknown. Administrators have certain powers that can deeply affect the lives of faculty (for example, compensation and course assignments). Administrators not only have the authority to develop the institution’s decision-making venues, but they frequently have the capacity to appoint the members of various committees and task forces. They can also choose to dismantle a particular decision-making structure if the members of that body are unlikely to support administrative priorities. Faculty, on the other hand, have less direct formal power vis-à-vis the administration, although votes of “no confidence” and union actions on some campuses can undermine administrative agendas, and informal coalitions of faculty power clearly can influence administrative decision-making. Given the power dynamics between the groups, communications between faculty and administration may not expose underlying conflicts out of fear of retribution by the other side. In organizations where such fears are prevalent, weaknesses and problems may be withheld or disguised, which, in turn, undermines the capacity of the organization to engage in critical analysis and problem-solving (Gouran & Hirokawa, 1996). Furthermore, some facultyadministrator conflicts may be viewed by the conflicting parties as unresolvable, especially when members of each group appear to be permanently at odds with each other and/or they represent long-standing positions that the parties fail to

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address for fear of opening up a wider range of problems that the institution would prefer not to have exposed. Ironically, both faculty and administrators may report a sense of powerlessness in their interactions with the other group. In several surveys, faculty have reported that their influence in governance has declined, while the authority of administrators has increased. In a 2007 international survey, 64 percent of U.S. faculty respondents described their institution as having a top-down management style, and only 31 percent agreed or strongly agreed that there is collegiality in decision-making at their institution (Cummings & Finkelstein, 2009). Critics have decried a growing managerialism in colleges and universities, and have raised concerns about an erosion of faculty power and threats to academic freedom (Burgan, 2006; Rhoades, 1998). Administrators, however, also report a sense of powerlessness and frustration in not being able to convince faculty of the need for change (Tagg, 2012; Trower, 2006). In their interviews with academic administrators, Esterberg and Wooding (2012) found high levels of frustration among administrators who believed that faculty blocked needed changes. Clark Kerr (1982), president of the University of California system during the 1960s, once noted that the most likely outcome of a faculty committee is the status quo, because that is the only outcome that cannot be vetoed. This sense of powerlessness among faculty and administrators may provoke defensive reactions from both groups. If administrators feel powerless vis-à-vis faculty, then they might perceive any faculty concern as an expression of petty self-interest. If faculty feel powerless vis-à-vis administrators, then they might perceive any administrative policy as an infringement of faculty autonomy. When both groups feel powerless, their communications will likely be characterized by a continuous cycle of recriminations, charges, and countercharges (Gamson, 1968; Mintzberg, 1983). FACULTY AND ADMINISTRATOR IDENTITIES Communications and interactions between faculty and administrators are complicated by the distinctly different professional identities of these two groups. If we view faculty and administrators as distinct occupational subcultures, then we can begin to take note of the ways in which the values, beliefs, and norms of one group may differ substantially from those of the other group. The identities of faculty members are often shaped much more extensively by their disciplines, rather than by their employing institutions. Particularly in research universities, faculty values and beliefs may be shaped more extensively by other colleagues in their field, rather than by their colleagues on their campuses. Scholars who study faculty identities have used Gouldner’s (1957, 1958) conceptualization of cosmopolitans and locals to explain faculty orientations toward their work (Rhoades, Kiyama, McCormick, & Quiroz, 2008). According

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to Gouldner, cosmopolitan workers have a high level of commitment to external groups and a low level of commitment to their employing organization. In contrast, locals have a high level of commitment to the institution and a low level of engagement with external groups. In the case of faculty, relevant external groups would include professional associations in their respective disciplines, as well as faculty colleagues in their field who work at other institutions. Faculty identities are structured in relation to the academic profession (Becher & Trowler, 2001; Henkel, 2000). In spite of substantial differences among the disciplines, nearly all faculty are socialized into a common set of professional norms and values regarding autonomy, academic freedom, shared governance, and the pursuit of knowledge (Merton, 1973). Social groups also tend to define themselves in opposition to a reference group. That is, groups define themselves not only in terms of what they are (or want to be), but also in terms of what they are not (or what they do not want to be). In colleges and universities, faculty identities are shaped in opposition to the administration. While this us-versus-them mentality may strengthen solidarity within the group, this mindset creates problems when collaboration and collective action are needed to advance organizational goals. The structuring of faculty identities in opposition to the administration is commonplace, regardless of institutional type or faculty disciplinary affiliation, and may take the form of denigrating or demonizing administrators. For example, faculty may express disapproval when they learn that a colleague is planning to accept an administrative appointment. The common expression is that the faculty member has “gone to the dark side” if he or she becomes an administrator. The “dark side” reference comes from the 1977 movie Star Wars, in which the villain, Darth Vader, attempts to coerce the young protagonist, Luke Skywalker, into abandoning his values and joining Darth Vader as an apprentice to evil. In this context, the dark side refers to using one’s powers for evil, rather than good.While faculty may make this reference in a lighthearted way, the prevalence of this metaphor suggests that it resonates strongly with the faculty identity. Administrative identities are also shaped in opposition to the faculty identity. Academic administrators are often former faculty. A faculty member becomes a department chair, then receives an appointment as a dean, and perhaps eventually serves as a provost or president. Despite their prior service as faculty, new administrators may quickly adopt an administrative identity. In her study of faculty who became administrators, McLellan (2007) found that most new administrators adopted an administrative identity within their first year in the role. Similarly, Esterberg and Wooding (2012) found that several new administrators were surprised by how quickly they embraced an administrative perspective on campus issues, and how readily they began to characterize the faculty as problematic. New administrators begin to view other administrators as their colleagues; they communicate more frequently with other administrators than with faculty, and they share common tasks regarding the management of the institution such as

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budgets, enrollments, and personnel matters. An us-versus-them mentality sets in, as administrators share “war stories” about outlandish professors. This sharp division between faculty and administrative identities leads to the formation of oppositional subcultures, which have different norms and values and attach different stakes to organizational issues. Neither the faculty nor the administration is a monolith. It must be recognized that there is no single faculty culture or uniform set of faculty attitudes and values (Schuster & Finkelstein, 2006). Partly because of inherent metaphysical, epistemological, and axiological differences among disciplines, as well as variations in research styles and practices, faculty members do not always form a unified group “against” administrators (Gumport, 1993). Only when the common concerns of all or most faculty are salient will faculty from different disciplinary allegiances be open, at least potentially, to joining forces. Thus, any college administration must deal both with the entire faculty and with each faculty subculture within the institution (Lin & Ha, 2009). Likewise, it is problematic to consider “the administration” as a monolithic cultural group. Clearly, there are important differences between academic and nonacademic administrators. Most academic administrators will have had prior work experience as faculty members themselves, while non-academic administrators may not have advanced degrees and may not understand the unique concerns and professional prerogatives of the professoriate. Moreover, there are often significant tensions within the administrative ranks, especially when top-level leaders such as deans and vice presidents jockey for position when institutional budgets are established. Thus, when faculty communicate with administrators, they need to consider the multiple, unique subcultures of administration, and avoid broad characterizations that may unfairly stereotype certain administrative subgroups (for example, faculty members assuming that student affairs administrators focus only on “fun and games” and have little to contribute to student learning). CONCLUSION In this chapter, we examined how the external environments of colleges and universities have become more competitive and have compelled greater attention to efficiency and effectiveness. Colleges and universities are set in a social system that, at least partially, constrains each institution to conform to widespread beliefs and practices (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983, 1991; Martin, 1998; Morphew, 2009). These external pressures, combined with highly differentiated internal structures, create conditions that are favorable for the development of faculty-administrator conflict. Furthermore, the professional identities of administrators and faculty are constructed, at least in part, in direct opposition to each other.Thus, to be a faculty member means to view administrators as “the enemy” (at least potentially so), and

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becoming an administrator means shedding one’s faculty identity and assuming the managerial mindset. In the next chapter, we explore the types and sources of organizational conflict in relation to faculty and administrators.We show that conflicts often arise because of underlying mismatches in the deeper philosophical premises held by faculty and administrators. We will consider why current decision-making structures and processes are inadequate for addressing the deeper underlying sources of conflict between faculty and administration, and why a fundamentally different sort of thinking is required.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE Reframing our thinking about conflict. In higher education institutions, conflict may be viewed as a violation of collegial norms and a deviation from the rational discourse that administrators and faculty believe should characterize their interactions. This view suggests that conflict represents an individual or organizational failure to maintain harmony and productivity. Given those assumptions, administrators and faculty will tend to avoid conflict, either by not expressing disagreement or by minimizing differences when they emerge. Conflict avoidance, however, may be only a temporary remedy, as the underlying tensions between the groups will remain unaddressed and therefore likely to re-emerge at any time. Furthermore, the potential benefits of constructive conflict, such as innovation, creativity, and critical analysis, are lost when conflict is avoided. Rather than characterize conflict as indicative of failure, administrators and faculty can view conflict as an opportunity for change and improvement. Relationships between shared governance and conflict. Shared governance is a hallmark of higher education decision-making. The collaboration between administrators and faculty can result in higher-quality decisions and actions that benefit the entire institutional community. However, governance committees are frequently venues of significant conflict between administrators and faculty, and the leaders of these decision-making bodies need to be skillful in the management of conflict. We suggest that colleges and universities can build conflict management skills by convening a summit of governance leaders. Faculty senate leaders, the chairs of major committees, and senior administrators can work together to identify and foster productive norms for the expression and management of conflict. Relationships between consultation and conflict. In systems of shared governance, faculty members often expect that administrators will consult them, regarding proposals for new policies or strategies for the future development of the institution. An important challenge in shared governance, however, is that

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administrators and faculty may differ in their interpretations of consultation. Administrators may think that they have consulted the faculty on a particular matter, but faculty may believe that administrators have ignored or disregarded their input. Consultation involves not just the act of consulting the other group, but also the perception by the other group that they have been consulted. Colleges and universities, therefore, could benefit from conversations that establish mutual agreement regarding appropriate forms and modes of consultation. Once the parties agree upon a set of consultation practices, then they also need to agree to implement those practices consistently. Administrators should not seek shortcuts around consultation, and faculty should become more routinely engaged in the opportunities for consultation that are available. Below, we suggest some consultation practices that administrators and faculty can discuss and potentially implement: n

n

n

n

Opportunities for consultation should be widely publicized and with sufficient notice so that potential participants can arrange their schedules to attend. Administrators may need to use multiple forms of consultation to reach faculty who have different levels of knowledge and engagement in the issue. An open meeting or a community forum might be necessary when the issue is new or not well understood. In contrast, a quick e-mail survey seeking input might suffice when everyone has a good understanding of the matter. Faculty senates and governance committees may not represent the views of the total faculty, and, therefore, they might not be sufficient mechanisms for consultation. If administrators seek input only from these formal bodies, then they will exclude large numbers of faculty from the consultative process. The time period for consultation should be specified at the beginning of the process, and should not be left open-ended. Necessary changes could be delayed by elongated periods of consultation. However, the time period should not be so limited that it constrains participation. Organizational members should be given sufficient time to reflect on the proposal, discuss its implications, and develop collective responses.

Decisions about who decides. Jurisdictional conflicts are among the most virulent disputes in all of higher education. Higher education institutions often lack clear protocols for assigning certain types of decisions to specific decisionmaking bodies. Thus, the assignment of an issue to a particular decision-making group is often at the discretion of administrators. Faculty, however, may object to those choices, particularly if they believe that the selected decision-making group does not represent faculty interests. Thus, administrators and faculty may

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become engaged in heated arguments even before they begin to discuss the matter at hand. Despite the prevalence of jurisdictional conflicts, administrators and faculty seldom discuss the criteria by which various issues are assigned to different decision-making bodies. In fact, those criteria are often implicit and not well understood. If these criteria are made explicit, then administrators and faculty can discuss the relevance and appropriateness of those criteria. In this way, jurisdictional conflicts can be avoided, thus giving space to other types of conflict—such as critical assessment of plans and ideas—that can actually yield positive results. Dealing with information asymmetries. Administrators will tend to have more information than faculty regarding conditions in the external environment and initiatives operating at the level of the entire organization. Therefore, faculty will be at an information disadvantage in their interactions with administrators. In response, administrators can share relevant information with faculty, but faculty will likely attribute their own meanings and interpretations to those data. If faculty interpretations differ significantly from those of administrators, then administrators could seek to change how faculty view the situation. Faculty, however, will likely resist administrative persuasion and persist in the belief that their interpretation is valid. As an alternative, we suggest that administrators can share information, withhold their own initial judgments, and collectively construct an interpretation with faculty.

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Chapter 2

Paradigm Differences as the Underlying Sources of Conflict between Faculty and Administrators INTRODUCTION This chapter addresses the problems and inefficiencies of conflicts among different constituencies on college and university campuses, conflicts that often arise, as we will show, because of underlying mismatches in the deeper philosophical premises held by faculty and administrators and in the communication protocols that are used or misused. Critical problems remain, largely because significant philosophical differences between faculty and administrators too often leave attempts at reform insufficiently addressed and the “solutions” still deeply problematic and ineffective (Bess, 2006). We begin this chapter with a discussion of theory and research on organizational conflict and conflict management.This body of literature suggests that conflict can have positive or negative effects on individual and organizational outcomes. Whether the effects are positive or negative depends, in part, on how conflict is managed. Thus, we suggest that conflict management entails a complex balancing act between enhancing the positive functions of conflict, while minimizing the dysfunctions. Following our analysis of conflict, we introduce the central theses of the book. They involve an extensive description of the nature of paradigms and their role in shaping organizational communication and interpersonal interactions. We suggest that paradigm differences constitute the source of the most vexing conflicts between faculty and administration, and efforts to address such conflicts need to bring to the surface these paradigm differences, so that they can be discussed, understood, and incorporated more productively into the decisionmaking and problem-solving processes of colleges and universities. CONFLICT IN ORGANIZATIONS Conflict is one of the most widespread and salient of organizational phenomena. It is a topic of daily conversation on most campuses. In point of fact, conflict is

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omnipresent in higher education, though its severity and impact wax and wane as different issues arise and different constituencies attach themselves with varying strengths to those issues. Since all institutions must operate with a modicum of stability, the salience of conflict is important for leaders to address. An open system of severe conflict is disruptive to the institution and usually is avoided whenever possible. Conflict is also the subject of a voluminous body of literature (see, for example, Thomas, 1976). The many definitions of conflict run from the omnibus and simplistic to the more sophisticated. The following is a well-known example: “a conflict exists whenever incompatible activities occur . . . An action that is incompatible with another action prevents, obstructs, interferes, injures, or in some way makes the latter less likely or less effective” (Deutsch, 1973, p. 10). Another example is: Conflict may be defined as a situation of competition in which the parties are aware of the incompatibility of potential future positions and in which each party wishes to occupy a position that is incompatible with the wishes of the other. (Boulding, 1963, p. 5) The concept of awareness is particularly important to an understanding of conflict. The differences between the parties need to surpass a threshold level of intensity so that the parties become aware of the conflict. Conflict within an organization can be classified as interpersonal, intra-group, or inter-group (Rahim, 2002). Interpersonal conflict occurs when two or more individuals become aware of their differences, disagreements, or incompatibilities. The individuals involved in an interpersonal conflict may be from the same or different hierarchical levels or departments. A conflict between two tenured faculty members in a biology department is an example of an interpersonal conflict at the same hierarchical level, in the same unit. A conflict between a provost and a faculty member crosses hierarchical levels and units. Intra-group conflict refers to disagreements and disputes that emerge between members of a group, or between subgroups with the group. For example, faculty and administrators may comprise conflicting subgroups on a strategic planning committee, if they disagree about the future priorities for the institution. Finally, inter-group conflict is defined as a dispute or disagreement between two or more organizational units. An inter-group conflict might emerge between an academic department and an institutional assessment office, if the members of these units disagree about the best way to assess student learning. The study of organizational conflict has tended to emphasize its dysfunctional qualities (Pondy, 1967; Wall & Callister, 1995). Conflict is viewed as a disruption or deviation from the necessary work of the organization. Such disputes detract

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time and effort away from performing tasks and achieving goals. We might spend more time fighting about what we want to do than we spend actually doing the work. As a result, organizational effectiveness is likely to decline and organizational members are likely to become dissatisfied in their jobs (Pelled, 1996; Staw, Sandelands, & Dutton, 1981). Other scholars have focused on the functional benefits of conflict (Coser, 1956; Follett, 1924; Janis, 1982). Organizational conflict can surface new ideas and generate more robust analyses of organizational conditions, which, in turn, can improve decision-making (Gouran & Hirokawa, 1996). Conflict can also enable new leaders to emerge and heighten organizational awareness of the need for change (Fiol, 1994). From this view, conflict provides a needed destabilization of the status quo so that the organization can identify problems, generate innovative solutions, and adapt to changing conditions. The long-term effectiveness of the organization can be enhanced through the flexibility and creativity that conflicts generate. In contrast, the absence of conflict can signal complacency and decline. Minor and Tierney (2005), in a case study of a university with stable, consensusbased governance practices, found that faculty and administrators were not engaged in debates over key questions regarding the future of higher education, and this lack of conflict had compromised that institution’s ability to adapt and respond to a changing environment. Here, more conflict between faculty and administrators was needed, not less. TASK AND RELATIONSHIP CONFLICT Whether a dispute generates functional or dysfunctional outcomes may depend on the type of conflict that emerges. There are essentially two general but related types of conflict in organizations—task and relationship conflict (Guetzkow & Gyr, 1954; Jehn & Mannix, 2001). Task conflict (also known as substantive conflict) describes an organizational condition that needs remediation to eliminate misfits between or among organizational elements or to improve efficiencies in problem-solving among disparate elements. That is, the functional subunits of the organization are not able to exchange materials or information in an accurate and timely fashion.These conflicts arise from errors or disagreements in the allocation of tasks to various units within the organization and in the sequencing, prioritizing, or processing of those tasks, which may interfere with the smooth input-output functioning of the entire organization. This is a common condition in higher education organizations (Bess & Dee, 2008). A second basic form of conflict is relationship conflict (also known as affective conflict), which typically stems from interpersonal differences and incompatibilities in attitudes and personality within or between organizational entities (Amason, 1996). For example, though a faculty member and a budget manager may actually agree on goals for the institution, they may not be able to collaborate

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because their attitudes differ about commitment to work and/or emphases to be placed on goals and their priorities. Relationship conflict tends to generate negative outcomes for individuals and organizations. In a study of organizational groups and teams, Jehn (1995) found that high levels of relationship conflict were associated with lower levels of job satisfaction and a stronger desire to leave the group. Other research has shown that the stress and anxiety of relationship conflict tends to impair people’s cognitive functioning and reduces their ability to process complex information (Roseman, Wiest, & Swartz, 1994; Staw et al., 1981). Furthermore, organizational effectiveness is damaged under conditions of high relationship conflict, because people are unlikely to be receptive to new information provided by people whom they do not like (Pelled, 1996). Jehn (1995) also found that people experiencing relationship conflict tended to spend a great deal of time finding workarounds so that they would not have to interact with particular individuals. Rather than work with a team member whom they did not like, they sought help from coworkers outside their team. These workarounds, however, can create organizational inefficiencies. Requests that could have been handled more quickly within the team were farmed out to coworkers in other units. These coworkers would respond to requests from members of other teams, but only after they had completed their work for their own team—thus, slowing down work processes in the team that had asked for outside help. In contrast, research suggests that task conflict can have positive implications for organizational decision-making and effectiveness. Putnam (1994) found that task conflict can help organizational members identify and better understand organizational problems. Task conflict appears to have a strong potential for mitigating the groupthink phenomenon, in which people forge a quick consensus, fail to present dissenting points of view, and therefore overlook important information or superior alternatives (Janis, 1982). Creative ideas can be considered and critical analysis can take place when task conflicts emerge. The conflict compels the group to consider multiple alternatives before moving forward with a course of action, and this additional level of analysis often leads to better decisions. Studies also show that task conflict can foster organizational learning (Fiol, 1994), lead to more efficient use of resources, and improve customer service (Tjosvold, Dann, & Wong, 1992). The positive benefits of task conflict may be conditional, based on the type of task and the total amount of conflict. Jehn (1995) found that task conflict has a positive effect on group performance when the task is non-routine. Non-routine tasks are not guided by standard operating procedures or detailed employee manuals. Instead, these tasks have a high degree of uncertainty and variability, which call for customized rather than standardized approaches (Perrow, 1986). The design of a new academic program, the revision of an existing curriculum, and the development of a new research center would each involve many non-

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routine tasks. Groups performing non-routine tasks engage in high levels of problem-solving, and therefore benefit from the critical analysis and creativity that can emerge from task conflict. Jehn (1995) found, however, that task conflict had a negative effect when the group was working on a routine task. When the procedures for completing a task are already clearly spelled out, as they are for routine tasks, extensive debate and disagreement only decrease productivity (Hackman, Brousseau, & Weiss, 1976). The total amount of conflict can also determine whether task conflict is functional. Researchers have found a curvilinear relationship between task conflict and individual and group performance (see Figure 2.1). Jehn (1995) suggests that it is likely “that there is an optimal level of task conflict beyond or below which individual and group performance diminishes” (p. 261).Too little task conflict and performance suffers due to lack of critical analysis and diminished creativity. Too much task conflict and the group will be unable to proceed with coordinated action. Gersick (1989) found that groups with extreme amounts of task conflict were unable to move to productive stages of work. Given these research findings, the major challenge is to design organizational communication venues that allow task conflict to be expressed at sufficient levels, and to enact processes that enable the group to take what they have learned through conflict and apply that knowledge to improve organizational performance. Task conflict can be further classified based on a means-ends distinction (Collins, 1975). Organizational members may agree about the goals (ends) that

Positive

Conflict Outcomes

Appropriate Conflict

Neutral

Negative

Too Little Conflict

Low

Too Much Conflict

Moderate

High

Conflict Intensity

FIGURE 2.1 Optimum Levels of Conflict Source: Adapted from Brown (1983)

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they seek to pursue, but disagree about the means to achieve them. All parties may agree that a low retention rate for first-year students is a problem that must be addressed, but they may disagree regarding how to solve this dilemma. Some may argue for more advising services, while others may advocate for higher admissions standards, while still others may point to ineffective teaching practices. In contrast to conflicts about the means to achieve goals, other situations will reveal a conflict regarding the goals themselves. Administrators and faculty may disagree regarding what should constitute the appropriate goals and priorities for their institution. For example, administrators may set as a goal the movement of their institution toward status as a research university. Faculty, however, may disagree with that goal, and instead hold teaching and learning as a higher priority than institutional status. Another factor to consider is that certain means may accomplish more than one end. Administrators, for example, may be focused on the goal of improving undergraduate retention. Faculty, however, may have as their top priority the ability to conduct more research. Some methods or practices may be able to address both goals. Initiatives that promote the involvement of undergraduate students in faculty research projects may constitute a means to achieve both ends. Undergraduate research projects could both improve student retention and provide

DESTABILIZING EVENTS AND ORGANIZATIONAL CONFLICT The concept of punctuated equilibrium refers to an instance in which the relative calm of an organization is disrupted by external and/or internal dynamic changes (Gersick, 1988, 1989). When a period of relative calm is punctuated by an external or internal disturbance, such as a budget crisis or an unexpected change in leadership, conflict is likely to emerge among the various constituencies of an organization. Faculty and administrators may disagree strongly over how to respond to these destabilizing events. A long-standing, trust-based relationship between faculty and administration was badly damaged in the University of California system, following administrative decisions in 2009 to impose furloughs, layoffs, enrollment caps, and steep tuition increases. In vocal protests on the university’s 10 campuses, faculty called on administrators to tap into reserve funds and reduce administrative salaries. Administrators stated that they were merely attempting to maintain financial solvency and protect the bond ratings of the university’s medical centers (Keller, 2009, September 22). Nevertheless, the furloughs and layoffs had destabilized the equilibrium between faculty and administration, causing a breakdown in the communications between the groups.

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greater capacity for faculty research. Thus, if the conflict pertains to goals, then the parties will either need to arrive at a consensus regarding their priorities, or find a mechanism that can achieve multiple goals simultaneously (Bergquist & Pawlak, 2008). CONFLICT MANAGEMENT Organizational members encounter a complex balancing act when they attempt to respond to conflict. Depending upon organizational circumstances, they may need to take steps to reduce or increase the amount of task conflict, while simultaneously taking steps to reduce relationship conflict. Furthermore, different techniques may be needed depending on whether the conflict relates to organizational goals or the means to achieve them. Fortunately, an extensive literature is available on conflict management. The concept of conflict management differs from the idea of conflict resolution (Rahim, 2002; Robbins, 1978). Much of the literature on negotiation, bargaining, and mediation is based on the idea of conflict resolution, which implies the elimination of conflict (Wall & Callister, 1995). This approach has two major shortcomings. First, it is unlikely that complex conflicts can be neatly resolved in a single intervention. Any resolution of the conflict is likely to be temporary at best, and the issue that generated the conflict is likely to emerge again next semester, next year, or at some unexpected time. Second, by emphasizing the need to eliminate conflict, conflict resolution techniques do not acknowledge the functional benefits of a moderate level of task conflict. In contrast, conflict management theories provide a range of alternatives for dealing with situations that call for more or less conflict. Rahim (2002) defines conflict management as a process of “designing effective macro-level strategies to minimize the dysfunctions of conflict and enhancing the constructive functions of conflict in order to enhance learning and effectiveness in an organization” (p. 208). This definition acknowledges that conflict may be constructive and therefore contribute to organizational effectiveness. A unique aspect of this definition is its focus on organizational learning. Rahim suggests that conflict is constructive to the extent that it fosters learning within the organization. Conflict can stimulate organizational learning when it encourages questioning and critical inquiry into the status quo. Rahim (2002) uses Argyris and Schön’s (1978) theory of single- and doubleloop learning (Figure 2.2) to demonstrate how conflict can stimulate organizational learning. Single-loop learning involves the detection and correction of problems without changing the goals, structure, or culture of the organization. In this scenario, the definition of the problem and the proposed solution reinforce the status quo. Learning outcomes data, for example, may show that students are struggling to achieve proficiency in writing.The college may then add more writing

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Structures: goals, policies, plans, authority

Outcomes (consequences of action)

Actions

Culture: values, norms

Single-Loop Learning Double-Loop Learning

FIGURE 2.2 Single- and Double-Loop Learning

tutors to assist the students. But what remains unexplored in this scenario is whether the college’s current pedagogical approach to writing is appropriate. Tutoring services become more accessible, but the underlying goals and epistemology of writing instruction remain the same. In contrast, double-loop learning provokes a re-examination of organizational goals, structures, and culture. The status quo is viewed as part of the problem, and proposed solutions seek to transcend existing models and mindsets. In the writing proficiency scenario, if double-loop learning is activated, then faculty and administrators may question whether the underlying values and structure of the current curriculum are appropriate for writing skill development. Rahim (2002) suggests that conflict resolution is consistent with single-loop learning, while the aim of conflict management is to stimulate double-loop learning. Conflict resolution seeks to arrive at workable solutions within existing structures and processes.The goal is to minimize disruption so that organizational members can continue their work unimpeded. The hiring of more writing tutors, for example, is a solution that does not disrupt the preferred activities of faculty and administrators. Alternatively, conflict management strategies evoke significant changes in the work of the organization. In our example, rather than move to the quick solution of hiring more writing tutors, faculty and administrators could continue to debate the reasons for the problematic writing outcomes. If this debate generates a moderate level of task conflict, then the parties may begin to question whether existing teaching practices and their underlying values are appropriate. Faculty and administrators may then be compelled to admit that their current practices and policies are ineffective, and that they need to revisit their basic assumptions about writing instruction. An important challenge to conflict management is that the types of conflict that stimulate double-loop learning are also likely to generate defensive responses from organizational members. When conflict generates critical questioning of the status quo, it may call into question not only organizational goals, structures, and culture, but also the value and worth of individual organizational members. If individuals are invested in the status quo—that is, they have worked hard to build

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existing structures and processes—then their self-worth may be threatened by conflicts that critically question the status quo. This critical questioning may be perceived as an attack on the individual’s judgment or competence. In response, individuals may deepen their level of commitment to their current practices and resist strongly any proposed changes (Beer & Spector, 1993). In our writing proficiency example, if the prominent writing pedagogies in the college become the subject of critical questioning, then faculty may believe that their professional judgment and competence have come under attack. Any proposed changes to writing instruction would be strongly resisted. In this scenario, the level of conflict is likely to escalate beyond the moderate levels associated with constructive outcomes, and instead move into the “danger zone” of high levels of prolonged conflict. Organizational interventions may be needed to address defensive reactions to conflict. Specifically, Rahim (2002) suggests that organizations can make structural and cultural changes that mitigate defensive reactions and that support the open expression of conflict. Reward structures, for example, may need to accommodate risk-taking and failure. If only successes are rewarded, then organizational members may be reluctant to take the risk associated with doing something new (Levitt & March, 1988). In this scenario, organizational members will likely avoid conflicts that challenge the status quo, because such conflicts might jeopardize their access to valued rewards, such as pay raises and promotions. Instead, organizations can reward and recognize innovative efforts even if they fail to achieve desired outcomes. In that environment, organizational members will be less fearful of failure and more receptive to critiques of the status quo. Furthermore, cultures of mistrust, blame, and scapegoating will require remediation before organizational members will feel comfortable engaging in conflict. Cultural norms that favor experimentation, openness, and inquiry can be enhanced to support constructive forms of conflict. These structural and cultural interventions imply the need to foster organizational learning about conflict itself (see Figure 2.3). Specifically, if conflict is producing defensive reactions, then organizational members need to change the structures and cultural norms that lead to those reactions (double-loop learning),

Structures: goals, policies, plans, authority Culture: values, norms

Conflict Behaviors and Conflict Management Techniques

Outcomes of Conflict (constructive or dysfunctional)

Single-Loop Learning Double-Loop Learning

FIGURE 2.3 Organizational Learning about Conflict

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not simply change how they react to the conflict (single-loop learning). If an individual is reacting defensively to conflict, then organizational members might try to be more conciliatory to that person or less judgmental in how they convey their critiques. But those approaches are unlikely to address the underlying problem, and people will continue to react defensively to emerging conflicts. Instead, organizational members can address the structural and cultural disincentives to engaging in constructive conflict. With appropriate changes in reward structures and cultural norms, organizational members will be less defensive when task conflicts emerge. While Rahim’s (2002) conflict management theory focuses on the organizational conditions that are needed to foster constructive conflict, other theories provide guidance for individuals who are trying to determine how they can respond to specific episodes of conflict. These theories suggest that organizational members can promote constructive conflict outcomes when they match their conflict responses to the conditions present in the organization. Better matches will result in better outcomes for individuals and the organization. In the next section, we describe some of the more prevalent individual, group, and organizational responses to conflict. Then, we identify the organizational conditions that people need to consider when they decide which responses to use. MATCHING CONFLICT MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES TO ORGANIZATIONAL CONDITIONS March and Simon (1958) offered one of the first typologies of organizational responses to conflict. They depicted four typical responses: 1. Problem-solving is used when goals are shared. Given a shared goal, organizational members will devote their attention toward identifying solutions that satisfy their shared objectives. They will assemble information and search for alternative solutions. 2. Persuasion is used when the parties perceive that their goals may be in conflict, but they also believe that, at some level, they share overarching goals. Faculty and administrators, for example, may point to the overarching goal of educating students, even if they differ in the sub-goals that they are pursuing. The conflicting parties will engage in less information gathering than in problem-solving. Instead, they will put more emphasis on testing the consistency between sub-goals and overarching goals. If a party can make a compelling case that their subgoal is consistent with an overarching goal with which all parties agree, then that party may be persuasive in the conflict. 3. Bargaining assumes that goals are in conflict and cannot be reconciled. In this case, “agreement without persuasion is sought” (p. 130). Party A

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attempts to compel Party B to accept an outcome that is contrary to Party B’s interests. 4. Politics occurs under the same situation as bargaining; that is, when the parties perceive irreconcilable goals. Bargaining shifts to politics when one or more of the conflicting parties expands the arena of conflict to include new allies whom they have recruited to their cause. In a dispute between faculty and administrators over whether a policy change will disadvantage a particular program, faculty may bring students into the conflict to advocate for the program’s position. March and Simon (1958) argue that problem-solving and persuasion tend to be used more often when the conflict is between individuals, and bargaining and politics are more common when the conflict is between groups. When goals are shared or potentially shared, then the individuals involved in the conflict can typically address the matter themselves, through problem-solving or persuasion. But when goals are believed to be irreconcilable, the conflicting individuals will be incapable of developing a constructive solution on their own. They will appeal to group-based interests (bargaining) and widen the conflict to include other groups (politics). Figure 2.4 notes that most conflicts begin between individuals. If they believe that they share goals, then they will use problem-solving. If they believe that their goals are in conflict but potentially reconcilable, then they will engage in persuasion. If they believe that their goals are irreconcilable, then the conflict will escalate to the group level, where bargaining will be used. If the conflict attracts

Belief in Shared Goals

Individuals in Conflict

Belief in Potential for Identifying Overarching Shared Goals

Problem Solving

Persuasion

Bargaining Belief that Goals are Irreconcilable

Escalation to Group-Based Conflict Politics

FIGURE 2.4 Responses to Conflict in Organizations Source: Based on March and Simon (1958)

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PARADIGM DIFFERENCES

other groups to the dispute, then the conflict has entered the political arena (Mintzberg, 1985). Similarly, Thomas (1977) offers a practical framework for managing organizational conflict (see Figure 2.5). The framework includes five conflict management strategies: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Compete: seek to prevail over the other group. Avoid: indifference to the other group, withdrawal. Collaborate: integrate the ideas of both groups. Accommodate: allow the other group to prevail, appeasement. Compromise: split the difference between the groups; each group attains some but not all of what it sought.

The five strategies differ along two dimensions: assertiveness and cooperativeness. Competition and collaboration are assertive strategies in that each party engages actively with the other. In contrast, avoidance and accommodation are unassertive in that they do not foster much interaction between the conflicting groups. Collaboration and accommodation are cooperative strategies in that people have a desire to satisfy others’ concerns.The uncooperative strategies—

Compete

Collaborate

High Stake

Compromise

Stake in the Relationship Low Stake Avoid

Accommodate

Conflicting Interests

Common Interests

Nature of Interests

FIGURE 2.5 Forms of Conflict Management Source: Adapted from Thomas (1977)

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competition and avoidance—show little concern for others. Finally, compromise is somewhere in the middle—only somewhat assertive and only moderately cooperative. Determining which of the five strategies to use depends on two variables: the stake that the conflicting parties have in their ongoing relationship, and the nature of the interests held by the conflicting parties. First, regarding stake in the relationship, conflicting parties will have a high stake in their relationship if they are likely to work together again on other issues, or if each group is dependent on the output of the other group to perform its duties. On the other hand, the two groups will have a low stake in their relationship when their level of interdependence is low and when there is not much mutual impact between the groups. Second, regarding nature of interests, the question is whether the two groups share the same goal but disagree about the means to achieve it (common interests), or whether the groups disagree about the goal itself (conflicting interests). The stake in the relationship will determine whether the groups will find assertive or unassertive strategies to be more effective. When the relationship is high stakes, as it typically is between faculty and administrators, the conflicting parties may obtain more effective outcomes when they use assertive conflict management strategies. The high stakes relationship suggests that the conflicting parties need to engage each other, rather than simply avoid or accommodate. In other words, the relationship is too important to sit idly by. Next, the decision about which conflict management strategy to use turns to the nature of interests. If the parties share common interests, then the assertive, cooperative strategy— collaboration—has the most likely prospects for success. However, if the parties have conflicting interests, then collaboration is not a wise strategy. How can a group collaborate with others who do not share their goals? Instead, the assertive, uncooperative strategy—competition—will be more appropriate for the situation. When the relationship is low stakes, the conflicting parties might not wish to invest the time and effort associated with assertive strategies. Instead, the unassertive strategy of accommodation is likely to be used when the conflicting parties have shared interests.When both parties have common interests, whichever position prevails is still likely to be in the interest of both parties. Therefore, one group may appease the other, knowing that, ultimately, whatever actions are taken will advance a common goal, even if the specific actions are not those that the group would have preferred. On the other hand, under conditions of low stakes and conflicting interests, avoidance is the more likely tactic. Here, the group would have no desire to accommodate and endorse the other group’s actions, which seek to advance goals with which they do not agree. If the two groups are unlikely to interact extensively in the future, then the wisest course of action would simply be to avoid the other group and not become entwined in interactions that ultimately lead nowhere.

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And finally, compromise represents the middle ground. If the stake in the relationship is moderate (that is, at least some likelihood that the two groups will work together again), and if the interests are at least somewhat in common (perhaps agreement on some goals but not others), then splitting the difference would be an appropriate strategy. Each group obtains some of its desired outcomes without exerting the energy associated with collaboration or experiencing the resentment and jealousy that can be generated by competition. Compromise, however, is an unstable status. Since neither party is fully satisfied with the result, conflicts between them are quite likely to re-emerge. An additional consideration relates to the potential for mismatches between organizational conditions and the strategies selected by conflicting parties. Consider a group that seeks to collaborate with a party with whom it does not have common interests. They may naively be unaware that the other group has goals that are radically different from their own, or they may believe that collaboration is always the best strategy to pursue regardless of the conditions. Here, the group may be surprised by the intensity with which the other group seeks to rebuke their positions and prevail in a competition for resources and status. As a result, the naive, unprepared group fails to achieve its goal. Consider also a group that seeks to compete with a party with whom it does, in fact, share common interests. The other party is likely to perceive these uncooperative behaviors as unnecessary, given that both groups share common goals. If competition is the default strategy for a particular group, then that group risks alienating many potential allies. Another consideration is that conflicting groups can work to reframe organizational conditions so that common interests can be identified and integrative solutions can be implemented. Groups may not realize the extent to which they have common interests. Certain forms of communication may enable these groups to bring to the surface shared beliefs and values, which, in turn, can serve as the basis for collaboration. One type of reframing shifts the conceptualization of a conflict from either-or (where one group wins and the other loses) and zero-sum (a gain for one group is viewed as a loss for the other group) to win-win scenarios in which both parties can achieve desirable goals. To some extent, how conflict is resolved is a result of the conceptualization of the alternatives for a possible solution. Thomas (1976) notes that when there is a conflict of interest, four resolutions of the conflict exist: either-or, zero-sum, indeterminant, and unresolvable. Faculty and administrations who see the conflict in terms of different patterns of conflict resolution will encounter process difficulties in attempts to resolve the conflicts. For example, if the faculty believe the resolution must be “we get our way, and you get nothing,” then the processes of interaction will usually involve escalation of the conflict and an increase in hostility and distrust, resulting in further blockages to solutions. On the other

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hand, if both sides can come to see the possibilities of simultaneously satisfying the requirements of both parties, the resolution process will be smoother. Consider, for example, a conflict between a provost who wants to establish a new interdisciplinary program and department chairs who worry that the new program will draw resources away from their programs. If the conflict is conceptualized as either-or, then the chairs might believe that all new faculty hiring will occur in the interdisciplinary program and that no new faculty positions will be allocated to their departments. If the conflict is conceptualized as zero-sum, then the chairs would likely argue that when faculty in their department teach in the interdisciplinary program, their department will lose key resources. Instead, the issue could be reframed such that the interdisciplinary program is viewed as building a capacity that can assist the discipline-based departments as well. For example, a new interdisciplinary program in global studies could expand available course offerings for students in disciplines such as sociology and anthropology, as well as open the potential for new research collaborations for faculty in those disciplines. Additional examples that link to Thomas’s (1977) five forms of conflict management are provided in Table 2.1. Rahim (2002) extends the consideration of organizational conditions beyond the two variables—stake in relationship and nature of interests—that Thomas (1977) examined.These additional considerations are noted in Table 2.2. PARADIGMS AND CONFLICT IN ORGANIZATIONS Social scientists began to give considerable attention to the question of paradigms in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly as initiated by the work of Thomas Kuhn (1962, 1970). Paradigms are basic assumptions and fundamental beliefs that underlie different theories of human nature and society.They include beliefs about ontology, epistemology, meaning, and rationality (Scherer & Steinmann, 1999). The differences among three prominent social science paradigms—positivism, social construction, and postmodernism—are highlighted in Table 2.3. Paradigms are deep-seated personal values about the essential human relations and life questions that drive beliefs and attitudes about practical issues, including work. Indeed, Lincoln (1985) suggests that there is a “revolution” in paradigmatic thinking about organizations that involves essential changes in the “map” of reality in Western society. This revolution involves shifts toward views of reality that are complex and diverse, and from objectivity to a plurality of perspectives. In this context, conflict between faculty and administration emerges from these more fundamental differences. It has been asserted that if different theories rest on different paradigms, then the meanings of those theories will be incommensurable (Pfeffer, 1993). Incommensurability suggests that the meanings associated with one paradigm are

43

Stake in Relationship

High stakes

High stakes

Low stakes

Low stakes

Moderate stake

Conflicting Parties

Dean of first-year experience, and faculty who teach first-year seminars

Provost seeking to establish an interdisciplinary academic program and department chairs seeking to preserve resources for their academic programs

Dean of residence life and psychology department faculty, who have expertise in human development and who sit on a student life committee

Athletic director and faculty

Dean of college of education, and faculty in arts and sciences disciplines who prepare future teachers (for example, faculty in biology who prepare science teachers)

Some common interests, some conflicting interests: common interest in high-quality teacher preparation, conflicting interest regarding the utility of accreditation

Conflicting interests regarding the appropriate level of academic engagement for student athletes

Common interest in supporting students’ psychosocial development, but disagreement regarding whether to use curricular or co-curricular approaches

Conflicting interests: the chairs’ interest in supporting majors and research in the discipline, and the provost’s interest in interdisciplinary strategies to attract funding and prestige

Common interest in academic success for first-year students, but disagreement over first-year seminar course content

Nature of Interests

TABLE 2.1 Examples of Five Conflict Management Strategies

Compromise: arts and sciences faculty participate in a limited set of assessment activities for teacher education accreditation in exchange for modest reductions in class size

Avoid: staff in the athletics department rarely interact with faculty

Accommodate: the psychology department does not object to a new co-curricular program in residence life, even when they would prefer that such issues be addressed in the curriculum

Compete: chairs go to faculty senate to plead their case and seek allies; provost does likewise

Collaborate: convene a study group to explore first-year seminar pedagogy and curriculum issue

Strategy

PARADIGM DIFFERENCES TABLE 2.2 Matching Conflict Responses to Organizational Conditions

Conflict Response

Situations where Appropriate

Collaborate

• The issues are complex and cannot be resolved by one party acting alone • A synthesis of ideas is needed to develop an appropriate solution • Your party needs resources or support from the other party so that the solution can be implemented successfully • Sufficient time is available for problem solving

Accommodate

• The issue is more important to the other party • Your party is less powerful than the other party • Your party believes that it might be wrong

Compete

• • • • •

Avoid

• Issue is trivial • The conflicting parties need a cooling-off period

Compromise

• The parties are equally powerful • A temporary solution to a complex problem is needed

A fast decision is called for The other party has implemented an unpopular course of action Decisions by the other party might be costly to your party The other party lacks relevant expertise The issue is important to your party

Source: Based on Rahim (2002)

TABLE 2.3 Differences in Assumptions among Social Science Paradigms

Philosophical Key Question Positivist Domain

Social Constructionist

Postmodern

Ontology

Objective, waiting to be discovered through science

Multiple, produced and reproduced through interaction

Fragmented perceptions, often irreconcilable

Epistemology What is the nature of knowledge?

Separate from the researcher, value free

Context bound, multiple meanings

Determined by social power, inherent biases

Methodology What is the process of research?

Hypotheticaldeductive

Inductive

Deconstruction, emancipation

Praxis

Rational problemsolving process

Exploratory inquiry, framing of experience

Alleviate conditions of marginalization, foster empowerment

What is the nature of reality?

How is knowledge applied?

Source: Adapted from Creswell (1994)

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essentially impossible to explain using criteria other than those endemic to the paradigm itself. Some would say that incommensurable paradigms are competing or rival interpretations of reality (Erickson, 1986). Scherer and Steinmann (1999) noted that “the word ‘paradigm’ indicates criteria of scholarliness that are recognized within a certain school of researchers and are put into practice by those researchers, but not in other schools” (p. 520). Hence, two parties that are ignorant of each other’s paradigms will not be able to communicate effectively. For example, if members of a promotion and tenure committee differed in their underlying paradigmatic assumptions, then discussions about criteria to determine the quality of various forms of scholarship would be frustrated by the lack of common assumptions regarding valid and legitimate research. To some extent, it is alleged, such a conclusion depends on the degree of incommensurability (Lueken, 1990; Willard, 1987). That is, it may be possible for organizational members with partial understandings of the paradigm underlying a controversy to comprehend the argument of the other party in the conflict. But others would insist that incommensurability is not a continuous variable; hence, paradigms either are or are not incommensurable. In this view, partial knowledge and understanding is insufficient and may, in fact, be misleading. Let us first outline a conceptualization of paradigm use that can be utilized to understand conflict between faculty and administrators. Here, we employ the work of Gioia and Pitre (1990), who have operationalized an earlier conceptualization of paradigms by Burrell and Morgan (1979). Table 2.4 below depicts four basic paradigms as conceived by Gioia and Pitre: functionalist, radical humanist, radical structuralist, and interpretivist. These paradigms constitute a virtually exhaustive set that aptly describes the range of paradigms that underlie and cogently explain both the faculty and administrative worlds. The functionalist paradigm, according to Gioia and Pitre (1990), offers a positivist perspective of the organization, which is oriented toward the stable perpetuation of the status quo. Organizational leaders in colleges and universities who assume this perspective believe that there is an objective, discernible reality that is not dependent on any one person’s point of view. For example, the idea and existence of state funding is fairly well known and seemingly commonly TABLE 2.4 Typology of Paradigms

Assumptions about Reality

Belief Systems

Objective

Subjective

Values stability

Functionalist

Interpretivist

Values change

Radical structuralist

Radical humanist

Source: Based on Gioia and Pitre (1990)

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understood by all who have a connection with it. Moreover, many (probably most) administrators believe that state funding can (or should) be objectively determined with valid and reliable methods. Furthermore, the basic assumption of this paradigm is that consensus is possible and, as Pfeffer (1993) observes, is “a vital component for the advancement of knowledge in a field. Without some minimal level of consensus about research questions and methods, fields can scarcely expect to produce knowledge in a cumulative, developmental process” (p. 611). Espousal of a functionalist paradigm, in other words, presumes the possibility, even the necessity, of some degree of consensus about the most critical organizational phenomena. Pfeffer goes on to say that the informal adoption of a paradigm by an organization, or a part of it, does not presuppose tyrannical control over thinking in the organization. It leaves open room for arguments about reality, and organizational decision-making would proceed through the examination of relationships among variables and in a search for causality. Organizational members will continually examine their authority structures seeking objective information that can be used to regulate their operations and continue to be of value to the constituencies they serve. This is the most common model of decision-making found in higher education today. Using the interpretivist paradigm (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Morgan & Smircich, 1980), organizational members in colleges and universities would be seen individually and collectively to construct their own realities about the institution.Through this process, they would come to their own conclusions about all organizational phenomena, including structures, relations, and events. There is no assumption of commonly understood meanings. Organizational members would use their personal interpretations as heuristics to aid the performance of their duties, and they would freely revise their interpretations as new phenomena and understandings of them become more salient. Collectively, organizational members develop social constructions of reality that lead to the ongoing reproduction of the structures, processes, and cultures that guide organizational life. These social constructions emerge through extensive communication and collective activity (Bormann, 1996).The interprevist paradigm presumes, therefore, the possibility of discussion and compromise that will permit sufficient epistemological consensus to enable practical work to be performed. Furthermore, the interpretivist paradigm suggests that there is no single organizational reality that can be explained in terms of the belief systems or cultures of all participant groups (for example, faculty and administration) in organizational decisions. The many perceptions of those realities (plural) require multiple and not necessarily compatible theories. Hence, the goal of improving communication in higher education organizations is often misplaced when it is focused solely on finding ways to convince or win over the “other” side. Instead, faculty and administrators are most successful as partners when they seek “common ground wherein the dominant approach is to get simultaneous agreement among multiple

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constituencies, all of whose points of view are considered legitimate versions of reality” (Marshak & Grant, 2008, p. S9). A third quadrant in the Gioia and Pitre (1990) model is the radical humanist perspective. As with the interpretivist paradigm, the radical humanist paradigm holds that reality is a subjective construction. In contrast to the interpretivist mode, however, organizational members using this paradigm see phenomena as being inherently distorted by power and ideological biases. In interpreting organizational activities, they seek to understand how and why others bring their biases into the work setting. Equally important, underlying their views is a commitment to action—to change the organization in ways that remedy the power-based distortions that they see others as perpetrating to the observer’s detriment. Finally, Gioia and Pitre (1990) describe a radical structuralist paradigm.The focus of this paradigm is on the impact of large social structures that stratify society on the basis of social class, gender, race, ethnicity, or some other characteristic. Importantly, radical structuralists believe that it is often the case that social structures are instruments of power and dominance of more privileged members over others—for example, administrators and tenured faculty over untenured and adjunct faculty. Radical structuralists are also change-oriented: “The goal of radical structuralist theory is to understand, explain, criticize, and act on the structural mechanisms that exist in the organizational world, with the ultimate goal of transforming them through collective resistance and radical change” (p. 590). The paradigm that underlies this perspective suggests that not only is there a pluralism of perspectives, but that some of them are morally deficient and in need of change. More recently, postmodernism has emerged as an alternative to existing paradigms (Bloland, 1995; Hirschhorn, 1997). Postmodernism, as an intellectual tradition, offers a sharp critique of functionalist viewpoints, which emphasize rationality and objectivity as methods to solve organizational problems. Instead, postmodernists argue that social systems, including organizations, are highly fragmented. Here, fragmentation has at least two important meanings. First, the relationship between cause and effect has been destabilized. Organizational leaders can no longer predict that certain changes in policies and practices will result in desired outcomes. An organization may make changes in policies and practices in hopes of improving performance, but other variables beyond the organization’s control are likely to make the outcomes of such changes uncertain. Second, individuals in organizations are also highly fragmented in that they no longer have predictable relationships with other organizational members. Postmodernists argue that most organizations lack a unifying identity that links each organizational member to a common set of values and beliefs. Given this lack of unity, interactions with other organizational members are likely to be characterized by high levels of ambiguity, uncertainty, and paradox. Furthermore, postmodernists argue that any effort to impose order and rationality into organizational systems will simply reinforce the positions of

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top-level leaders and further marginalize those who are less powerful in the organization (Deetz, 1992). Likewise, any effort to develop a unifying organizational culture will inevitably privilege the values and beliefs of powerful individuals in the organization (Tierney, 1992). A unifying organizational culture would tend to reflect the values and beliefs of those in positions of authority. Less powerful organizational members would be compelled to adopt the dominant values that favor the status quo, or else risk being castigated as someone who is not a “team player” because they do not support the cultural values of the institution. In the field of higher education research, the most prominent paradigms include functionalism, interpretivism, and postmodernism (Bess & Dee, 2008; Kezar, Carducci, & Contreras-McGavin, 2006; Kezar & Dee, 2011). In this book, we argue that the communications of faculty and administrators can be characterized in terms of the paradigms that each group uses to express its interests and beliefs. If faculty and administrators frame their communications using the same paradigm, then they will likely achieve a high level of understanding. Conflicts will still be possible, but they can be addressed through the application of practices and norms that are consistent with the paradigm that both groups currently employ. In contrast, if faculty and administrators use different paradigms in their communications with each other, then not only is conflict inevitable, but such conflicts are likely to be virulent and intractable. Conflict between paradigms is likely to be exceptionally difficult to address, because neither party will be able to agree upon the appropriate mechanisms for communicating about their conflict. As Scherer and Steinmann (1999) note, as long as there are standards of decision-making acceptable to both sides, there is no major problem. It becomes a serious problem when such standards cannot be found, namely a situation of incommensurability. Therefore, if faculty and administrators are able to agree on criteria (including both methods and aims) to settle their differences, then incommensurability is not a problem. But if they employ vastly or even moderately different systems of philosophic orientation, then their conflicts are unlikely to be resolved, because there are no “standards of comparison with which a problem or conflict can rationally be solved” (Scherer & Steinmann, 1999, p. 521). CONFLICT WITHIN AND BETWEEN PARADIGMS If both faculty and administrators were using the functionalist paradigm to frame their communications with each other, then they would be able to identify a rational approach for dealing with their conflicts. Conflict would likely emerge due to information asymmetries, where one party would have more or better information than the other. Faculty, for example, may protest a budget cut proposed by administrators, but if administrators shared information about the

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college’s finances, then faculty may understand why such cuts are necessary. In order to address the conflict, both parties would ensure that all have access to the same data, and they would develop objective criteria for addressing their dispute. Faculty and administrators, for example, may come to an agreement regarding the process and criteria to be used for any proposed cut to the college’s budget. If both faculty and administrators were using the interpretivist paradigm, then conflict would emerge when the groups realize that they do not understand the meanings and interpretations that the other group attributes to various issues and events. For example, faculty may not understand why administrators are assigning so much importance to a proposed restructuring of academic departments, while administrators may not understand why faculty have resisted initiatives to promote interdisciplinary projects and programs. To address the conflict, both parties would need to agree to engage in open communications with each other, so that they can better understand how each group was interpreting reality within the organization. Faculty may learn that administrators were assigning a high value to organizational restructuring because they wanted to facilitate greater interdisciplinary learning opportunities for students. Administrators may learn that faculty opposition to the restructuring plan was centered on whether the new system would change tenure and promotion criteria such that interdisciplinary teaching and research would receive more prominence than work within a faculty member’s respective discipline. Through these communications, faculty and administrators may forge a consensus regarding the need to promote new learning options for students, and for ensuring that multiple forms of scholarship are valued in tenure and promotion decisions. If faculty and administrators were using the postmodern paradigm, then they would acknowledge that significant conflicts are the result of power disparities within the organization.The interests of less powerful groups, including part-time faculty and contract workers, are seldom considered in organizational decisionmaking. Top-level administrators may also acknowledge that they have dismissed faculty input in decision-making processes when that input was inconsistent with the direction that administrators wanted to take the institution. In order to address conflict, the more powerful groups in the institution—top-level administrators and senior faculty leaders—would seek to reduce power disparities in the organization by dismantling hierarchical structures and replacing them with venues that distribute authority more broadly across the organization. Some tangible outcomes might include engaging more part-time faculty in institutional governance committees, reducing the institution’s reliance on short-term employment contracts, and developing open, participatory processes for determining the institution’s priorities. Table 2.5 displays the three types of within-paradigm conflict. An important point here is that when the parties are operating from the same paradigm, they will be able to agree on the norms and processes for addressing their conflict.

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PARADIGM DIFFERENCES TABLE 2.5 Within-Paradigm Conflict

Emergence of Conflict

Conflict Management Approach

Functionalist vs. Functionalist

Conflict emerges due to information asymmetries, or through inaccurate interpretations of data

The parties share information so that all have access to the same data; they work to develop an accurate interpretation of evidence; they develop rational criteria for subsequent decisions

Interpretivist vs. Interpretivist

Conflict emerges because neither party understands the meanings and interpretations that the other party attributes to their experience; frequently occurs when the two parties have not worked together previously

The parties engage in extensive communication, and begin to develop a common mental model for understanding their situation; the new, socially constructed mental model guides subsequent actions and decisions

Postmodern vs. Postmodern

Conflict emerges when a less powerful, exploited group challenges the authority of a more powerful, privileged group in the organization

Although unlikely, the more powerful group may seek to equalize the power distribution in the organization, and provide venues for the formerly less powerful group to exercise authority

Within the functionalist paradigm, the parties will seek to reduce information asymmetries and clarify interpretations of data.They will develop rational criteria for assessing alternatives and making decisions.Within the interpretivist paradigm, each party will seek to understand how the other party interprets events and circumstances. Through extensive communication, they will seek to develop a common understanding of their collective challenges. Within the postmodern paradigm, the parties will address power disparities and seek to dismantle structures and policies that marginalize less powerful groups. In contrast to within-paradigm conflict, conflict between paradigms is often viewed as unresolvable due to the incommensurable positions of the various paradigms. Consider, for example, a conflict between a group that was using the functionalist paradigm and a group that embraced the interpretivist paradigm.The functionalists would attempt to share more data about the problem, but there is no guarantee that the interpretivists would attribute the same meanings and level of importance to those data.The functionalists would also seek to identify rational criteria by which both parties could assess competing alternative solutions to the problem. Interpretivists, however, would question whether objective criteria could be used to assess problems that are inherently subjective. A new decisionmaking rule or criterion would likely not be able to anticipate important

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contextual features in the organization. The functionalists, for example, may argue that faculty pay increases should be tied to course evaluation results, but interpretivists would likely note that important contextual features of teaching must also be considered—for example, whether the course is a requirement, or whether the course covers controversial topics that may challenge students. The uniform application of a rule would not be able to account for these types of contextual variations. Likewise, consider a conflict between a functionalist group and a postmodernist group. Conflict may emerge regarding the question of who gets to determine the goals for the university’s new strategic plan.Top-level administrators might adhere to the functionalist paradigm. They would convene open meetings to solicit broad input into the strategic planning process, as well as appoint members to a strategic planning committee who represent a wide range of organizational units and departments. The functionalists would claim that the new strategic plan will represent the input and ideas provided by all members of the organization. The postmodernists, however, would assert that top-level administrators occupy a privileged position in this process.Top-level administrators are likely to make their ideas and preferences known early in the process, and, therefore, organizational members with less power may be afraid to speak out in opposition to those ideas. Moreover, it is the top-level leaders who will compile and interpret the input provided at open meetings and other participatory forums. They can interpret or manipulate the input so that it is conveyed as an endorsement of the preferences of the most powerful organizational members. Finally, consider a dispute between an interpretivist group and a postmodern group. Attempts to foster shared understandings and common interpretations of organizational events may provoke this type of conflict. Administrators might convene discussion groups to foster dialogue around the faculty experience on campus. Here, the goal would be to arrive at a shared understanding between administration and faculty regarding how to improve the academic work environment. After a period of discussion, administrators and some faculty may believe that they have arrived at a common interpretation of the work environment and have established a consensus regarding how to move forward. But other faculty— perhaps part-time faculty or underrepresented faculty of color—may believe that the consensus simply reinforces the status quo and reflects the priorities of privileged individuals. Between-paradigm conflict can generate significant organizational turmoil because the conflicting parties disagree not only about ends and means, but also about basic values and beliefs. These disputes have deeper roots than task or relationship conflict. While task conflicts center on organizational processes and activities, and relationship conflicts revolve around interpersonal dynamics, between-paradigm conflicts are, at their core, ideological disputes. In ideological disputes, the groups assert stances that are based largely on value systems, rather

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than material interests (Druckman, 1993). Efforts to persuade or arrive at an integrative solution are often dismissed, largely because the groups believe that they would be compelled to surrender values that are central to their self-identity. As Wade-Benzoni et al. (2002) describe, the issues that underpin ideologically based disputes are often in close proximity to core values that are central to the identities of the conflicting parties. The intensified presence of core values then acts as a barrier to conflict management: To the extent that conflicts involve people’s core values and beliefs, people will be more emotional, less able to think in an integratively complex fashion, and less likely to conceive or consider tradeoffs on issues involving those core values . . . People will be more rigid and single minded in their argument content and style.To the extent that these issues are viewed as “sacred,” people are more likely to be willing to defend these values at any cost. (p. 44) Table 2.6 displays the three types of between-paradigm conflict. The difficulty in addressing these conflicts resides not only in the substance of the conflict, but also in the inability of the participants to agree on a way out of the conflict. We argue that the most virulent and intractable disputes between faculty and administration are between-paradigm conflicts. Moreover, we believe that the prevalence of between-paradigm conflict is increasing in higher education institutions. Organizational members in colleges and universities are unlikely to share a common set of values and beliefs; that is, a common paradigm for guiding their interactions together (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000; Gioia & Pitre, 1990; Hassard & Kelemen, 2002; Schultz & Hatch, 1996). The reasons for paradigm divergence in higher education institutions are many. As faculty have become increasingly specialized in their teaching and research, they may identify themselves more strongly with external associations in their field of study than with their employing institution. Highly specialized faculty are more likely to seek community with like-minded scholars outside their own institution, rather than build community within their own institutions. Furthermore, as competition for resources and prestige has intensified in the higher education marketplace, college and university trustees have empowered top-level administrators to make strategic decisions on behalf of the institution. The emphasis is on making quick decisions that maximize the institution’s competitive advantage. These market-based pressures for competitiveness stand in stark contrast to the more deliberative processes of academic governance that have characterized faculty-administrative interactions in previous eras. Despite the seeming intractability of between-paradigm conflicts, integrative solutions are possible. First, by characterizing these ideological disputes as between-paradigm conflicts, organizational members can gain a more nuanced

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PARADIGM DIFFERENCES TABLE 2.6 Between-Paradigm Conflict

Functionalist vs. Interpretivist

Emergence of Conflict

Conflict Management Approach

Functionalists believe that an accurate interpretation of the problem is possible, and the other party can be convinced to change its position if they were provided more information or if they possessed more knowledge

Functionalists will share data and attempt to develop rational criteria for decision-making; yet, interpretivists will not see these data or criteria in the same way as the functionalists —thus, the conflict will persist

Interpretivists believe that issues are highly contextualized; therefore, organizational problems are difficult to represent in a single, unified, allegedly accurate way; instead, a multiplicity of interpretations should be recognized as valid

Interpretivists will seek to build understandings of how different parties attribute meaning to their experiences, in hopes that a common mental model can guide future interactions across the previously conflicting groups; functionalists, however, will persist in seeking objective criteria to resolve the differences

Functionalist Functionalists believe that vs. authority relations can be Postmodernist organized rationally, and that input from multiple organizational groups can inform decision-making Postmodernists believe that organizational structures marginalize certain groups and perspectives; organizational attempts to foster participation are inauthentic, since top-level leaders would not do anything to jeopardize a status quo that preserves their privileges Interpretivist Interpretivists believe that shared vs. mental models can be socially Postmodernist constructed through authentic communications; these mental models can then foster more effective collaboration between previously conflicting groups Postmodernists believe that a shared mental model may become a powerful ideology that relegates certain groups and individuals to marginalized status

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Functionalists would invite less powerful groups into the decision-making process

Postmodernists would argue that such participation simply co-opts the less powerful groups into agreeing to maintain the status quo; instead, postmodernists would seek to dismantle existing hierarchical structures

Interpretivists would seek to understand the meanings that less powerful groups attribute to organizational events and circumstances; common understanding, in turn, could lead to more effective communication and collaboration in the future Postmodernists would argue that when powerful groups seek to understand the perspectives of less powerful groups, their understandings are likely to be only superficial and potentially paternalistic, if the more powerful groups seek to reshape the less powerful groups in their own image

PARADIGM DIFFERENCES

understanding of the source of the tensions. If they can identify the paradigm stances of the opposing group, then they can more easily identify the values and beliefs that serve as the source of the conflict. For example, if faculty and administrators come to understand that their conflict is based in differences between functionalist and interpretive perspectives, then they may be better able to acknowledge and perhaps appreciate the values and beliefs of the opposing group. Second, after identifying the type of between-paradigm conflict, the opposing groups can adopt communication practices that transcend those paradigm differences. Typically, communication practices reinforce paradigm differences, rather than transcend them. Practices such as bargaining, negotiating, and politicking call for each side to strengthen its respective arguments, thus sharpening the paradigm differences. Instead, different communication practices will be needed, specifically those that move beyond the “us-versus-them” identity-based stances that characterize the most virulent faculty-administrator conflicts. We examine those types of communication practices in subsequent chapters. CONCLUSION This chapter examined various forms of organizational conflict, including task and relational varieties. Task conflict has the potential to strengthen organizational performance, while relational conflict is often associated with stress and dissatisfaction. Task conflict may compel organizational members to examine current operating procedures and consider whether alternative approaches could obtain better results. Relational conflict may lead to people feeling unwelcome or anxious in the workplace. The chapter also highlighted the important means-ends distinction. Conflict may emerge in relation to the methods used to achieve goals, or the conflict may relate to the goals themselves. This means-ends distinction can shape the selection of conflict management strategies. If the conflict pertains to the means to achieve an agreed upon goal, then the conflicting parties will be more effective if they collaborate. But if the conflict pertains to the goals themselves, then the parties are likely to engage in competition to determine which goals will prevail in organizational decisions and resource allocations. These organizational conflicts can be understood through an examination of the paradigms adopted by different organizational constituencies, including faculty and administrators. A paradigm encompasses a range of assumptions about the nature of reality and the nature of knowledge. These assumptions shape decisions and actions, and structure the ways in which groups communicate with each other. When groups communicate from the same paradigm (that is, using the same sets of assumptions), they will be able to agree upon norms and practices for addressing the conflicts that emerge. In contrast, when groups communicate across different

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paradigms, they will struggle not only with the substance of the conflict, but also in their inability to agree on a way out of the conflict. Given the different occupational subcultures of faculty and administrators, these groups tend to frame their communications from the standpoint of different paradigms. Therefore, when faculty-administrator conflicts emerge, they are exceedingly difficult to address.We argue that simply having more communication is unlikely to address the differences between faculty and administration. Instead, what is needed is communication that acknowledges and creatively uses paradigm differences to advance the knowledge-generating capacity of the institution. We begin to outline the path toward that type of communication in the next chapter. IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE The balancing act. Administrators and faculty can assess the type and level of conflict present within their institution, and take appropriate steps to maintain moderate levels of task conflict and low levels of relationship conflict. When relationship conflict escalates, the parties can redirect their focus to the task at hand. Research also suggests that compromise may be an effective short-term strategy when relationship conflicts are pervasive (Murnighan & Conlon, 1991). Other strategies that require more interaction between the parties, such as competition or collaboration, may put too much strain on a fragile relationship. Longer-term solutions, however, will require that the relationship be repaired, perhaps with the assistance of a third-party mediator making use of dispute resolution techniques (see Costantino & Merchant, 1996). When levels of task conflict are high, the parties will need to identify norms for establishing agreement. Debates over ideas and plans cannot continue indefinitely. When decision-making groups are formed, administrators and faculty can agree to allocate a specific amount of project time to debate and critical questioning. When that time has elapsed, the group members will agree to shift the conversation toward building agreement and completing the task. Research by Gersick (1988) suggests that effective groups tend to experience a burst of productivity right around the midpoint in their calendar, halfway between their first meeting and their deadline. The implication is that the midpoint of a project represents a critical juncture for group performance. Therefore, administrators and faculty should work to ensure that the committees and task forces on which they serve have ample information and resources available prior to the midpoint of the group’s calendar, so that they can wrap up analysis and debate and move toward task completion. When levels of task conflict are low, administrators and faculty can stimulate debate and discussion by bringing new ideas back to the group. They can attend conferences, search the available literature, or ask colleagues at other institutions

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PARADIGM DIFFERENCES to describe how they are addressing similar challenges. The group can also adopt norms that encourage the expression of disagreement. For example, norms for confidentiality can ensure members that their comments will not be discussed outside the group setting, and, therefore, members can feel free to express their perspectives without fear of repercussion from individuals outside the group. Dealing with defensiveness. Task conflicts may provoke defensive reactions from administrators or faculty. If an individual has worked hard to establish a program or policy, then that individual might take personally any criticism of that program or policy. Reward structures and cultural norms may need to be modified so that organizational members will be less defensive when task conflicts emerge (Rahim, 2002). For example, rewards and recognition can be provided for innovations, including those that do not succeed. Such rewards provide incentives for taking the risk associated with trying something new or different. With such rewards in place, organizational members will likely become more comfortable engaging in conflicts that challenge the status quo. Assessing the conflict before attempting to manage it. Administrators and faculty can use Thomas’s (1977) conflict management framework to assess a conflict in which they are engaged, and then determine which conflict management strategy best fits the situation. When assessing conflict, administrators and faculty should avoid typecasting the other party. Administrators may have a tendency to underestimate the stakes of the conflict and view the issues raised by faculty as unimportant. Faculty, however, may underestimate the extent to which they have common interests with administrators; they may assume the worst regarding administrators’ intentions. Both groups need to avoid relying on stereotypes, and instead assess the conflict situation on its own merits. Paradigm awareness. When conflicts emerge, administrators and faculty can develop an awareness of the paradigms in which they are operating, and thus come to understand whether their conflict is within the same paradigm or has emerged between different paradigms. If administrators and faculty are engaged in a within-paradigm conflict, then conventional conflict management strategies, such as Thomas’s (1977) framework, can be effective. However, if administrators and faculty are engaged in a between-paradigm conflict, then their paradigm differences will need to be discussed first, before they can productively address the substance of their conflict.

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Chapter 3

Communication and Conflict in the Academy

INTRODUCTION In a 2007 international survey, only 30 percent of U.S. faculty respondents agreed or strongly agreed that there is good communication between administrators and faculty at their institution (Cummings & Finkelstein, 2009). The comparable percentages were similar in other nations: 22 percent in the United Kingdom, 29 percent in Germany, 24 percent in Japan, and 35 percent in China. The need for effective faculty-administrator communication is, therefore, a concern for colleges and universities worldwide. Typically in the higher education literature, needed improvements in communication are framed in terms of a desire for more open and inclusive forms of communication (Del Favero, 2003; Kezar, 2004; Schuster et al., 1994;Tierney, 2006). Fostering more communication, however, does not necessarily lead to better communication. Nor does including more participants in communication processes necessarily lead to better decisions and outcomes (Gouran & Hirokawa, 1996; Lewis, 2000). Ironically, open and allegedly inclusive forms of communication could actually further marginalize underrepresented groups in colleges and universities. Open meetings and forums on campus, for example, frequently become vehicles to advance agendas for interest groups that are already well organized and whose members already possess significant forms of social capital that they can use to their advantage (Hammond, Anderson, & Cissna, 2003). Alternatively, we argue that a different mode of organizational dialogue will be needed to address conflicts between faculty and administration, with special attention paid to problems of language and discourse. This significant change in communication norms and practices will require both faculty and administrators to re-examine the underlying values, assumptions, and mental models that shape how each party communicates with the other. Addressing the challenges of communicating across paradigms involves a different vocabulary and mode of discourse. In particular, our belief in the necessity to open up hidden or

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obscure communication variables is based in the literature on intercultural discourse and communication (Kiesling & Paulston, 2004). To understand the complexities of communicating across paradigmatic levels, we take up, in this chapter, issues of communication from a number of different perspectives. In particular, we seek to explain how the communication patterns of faculty and administrators derive from different paradigmatic premises. Here, we consider the goals that faculty and administrators have for academic communication, and show how the goals vary greatly depending on the characteristics of these different institutional constituencies.Then, we examine linguistic issues in organizational communication, including the vocabulary and speech practices associated with various organizational roles in colleges and universities. Different paradigms, it will be seen, drive the modes by which organizational roles are established and the ways in which they are played out and often conflicted. DEFINING LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION “Language analysis has moved into a prominent place in organizational studies,” say Putnam and Fairhurst (2001, p. 78). Earlier scholarly inquiries into the use of language focused on the modes by which it was used to persuade and win arguments. Today, researchers seek to understand communication not so much in terms of its intent, function, or efficacy as the composition and meaning of the language itself. Indeed, there are at least eight interrelated features highlighted in the current communication literature: codes, structure, function, language user, meaning, text, context, and intertextuality (Putnam & Fairhurst, 2001). We offer definitions of language, interpersonal communication, and organizational communication that are suitable for an analysis of faculty-administrator interactions. Nunan (2007) suggests that: Language consists of an interlocking set of systems and subsystems made up of sounds, words and sentences, and . . . these are meaning-making tools; resources through which listeners, speakers, readers, and writers create, exchange and negotiate meanings, obtain and exchange goods and services, and establish and maintain relationships. (p. 17) According to Porter and Roberts (1976): Interpersonal communication can be defined as an interactive process which includes an individual’s effort to attain meaning and to respond to it. It involves transmission and reception of verbal and nonverbal signs and symbols which come not only from another person, but also from the physical and cultural settings of both sender and receiver. (p. 1558)

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And Stohl (1995) defines organizational communication as “the collective and interactive process of generating and interpreting messages” (p. 4). These definitions reject a simple sender-receiver model, in which communication is equated with transferring information from the mind of one individual to another. Instead, these definitions view communication as an interactive process of interpretation and meaning making. Of course, communications between faculty and administrators are usually not one-way information disseminating dicta. Rather, they are attempts to introduce new ideas for changes in policy and practice that are initially exchanges that call for a reaction. It is important to note that information exchanges among individuals are more than personal statements with a direct functional intent. Ancillary information is also passed on, either intentionally or unintentionally. In fact, “information transmitted can be more heavily influenced by context and motives than by communicators’ original beliefs, so that communicators often transmit information to others that is divorced from their private beliefs in intriguing ways” (Douglas, Sutton, & McGarty, 2008, p. 189). One of the most common modes for doing this is through abstraction and generalization, which deindividualizes the communication and may remove some of the potential negative affect. COMMUNICATION AND CONFLICT Communication is the primary medium through which conflict occurs. Faculty and administrators communicate on a number of levels, ranging from no interaction to frequent interaction (Eisenberg, 1984). The substance or content of these interactions is varied. Some of these communications occur through formal channels, while others take place in more informal venues. In this book, we will be primarily involved with person-to-person communications, although the formal communications will affect these and will be explained as well. When formal communication becomes distorted, it is often due to the misunderstandings of both groups and to the unique languages and grammars used by both. For our purposes, in attempting to understand the sources of conflict between faculty and administration, we can illustrate the complications of creating meaningful linguistic interactions (when they are intended; sometimes, they are intentionally ambiguous) by listing the nine traditional classes of words: nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, adverbs, determiners, and interjections (Nunan, 2007). These classes include “content” that allows participants to discuss entities, events, and the systemic conditions in which the exchange is taking place. The classes are organized by “grammar” (or sometimes multiple grammars) that permit an individual to relate content in one word to another in (mostly) logical ways. The study of morphology addresses the variables of both grammar and vocabulary, while syntax is concerned with phrase and sentence structures.

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We would assert here that the morphology of faculty and of administrators differs in ways that are significant enough to obstruct the establishment of reasonably permanent common meanings attached to important public and institutional events and communications (for example, policy documents and speeches). A morphology that is unique to a particular group or constituency usually interferes with communications where each party in the exchange relies on background and experience in the language of its own set—either faculty or administration. As Coupland (2009) observed, “the techniques we use every day begin after a while to alter the way our brains work, and hence the way we experience our world” (p. 19). Thus, faculty communicate in unique ways that may not initially be meaningful to administrators—and the reverse. The opportunities for distortion or misunderstanding in organizational communication are manifold. Take, for example, the “nodes” in the communications pathway identified in the classic Shannon and Weaver (1949) model. Miscommunication can occur at the information source, through semantic noise in the message sent, in the encoding process by the transmitter, in the signals, in the decoding process by the receiver, and in the decoding of the message itself (not the process) by the receiver. It is also affected by the frequency of messages sent and the physical proximity of the communicants. Clearly, significant differences between sender and receiver understandings of communication can, and often do, result in conflict over revisions of policy and practice. In addition, the context or environment in which both sender and receiver exist creates more opportunities for miscommunication. As March and Simon (1958) observe, the more complex the environment, “the greater the differentiation of perceptions within the organization” (p. 127). Since faculty and administrators are members of two separate complex environments, it is to be expected that the perceptions of the members of each group will be different from each other. However, the overarching environment of the institution as a whole, including its culture and norms, can partially condition the separate perceptions and communications of each group. While conflict is expressed through the act of communication, the sources of conflict are associated with the cognition and sensemaking that occur prior to the communication act. As Weick (1995) notes, the cognitive frames of individuals shape the types of information they notice and the types of information they neglect. These cognitive frames also shape how people make sense of the information that they use. Furthermore, according to Goffman (1974), cognitive frames provide a point of view that influences thinking, judgment, and subsequent action. Since the cognitive frames of individuals will differ to some degree, people are likely to attend to different sources of information and construct different interpretations of events and circumstances. If one party notices certain cues and data, while the other party attends to different sources of information, then the two parties are likely to misunderstand each other when they communicate.

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Misunderstandings, if not identified or addressed, are likely to generate conflicts in subsequent communications, largely because neither party can accurately predict the behaviors and attitudes of the other. Thus, conflicts are likely to emerge when the mental models of different individuals result in divergent interpretations of reality. If the two parties communicate clearly with each other, then the nature of their conflicting interpretations will become apparent rather quickly. They will realize that they do not share the same interpretation of events, and their subsequent communications will be shaped by the knowledge that the two parties disagree about fundamental issues in the organization. On the other hand, if one or both parties do not communicate clearly, then the nature of their conflict may remain unknown to them, until subsequent behaviors reveal that the parties were, in fact, not in agreement (see Table 3.1). Another possible scenario is that the two parties do not communicate at all; in this instance, the groups would be unaware that their basic interpretations of the organization are not in agreement. Of course, once these two parties begin to communicate with each other, the nature of their disagreement will inevitably become evident to them—either immediately if they communicate clearly, or subsequently if the initial communications are unclear. COMMUNICATION IN HIGHER EDUCATION ORGANIZATIONS Colleges and universities are afflicted (some might say “blessed”!) by what Rescher (1991) calls “baffling phenomena.” By that term, he means: those eventuations that we encounter in the course of experience that perplex us because they are at odds with our (putative) knowledge of the world. TABLE 3.1 Interpretive Sources of Conflict

Mental Models

Quality of the Clear Communication

Consistent

Inconsistent

No ambiguity, message is likely to be understood; conflict is unlikely

Reveals divergent interpretations of reality; immediate conflict is likely

Unclear Ambiguous message; lack of understanding, but conflict is unlikely, because subsequent actions will be consistent with a mental model that both parties share

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Ambiguous message; lack of understanding; conflict may not emerge right way, but is likely to occur when subsequent actions reveal inconsistent viewpoints

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A baffling phenomenon in this sense is an eventuation that cannot be accommodated within the framework of one’s understanding of what goes on, because it conflicts with our accepted view of the natural order of things. (p. 1) We have argued in this book that both faculty and administrators frequently encounter such “baffling phenomena” as they work with one another. The reasons for the bafflement lie not only in the structural conditions and perceived pragmatic, if self-oriented, needs of each side (frequently short-term), but, more importantly, in the deeply differing paradigmatic beliefs of each. It could be argued, of course, that competing explanations of organizational phenomena can coexist, much as in physics, in which wave and particle theory, though often suggesting contradictory conclusions, may serve as platforms for research and useful explications of phenomena that do not lend themselves unequivocally to explanation from both perspectives simultaneously. Rescher (1991) offers a number of typical reactions that individuals display when confronted with a baffling phenomenon. Readers will likely recognize these typical faculty and administrator tactics: 1. Dismissal: People reject the phenomenon as imaginary or unreal; they suggest that the phenomenon does not exist. Women faculty, for example, may complain about sexism in their department, only to have a chair or dean tell them that they are imagining the slights or reading too much into the behaviors. 2. Degradation: People acknowledge that the phenomenon is real, but suggest that it is unimportant or insignificant. Faculty may concede that massive open online courses (MOOCs) exist, but deny that they portend any significant changes for higher education. 3. Accommodation: People acknowledge that the phenomenon is real and important, but suggest that it is not unusual or unique. Therefore, they can claim that the phenomenon can be accommodated by existing structures and practices. Faculty may acknowledge the increasing diversity of the students they teach, and they may agree that these changes are important to their institution, but they persist in using the same teaching practices that they have used for years. 4. Resignation: People acknowledge that the phenomenon is real, important, and unprecedented, and they acknowledge that existing structures need to be reconfigured to address it. But they also contend that it is not feasible to reconfigure those structures at this time, and that the organization must wait until better options become available. Administrators, for example, may agree with faculty union activists who argue that the institution is relying too extensively on part-time

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faculty. These administrators may also contend that resources are not currently available to hire more full-time faculty, and that perhaps in the future, if the resource environment improves, the institution might be able to hire more full-time professors. But until then, nothing can be done. As we noted in Chapter 2, institutions of higher education are loosely coupled (Weick, 1976), more so at doctoral-granting research universities than at community colleges where tighter hierarchical authority is typically in place. Organizational members in a college or university work in a system of roles that are “networked.” That is, the roles (and their occupants) are connected formally by virtue of organizational activities, interactions, and sentiments demanded by the technology of the transformation of raw material into finished products. They are also linked informally through a set of activities, interactions, and sentiments developed by individuals who emerge to fill holes in the formal structure and technology (Homans, 1950). Interactions between faculty and administrators evolve over time and are determined by the necessities of coordinating the work, moderated by each group’s need for autonomy and self-control. Each interaction between an individual faculty member and an individual administrator is to some extent prototypical—built on a long-standing pattern of interactions—but also idiosyncratic. Colleges and universities must take into account communication across and within many levels. Because of the overlapping structures in higher education (faculty and administration), there is inevitably some redundancy in communication. On the other hand, political influences leave many institutions with carefully guarded circles of limited and/or filtered communication (Davis, 1953a, 1953b, 1968; Tierney, 1993). Despite the predominance of short-term, issue-dominated communications between faculty and administration, in point of fact, over time, repeating patterns of communication among these organizational participants and their offices are established and, in most cases, become routine. Consistently predictable interactions between groups are one of the bases of collaboration. Otherwise, in the face of ambiguity and uncertainty, collaborative or concerted work would be exceptionally difficult (Monge & Contractor, 2001). UNCERTAINTY AND EQUIVOCALITY Some of the communication challenges experienced by faculty and administrators are associated with information processing. Information can be viewed as an assortment of data and messages that needs to be organized so that it can be useful (Losee, 1997). Unprocessed information lacks meaning and relevance. The act of processing information, therefore, generates new knowledge for the organization.

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Daft and Weick (1984) characterized all organizations as information processing systems. Organizations process information to carry out tasks, coordinate activities, and interpret conditions in the external environment. To facilitate the processing of information, organizations have developed a large number of elaborate structures, including management information systems, group meetings and task forces, and liaison personnel who coordinate information flows across departments and divisions. Organizations confront two key challenges to effective information processing: uncertainty and equivocality (Daft & Lengel, 1986). Uncertainty refers to the absence of relevant information (Galbraith, 1977). Organizational members have a specific question that needs to be addressed before they can take appropriate action. If an answer to that question is unavailable, then actions may be delayed until relevant information is obtained and processed. Prolonged uncertainty can freeze an organization from taking any action, which, in turn, may compromise organizational effectiveness. Equivocality refers to ambiguity and the likelihood that different meanings will be assigned to the same phenomenon (Weick, 1979). When the situation is equivocal, gathering more information will not resolve the problem. Instead, more information could simply generate more ambiguity. High levels of equivocality will make coordinated action nearly impossible, because people will lack a common understanding of organizational conditions, goals, and priorities (Daft & Lengel, 1986). Different organizational conditions contribute to uncertainty and equivocality. High levels of interdependence contribute to uncertainty. When two organizational units are highly interdependent, each depends on the other to perform its tasks. If two committees must approve a policy before it can be enacted, then those committees are highly interdependent. As Daft and Lengel (1986) note, “interdependence increases uncertainty because action by one department can unexpectedly force adaption by other departments” (p. 564). If the interdependent departments are not sharing information, then levels of uncertainty are likely to be high. In higher education institutions, academic departments and many administrative units operate with relatively high levels of autonomy; however, interdependence increases in the context of shared governance, strategic planning, and institution-wide efforts to improve performance. In those settings, uncertainty may constrain the ability to take action. While interdependence is associated with uncertainty, the organizational characteristic that contributes to equivocality is differentiation. As the differences between groups become greater, there is a stronger likelihood that the groups will interpret information in different ways. “Each department develops its own functional specialization, time horizon, goals, frame of reference, and jargon . . . A common perspective does not exist . . . Interdepartmental communications thus can be complex, ambiguous, and difficult to interpret” (Daft & Lengel, 1986, p. 564). As we have noted, colleges and universities are highly differentiated

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organizations, and, therefore, communications between faculty and administrators are quite susceptible to equivocality. Given the negative impact that uncertainty and equivocality can have on organizational performance, leaders can seek to reduce uncertainty and overcome equivocality. Different approaches, however, are needed to address each. To address uncertainty, leaders need to design structures that provide larger amounts of information. The development of plans, reports, and shared databases can increase the amount of information available to organizational units and reduce the level of uncertainty between them. Advising offices and academic departments, for example, may both have responsibility for promoting student success. But if advising staff are unaware of changes in departmental curricula, then they will be uncertain about how to advise students. And if academic departments are unaware of services provided in the advising center, then faculty may be uncertain regarding the level of support that students are receiving. Finding a way to share more information between these units—perhaps through shared student databases— could reduce uncertainty and enable members of each unit to feel confident that their actions will be consistent with those in other units. While providing more information can address uncertainty, a different approach is needed to mitigate equivocality.The distribution of more data will not necessarily clarify an ambiguous situation. Instead, what tends to reduce equivocality is the use of rich media. Information richness is defined as “the ability of information of change understanding within a time interval” (Daft & Lengel, 1986, p. 555). Rich media have a strong capacity to change understandings within a relatively brief time frame. This capacity is highest in media that allow for immediate feedback and that convey multiple cues such as body language and tone of voice. Face-to-face communication is a rich medium, but e-mail correspondence is low in information richness. When differentiated departments engage together in the use of rich media, they are more likely to build shared understandings that reduce equivocality. Here, we point toward Marshall McLuhan’s hypothesis that the medium used to communicate ideas exercises an independent, latent, and frequently imperceptible force on both sender and receiver; a force that often is a more important influence than the message itself (Coupland, 2009, 2011; McLuhan, 1964). Rich media can quickly clarify ambiguity and generate common understandings. Faceto-face communication, for example, can be a rich communication medium, because it conveys nonverbal signals and provides immediate feedback. In contrast, e-mail is an impersonal, asynchronous medium that lacks richness; thus, e-mail is not well suited to convey complicated information or to convince and persuade others. Despite the low level of richness, e-mail messages have become the preferred communication medium at many colleges and universities (White et al., 2010). An overreliance on e-mail, however, can perpetuate misunderstandings due to a lack of context. Furthermore, disagreements can be addressed more

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quickly and effectively through the use of rich media; in contrast, hastily worded e-mails sent in the heat of the moment are likely to exacerbate tensions. The independent effects of communication media are likely to become more significant given innovations in social media that have generated new norms and expectations for the pace and distribution of information sharing. Faculty and administrators can diagnose whether their communication challenges are related to uncertainty, equivocality, or both. Daft and Lengel (1986) provide a useful framework for characterizing the communication challenges between organizational units. This framework (see Table 3.2) juxtaposes the level of differentiation between the groups with the degree of interdependence between them. Given the high level of structural differentiation in most colleges and universities, we will focus on the two quadrants in the framework that assume high levels differentiation. Quadrant 1 applies to situations in which the units are highly differentiated but not particularly interdependent. This quadrant might typify routine facultyadministrator relations. The day-to-day work of faculty may be far removed from the work of administrators, and the daily tasks of administrators may not put them in frequent contact with faculty. However, when faculty and administrators are compelled to interact, their communications will be characterized by a high level of equivocality, because they do not typically share common interpretations of organizational issues. Consider, for instance, whether a proposed new course on global citizenship would meet a university’s general education requirement for diversity. Faculty and administrators may have different understandings of the concept of diversity, and, therefore, different expectations regarding the types of courses that would fulfill curriculum requirements. What is needed here is not more information about the proposed new course. Instead, faculty and administrators need to engage in rich media (face-to-face meetings, special task TABLE 3.2 Structural Conditions that Generate Uncertainty and Equivocality

Level of Differentiation

High

Quadrant 1 High differentiation, low interdependence Communication challenge: Equivocality

Quadrant 2 High differentiation, High interdependence Communication challenge: Equivocality and uncertainty

Low

Quadrant 3 Low differentiation, low interdependence Communication challenge: None

Quadrant 4 Low differentiation, High interdependence Communication challenge: Uncertainty

Low High Degree of Interdependence

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forces) to forge a common understanding of diversity in relation to the institution’s undergraduate curriculum. Quadrant 2 relates to situations in which the groups are both highly differentiated and highly interdependent.While this situation may not characterize day-to-day interactions between faculty-administration, it does have relevance for communications regarding large-scale, institution-wide initiatives, such as strategic planning, accreditation, or assessment. In these larger-scale projects, faculty and administrators are much more interdependent than they typically are. If either group drops the ball, then the entire effort is jeopardized. Here, faculty and administrators need both rich media to resolve their differences, and large amounts of information to reduce uncertainty. A strategic planning task force, for example, might provide a rich media venue for faculty and administrators to develop a common understanding of institutional goals and priorities. But faculty and administrators may remain uncertain regarding how each group is addressing those goals and priorities.Therefore, the institution also needs to create structures for sharing large amounts of information. One example might be a frequently updated database that shows how each academic department is assessing student learning outcomes. Given a shared database of information, administrators can be more certain regarding the extent and impact of the institution’s assessment efforts. And faculty can be more certain that their departmental assessment efforts are relevant to larger institutional goals, rather than viewing assessment as merely a time-consuming exercise in bureaucratic compliance. Administrators and faculty may mistakenly assume that their interactions are situated in quadrant 4—low differentiation and high interdependence. In communications associated with governance, planning, and decision-making, administrators and faculty may correctly conclude that their activities are highly interdependent, but they may also assume that they share values, beliefs, and norms. Administrators and faculty may believe that a common commitment to the institution’s mission would reduce the level of differentiation between the groups, at least as far as institutional governance and decision-making are concerned. As a result, they would work to address the communication challenge associated with high interdependence (uncertainty), but fail to consider that their interactions are constrained by equivocality. In this scenario, administrators and faculty would generate and share with each other large volumes of data, but then become frustrated when substantial differences of interpretation emerge. Here, elaborate management information systems, detailed spreadsheets, and precise planning documents are unlikely to be sufficient. These need to be coupled with rich media venues so that both uncertainty and equivocality can be addressed. Another error would be to situate faculty-administrator interactions in quadrant 3: low differentiation and low interdependence. Low differentiation assumes that the interests of faculty and administrators are not that different—a problematic assumption even under ideal circumstances. Low interdependence assumes that

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faculty and administrators do not need to work together to advance the aims of the institution. Each group can perform its respective tasks separately, and the organization will be better for it. Neither group would feel the need to share much information, nor be willing to invest the time and energy needed to participate in rich communication media. The current context of accountability, efficiency, and effectiveness, however, calls for greater collaboration and more interdependent activity between faculty and administrators (Kezar & Lester, 2009).The long-term success of any strategic initiative in higher education is likely tied to the level and extent of collaboration between faculty and administrators. For institutions to change, develop, and better serve the needs of society, faculty and administrators will need to work together, and, therefore, issues of uncertainty and equivocality will need to be addressed in the communication practices of the institution. STRATEGIC AMBIGUITY Efforts to reduce uncertainty and equivocality, through clear and consistent communication, have a potential downside. Clarity of communication may not always be effective or appropriate. Clarity “reflects the degree to which a source has narrowed the possible interpretations of a message, and succeeded in achieving a correspondence between his or her intentions and the interpretation of the receiver” (Eisenberg, 1984, pp. 229–230). Clear communication, therefore, can establish a greater likelihood that individuals will interpret a message in the same way that the sender had intended. But clear communication also results in a narrowing of interpretive possibilities. Clear messages are not amenable to multiple interpretations, and, in some instances, it might be more beneficial to keep open a wider range of interpretation possibilities, rather than close them off. For example, during the planning phases of a project, a group may benefit from a more ambiguous framing of their task, so that members will feel comfortable sharing different interpretations and linking new ideas to existing strategies. In contrast to communication clarity, Eisenberg (1984) offers the concept of strategic ambiguity, which suggests that organizational members will occasionally choose to be less than precise in their statements and messages. Ambiguous messages are open to multiple interpretations.When people receive an ambiguous message, they will often “fill in what they believe to be the appropriate context and meaning” (p. 233).When people fill in the meaning of an ambiguous message, they will tend to do so in a way that is consistent with their own values and beliefs. Likewise, groups within an organization will also construct and attribute their own meanings to ambiguous messages. Since those meanings will be consistent with the values and beliefs of the group, the members of that group will likely develop a sense of agreement with that message. In other words, they will view the message as consistent with the value system of the group and therefore worthy of support.

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Different groups can achieve similar levels of agreement with an ambiguous message, even if the groups do not share the same goals and values. This level of agreement can occur at the abstract level of metaphors, symbols, and ideas. The idea of an urban university, for example, is amenable to multiple interpretations, particularly if the concept is not defined in terms of geography. A faculty member working with K-12 schools in the city in which the university is located can readily connect to the idea of “urban,” but so can faculty working on urban issues with colleagues in Barcelona, Bangalore, or Buenos Aires. This idea of “urban” allows the university to pursue multiple goals and satisfy multiple constituencies. If university leaders tried to clarify the meaning of “urban,” then some groups within the university would likely feel disconnected from that clarified meaning, and therefore come to believe that their goals and values are no longer a priority for the institution. Eisenberg (1984) suggests that strategic ambiguity may be essential in organizations that pursue multiple goals and strategies. Ambiguous messages can promote unified diversity, as groups with different values and goals can coexist and contribute to overall organizational performance. Eisenberg and Witten (1987) indicate that these ambiguous messages are particularly important in discussions of missions, goals, and plans: “Ambiguous missions and goals allow divergent interpretations to coexist and are more effective in allowing diverse groups to work together” (p. 422). In complex organizations that pursue multiple goals, strategic ambiguity can unite diverse elements around a common idea, metaphor, or symbol, without requiring those elements to be tightly aligned in terms of goals, values, and beliefs. In higher education, college and university missions are typically framed in ambiguous terms. This framing allows each constituency within the organization to construct and attribute its own meaning to that mission. More precise mission statements, in contrast, would likely exclude certain activities and functions from the institution’s set of priorities. Certainly, missions can be framed so broadly that they lack any impact at all on the institution. But if the mission is oriented toward a compelling metaphor, then organizational members can, in spite of their differences, find ways to connect to it and shape their work around it. The vision statement at the University of Massachusetts Boston, for instance, refers to the institution as a “research university with a teaching soul.” Administrators and faculty who value research can see in this statement a prioritization of their work and an acknowledgement that good research serves as the basis for good teaching. Administrators and faculty who value teaching can interpret the same statement as indicating that the overarching spirit of the institution is animated by teaching and that good research is an extension of good teaching and mentoring. This metaphor, given its looseness and ambiguity, can resonate with and affect the practices of groups that have different values and goals.

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To summarize, while there are problems associated with ambiguity, there are also dangers associated with being too clear.With too much ambiguity, the organization lacks sufficient coherence to survive as a distinct entity. The organization loses its identity and drifts toward randomness. With too much clarity, the organization lacks the diversity of perspective needed to pursue multiple goals. Thus, organizations need both clarity and ambiguity. To manage this paradox, organizational members can assess the context and determine when clarity or ambiguity might be preferable. Clear messages might be needed when organizational performance declines, so that a call to action is issued for all organizational members. Strategic ambiguity might be called for when the organization needs to foster collaboration across different units or divisions, or during discussions of missions, goals, and plans for the future. INFORMATION OVERLOAD AND UNDERLOAD The quality of organizational communication can also have a significant impact on individual and institutional outcomes.White et al. (2010) found that when faculty and staff felt well informed, they reported a stronger sense of identification with their institution. In a national study of university faculty, Daly and Dee (2006) found that open communication was positively associated with job satisfaction and commitment to the institution. Well-informed and highly committed organizational members can, in turn, generate a positive external reputation for the organization. They can tell success stories and convey a positive organizational image to external groups (Gioia & Thomas, 1996). In contrast, when organizational members are poorly informed, their level of commitment may decline, and their communications with external groups may fixate on the negative. Such organizations become susceptible to the “disgruntled within” (White et al., 2010). The quality of communication, as perceived by organizational members, can be understood through an analysis of information load. Bartoo and Sias (2004) defined information load as the “amount of information employees receive in comparison to the amount of information they feel they need to receive in order to do their jobs” (p. 17). Information overload occurs when the organization provides more information than people can use. To deal with the overabundance of information, people develop their own filtering systems for determining what to pay attention to, and what to ignore. In their study of higher education communication,White et al. (2010) found that faculty and administrators routinely filter their e-mail accounts by looking at sender names and subject lines, reading some messages immediately, deleting others, and holding still others to read later. The overwhelming amount of information that faculty and administrators receive may lead them to “tune out” and overlook important issues or emerging concerns. Furthermore, information overload can generate misunderstandings and conflict between faculty and administrators. Faculty may feel ignored if administrators do

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not respond to an e-mail that they marked as urgent. Likewise, administrators may feel neglected when faculty do not respond to a call for feedback on a draft policy proposal. While information overload may lead people to neglect or overlook important communications, information underload can lead to the spread of rumors and unfounded speculation. Information underload occurs when the organization provides less information than employees expect. A lack of information generates uncertainty, because organizational members believe that they do not have the information they need to do their jobs. In the absence of organizationally sanctioned information, people will fill the void with their own speculation.These speculations may reduce the discomfort associated with uncertainty, but they will often harm the organization as a whole. When organizational members fill the information vacuum with their own speculation, those speculations are often infused with assumptions of distrust and organizational deficiency. People may assume that information is withheld because the keepers of the information do not trust those who want to receive it. People may also assume that the information is withheld because it reflects poorly on the organization. Thus, speculation and rumor are more likely to be negative than positive. In a study of a university that was experiencing changes in its resource environment, Neumann (1995) found that the absence of information about the campus budget generated speculation that the institution was facing hard times, even when that university’s finances were actually quite strong. This unfounded speculation about university finances led to high levels of uncertainty regarding whether sufficient resources would be available for future initiatives. Thus, new initiatives were tabled or delayed, even though resources would likely have been available for their implementation. Here, information underload led to uncertainty about resources, which led to negative speculation and a delay in needed institutional improvements. Given the problems associated with information overload and underload, faculty and administrators need to consider ways in which they can provide the right amount of information to the right people. The challenge, though, is that the “right” amount is subjective, at least in part (see Table 3.3). Information load is judged in relation to the amount of information that people believe they need, not by an amount that has been objectively specified. As such, there could be a gap between the amount of information needed to perform a job, and the amount of information that the person believes is needed to perform that job. There could also be a gap between the amount of information provided by the organization, and the amount of information that is received and processed by organizational members. Even if the organization supplies all the information that people need to do their jobs, they may still experience information underload, if they miss or neglect some of the information that was provided. The concept of information load is also limited in that it focuses on information needed to perform a job. Organizational members may expect to receive

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COMMUNICATION AND CONFLICT IN THE ACADEMY TABLE 3.3 Scenarios that Trigger Information Underload or Overload

Conditions that Produce Information Underload

Organization provides insufficient information for people to do their jobs.

Organization provides sufficient information for people to do their jobs, but people ignore or neglect the information.

Organization provides sufficient information for people to do their jobs, but people view the information as insufficient.

Conditions that Produce Information Overload

Organization provides much more information than is needed for people to do their jobs.

Organization provides sufficient information for people to do their jobs, but people do not understand how the information is relevant to their jobs.

Organization provides sufficient information for people to do their jobs, but people perceive the amount of information to be overwhelming.

information that transcends their specific job responsibilities. White et al. (2010) found that even when faculty had sufficient information to perform their jobs, they still wanted information about administrative decisions, budgets, pending changes, and future directions. Receiving this type of information helped solidify their sense of commitment and connection to their employing institution. As the authors concluded, “There is a difference between knowing what you need to know, and being in the know, which fosters a sense of community and increases willingness to be an advocate for the organization” (p. 80). This finding shows that information not only fulfills task/instrumental purposes, but also has an affective/emotional component. Administrators may contribute to information underload when they make untested assumptions regarding what constitutes common knowledge in the organization. White et al. (2010) found that senior administrators often lacked an understanding of what was common knowledge among the faculty. These administrators assumed that faculty would feel abundantly informed because so much information was available on the university’s website. But faculty in this study did not use the institution’s website as a communication channel to obtain new information. Instead, for faculty, the website served as an archive from which they retrieved and downloaded existing forms and policy documents. The administrative hierarchy may be another impediment to the effective distribution of information. Top-down communications are susceptible to bottlenecks and uneven distribution. As information progresses down the organizational hierarchy, its distribution is shaped by individual managers, who may decide to filter or withhold the information. Provosts may share information with deans, but then each dean may decide whether and how to share the information with faculty. This ad hoc system of communication can generate a sense of information underload, as well as a sense of inequity, in that some organizational units are

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UNEVEN DISTRIBUTION OF INFORMATION AT DSU Faculty in our study at DSU raised concerns regarding unequal treatment across departments and colleges within the university. Subsequent interviews with deans and department chairs, however, revealed that many of the concerns were attributable to uneven distribution of information, rather than outright inequitable treatment. We provide three examples below: n

n

n

“I was told by my department chair that we can’t use grant funds to buy us out of courses, but then I hear that they are doing exactly that in the biology department. What gives?” asked a faculty member in the social sciences. The university-wide policy at DSU is that grant funds can be used to reduce a full-time faculty member’s teaching load. The department chair, in this case, provided inaccurate information that was based on a one-yearonly restriction when the college of arts and sciences did not permit grant buy-outs because of a faculty shortage. The department chair was unaware that this restriction had been lifted. “In English, they have a class size limit of 20 in writing intensive courses. But my course in psychology is also writing intensive, and I’ve got more than 30 students in there.” In this case, the faculty member in psychology was unaware of the process by which courses get designated as “writing intensive.” Her chair never distributed the information, because he did not think writing-intensive courses were relevant to psychology. “My dean said that travel funds are only available if you are presenting research at a conference,” explained a faculty member in the humanities, “but faculty in the college of management got travel funds even if they weren’t presenting.” The university-wide policy is that travel funds are made available first to faculty who are presenting research at a conference, and then remaining funds are allocated to those attending conferences but not presenting. This faculty member had received only partial information about the policy, and the faculty in management had received the funds in question in a rare year when surplus funds were available.

viewed as receiving privileged information while others are shut out of the communication loop. PARADIGMS, COMMUNICATION, AND DISCOURSE Scholars have identified important connections between the paradigms of various social groupings and the communication practices of group members. Hassard and

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Keleman (2002) note that paradigms are established and demarcated through the communication practices and language conventions of distinct social groups: Our view is that, primarily, it is the language conventions, techniques and representational practices—recognized as scientifically legitimate and which are regularly mustered by members of a particular scientific community—that serve in practice to establish paradigm “identity.” Allegiance to a paradigm is allegiance to a heterogeneous and shifting collection of language conventions embedded in the practice of a particular context—in other words, allegiance primarily to a set of discourses. (pp. 338–339, emphasis in original) Thus, in order to understand the paradigms of faculty and administrators, we must examine the communication and discourse practices that characterize and define each group’s identity. Discourses emerge out of the necessities of interpersonal and interdepartmental cooperation, but also out of unique vocabularies and grammars of the work at hand. Gee (1999) argues that “words have multiple and ever changing meanings created for and adapted to specific contexts of use. At the same time, the meanings of words are integrally linked to social and cultural groups in ways that transcend individual minds” (p. 40). In the context of this book, then, it is important to examine the contextual meanings that faculty and administrators attach to words. Meanings are situated in the particulars of an interaction or a series of interactions between individuals or groups. Individuals construe the meaning from the perspective of the particulars of the context, but that process is moderated by past experience and is frequently negotiated in the course of the interaction (Goffman, 1981). Gee (1999) notes that there is a reciprocity or reflexivity between language and reality. He says: “language simultaneously reflects reality (‘the way things are’) and constructs (construes) it to be a certain way” (p. 82, emphasis in original). Because language assumes such an active role in the establishment of common understanding, it is important to begin an analysis of discourse by looking at the ways that language is constructed and used. Gee proposes that there are six building tasks in the use of language to comprehend the structure of an interaction episode. These are listed in Table 3.4. A key question in communication research is: where do conceptualizations of the communication process originate? The linguistic origins of the communication process can lie in one of two domains: a rational, abstract conceptualization of truth and knowledge, or a local, emergent ideology that suggests that meaning emerges from the situated nature of conflict. Furthermore, communication processes differ in their fundamental orientations toward building consensus or giving voice to dissensus. When we consider these two variables (rational/ emergent and consensus/dissensus) together, according to Deetz (2001), we can

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COMMUNICATION AND CONFLICT IN THE ACADEMY TABLE 3.4 How Language Builds Reality and Meaning

Building Task

Language Practices

Semiotic building “Using cues or clues to assemble situated meanings about what semiotic (communicative) systems, systems of knowledge, and ways of knowing, are here and now relevant and activated” (Gee, 1999, p. 85) World building

“Using cues or clues to assemble situated meanings about what is here and now (taken as) ‘reality,’ what is here and now (taken as) present and absent, concrete and abstract, ‘real’ and ‘unreal,’ probable, possible, and impossible” (Gee, 1999, p. 86)

Activity building “Using cues or clues to assemble situated meanings about what activity or activities are going on, composed of what specific actions” (Gee, 1999, p. 86) Socioculturally situated identity and relationship building

“Using cues or clues to assemble situated meanings about what identities and relationships are relevant to the interaction, with their concomitant attitudes, values, ways of feeling, ways of knowing and believing, as well as ways of acting and interacting” (Gee, 1999, p. 86)

Political building

“Using cues or clues to construct the nature and relevance of various ‘social goods,’ such as status and power, and anything else taken as a ‘social good’ here and now (e.g., beauty, humor, verbalness, specialist knowledge, a fancy car, etc.)” (Gee, 1999, p. 86)

Connection building

“Using cues or clues to make assumptions about how the past and future of an interaction, verbally and nonverbally, are connected to the present moment and to each other, so that interactions can have some degree of continuous coherence” (Gee, 1999, p. 86)

identify four prototypical types of discourse: normative, interpretive, critical, and dialogic (see Figure 3.1). The four prototypical discursive modes differ in a number of ways; for example, in their goals, methods, problems addressed, and likely organizational benefits. Each of these discourse modes is used in higher education as different circumstances demand them. The basic goal of normative discourse is to establish “lawlike relations among objects” (Deetz, 2001, p. 17). Faculty and administrators considering faculty salaries, for instance, would engage primarily in a rational/technical discussion of the nature of the labor market for faculty. In contrast, the basic goal of the interpretive mode of discourse is the establishment of a unified culture with a universal value of community agreement. The data employed in this mode might involve an ethnographic study of individual faculty or groups of faculty. A more concrete goal would be to develop a reliable means of “translating” interests, concerns, and sensemaking patterns among different constituents so that all involved have a common understanding of the problems and possible solutions. The third mode of discourse—the critical mode—has the goal of unmasking

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Consensus

Normative

Interpretive

Rational/Abstract

Local/Emergent Critical

Dialogic

Dissensus

FIGURE 3.1 Modes of Discourse Source: Based on Deetz (2001)

domination and revealing the “micropractices of unwarranted control, discursive closure, ideology, and skewed representation in organizational sites” (p. 17). The focus of the critical mode is on inequalities and on the political sources of those inequalities. Finally, the fourth mode of discourse—the dialogic—emphasizes the fragmentation of social life and aims to reveal “the hidden points of resistance and complexity” (p. 31). Dialogic perspectives seek to bring to the surface conflicts and tensions that have been suppressed or unrecognized. A further aim is to reestablish diversity by claiming space for marginalized voices. To be sure, these discourse modes are not ordinarily described as paradigms. That is, they are not premised on differing conceptualizations of epistemology (the basis of our knowledge, the limits of human knowing, etc.), metaphysics (our conceptions of human existence, time, truth, causality, etc.), or axiology (our views of ethics, aesthetics, religion, etc.). Yet, each of the discourse modes in Deetz’s framework can be linked to a particular paradigmatic stance. Normative discourse is aligned with the functionalist paradigm in its adherence to rational rules and its desire for objective analysis of organizational conditions. Interpretive discourse, quite obviously, is aligned with the interpretivist paradigm, which emphasizes the importance of collective sensemaking and the development of a shared understanding of the multiple meaning systems that comprise an organization. Deetz’s critical form of discourse is grounded in a paradigm of critical theory, which seeks to deconstruct hierarchy and alleviate conditions that maintain power disparities. Finally, the dialogic mode of discourse reflects postmodern assumptions regarding diversity and paradox in organizations. It is our belief that dialogues between different constituencies in colleges and universities must begin at the more fundamental paradigmatic level, and then move to an examination of how these paradigmatic beliefs affect the choice and use of discourse modes. For example, if an administrator is primarily focused on the

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interpretive mode and is communicating with a faculty member who is arguing from the perspective of a dialogic mode, their colloquy will not initially be successful—at least, in part, because the administrator is seeking consensus, while the faculty member is emphasizing dissensus. In this case, they must both expose their discourse mode assumptions, and then examine the paradigmatic belief systems that undergird them. COMMUNICATION PROTOCOLS It is important in discussing communication to describe the psychological orientations of the actors in a dispute and then be able to predict the communication protocols that will be used. For example, to understand the dynamics of communication in higher education, it is necessary to classify or categorize the different forms and metaphors that communications between actors in an organization can take (Putnam, Phillips, & Chapman, 1996). A useful typology has been suggested by Franco (2006), who proposes that there are five forms of conversation: debate, persuasion, dialogue, negotiation, and deliberation. The motivation for the choice of each of these differs, and the modes of conduct for each will vary depending on which paradigm is being used. Debate is brought on by conflicts of opinion between parties, and each party tries to demonstrate the falsity of the other’s position/paradigm. Persuasion also arises because of conflicts, but the parties focus on the legitimacy of their own paradigms in the hope that the other party will change. In a dialogue, participants do not engage in attempts to discredit the other or put forth their own position. Rather, they try to find points of commonality in the positions so that they can work toward a common meaning and understanding. A negotiated conversation is aimed at reconciling differences by offering concessions. Finally, deliberation is a form of conversation in which participants together seek agreement on a course of action that satisfies each of their aims. Importantly, each of these forms of communication takes place within a “topography” of speech—a mode of verbal interaction that is distinctive and appropriate to the goal of the interaction and the norms and values of the participants (Wittgenstein, 1953). Again, these norms and values are situated in the underlying paradigms used by the individuals who communicate with one another. Each of these conversation modes works best when the actors make the topography more “balanced” or what Habermas (1984) identifies as an “ideal speech situation” (ISS). ISS conversations are difficult to achieve because participants typically attempt to control the flow of discussion so that it suits their particular aims or paradigm preferences (consciously or unconsciously). To counteract this, participants must engage in structuring a framework for the conversation and in sensemaking, which requires interpretation and analysis (see Weick’s seven

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characteristics of sensemaking that describe what it is and how it can succeed or fail—Weick, 1995, pp. 17–62). In addition to the intellectual differences among disputants, conflict almost inevitably (at least in academia) involves a personal investment of the parties in the outcomes. Such concern for a favorable outcome tends to have at least two effects on interactions. First, it tends to raise the emotional pitch of the discussion to the detriment of authentic listening to the arguments of the other. Second, it leads to distortion of positions (intentionally and unintentionally), thereby making more difficult a focus on both the practical issue at hand, as well as on the underlying paradigms. In fact, Follett (1924) suggests that the objective of interactions should be constructive conflict (Gehani & Gehani, 2007), brought about through “inventive integration”—the development of mutually beneficial continuing relationships. On the other hand, if both faculty and administrators can become engaged in a discussion of the paradigms underlying their arguments and disagreements, it is possible that their differences, rational and emotional, can be addressed, and a workable solution can be developed. We do not suggest, however, that such communication will lead to a resolution of paradigm differences; that would require one party to adopt the paradigm of the other. That kind of transformation necessitates more than cognitive appreciation. It involves a radical ideological and psychological change that is highly unlikely in an organizational setting such as a college or university with diverse interests and personalities (Zarakovskii & Zatsarnyi, 2000). Instead, we argue that it is possible for the parties to reach a paradigmatic understanding that enables them to operate across multiple paradigms. In communicating, an actor does not surrender his or her paradigmatic stance; instead, he or she learns to work across multiple paradigms. The actor maintains his or her “home” paradigm, but also learns to communicate in the language of other paradigms (Morgan, 1983; Schultz & Hatch, 1996). FORMAL AND INFORMAL COMMUNICATION NETWORKS Two different types of knowledge—migratory and embedded—have been deemed important to understanding formal and informal modes of communication (Badaracco, 1991). Migratory knowledge is associated with information that is regularly transmitted among individuals or groups. This information is part of the customary and habitual transfer of functional data that allows the organization to complete its work on time. It is often encapsulated in written reports or data files that are easily accessible. Embedded knowledge, on the other hand, takes more complicated structures and process to transfer. This form of knowledge is often latent but deeply rooted in the traditions of the institution (Lam, 1997).

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In terms of formal organizational communications, Farace, Monge, and Russell (1977) identified three types of networks in organizations: production, maintenance, and innovation. These different and often overlapping functions employ different vocabularies and grammars that emerge out of their separate work requirements. For example, interactions that address production problems, such as curriculum development, will likely employ language and grammar that are concerned with outcomes that facilitate the refinement and implementation of procedures for installing a new curriculum (see, for example, McConnell & Mortimer, 1971). Interactions that are concerned with maintenance issues, such as graduation requirements, will use the languages germane to ongoing institutional concerns with standardization and routinization, while interactions dealing with innovations will employ language and interaction protocols that normatively permit departures from the status quo. It is important to recognize the critical distinction between formal and informal/emergent communication networks (Monge & Contractor, 2001). Clearly, faculty and administrators must engage in regular formal interactions to carry out the work of the institution. But most formal communication networks are inaccurate and incomplete, partly because it is impossible to specify in advance all the conditions that obtain in a given situation (Eisenberg, 2007). Given the limitations of formal networks, organizational members will create and participate in informal networks. Through informal networks, organizational members can generate information and knowledge that fill the gaps in formal organizational systems. As one example, an institution may have formal networks for administrators to communicate with faculty regarding criteria for tenure and promotion. These formal communications may include faculty handbooks or websites that describe the faculty evaluation process. Even if these formal communications are quite extensive, they still may not anticipate all contingencies associated with the evaluation of faculty.When an unanticipated contingency emerges, the affected faculty member is likely to seek an answer through informal communication, such as a hallway conversation with a dean or over a cup of coffee with the department chair. While informal networks may effectively supplement the information available in formal networks, these informal forms of communication have the potential to generate confusion and inconsistency. Informal networks are somewhat idiosyncratic; each organizational member will rely on a slightly different set of individuals.Therefore, two individuals could have a similar concern, approach their respective informal networks, and receive quite different information. It is also possible that informal networks will convey information or perspectives that contradict what is stated or implied in formal communications. Thus, the danger in relying extensively on informal networks is that such communication is not formally sanctioned by the organization, and, therefore, might not be reliable or consistent with the norms and values of the organization.

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As a result, for many years, scholars have endeavored to explore the many ways in which informal networks augment and/or inhibit formal network communications (Krikorian, Seibold, & Goode, 1997). For example, in the relatively new theories of “structural holes” (Burt, 2004), some scholars have found that when two or more workers are not connected formally by the organization, their work can still benefit from collaboration. By creating informal linkages with others (filling in between structural holes), individuals usually increase their social capital by virtue of their interactions with diverse individuals with different knowledge bases. The nature and quality of the holes can facilitate the formation of “social capital” in an organization (Burt, 2001), which, in turn, generates energy and norms that can be put to use in the pursuit of organizational goals. Moreover, individuals who fill structural holes in organizations increase their own autonomy because they control information needed by others (Burt, 1992). The concept of structural holes can be viewed as an extension of Granovetter’s (1982) theory of the “strength of weak ties,” which confirms that workers with weak ties are, in fact, embedded in structural holes. While there is a tendency for faculty and administrators to be insular and to interact only with the functional units with which they have an operational relationship, in point of fact, both faculty and administrators are socially linked with members of other units. This phenomenon is known as the “strength of weak ties” (Granovetter, 1983). This theory argues that social networks of both close friends and mere acquaintances are important for the dissemination of ideas and innovations, as well as for effective cooperation and collaboration in organizations. Granovetter notes that while communications between friends and close colleagues are important, the weak ties between acquaintances in other organizational units are also significant if we are to understand how social systems change over time: The overall social structural picture suggested by this argument can be seen by considering the situation of some arbitrarily selected individual—call him Ego. Ego will have a collection of close friends, most of whom are in touch with one another—a densely knit clump of social structure. Moreover, Ego will have a collection of acquaintances, few of whom know one another. Each of these acquaintances, however, is likely to have close friends in his own right and therefore to be enmeshed in a closely knit clump of social structure, but one different from Ego’s. The weak tie between Ego and his acquaintance, therefore, becomes not merely a trivial acquaintance tie but rather a crucial bridge between the two densely knit clumps of close friends. (Granovetter, 1983, p. 202) While faculty may have relatively strong ties with colleagues in their department, they may also have weak ties with acquaintances in other academic and administrative departments. Likewise, administrators may have strong ties with

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coworkers in their division, but also have weak ties with faculty and staff across the institution. For example, a dean of students may have weak ties with faculty members in the psychology department. She may call on these faculty members when she needs some assistance in designing a new advising program for firstyear students. Similarly, the psychology faculty may call on the dean to serve as a guest lecturer in a class session that relates to her area of expertise. In this way, informal weak ties can promote collaboration across formal structural boundaries. Weak ties between faculty and administrators can serve to maintain a norm of reciprocity that might enhance the operational efficiencies and effectiveness of each group. Granovetter (1983) argues that “social systems lacking in weak ties will be fragmented and incoherent” (p. 202). In such systems, innovations will diffuse slowly, if at all, and organizational change efforts will be stymied, because the social networks of the institution do not have sufficient capacity to convey information to all of the widely dispersed units and divisions of a complex organization. While evidence suggests the importance of building weak ties among organizational members, the structures and practices of higher education institutions make it difficult for weak ties to develop. In the typical college or university organization, there are few opportunities for faculty of different departments to interact informally, just as there are limited opportunities for administrators to move outside their offices and meet faculty and staff. The two groups, furthermore, are not positioned structurally to develop common group norms that would support the goals of each. Faculty and administrators are often immersed in inefficient communication networks with many structural holes. Unfortunately, when structural holes occur across functionally differentiated units (for example, faculty and administration), the autonomy of these units often results in conflicting work objectives and work procedures. That is, the intellectual and language gaps between disparate units require motivation, time, and resources to reconcile. Put simply, an organizational member must exert significant effort to fill a structural hole, or, in Granovetter’s terms, it takes time to develop and maintain weak ties across an organization. Unfortunately, the pace of change is such that workers prefer (or are forced by circumstances) to muddle through by guessing at the meanings of communications from the other side. ISSUES OF POWER IN ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION Other sociological conditions also make faculty-administrator communication difficult. For example, in different institutions, partly as a result of historical circumstances and partly because of the leadership attributes of one or more members, the social status of faculty and administration may be different—one being higher than, equal to, or lower than the other (Fine, 1996; Strauss, 1991).

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These status differences can be explicitly manifested in the size and furnishings of offices, the social separation of members of one group from another, and the formality or informality of communication between the groups. Postmodern conditions demand a careful scrutiny of the nature of communications among people, especially the “language games” that are typically played (Lyotard, 1984). In organizations such as colleges and universities, these games emerge through the experience of required activities and interactions. Faculty and administrators, needless to say, engage in quite different activities. In higher education, these language games might include introducing new ideas with abstruse terminology, overloading an idea with excessive text, or referring readers to a difficult-to-find reference. To examine issues of hierarchy and power in conflicts between faculty and administrators, it is useful to utilize a sociolinguistic approach, since that mode recognizes that the source of linguistic repertories resides importantly in social systems and differs across social and cultural categories related to class, background, education and training, and professional experience.These characteristics not only predispose organizational members in different sectors to use different language repertories, but also to attach different meanings to common language usages.The use of language also creates the means by which discourse communities define and reinforce their membership boundaries, thus creating additional barriers to effective communication. A considerable amount of literature describes the difficulties of communication across “speech communities.” Faculty and administrators can be viewed as distinct speech communities that “coalesce around shared language use and schemata for interpreting linguistic codes” (Putnam & Fairhurst, 2001, p. 92). Much of this literature, however, is only descriptive, and while useful in revealing the nature of the ambiguities and conflicts across the different speech communities, does not address the question of how to overcome them in order to facilitate effective and meaningful communication, especially in organizations. In the next section of this chapter, we examine the literature on cross-cultural communication to develop a more thorough understanding of how distinct speech communities—between faculty and administration—can begin to address their conflicts and work together more effectively. COMMUNICATION ISSUES STEMMING FROM CULTURAL DIFFERENCES Colleges and universities are divided not only into functional work categories, but also into cultural communities that complement and support the belief systems of the workers in those spaces. Anthropologists generally agree that culture refers to the ideational dimension of human experience (e.g. Geertz, 1973; Goodenough, 1981; Spradley, 1980). Culture can be conceptualized as “the shared

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meanings, sensemaking, assumptions, understandings, or knowledge by which a group of people give order to their social world” (Brannen & Kleinberg, 2000, p. 393). Schein (1992) offers a definition that conceives culture in terms of artifacts, values, and assumptions. First, artifacts are evidence of culture at the physical, observable level, and include the norms, rituals, and symbols that characterize a particular organization. Cultural artifacts can be observed in the work environment (for example, the relationships that coworkers have with one another), in the processes used by an organization to transform inputs into finished outputs, and in the written and spoken language of an organization (for example, the formality or informality of verbal exchanges between members of different rank and status). Second, individual values are deeply held emotions directed toward a variety of objects, including people, institutions, and actions. When values are widely shared, they tend to influence the behavior of a group or organization. Schein’s third ingredient in his definition of culture, assumptions, is quite similar to the conception of paradigms that we discussed earlier. These are deep-seated, underlying patterns of driving forces (usually unconscious) that stem from an individual’s sense of “being in the world” and his or her answers to basic human questions about the nature of reality. Another way of describing organizational culture is through the insights of Martin (1992), who distinguishes among three perspectives on culture: integration, differentiation, and fragmentation. The integration perspective focuses on culture as a set of shared values. These values, when broadly shared by organizational members, serve as a basis for collaboration and coordinated action to achieve organizational goals. Faculty and administrators in a liberal arts college, for example, may share some overarching values regarding the benefits of an interdisciplinary education. These values would help them collaborate around the development of new courses and programs of study. While the integration perspective emphasizes a unified, organization-wide culture, the differentiation perspective highlights subcultural differences within an organization. Organizations are comprised of many subcultures, each with its own set of values and beliefs. While faculty and administrators are formally part of a single organization, in many respects they comprise quite distinct and separate subcultures. Martin suggests that three types of subcultures can emerge in organizations: enhancing subcultures that support or embrace the dominant culture of the organization, countercultures that oppose the dominant culture, and orthogonal cultures that remain separate from the dominant culture.Typically, the dominant culture of an organization reflects the values of top-level managers. Thus, if we equate higher education administrators with top-level managers, then the faculty subculture may be enhancing, countercultural, or orthogonal to the administrative culture. A faculty senate that embraces every administrative initiative would represent an enhancing subculture, a faculty coalition that protests an

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administrative decision would be countercultural, and a faculty subculture that seldom interacts with administrators would be orthogonal. Finally, a fragmentation perspective views organizational cultures as rife with ambiguity. Values take on different meanings for different people, based on the situation and the context. Therefore, the fragmentation perspective calls into question whether values can remain stable long enough to unify an entire organization (as in the integration perspective) or even serve to unite subgroups within an organization (the differentiation perspective). Consequently, organizational cultures and subcultures are viewed as temporary creations that emerge and dissolve based on circumstances, power, and politics. Subcultural divisions between faculty and administrators can be understood more fully through an analysis of the relationship between cultural values and group identity. Social identity can be defined as: the set of meanings that define who one is in terms of a group or classification (such as being an American or female), in terms of a role (for example, a stockbroker or a truck driver), or in terms of personal attributes (as in being friendly or honest). (Stets & Burke, 2005, p. 44; see also Stets & Burke, 2000) As Dovidio, Gaertner, Pearson, and Riek (2005) observe: This perspective [social identity theory] also posits that a person defines the self in one of two ways, as a unique individual with distinct characteristics and personal motives, or as the embodiment of a social collective, reflecting shared characteristics and goals. At the individual level, one’s personal welfare and goals are most salient and important. At the collective level, the goals and achievements of the group are merged with one’s own, and the group’s welfare is paramount. (pp. 234–235) The collective values of a group define and shape that group’s identity. Both faculty and administrators bring to their institutions the accumulated self and group identities formed through prior and contemporaneous socialization and professionalization experiences. In the cases of faculty and administrators, the sharing of information and values is often difficult because the culture of each group is particularly strong in inculcating its own norms and values. Each group constitutes a “situated system of symbols, symbolic forms, and meanings . . . used systematically by workers to make sense of themselves as workers, and to make sense of their work-life” (Carbaugh, 1996, p. 63). Each group proudly posits its status and related perquisites as justifications for its arguments. Further, each group consciously and intentionally develops boundaries that are intended to exclude

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those whose differing characteristics, norms, dispositions, life and work styles, and language are not tolerated by the group (Kuhn, 1975). These boundaries can be physical, emotional, psychological, or philosophical. The boundaries surrounding faculty and administrative subcultures are usually pronounced and often result in distortions (intentional and unintentional) of communication that further isolate each group and can impede total institutional effectiveness. The self-identification of faculty and administrators with their distinctive “ingroups” gives each an opportunity to gain social satisfaction and status from membership in a specific occupation and, importantly, to differentiate themselves (even defend themselves) from other occupations and their members with whom they must work (Berger, Cohen, & Zelditch, 1972). The working language of administrators contains grammar, words, and meanings that come to be known through experience and practice and, to some extent, through academic learning and training. The same is true for faculty. Although faculty utilize different vocabularies in their academic disciplines, the media of communication across disciplines is grounded in their common training in “scholarship.” This refers not to the scholarship of the discipline, but to the scholarship of academic work in general. Importantly, it is also the assumptions of scholarship (for example, the search for truth, verification of authorship, application of rigorous scientific research methods, etc.) that give confidence to faculty that their communications with fellow scholars have a common grounding in the academic profession. The boundaries between occupational subcultures are difficult to bridge, in part because each has its own language and rhetoric—or, in fact, multiple rhetorics that are unique to a particular profession. Fine (1996) suggests that an occupational rhetoric is a profession-specific system of language that people use to define and describe their work. Each occupational group will have a distinctive rhetoric that provides meaning to the most important attributes of that occupation. Faculty, for example, may use words such as academic freedom, knowledge, and peer review to define and describe key elements of the academic profession. Administrators may use words such as accountability, strategy, and institutional mission to characterize the work of administration. These systems of language also shape how the members of a profession define themselves. To be a faculty member, for example, means understanding how faculty make sense of academic freedom, knowledge, and peer review, along with other profession-specific terms. To be an administrator means thinking about accountability, strategy, and mission (and other profession-specific terms) in ways similar to other administrators. Thus, an occupational rhetoric reflects and constructs the professional identities of organizational members. This professional identity, in turn, shapes the ways in which members of a particular profession make sense of the larger world. As Fine notes, “Lawyers interpret the world legally, physicians medically, gardeners horticulturally, and, presumably, cooks edibly” (p. 90).While occupational rhetoric can provide coherence and unity within a profession, it can make communications

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across professions quite challenging, due to the unique meaning systems that each profession has constructed. Needless to say, communication across subcultures is fraught with ambiguity. Different communities have different rules for engaging in and interpreting speech (Gumperz, 1962). These “ethnographies” of speech (Bauman & Sherzer, 1975) are themselves paradigmatically situated. That is, they make assumptions about basic human values—epistemology, ontology, and axiology (Smith, 2005). When subcultures adopt different paradigmatic values, they will construct language systems that appear incompatible. In the communication protocols that faculty and administrators use, there are patterns of expression that are unique to each side —and perhaps inscrutable to the other side. In higher education organizations, knowledge itself is often tacit and context bound and is thus frequently inscrutable to outsiders. Some organizations, say Kilduff and Corley (2000), “may develop fortress-like cultures whereas others may create cultures that interact fluidly with the environments of other organizations” (p. 213). In higher education, such fortresses are common between faculty and administration. It is necessary, but quite difficult, to establish inter-unit permeability and coordination, partly because each group fears a loss of autonomy. Merging identities and goals may be entropic and thus causes fear among workers whose organizational identities are longstanding. It is difficult for them to forgo part of their specialized identities and to embrace a larger one. A potential solution is to develop inter-team or interdepartmental goal and task interdependence, without losing the unit boundaries that strengthen team or departmental identities (Drach-Zahavy, 2010). CONCLUSION In this chapter, we explored how conflicts are expressed, intensified, and sometimes addressed constructively through communication. We noted that communication in higher education organizations is complicated by “baffling phenomena” that elude clear and consistent explanation. The uncertainty and ambiguity of organizational life in colleges and universities is related, in part, to the differing paradigms used by faculty and administrators. These paradigm differences generate decidedly different discourses for each group. Given the different discourses of faculty and administration, their communications are impeded by a lack of agreement on word meanings and the absence of common interpretations of everyday occurrences. We also examined how formal and informal structures, power relations, and cultural values and beliefs shape facultyadministrator communication and may contribute to high levels of conflict between them. In the next chapter, we examine how these paradigm-based differences can erupt into significant conflict regarding the assessment of institutional effectiveness—one of the most critical issues facing higher education today.

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IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE Using media with different levels of richness. Communication media vary in their richness; that is, they differ in their capacity to evoke changes in understanding. Rich media have a strong capacity to change understandings due to their use of multiple cues, such as body language and tone of voice, and the speed with which they can provide feedback. On a continuum of media richness, face-to-face communication would be on the high end, while e-mail would be on the low end. Administrators and faculty can carefully consider their choices of media, and select the medium that best matches their communication goals. If administrators are seeking to encourage faculty to participate in a new initiative, then they should use rich media, such as forums and other face-to-face gatherings. When the purpose of the communication is to persuade or convey complex information (as is typically the case with a new initiative), rich media will tend to be more effective than less rich media. Conversely, the use of websites and e-mail messages, which are lower in media richness, will be unlikely to foster high levels of faculty engagement in a new initiative. If faculty are seeking to convey their opposition or concern regarding an administrative proposal, then they should use rich media, including face-to-face discussions. Oftentimes, the reasons for faculty opposition are complex and cannot be conveyed easily in an e-mail or written memo. If faculty opposition is presented without sufficient context, then administrators may simply dismiss the concern as knee-jerk resistance to change. A further advantage to rich media is that they provide opportunities for the participants to engage in a “give and take” of ideas, in which each party can improvise and build upon the ideas presented by the other. In this way, opposition can lead to innovative ideas for improvement, not merely to blockages of change. Uncertainty and ambiguity. Some of the most significant organizational communication challenges are associated with uncertainty and ambiguity. Uncertainty stems from the interdependencies between organizational units, while ambiguity emerges from high levels of differentiation within the organization. Administrators and faculty are highly interdependent during strategic change initiatives that require extensive collaboration across the institution. Administrators and faculty are also highly differentiated in that they adhere to different values, norms, and modes of work. Thus, colleges and universities are typically characterized by high levels of both uncertainty and ambiguity. The tactics for addressing uncertainty differ from those associated with mitigating ambiguity. To address uncertainty, organizational members can share more information with each other. To address ambiguity, organizational members

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n

n

Uncertainty can be addressed through the use of low-richness media, such as data reports, spreadsheets, e-mails, and memos. Simply getting the information into the hands of the other party will reduce uncertainty. Providing more information, however, will not clarify an ambiguous situation. Instead, organizational members will need to use rich media that can foster a change in how people interpret and understand the issue. Administrators and faculty can assess the extent to which their communication challenges are associated with uncertainty and/or ambiguity, and match their use of media to the types of challenges that they are confronting.

Strategic ambiguity. While ambiguity presents a challenge to effective organizational collaboration, it can also represent an opportunity to unite the disparate elements of an organization. Organizational groups with different values and goals can develop their own interpretations of and commitments to ambiguous statements. These diverse groups can unite around a common idea, metaphor, or symbol, without necessarily sharing the same goals, values, and beliefs. This type of ambiguity might be necessary if an organization seeks to accomplish multiple, and sometimes conflicting, goals, as is the case for most colleges and universities. Administrators and faculty can avoid the temptation to clarify ambiguous meanings, particularly in relation to missions, goals, and future plans. Tolerance for ambiguity is needed when administrators and faculty engage in conversations regarding the institution’s future; for example, during strategic planning or accreditation self-studies. Such conversations benefit from keeping open a wide range of interpretations, which is possible through the use of compelling, yet ambiguous messages. In these instances, rather than aim for clear communication, administrators and faculty can develop and use compelling metaphors that have the capacity to generate multiple interpretative possibilities.

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Chapter 4

Faculty-Administration Conflict and Institutional Effectiveness

PROBLEMS IN ASSESSING ORGANIZATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS Thus far, we have discussed the problems of conflict between faculty and administration. We suggested that these conflicts emerge, at least partly, because of the use of different paradigms. We explained that when subgroups rely on different paradigms, communication between the subgroups becomes extraordinarily complicated due to incommensurability. Now, in this chapter, we explain how these paradigm-based conflicts shape the ways in which faculty and administrators view the effectiveness of their institutions. Effectiveness, of course, is a critical issue, and if faculty and administration cannot achieve some type of common understanding of the criteria by which effectiveness will be assessed, then institutional outcomes will likely suffer as a result. Paradigms undergird our understanding of what organizational effectiveness means, and since different people employ different paradigms at different times, consensus on the appropriate effectiveness criteria to use will be elusive (Weick, 2001). In fact, it has long been understood and largely accepted that institutional effectiveness in higher education is difficult to assess. Part of the problem lies in the multidimensionality of the work performed by employees in colleges and universities, which usually requires a sophisticated selection and matching of evaluation criteria to the characteristics of that work. In higher education, the evaluation criteria are somewhat ambiguous and continue to emerge as a result of new research findings. The problem is also complicated by the arbitrariness of the time frame in which productivity is to be measured, with positive values often accruing, for example, to students well after the immediate instructional activity. The same time frame complication occurs in the selection of evaluation criteria for faculty. Faculty members derive different practical and psychological benefits from their work at different stages in their careers and thus require stageappropriate evaluation criteria. Furthermore, the selection of performance

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evaluation criteria is not entirely a rational process. The political interests of organizational subgroups can shape to their advantage decisions about evaluation criteria. Powerful academic departments, for example, may have much greater influence in determining the tenure and promotion criteria at their institution than the less powerful departments. Needless to say, authority over evaluation is a source of considerable conflict for faculty and administration. In this chapter, we examine the evaluation criteria used to assess the outcomes of the two primary arenas of faculty productivity: teaching and research. As these criteria are implicitly and explicitly used by different institutional constituencies to make personnel decisions and to develop institutional strategies, conflicts arise. In particular, we will consider how the evaluation criteria preferences of different constituencies vary and, further, how communication across the constituencies becomes problematic because of differing philosophic and semantic assumptions about effectiveness. It is our belief that the commonly employed effectiveness dimensions of organizations are undergirded by ontological, epistemological, and axiological assumptions—paradigms—that are often ignored or misunderstood in communications, both among evaluators representing different constituencies, as well as between the constituencies and those being evaluated (Frohock, 1999). Our thesis is that each of the many and diverse legitimate criteria of evaluation in practice is premised on different worldviews and that solutions to problems of evaluation that arise in personnel issues must be fully explored initially and then regularly through an analysis of the paradigms that underlie them. We will discuss the dominant paradigms that are salient in the literature and specifically in each model of effectiveness as they bear on evaluation practices and have resultant consequences for organizational performance. Conflicts in the evaluation of organizational performance invariably arise in colleges and universities (as in all organizations), especially when more than one constituency is responsible for personnel decisions about upward or downward mobility. These critical decisions are, of course, based on different paradigms. In higher education institutions, there are multiple constituencies involved in the assessment of institutional effectiveness, including faculty members, students, internal and external peers, local campus administrators, and, in some cases, university system administrators. If these constituency groups employ different paradigms in assessing institutional performance, then their conceptualizations of evaluation criteria will also differ significantly. Thus, in addition to differing paradigms that might explain or organizationally justify different role behaviors, the conceptualizations of the evaluation criteria themselves may differ. For example, faculty activity (in some disciplines) may conform to a social constructionist epistemology, while administrators may adhere to a strict positivist position. In turn, faculty may believe in the legitimacy of multiple evaluation

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criteria, while administrators may feel that there is, and should be, one standard applied to all. Given the different paradigms associated with faculty and administration, these groups are quite likely to attribute different meanings to the concept of effectiveness.These different meanings will generate conflict, largely because both groups are involved in the assessment of institutional effectiveness.These conflicts over what constitutes effectiveness will harm the long-term development of the institution. Ambiguity will surround the processes associated with assessing effectiveness. As a result, faculty, staff, and students will not have a clear understanding of what the institution values or how their work can connect to a larger organizational mission. In this chapter, we argue that disagreements over what constitutes effectiveness reveal not only differences regarding institutional goals, but also more fundamental conflicts of ideology and belief systems. Therefore, efforts to get everyone “on the same page” regarding institutional goals are unlikely to address the underlying sources of conflict.We suggest that conflict across institutional constituencies must be managed first by identifying the paradigms that predominate for each party, since the paradigms are the philosophic foundations of the measures of effectiveness that are invoked by the different parties. When the different paradigms of faculty and administrators are identified and discussed, the next step is not to determine which paradigm is correct. Such a move would require one party to adopt the paradigm of the other. The party compelled to abandon its paradigm would be relegated to a subjugated state, and its members would likely become resentful and alienated—conditions that would not advance anyone’s definition of effectiveness. Instead, both parties can seek connections across their respective paradigms. Such connections are possible when organizational members can envision and implement practices that fulfill multiple goals and that are consistent with different belief systems (Bergquist & Pawlak, 2008). Rather than view paradigms as incommensurable, they can be conceptualized as having permeable boundaries. Each paradigm can then serve as a unique source of ideas and innovations for the organization. Conversely, if a single, strong overarching paradigm prevails, then organizational members will likely consider only a limited range of ideas and innovations (Crossan, Lane, & White, 1999). FACULTY EVALUATION TENSIONS AT DSU Several faculty described administrators at DSU as being driven by a “chase for prestige” in which administrators have equated excellence with the research university model. This chase for prestige, they argue, creates an emphasis on the types of scholarship that are typically produced at prestigious research universities, including publications in top-tier scholarly journals. This emphasis,

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some faculty argue, serves as a disincentive for faculty to engage in other forms of scholarship, such as community engagement or research with undergraduate students. These alternative forms of scholarship are also espoused by administrators as priorities for DSU. Therefore, faculty indicated that they are receiving mixed signals regarding what constitutes effective performance. A faculty member in the social sciences provided an example of the tension between the university’s push toward traditional forms of research and faculty involvement in other types of scholarly activity: “The president of DSU has made it clear that local conferences do not count toward tenure and promotion, and that has discouraged faculty from working with undergraduate students on research, because those projects [with students] would probably only get presented at local conferences.” Similarly, a faculty member in the teacher education program argued that “the current tenure and promotion system is misaligned and leads to disincentives for faculty to spend time working with public schools or on other issues in the community.” DSU administrators acknowledged that tensions had emerged around tenure and promotion criteria, but they also identified steps that they were taking to improve the evaluation process. “The provost has asked each department to define their tenure and promotion expectations, what the criteria mean to each department,” explained an academic dean. Several department chairs described the processes by which their departments had developed tenure and promotion guidelines. A department chair in a professional field explained that “in the process of developing the guidelines, we considered what we value in a faculty member . . . The guidelines represent what we view as valid [faculty activity] in our department.” A faculty member in the sciences expressed confidence that the guidelines developed in his department would be upheld by administration, even though the guidelines give preference to conference presentations with students, rather than peer-reviewed publications: “In our department, for scholarly activity, we prefer that faculty present research with their students at professional conferences, and we assign a high value to that. That will be what we emphasize.” However, other faculty expressed concerns regarding whether various forms of scholarship would be considered valid by university administration, even if those forms of scholarship were endorsed in departmental guidelines. These feelings of uncertainty resulted in much second-guessing among faculty, regarding whether they should engage in alternative forms of scholarship. A faculty member in a liberal arts field, for example, stated that “I have been working with local school districts . . . This activity is highly valued in my department, but it might not be viewed favorably by the president, who seems to favor national and international activities.”

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AWARENESS OF PARADIGMS IN EFFECTIVENESS CRITERIA Our belief is that criteria of effectiveness vary by organizational phase and by individual belief based on paradigms. The thesis of the viability of multiple paradigms to aid in organizational effectiveness is the basis of much discussion in the literature of incommensurability. It is also criticized in the “Pfefferdigm thesis” (Pfeffer, 1993)—the argument by Jeffrey Pfeffer that any discipline attempting to employ multiple paradigms will become so fragmented as to disintegrate to the point of ineffectiveness. Gadamer (2013/1975) has argued, on the other hand, that one’s unconscious biases can be used in social and work interactions to learn about oneself and one’s colleagues. The act of interaction evokes (or at least has the possibility of evoking) a higher level of awareness of other actors. For this to happen, however, a “translator” must be able to “translate the meaning to be understood into the context in which the other speaker lives” (p. 402). Further, Gadamer stated that “language as the medium of understanding must be consciously created by an explicit mediation” (p. 402). Finally, he makes the point that understanding another’s perspective requires more than a translation, but a complete mastery of the other’s “language”—or, in our thinking, the other’s paradigm. Thus, the translator becomes not a vehicle for interpretation of one paradigm to another, but a method of helping each group make the language of the other “naturally” its own. Effectiveness can best be assessed by discussions that focus not only on the evaluation criteria employed by various members of the academic community, but also on the paradigms assumed by faculty and administrators who are involved in the evaluation process. Such discussions can generate a deeper, more fundamental, mutual understanding of the reasons why groups differ in the effectiveness criteria that they use. We must admit, however, that the possibility of achieving this kind of widespread knowledge and awareness of the multiplicity of paradigms used by different members of the academic community in discussions of effectiveness is low. Faculty and administrators have long-standing, personal biases drawn from professionalization and experience (Freidson, 1994). Ellul (1964), in fact, described the inevitable evolution of virtually impenetrable coteries of practitioners who resist the release of proprietary knowledge. This resistance is further complicated by issues of personal and collective control over work lives. Competing paradigms of what constitutes “true knowledge” about teaching, learning, and research raise important questions about the very possibilities of constructing a theory of organizational effectiveness that embraces the enacted worlds of all of the members of an organization (Calas & Smircich, 1999; Kilmann & McKelvey, 1975; Smircich & Stubbart, 1985). Weick (1984) identifies this problem as managing the “cohesion-accuracy tradeoff ” (p. 15). Organizations must

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find ways simultaneously to create at least a minimum level of social cohesion so that collaboration, or at least cooperation, can take place. However, actions that strengthen the sense of cohesion may also diminish adherence to individual commitments to truth and valid knowledge. The pursuit of valid knowledge, according to Weick, often involves conflict and disagreement, which, in turn, can erode the level of social cohesion among organizational members. Conversely, efforts to promote social cohesion may diminish the pursuit of valid knowledge, because organizational members with high levels of affinity may not critically question or challenge each other (see also Janis, 1982). Furthermore,Weick argues that colleges and universities will tend to favor accuracy over cohesion when the two clash, because the production of valid knowledge is central to the identity and social relevance of a higher education institution. If colleges and universities fail to produce valid knowledge, then their relevance for society and continued existence are called into question. The trade-off, however, is the associated loss of cohesion that comes when certain forms of knowledge are deemed less valid and less valuable. EFFECTIVENESS IN HIGHER EDUCATION ORGANIZATIONS Organizational effectiveness is (or should be) one of the dominant aims of all organizations, though the operational definition of the term may highlight different criteria for measuring it (Goodman & Pennings, 1977). Effectiveness in higher education is difficult to define and measure, largely because the criteria for measurement are defined nebulously and differently by different constituencies in the academy. Effectiveness in organizations results from interactions of human resources with goals and technology—for example, faculty with instructional goals and with methods of work that transform raw material (such as knowledge and students) into more sophisticated forms. Again, these interactions may be carried out differently depending on the underlying paradigms assumed and employed. To appreciate fully the problems of faculty-administration interactions (for example, collaboration or conflict), it is necessary to utilize a broad conceptual framework that will permit a better understanding of the terms and meanings comprising the conversations that occur between these groups. In this book, we use some of the main elements of systems theory (Bertalanffy, 1968; Churchman, 1968; Parsons, 1951; Senge, 1990) to identify four organizational actions that together utilize human resources, goals, and technology in organizations: (1) accumulating inputs of resources; (2) transforming the resources into valued products and services; (3) sending outputs across organizational boundaries to be utilized by others; and (4) gathering and utilizing feedback information

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(Evan, 1976; Katz & Kahn, 1978; Parsons, 1951). Communication protocols in each of these domains are subject to different interpretations, and, in turn, these interpretations are embedded in different paradigms. Once again, we believe that only when the latent paradigms are revealed across constituencies will the protocols utilized in the four domains have common meaning for the users. Briefly, we lay out the parameters of the classic organizational problems; namely, inputs, transformation processes, outputs, and feedback (see Figure 4.1). First, we can consider the subject of inputs, one critical ingredient in the production of outputs. Clearly, the perception, as well as the actual quality and quantity, of inputs affect institutional policies and procedures and, in turn, its outputs. As the cliché goes, “garbage in, garbage out.” Thus, it is critical that inputs be given primary attention. Second, the technological, social, and intellectual quality of the transformation processes of a college or university (for example, teaching, research, etc.) has an impact on system effectiveness. Choosing the wrong book and/or teaching the material badly will lead to outcomes and organizational outputs of lower quality. Students will not learn, and research conclusions will be erroneous, inconclusive, pedestrian, or irrelevant. Third, the storing and distribution of organizational outputs to its consumers is an important ingredient in effectiveness. An organization that is unable to evaluate in a timely way which outputs to make available at good value to the markets that can and should use them would be considered ineffective. For example, if students cannot get jobs because of institutional failures, then the institution is ineffective. Finally,

The Organization Transformation Processes Inputs

Outputs

Feedback

FIGURE 4.1 Dimensions of an Organizational System

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organizations that employ faulty feedback systems will ultimately fail, since they will perpetuate errors in the first three domains above. MATCHING EFFECTIVENESS AND PARADIGM MODELS We argue that communication across paradigms is possible despite perceived problems of incommensurability. Further, this type of cross-paradigm communication is central to the understanding of organizational effectiveness. To illustrate this point, we align the quadrants in Quinn and Rohrbaugh’s (1983) “competing values” model of organizational effectiveness with the paradigms that are assumed by them. A considerable amount of literature has examined organizational effectiveness in general and in higher education in particular (for example, Bailey & Morest, 2004; Cameron, 1978, 1981, 1986; Kezar & Eckel, 2004; Lewin & Minton, 1986; Lysons, 1993; Lysons & Hatherly, 1996; Ostroff & Schmitt, 1993; Pounder, 2000; Smart, 2003; Skolits & Graybeal, 2007). Some of the most salient models are as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

goal model (Steers, 1977); system resource model (Yuchtman & Seashore, 1967); internal process model (Blake & Mouton, 1978); strategic constituencies model (Connally, Conlon, & Deutsch, 1980); phase model (Quinn & Cameron, 1983); fit or congruence model (Nadler & Tushman, 1983); competing values model (Quinn & Rohrbaugh, 1983); quality model (Cameron & Whetten, 1996); perceptual models from other paradigms (Cameron, 1978); and decision-making paradigm (Huber & McDaniel, 1986).

We consider here for illustration purposes the competing values model (Quinn & Rohrbaugh, 1983), because this model incorporates many of the dimensions found in other effectiveness models and thus constitutes a parsimonious yet comprehensive framework for assessing organizational effectiveness (Pounder, 2000). Although the model is labeled a “values” model, in point of fact, it does not deal so much with issues of “good” or “bad” human actions as it does with the strength of constituents’ assessment of the priorities of action taken by the organization. The unit of analysis, in other words, is the organization, its orientations, and the appropriateness of the actions that follow from those orientations. Moreover, the Quinn and Rohrbach model does not concern itself so much with principles of effectiveness, but instead focuses on the conceptualizations of effectiveness held by workers in an organization.

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The Quinn and Rohrbaugh competing values model holds that all organizations, including colleges and universities, must achieve four goals: productivity and economic efficiency, stability and control, growth and resource acquisition, and human resource development. These categories are parallel in many ways to the functional prerequisites that Parsons (1951) postulates as universal needs to be satisfied if an organization is to succeed or even to survive. The objective of all organizations is to find ways to balance these goals or functions. At different times and circumstances, one or another may be more salient for organizational leaders and/or for the organization at a particular stage in its development. Parsons, Bales, and Shils (1953) argue that the goals are in a zero-sum relationship as the organization moves through different phases (see also Cover, 1993), which compels organizational leaders to prioritize them. Quinn and Rohrbaugh (1983) have offered a visualization of these dimensions of effectiveness—essentially, a depiction of alternative institutional policy priorities. Operationally, the competition among alternative priorities is manifested in the juxtaposition of two variable dimensions in a two-by-two table: structure and focus (see Table 4.1). The first dimension is “structure,” which has as its end points the concepts of flexibility versus control. All organizations must balance these two competing prerequisites. One kind of structure is needed to assure organizational and individual learning and adaptability to changing circumstances; another type of structure can ensure that requirements for internal interdependency are adhered to, usually by top-down authority. TABLE 4.1 Organizational Effectiveness Models

FOCUS Internal STRUCTURE Flexibility

Human Relations Model Goal values: utilization of human capital, human resource development Sub-goals: cohesion, morale, training

Control

Internal Process Model Goal values: internal integration and coordination, stability, equilibrium Sub-goals: information management, communication

Source: Based on Quinn and Rohrbaugh (1983)

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External Open Systems Model Goal values: adaptability and responsiveness to external environment, growth, resource acquisition Sub-goals: flexibility, readiness, external evaluation Rational Goal Model Goal values: economic efficiency, productivity, profit Sub-goals: planning, goal setting

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The second dimension is “focus” and is defined at its two extremes by internal versus external orientations. Again, organizations must prioritize these prerequisites—that is, in terms of resource allocation policy—to decide how much to devote to each side and when it is propitious to act. On the one hand, organizational leaders must attend to internal matters of efficient collaboration among workers; on the other, they must let themselves be directed by the external expectations, which often upset the stable interdependence of workers and/or units that has evolved over time. A crossing of these two dimensions in a two-bytwo table results in four effectiveness models, each with different goals, sub-goals, and system characteristics. The first quadrant in the competing values model is called the human relations orientation and has as its focus human resource development and the building of a cohesive organization with high morale. Its orientation is internal, and its predominant mode of operation is flexibility. Such a model depends on paradigmatic assumptions of subjectivity. The human relations goal of social cohesion would exclude explicit critiques of other persons or other groups in the interest of developing tolerance, trust, and high morale. A college or university that considers itself effective in the human relations model would, therefore, be undergirded by the radical humanist paradigm (Gioia & Pitre, 1990). Workers would seek to understand others’ perspectives and attempt to find common values that make for a caring community. They would seek to create awareness in the community of forces of alienation and exploitation. In the second quadrant, the open systems model has an orientation that is external and flexible. A college or university with this orientation would be actively concerned with external opportunities to expand its operations by attracting new students, highly qualified faculty, and new sources of funding. Adherents to this model of effectiveness value change and objective data; hence, there is consistency with Gioia and Pitre’s (1990) radical structuralist paradigm. Scholars may differ regarding whether they believe that the open systems model is, indeed, radical; however, the underlying assumptions of the radical structuralist paradigm (that is, an emphasis on objective reality and the belief in the need for change and transformation) are consistent with Quinn and Rohrbaugh’s (1983) open systems model of effectiveness. In quadrant three, the internal process model emphasizes stability and equilibrium ensured through information management and communication.We argue that the paradigm underlying this model is interpretivist.The interpretivist paradigm suggests that all dimensions of an organization—for example, its environment, structure, and culture—are socially constructed through ongoing interaction, negotiation, and agreement among organizational members. This paradigm is not oriented toward responding to an objective external environment; in fact, adherents to this paradigm argue that the external environment is a social construction by people

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inside the organization (Weick, 1979). Effectiveness is viewed in terms of the stability of internal communication systems, and in terms of the capacity of those systems to generate shared understandings to guide collective action. Finally, in quadrant four, the rational goal model has an external focus and relies on organizational structures that evoke control and stability. This model is linked to an emphasis on productivity and efficiency. Under the assumptions of the rational goal model, organizational members use planning and goal setting as tools to enhance organizational performance. Staying attentive to changes in the systems outside of the institution requires continual monitoring of other institutions, funding sources, and regulatory agencies.This model of effectiveness would likely be underpinned by a functionalist paradigm.Workers will continually examine their authority structures and seek objective information that can be used to regulate their operations and continue to be of value to the constituencies they serve. This is the most common effectiveness model found in higher education today. The best example is the well-respected work of Kim Cameron (Cameron, 1978; Cameron & Whetten, 1996). In our thinking, each quadrant in the competing values model is hypothetically grounded in a dominant paradigm, which may be viewed as incommensurable with the others. The idea of incommensurability is essentially the argument that organizational members who focus on the goals of any one quadrant will be diminished in their ability to comprehend intellectually and to appreciate the goals of other members whose orientation is toward another quadrant—and, as a result, they will have difficulty in communicating with one another. The faculty subculture, for instance, may operate from the perspective of a human relations model, while administrators adhere to a rational goal model. Viewing each quadrant from a perspective of incommensurability, however, limits the ability of an organization to apply effectiveness models from different quadrants as circumstances suggest. The juxtapositions of effectiveness models and probable paradigmatic positions are offered in Table 4.2. We acknowledge that there is not a direct correspondence between the effectiveness models and the paradigmatic positions. Some elements of the internal process model, for example, overlap not only with interpretivist perspectives on communication, but also with the functionalist emphasis on stability and order. And the open systems model, undeniably based in objectivist assumptions, could be aligned, in part, with the functionalist emphasis on rational planning. Thus, it is important to view the effectiveness models as having permeable rather than fixed boundaries. Not only do the effectiveness models overlap more than one paradigm, but the models and the paradigms themselves contain “transition zones” that enable people to recognize commonalities across effectiveness models and among paradigms (Gioia & Pitre, 1990).

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CONFLICT AND INSTITUTIONAL EFFECTIVENESS TABLE 4.2 Paradigmatic Bases of Effectiveness Models

Paradigms Radical Humanist

Effectiveness Models

Radical Structuralist

Interpretivist

Rational Goal

X

Internal Process

X

Open Systems Human Relations

Functionalism

X

w w

X

Note: “X” represents the strongest probable association between the paradigm and the effectiveness model. A “w” indicates somewhat weaker associations.

APPLICATION OF EFFECTIVENESS MODELS To clarify how the concept of effectiveness is underpinned by different paradigms, we offer a practical example that begins by identifying the core variables that comprise effectiveness in a given domain (Steers, 1975). We provide here for illustrative purposes a simple enumeration of the primary variables involved in the evaluation of teaching and research for promotion, tenure, and salary decisions for faculty (for a nearly exhaustive list of these variables, see Arreola, Theall, & Aleamoni, 2003; Bess, 1982). First, we consider the variables associated with effectiveness in the teaching role. Typically, in the short run, teaching is evaluated by students and, in some instances, peer evaluations of faculty performance during and/or at the end of a semester or an academic year. There are, however, problems with using this time frame, particularly since the outcomes of teaching may not be immediately realized by students.The long-term outcomes of teaching are difficult to measure. Former students may not be available to provide data regarding how a particular course or instructor enhanced their subsequent professional accomplishments, motivated their desire to pursue advanced degrees, or strengthened their actions as engaged citizens. While the outcomes of teaching are subject to measurement complications, the inputs to teaching—the variables that affect teaching outcomes—can be specified in ways that are relevant to nearly all faculty. In Table 4.3, we provide an enumeration of a selected number of variables that have an impact on the evaluation of teaching effectiveness.

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CONFLICT AND INSTITUTIONAL EFFECTIVENESS TABLE 4.3 Variables that Affect Faculty Teaching Effectiveness

INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES

Variables across Faculty Members Knowledge of subject matter: For example, faculty may be taking on an ambitious new subject matter; yet, the criteria for evaluation are the same as for courses that they have been teaching for many years Differences in faculty workloads: Time available for preparation may differ by faculty member or discipline Differences in expected teaching effectiveness: For example, research output for a faculty member may be so prodigious that lower standards are applied to teaching Variables within Faculty Members Motivation to teach: Faculty place different emphases on certain courses depending on interest and expertise. Hence, they devote different amounts of energy to preparation and delivery Stages of faculty development: Faculty at different career and life stages may turn to interests other than teaching Personal circumstances: Health, marriage and children, or caring for aging parents may prevent full dedication to teaching Variables across Time Course length (for example, summer courses): Generates different teaching behaviors and expectations of students WORK-RELATED DIFFERENCES

Variables in Required Pedagogy Large introductory courses may require different approaches than elective seminars, in part because of the variability in student ability and interest. Courses with large class sizes may require different pedagogical approaches than those used in small seminars

Variables in Instructional Goals Manifested course goals may be different from or even conflict with institutional goals for students. A required introductory course in physics, for example, may use instructional methods that assure mastery of basic content necessary for advancement to a second-level course. Longer-term goals, on the other hand, such as developing new student interests, deepening current interests, providing linkages to other liberal education goals, providing a philosophical understanding of subject matter, developing habits of thinking conceptually, and encouraging questioning of authority, may be ignored by instructors or relegated to ancillary objectives, time permitting

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Measurement of research productivity is similarly complicated. First, the expectations of institutions for faculty research vary in number and quality. For faculty in some institutions, an article in a popular magazine may suffice to satisfy requirements, while, in other settings, faculty will be expected to write a book published by a prestigious publisher, as well as multiple articles in highly sophisticated journals. Second, evaluations of research may be conducted superficially by faculty who have limited knowledge of the specialized subject matters and publishing channels of their colleagues. Furthermore, tenure and promotion reviews often require that a faculty member’s research will be evaluated by faculty external to his or her institution. These evaluations may be compromised by the reluctance of external evaluators to give negative reviews to colleagues who are friends or who may have been collaborators on previous projects.Third, the impact of research findings may not be known for many years, especially if the research is ambitious and/or contentious. Hence, what is rewarded is behavior that fits into the mold, rather than ideas that may contribute to the literature or even to the long-term well-being of society. Further, as Weick (1995) points out, when technology is non-routine, there is a greater likelihood for incomprehension and misunderstanding across organizational units and departments. Non-routine tasks are not governed by formal procedures or written rules; instead, organizational members develop customized responses that fit the unique conditions of their work (Perrow, 1967). Faculty would likely assert that teaching is non-routine, given the uniqueness of each student, or at least the pedagogical imperatives that follow from presuming student uniqueness (Bess, 1997; Dunlap, 1997). Administrators and some faculty, however, might seek greater coherence in a curriculum or more uniform approaches toward shaping student learning. They might create course materials to be used by all faculty teaching the same course, or they might require that specific textbooks and exams be used. Such efforts clash with the autonomy and customization associated with non-routine technologies. In the research area, the strength of disciplinary norms varies (for example, humanities versus physical sciences), but the arcane language of the disciplines makes communication with the non-expert difficult at best. Faculty and administrators are forced into a communication fog in which “truth” is largely a matter of trust. For example, in matters of evaluation for promotion and tenure, administrators must rely on faculty committee expertise. When there are disagreements, the disciplinary norms invoked by committee members are rarely understood by administrators (unless the administrator happens to have been trained in that field). Decisions may be made on the grounds of administrative expediency—for example, needs for fewer or more faculty members in a department—rather than on evidence of effective performance. Our thesis, then, is that organizational effectiveness can best be assessed by discussions and sharing not only of the models of effectiveness employed,

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consciously or unconsciously, by different members of the academic community, but also of the paradigms assumed by faculty and administrators involved in the evaluation process. Such discussions must, we would submit, precede attempts to resolve specific controversies over whether an individual has or has not achieved a standard of effective performance. What is required first is a deeper, more fundamental, mutual understanding of the paradigmatic bases for the effectiveness criteria in use by the different parties. This level of understanding can help set in place effectiveness criteria that have a reasonable chance of being adopted by both faculty and administrators and a greater likelihood that conflicts and anxiety over evaluation practices will be mitigated. COMMUNICATING ACROSS EFFECTIVENESS MODELS As noted earlier, the conflicts that are most frequently experienced among different constituencies lie in their different conceptualizations about what “effectiveness” means in higher education. Our contention is that such conflicts cannot be readily resolved at the level of effectiveness models, but must involve the deeper paradigmatic assumptions that underlie each effectiveness model. Faculty and administrators, for example, will not be able to come to an agreement about whether an assistant professor who is being considered for tenure has achieved the necessary accomplishments if the administrator uses a rational goal model while the faculty member uses the human relations model. They will argue past one another.The administrator will base his or her assessment on functionalist assumptions (for example, objective criteria such as number of journal articles published, credit hour production for teaching), while the faculty member, in contrast, will rely on humanist assumptions (for example, social action, communitybased research). On the other hand, if both can become engaged in a discussion of the paradigms underlying the effectiveness models on which their arguments are based, it is possible that their differences can be understood and addressed, and either a workable solution can be developed, or at least the parties can enter into a tolerant/cooperative mode with accompanying supportive norms. To reiterate, we do not suggest that such communication will lead to a resolution of paradigm differences. To do so would compel one party to abandon its own basic belief system in favor of the other. Instead, we argue that it is possible for the parties to reach a paradigmatic understanding that enables them to operate across multiple paradigms. In Chapter 6, we consider an approach to reconciling and/or utilizing this multiple paradigm model using an interactionist mode of communication called appreciative inquiry. THE PARADIGM OF THE MOMENT It is our thesis that some progress in the development of more reasonable and valid evaluations of effectiveness is possible.We turn, therefore, to the explication

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of the “paradigm of the moment” as an intermediate solution to the chasms between faculty and administrators in the evaluation of organizational effectiveness. Consideration of the “paradigm of the moment” is appropriate when one takes into account the movement of organizations from a concentration on one or another effectiveness model (and underlying paradigms)—that is, the shift in focus and priorities of the organization that are associated with these phase movements or even with a more punctuated (that is, nonlinear, unexpected, and turbulent) shift from one to another. The idea of a “paradigm of the moment” is related to Follett’s (1941) conceptualization of the “authority of the situation.” That is, the person with the most expertise required by the demands of the situation is permitted to assume authority for critical decisions, regardless of that person’s position in the organizational hierarchy. Similarly, the “paradigm of the moment” suggests that the paradigms underlying each of the four quadrants in the Quinn and Rohrbaugh model (see Table 4.1) usually command primary attention by different members of the organization depending on their value predilections and their competence in exercising the paradigms. There is not, however, one objectively appropriate paradigm for an organization. Instead, there is likely to be a variety of paradigms adopted by different constituencies—for example, faculty, administrators, and outside evaluators. Each paradigm is likely to evoke a perceived priority for a different set of data and to suggest different policy implications from those data. Indeed, a postmodern conceptualization of this problem would suggest that different constituents opt for self-serving paradigms and that, collectively, there is little or no possibility of creating a coherent, rational explanation that accounts for the different perspectives (see White & Jacques, 1995). Based on our conceptualization of the “paradigm of the moment,” decisions regarding effectiveness criteria are decoupled from the paradigms held by faculty and administrators. Instead, the parties collectively determine which paradigm is most appropriate for a given “moment.” Rather than select one paradigm to guide all decisions, organizational decision-makers can routinely shift from one paradigm to another—and thus, from one effectiveness model to another. Attention to each of these models may require successive or, on occasion, simultaneous use of all of them. A rational goal model, for example, may be needed to focus the organization on achievable short-run objectives, such as establishing a distinctive market niche in the external environment. An open systems model may suggest the need to focus on securing with some certainty high quality system inputs; for example, students, new faculty, and grant funding. An internal process model directs attention to the achievement of interdepartmental collaboration and to the establishment of a belief among organizational participants (such as faculty and administrators) in the stability and predictability of the system—especially in the validity of its communication and information systems. Finally, a human relations model focuses on worker cohesion, morale, professional development,

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and training. Each quadrant in this model may occupy the primary (but not necessarily exclusive) attention of different constituencies on a college campus. To summarize, we suggest that decisions regarding effectiveness criteria can be decoupled from the paradigms held by faculty and administrators.These groups can then collectively determine which paradigm and related effectiveness model best fits the organization’s needs at that moment. Given the wide-ranging, multifaceted needs of complex organizations, it is likely that colleges and universities will need to employ multiple paradigms (and multiple effectiveness models) simultaneously in order to promote continuous growth, adaptability, and innovation. Organizations will need flexible systems of evaluation in which criteria can be customized to fit internal or external contingencies, as well as needs for flexibility or stability—in other words, evaluation systems that address the four components of the competing values model. CONCLUSION Efforts to improve organizational effectiveness are central to many of the strategies adopted by colleges and universities (Chaffee, 1985; Gioia & Thomas, 1996; Keller, 1983). Ironically, an initiative intended to improve institutional effectiveness may trigger conflicts that ultimately undermine performance and make the institution worse off than it was before. Higher education institutions typically lack consensus regarding the conceptualization and operational measurement of effectiveness.The outcomes of higher education—educated students, transformative research findings, and the advancement of the human condition—are not amenable to objective, standardized measurement. Furthermore, administrators and faculty are likely to view effectiveness through different paradigmatic lenses. Expectations for accountability, adaptability, and responsiveness are likely to shape administrative perspectives on effectiveness, while autonomy, academic freedom, and the norms of the academic disciplines are likely to influence faculty beliefs about what constitutes effectiveness. The conflict between disparate views regarding effectiveness cannot be avoided, because both administrators and faculty have responsibility for assessing institutional outcomes, particularly in the area of student learning outcomes and in the evaluation of faculty for tenure and promotion. While administrators and faculty may spend countless hours in committees and tasks forces trying to resolve their differences regarding the assessment of effectiveness, they may spend little, if any, time discussing the underlying beliefs and values that shape their different perspectives on effectiveness. We suggest that this deeper conversation is needed, so that administrators and faculty can understand the source of their conflicts. Through these conversations, administrators and faculty can come to understand the paradigms that shape their views on effectiveness, as well as clarify the linkages between different effectiveness

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criteria and their underlying paradigms. Each effectiveness criterion is derived from a particular paradigm. In conflicts over which criteria to use, one party typically attempts to assert its paradigm over the other. When one party tends to prevail more often, the total set of evaluation criteria begins to reflect the beliefs and values of a single paradigm. That outcome may have detrimental long-term consequences for the organization. Colleges and universities operate in a highly complex environment in which these institutions are expected to achieve multiple, and sometimes disparate, goals. A standardized set of evaluation criteria, based in a single paradigm, is unlikely to be flexible or robust enough to guide organizational behavior under these levels of complexity. More diverse evaluation systems, shaped by multiple paradigms, can be more responsive to the range of organizational behaviors that will be needed to advance the multifaceted goals of higher education. The definition and measurement of effectiveness is intended to impact how organizational members spend their time. Effectiveness criteria convey messages about institutional priorities, and when rewards and cultural values are aligned with those criteria, organizational members will tend to devote more time to activities that are endorsed by that evaluation system. As a basic example, if effectiveness criteria emphasize research productivity, then faculty will spend more time engaged in research. In this way, an organization commands some degree of control over how organizational members spend their time. The extent of this control, however, is a matter of tension between administrators and faculty. Administrators represent the organization’s interest in directing time toward precise outcomes, while faculty represent the interests of the academic profession, which suggest that faculty should have wide discretion in how they use their time. Time, as an arena of conflict, is our focus in the next chapter.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE Broadening the scope of faculty evaluation. In Scholarship Reconsidered, Boyer (1990) offered a new model for understanding and evaluating faculty effectiveness. He identified four forms of scholarship: discovery, integration, application, and teaching. The scholarship of discovery is associated with the production of original empirical research that has the potential to reshape the contours of an academic discipline or body of knowledge. The scholarship of integration involves cross-disciplinary synthesis, as well as the identification of patterns and trends across previously disconnected pieces of research. The scholarship of application focuses on making knowledge available and useful to the broader society. Finally, the scholarship of teaching and learning focuses on transmitting, transforming, and extending knowledge through interactions between

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faculty and students. More recently, the scholarship of engagement (Rice, 2005) has been added to the framework. This form of scholarship connects the work of faculty to the needs of communities. While these forms of scholarship are not aligned with particular paradigms, they do provide support for the notion the faculty can pursue knowledge through a variety of ontological, epistemological, and methodological frames. Conversely, if institutional reward systems prioritize only one form of scholarship, then faculty will find it more difficult to gain acceptance for scholarship that deviates from the dominant paradigm. Some evidence suggests that colleges and universities are broadening the scope of faculty evaluation to include multiple forms of scholarship. In a national survey of chief academic officers, O’Meara (2005) found that within the previous 10 years, more than two-thirds (68 percent) of four-year institutions had modified their academic policies to acknowledge or support an expanded definition of scholarship. Thus, the Boyer framework can be used by administrators and faculty to expand the range of faculty evaluation to include additional paradigmatic perspectives. Mapping the institution’s use of effectiveness criteria. If the evaluation systems of a college or university are guided strongly by a single paradigm, then that institution will be unlikely to recognize or foster the range of behaviors that will be needed to advance the multifaceted goals of higher education. Behaviors will align with the dominant paradigm, and organizational members will cease to engage in activities that deviate from the status quo. Instead, administrators and faculty can design evaluation systems that are shaped by multiple paradigms. These more flexible systems of evaluation can enable an institution to pursue multiple goals simultaneously. We suggest that at the beginning of a major evaluation process, such as an accreditation self-study or an academic program review, administrators and faculty can critically examine the effectiveness criteria that have been used in the past. They can map those criteria in terms of the four dimensions of the Quinn and Rohrbaugh (1983) competing values model. If the evaluation criteria are clustered in a particular effectiveness category, then participants will realize that the evaluation system is underutilizing alternative paradigms. A more balanced map, with criteria distributed across all four effectiveness models, will reveal an evaluation system that is better suited to the simultaneous pursuit of multiple goals. Obtaining more and better data. When evaluation systems are guided by multiple paradigms, organizational members will collect more data and develop more elaborate analyses of those data. Specifically, if the evaluation system draws from all four of the Quinn and Rohrbaugh effectiveness models, then administrators and faculty will be gathering data from both internal and external sources. They will also carefully examine existing data and develop processes for

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collecting new data. Moreover, when multiple paradigm lenses are used to analyze those data, the resulting conclusions will be more complex and sophisticated. In Table 4.4, we have reconfigured the Quinn and Rohrbaugh model to reflect its implications for data collection and analysis.

TABLE 4.4 Data Use within Effectiveness Models

FOCUS Internal Data STRUCTURE Flexibility: Human Relations Model Gather New internal data new data Examples: campus climate surveys, assessment of student learning outcomes

Control: Analyze existing data

Internal Process Model Existing internal data Examples: analysis of trends in student retention and graduation rates, reviews of curriculum and syllabi

External Data Open Systems Model New external data Examples: market research for new academic program development, public forums for community stakeholder input Rational Goal Model Existing external data Examples: previous accreditation reports prepared by external evaluators, regional and national reports on workforce development needs

Source: Adapted from Quinn and Rohrbaugh (1983)

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Chapter 5

When Time is of the Essence The Temporal Dimensions of Conflict in the Academy

TIME FRAMEWORKS IN CULTURE AND COMMUNICATIONS THEORY As knowledge ineluctably becomes an increasingly fundamental force in economic and social decisions in all sectors of society, its sophisticated management and use are more and more critical to high-level performance in formal organizations, including colleges and universities. Institutional effectiveness in knowledgecentered organizations is, in large part, a function of complex interactions among highly skilled, professionalized employees. Many variables affect the ability of those employees to perform well individually and collectively. It is important, therefore, to understand the variables that have an impact on both individual effectiveness and collective actions. A particularly critical but often neglected variable in understanding organizational effectiveness, especially in colleges and universities, is the degree of commonality regarding the conception and use of time among the members of an organization. Significant organizational problems may arise when there are differences among workers in their habits, beliefs, and orientations toward time (Thompson, 1967). Time has shaped organizational performance since the early days of the Industrial Revolution, when “clock time” was used as a control factor in production. The shift to a postindustrial era and a knowledge-based economy has not lessened the tyranny of the clock with its dictates determining the pace of our activities, and even the choice of activities themselves (Castells, 1996). As Eriksen (2001) notes, “clock time turns time into an autonomous entity, something that exists independently of events” (p. 39) and which can exert important effects on behavior in organizations. In this chapter, we illustrate how different constituencies in higher education have differing dispositions toward and ideological conceptualizations of how time can and should be used in the management of organizations. The differences turn, in part, on the value the organization gives to the critical issues of control and

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accountability (Kunda, 1992). Control, in this conceptualization, is a manifestation not only of hierarchical authority structures, but also of the dominant metaphors and paradigms assumed and/or adopted by the members of the organization. Metaphors regarding the appropriate manifestations of control, in turn, drive most organizational functions, either directly or indirectly. They also shape individual and collective behaviors in the organization, including the modes of communication employed by organizational members (Putnam et al., 1996). Faculty and administrators frequently have quite different perspectives on who should have control over time dedicated to different tasks, particularly as roles and assignments change. In addition, faculty tend to have more “intangible time,” which refers to time spent at work that cannot concretely be designated into a category of work, but is still intrinsically part of the role itself (O’Carroll, 2008). An informal exchange between faculty colleagues, for instance, may not produce any tangible outcomes, but still keeps lines of communication open for later, more substantive work-related discussions. Likewise, a faculty member may ponder an idea for hours, produce no immediate outcome, but call upon that idea months later in response to a student’s question. The benefits of intangible time, however, are often compromised by a heightened attention to linking time to specific outcomes or productivity goals, thus hindering the organization’s ability to incorporate new ideas and practices into its ongoing functions. Put simply, an emphasis on productivity may constrict intangible time, and, in turn, stifle organizational learning and development (Lawson, 2001). Latent assumptions or manifested controversies about the legitimacy and use of time may also contribute to failures of faculty-administrator collaboration. In recent years, the idea of collaboration through shared governance between faculty and administrators appears to be deteriorating in favor of a more hierarchical, centralized decision-making model (Bess, 2006; Doray, 1988). The benefits of shared governance are heavily dependent on the nature and quality of communication between faculty members and administrators (Del Favero, 2003; Kezar, 2004; Tierney, 2006). Collaboration, however, requires not only clarity of communication, but also common understandings of the meanings of communications transmitted. As Derrida (1976) noted, clearly communicated messages can still be misunderstood when the parties involved in the communication have attributed vastly different meanings to the same words and phrases. In this chapter, we argue that different meanings and interpretations associated with time and its use can account for a significant number of communication problems in complex organizations such as colleges and universities. Differences in meanings and interpretations associated with time can be viewed through three dimensions or facets: (1) a cognitive appreciation of the time framework in which decisions are made; (2) an understanding of the cultural contexts in which time is implicitly and explicitly employed by each party in the

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communication (Ancona & Chong, 1996; McGrath & Tschan, 2004); and (3) an affective acceptance of the strength and constraints of time on decision-making by all parties (O’Carroll, 2008). Thus, the organizational and communication challenges associated with time are cognitive, cultural, and affective (that is, emotional or dispositional). In the cognitive domain, communicating actors may differ regarding their preferred time horizons for decision-making. Faculty, for example, may prefer that long-term perspectives on time guide decision-making regarding curricular changes, while administrators may be oriented toward shorter time horizons that capitalize on the availability of resources or the emergence of new markets. These differing perspectives on time, if unaddressed, often generate significant conflict in governance processes. In the cultural domain, differences between faculty and administrative subcultures can impede the open and authentic communication needed for shared governance to be successful (Kezar & Eckel, 2004;Tierney, 2006). Communication between faculty and administrators is complicated by their differing priorities and expectations (among many other distractions). The administrative subculture tends to emphasize efficiency, accountability, and return on investment, while faculty subcultures value autonomy and unfettered inquiry into scholarly domains. When these cultural differences become reified: administrators become identified in the faculty mind with red tape, constraints, and outside pressures that seek to alter the institution . . . Faculty in turn come to be seen by the administration as self-interested, unconcerned with controlling costs, or unwilling to respond to legitimate requests for accountability. (Birnbaum, 1988, p. 7) As we will show, both subcultures employ quite different time paradigms in their work, and these cultural differences are likely to manifest themselves in communication problems between faculty and administrators. Finally, the affective domain suggests that communication problems can be mitigated when the communicators understand and accept the time constraints of others. An understanding of the temporal pace of others’ work is critical to being an effective communicator, especially in complex organizations where professional workers are engaged in multiple tasks and projects simultaneously. In a matrix structure, for example, department heads will need to understand that certain members of their staff will not be available as frequently to perform the functions of the department, because these staff will also be participating in project teams that require their time and attention. Project team leaders, in turn, can anticipate the extent of time commitment that will be necessary for team members. If the extent of time commitment would impinge upon the basic functioning of the team members’ “home” departments, then the size of the team

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can be enlarged. In a larger team, the workload of individual team members may be reduced, and, as a result, the team members could also remain connected to and engaged in the work of their home departments. The affective dimension of time points toward the need for sensitivity to the workflows, interdependencies, and transformation processes of other organizational units. In contrast, mutual distrust and lack of respect for the work processes of other units can lead to significant conflict over the allocation of time within the organization. We argue that adherence to different paradigms leads to different orientations and preferences regarding time and its use. From a positivist perspective, if an organizational leader assumes that time is an objective facet of human experience, then that leader will likely view time as a fixed commodity that is frequently in short supply and which must be managed and controlled with some precision. In contrast, based on the interpretivist paradigm, a leader may assume that time is a social construction that varies in its meaning and significance across contexts. That leader may understand time as a feature of unique organizational cultures and subcultures. Under this set of assumptions, the leader would likely attempt to bridge gaps in understanding between different organizational subgroups regarding time and its use. Finally, the epistemological assumptions of postmodernism suggest that time itself has become fragmented, disjointed, and nonlinear. People experience time in fragmented ways; for example, the distinction between work life and personal life has disintegrated more substantially in recent years through new communications technologies that link people beyond the physical workplace (for example, working efficiently from home).Thus, according to the postmodernists, time has become disjointed and chaotic, rather than differentiated and regulated into distinct spheres of activity (Gergen, 1992). These different paradigmatic perspectives regarding time have direct, practical implications for organizational leadership. In this chapter, we examine time in an organizational context. Specifically, we use Parsons’ (1951) conceptualization of the different functions of an organization (adaptation, goal attainment, integration, and latency) to explore the implications of alternative conceptualizations of time in different domains of organizational leadership. Then, based on this analysis, the chapter offers recommendations for higher education decision-making and governance systems. The recommendations focus on alleviating the conflict and communication problems associated with different orientations and perspectives regarding time, especially those that may impede collaboration between administrators and faculty members. PHILOSOPHICAL AND EPISTEMOLOGICAL ISSUES REGARDING TIME The idea of time is complicated, and its meaning must be systematically unpacked. According to one view—the Newtonian or absolutist view (Hassard, 1990;

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Newton, 1958)—time flows without reference to anything external, and its demarcations are uniform; that is, a minute now is of the same duration as a minute an hour or a day from now. As Adam (1990) notes: The time of Newtonian physics is fundamentally conceived as a quantity: invariant, infinitely divisible into space-like units, measurable in length and expressible as a number. It is time taken; the duration between events, which is unaffected by the transformation it describes. (p. 50) In the Newtonian conceptualization, time is fungible (Bluedorn, 2002). That is, time’s units are conceptually interchangeable with each other.Time, in this way of thinking, is also linear and unidirectional (Denbigh, 1972). “Time’s arrow” flies truly and cannot be reversed. This positivist-objectivist view conceives of time as a uniform commodity, with varying, but fixed, amounts available to workers in organizations (Arndt, Gronmo, & Hawes, 1981; Gronau, 1977; Hill, 1985). In fact, as early as the eighth century, society would begin to adhere to what seemed to be an objective standard of time, as measured by hours, minutes, and seconds (Mumford, 1955). Furthermore, the concept of causality is partially based on a positivist epistemology, which demands a Newtonian perspective. Notions of cause and effect guide not only most scientific inquiry, but also shape managerial perspectives regarding time. A prior condition is assumed to have led to a current state of affairs. If the current state of affairs is functional and effective, then the organization will seek to maintain the prior conditions that led to the existing advantageous state. In contrast, if the status quo is undesirable or ineffective, then leaders will attempt to diagnose the causes and act to modify or control the prior conditions that contributed to the poor performance. Many managerial practices in higher education, including strategic planning, performance measurement, and quality management, rely on assumptions that suggest that time is linear, that events can be ascribed to a particular temporal demarcation (for example, something that occurred five years ago, as opposed to something that is happening now), and that the future is likely to be an extension of the past and therefore is predictable and controllable, at least in part. Many of our day-to-day work activities are structured by this Newtonian orientation toward time. Clocks and machines have come to dictate much of our lives (Feldman & Hornik, 1981; Jacques, 1982; Leclerc, Schmitt, & Dube, 1995). The question of who gets to control the organizational clock, and thereby control worker behavior, has been the focal point in disputes between labor and management that date back at least to the implementation of Taylor’s (1911) scientific management principles in large-scale manufacturing enterprises at the turn of the twentieth century.

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Despite the appearance of an objective, measurable reality regarding time, social scientists are coming to understand the limitations of this conceptualization. That is, in an amorphous, disorganized, postmodern world, the individual sees time subjectively—based on idiosyncratic perceptions—though moderated by required organizational activities constrained by clock time. Time, in this conception, is “highly mutable and context dependent. It is intimately shaped by the cues and stimuli emanating from the surrounding environment and the degree to which they capture and hold a person’s attention” (Blount & Leroy, 2007, p. 170). An hour in a department meeting for a faculty member, for example, may be experienced quite differently from an hour in a laboratory. This same hour in the eyes of an administrator, who may have a concrete goal for the meeting, can have quite a different effect on that administrator’s psyche and appraisal of other participants at the meeting. Many social scientists have begun to conclude that time is relative; it is a social construction that is a reflection of social and cultural conditions (Adam, 1990) and is rooted relativistically in the cognition of the observer (Barnett, 1968). Under these assumptions, no two individuals experience time in exactly the same way, nor do different professional communities in the same organization understand time in exactly the same way (Elias, 1992; Nowotny, 1994). Time for a physicist may be quite different from time for a linguist. Husserl (1964), for example, rejected the notion that time is experienced in a linear succession of conscious “now” moments. “In contrast to convention, Husserl conceptualized the present as horizontality of the flowing present in which impressions and perceptions in the now are extended by retentions and protentions” (Adam, 2004, p. 57). That is, the precedents of the past and the anticipated future are necessary and inevitable to establish meaning in the present. In other words, the invention of the present is, quite naturally, dependent on retention of past events and projections of possible futures. These choices by individuals are partially the products of contemporary cultures and values. Hence, as might be expected, there are differences among individuals in their interpretations of the present. These differences are the subtext of policy differences between faculty and administration. If meanings and interpretations of time are social constructions that vary among organizational subgroups, then time becomes a medium through which different interests and goals are negotiated. These negotiations among subgroups occur within arenas that Barbara Adam (1998, 2004) calls “timescapes.” Adam notes that individuals and groups frequently modify the concept of time to fit their selfinterests. In an organization, if groups modify time and its use based on their own interests, then the organization as a whole will likely become out of sync regarding time. In other words, there will be multiple timescapes in which the pace and intensity of work differ based on the interests of different groups within the organization, and efforts to align work across these timescapes will generate

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conflict regarding the appropriate use and control of time (Adam, 2004). The reason for the emergence of conflicting preferences regarding time is related to the idea that the members of an organizational group or unit will tend to adopt goals that are decentralized and focused on local particularistic priorities rather than overall organizational objectives. As McGrath and Kelly (1986) note: Any individual who is a member of a large formal organization is usually also a member of the broad culture within which that organization is embedded and from which, at least in part, it draws its temporal conceptions. So those individuals are likely to share that organization’s conception of time to some degree. On the other hand, every culture contains subcultures whose value orientations (including their temporal conceptions) are a patterned variant of the culture’s dominant value orientation. Subsets of members (and/or of clients) of the organization may come from such a variant subculture and therefore bring with them an alternative value orientation and temporal conceptions. Graham (1981) argues that a given individual is likely to have “command of ” more than one of these time conceptions, and to choose one or another of them as an operating culture for a given set of activities. (p. 111) One of our concerns in this chapter is with how individually perceived constraints of time may have an impact on the interaction of individuals or groups of individuals (for example, faculty and administrators engaged in shared decisionmaking). According to symbolic interactionist theory, “human beings interact by interpreting each other’s acts and forming their own acts on the basis of such interpretation” (Blumer, 2004, p. 100). Faculty members and administrators, then, listen to the “other,” and, to some degree, identify with the other as they jointly carry out organizational tasks. However, as McGrath and Kelly (1986) note, individuals carry with them to interactions a variety of assumptions (not all of them in the sphere of the individual’s conscious awareness) about appropriate rates of work activity, energy inputs, and time allocations: “During a period of social interaction, the members of that social system must work out a ‘negotiated temporal order’ in which they adjust their activity patterns to coordinate with one another” (p. 89). The negotiation of temporal order may determine, in part, whether the different parties are able to work together effectively. If the parties mutually adjust their expectations and behaviors regarding time, then productive interactions will be possible across different organizational subunits. In contrast, if the parties persist in maintaining separate constructions of the meaning and appropriate use of time, then their work together will likely result in dysfunctional conflict regarding the pace, flow, and amount of time dedicated to various tasks. Thus, if a negotiated temporal order cannot be established, then the different parties will compete to

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make sure that their preferred goals are allocated sufficient time in their collective activities. The concept of negotiated temporal order can be applied to facultyadministrative relationships. These relationships are developed over time and involve different personnel at different times and under different external circumstances. The process of developing effective faculty-administrative relationships may require the recognition of particularistic orientations, attitudes, and values of each side, and a careful planning of the objectives of different kinds of interactions between the two groups. Faculty and administrative leaders may need to consider not only the manifest goals of their governance committees, but also recognize the secondary—or perhaps preliminary—objective of preparing each side to be receptive to the other. These preparations may require dedicated time for relationship building and for discussing time itself as an agenda item. Through these discussions, faculty and administrators may negotiate new understandings and expectations regarding time and its use in activities that require collective action. It is important to note that the above discussion recognizes the legitimacy of the concept of human agency. The social construction perspective recognizes that the perception of time is a joint function of events and human perceptions of them.Time serves as a means for sensemaking by providing a temporal ordering of events and actions (Sandberg, 2001). As Hochschild (2003) notes, individuals create and/or distort time to provide rationalizations or justifications for their actions. Postmodernists raise additional questions that organizational leaders should consider regarding the conceptualization and use of time. In particular, postmodern theorists argue that given fragmentation in society at large, individuals experience time in disconnected, inconsistent ways. Under these postmodern conditions, it becomes increasingly difficult for individuals to compartmentalize time into distinct domains such as work time or family time. As Adam (1995) suggests: For postmodern theorists, time constitutes an elusive incommensurability and irresolvable problematic that resists being unified into public time or the chronology of history . . . Postmodernist theorists reject the totalizing tendencies of abstract time, affirm the contingencies of the event and emphasize indeterminacy, incompleteness and fragmentation. (p. 195, emphasis in original) It might be concluded that this relaxation of the constraints of linear time might provide more actual and psychological freedom for individuals. And in some cases, freedom from the objective constraints of time has produced for some a level of autonomy and discretion not previously possible when most workers were expected to be physically present in a specific space for prescribed periods of time.

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However, as Loy (2001) observes, “The dissolution of linear temporality is linked with accelerated ephemerality and a widespread increase in insecurity and anxiety, contributing a ‘manic’ quality to much of public and private life” (p. 262). Similarly, Hassard, Kelemen, and Cox (2008) note that in the postmodern world, the clock-time paradigm has been supplanted with “instantaneous-time,” a result, in part, of the revolution in communications technology that pressures workers to respond rapidly without sufficient cogitation. Doubtless these feelings are experienced in colleges and universities by both faculty and administrators, making communication between the groups even more problematic. Whereas previously, each side may have been confident in a single rational position that could be argued in public; now, in the absence of a unified, collectively held objective sense of time, the “positions” have become not only much more ambiguous, but also harder to explain and defend. In other words, we cannot count on there being a clear “faculty position” and a clear “administrative position” on any issue. Postmodernism suggests that the definition of issues and interests is much more complex, because these processes are affected by many cross-cutting currents that do not necessarily align with a stable subgroup identity. Therefore, it is less useful to think in terms of faculty and administrators as different “sides,” and instead consider how different factions within the two groups coalesce periodically, depending on the contingencies of the moment. Under these circumstances, Adam (1995) asserts the need for a relevant, countervailing force that recognizes the reality of the need for functional daily interactions among organizational members. In interpreting organizational or social events, it is possible to examine constancies as well as ambiguities, apparent valid sequences as well as randomness, order as well as discontinuity (Alvesson, 2003). In other words, even if one accepts organizational disorder as natural and inevitable, good organizational leadership can create an acceptable “myth” of order so that work can be carried out collaboratively.The myth may be interpreted differently by different participants (for example, faculty and administration), but there must be sufficient overlap to permit effective communication between the groups. Faculty and administrators must be able to communicate with some minimal agreement, perhaps unstated, perhaps cultural, on the ways in which time will be conceived and used in the organization. KEY ORGANIZATIONAL DIMENSIONS IN WHICH TIME IS ESPECIALLY CRITICAL To understand the nature of time in organizations, we adopt Talcott Parsons’ (1951) theory of organizational functions as a framework for considering the impact of different conceptions and uses of time. In Parsons’ theory, organizations must satisfy four functional prerequisites: adaptation, goal attainment, integration, and latency (see Table 5.1). Since these prerequisites constitute an exhaustive and

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WHEN TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE TABLE 5.1 Functional Prerequisites for Organizational Systems

Instrumental (“means”)

Consummatory (“ends”)

External

Adaptation • securing adequate resources from the environment and distributing those resources efficiently

Goal Attainment • setting and achieving goals; demonstrating to the environment that system outputs are useful and of high quality

Internal

Latency • continuity and stability over time in working relations among units; achieved through socialization processes and communicating the system’s values

Integration • maintaining solidarity or coordination among the subunits, and encouraging contributions to the effective functioning of the system as a whole

Source: Based on Parsons (1951)

comprehensive explanation of organizational action, it is critical that we observe how time plays an important role in the degree to which an organization will be successful. Indeed, we will show that in satisfying each of these prerequisites, organizational members conceive of time differently; that is, time spent fulfilling the adaptation function is different from time spent fulfilling the integration function. Moreover, the patterns of faculty-administrator communication in each of these domains will be critically dependent on the way that time is conceived in the action frameworks taken by these groups as they pursue the satisfaction of these prerequisites. For example, time attending to adaptation tasks will likely be subjectively different for faculty than it will be for administrators. ADAPTATION AND TIME Adaptation as a functional prerequisite is concerned with an organization’s need to seek out and obtain sufficient resources for its operation and with the tasks of efficiently distributing those resources across the organizational subunits. As institutions of higher education become more and more entwined with the corporate sector both in providing them with research findings and with conducting research on their behalf, faculty and administrators are constrained to adapt their timetables to external time clocks and frameworks. As has been documented in the literature, administrators are increasingly coming under the influence of the corporate sector both in their thinking and in the short- and longterm goals that they adopt. Indeed, some higher education administrators began their careers in the corporate domain and tend to apply both corporate time and procedures to the academic sphere, to the confusion and displeasure of many

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faculty. As Ross (2008) notes, “most academics have little practical knowledge of this aspect of corporate America, and what we do know is wished away lest it sully our hallways” (p. 10) (see also Krause, Nolan, Palm, & Ross, 2008). Similarly, Ross notes, leaders in the corporate field are unaware of the fact that “the mentality and customs of academic life are being transplanted into knowledge-industry firms, whose research is increasingly conducted along lines familiar to us, and whose work tempo is also strikingly similar [to that of higher education institutions]” (p. 10). Lawrence and Lorsch (1967) were among the first to note that organizational subunits align their temporal perspectives with the time span of feedback provided by their specialized external environments. Staff in an admissions office, for example, may align their temporal perspectives with predetermined feedback cycles from their environment; specifically, decision deadlines on offers of admission allow staff to calculate yield rates and then adjust how the unit will allocate time to various tasks in the next recruitment cycle. In adaptation, a subunit’s production cycle is frequently linked to cycles of information provided by the elements of the external environment with which it interacts (Bluedorn, 2000). The external environment is characterized by both routine feedback cycles and unpredictable events to which organizations are challenged to respond (Hrebiniak, 1985). Organizations occasionally and unexpectedly experience “environmental jolts” (Meyer, Brooks, & Goes, 1990), during which their habitual responses to regular stimuli may no longer be viable. In these circumstances, existing organizational structures may need to be redesigned and organizational processes and goals may need to be reoriented to address emerging expectations among different external stakeholders. Bureaucratic structures attempt to accommodate these types of routine and non-routine inputs. Bureaucracies attempt to standardize or program many decisions into specific departments where routine protocols can be designed.This structure allows many routine inputs to be addressed through bureaucratic procedures, leaving top-level leaders free to address the more complex, nonroutine inputs when they emerge. These bureaucratic structures are limited, however, when front-line workers encounter non-routine inputs. When rigid and finely specified, bureaucratic protocols may not allow workers sufficient time to accommodate non-routine requests that emerge sporadically and that are potentially disruptive to workflow. Moreover, when workers are constrained (or feel they are constrained) by tight deadlines and work schedules, there is little opportunity or incentive to explore potential improvements in strategy, structure, and operation in the organization (Cegarra-Navarro & Cepeda-Carrion, 2008; Crossan, Cunha, Vera, & Cunha, 2005). Problems of adaptation often become a challenge for mid-level managers. A front-line worker who encounters a non-routine request may direct the issue to

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his or her supervisor.This middle manager then confronts the dilemma of whether to make an exception to existing bureaucratic procedures. As a result, mid-level leaders usually find themselves with less time than they feel they need (and actually do need) to make informed decisions, especially when they encounter many exceptions to existing bureaucratic protocols. Moreover, increasingly complex decisions faced by colleges and universities now frequently require the gathering of experts from different fields so that their inputs can be considered. Such patterns of decision-making obviously challenge the old time frames that were traditionally used. One result is a “compression” (see Bergson, 1912; Peters & Waterman, 1982) of tasks so that they can be managed within the given time frame. Unfortunately, as Sabelis (2002) notes, “compression can be seen as a consequence of acceleration, paradoxically reinforcing its cause—as compression leads to an increase of acceleration and a loss of ‘quality’ in managerial work” (p. 90). Further, Sabelis notes that compression may lead to communication distortions by “triggering a decrease in the most important way of communication, the expression and exchange of meaning(s) in words” (p. 93). In short, the condensed framework of time for administrative decision-making may induce a proclivity to communicate in language that is either ambiguous or misleading (sometimes intentional, sometimes not). Sabelis (2002) also suggests that compression may actually lead to individual memory suppression, inducing a self-serving palliating forgetting of the details that led to a particular decision: “it seems that remembering is a timeconsuming activity and not appreciated, or maybe not functional, in [this] type of business” (p. 97). Thus, the pace and timing of external stimuli may compress time available for resolving certain exceptions to standard operating procedures. Front-line workers may have neither the authority nor the expertise necessary to address such exceptions. Thus, problems are pushed to middle managers, who then must decide whether an exception will be granted. As external environments become increasingly complex and specialized, the number of exceptions to existing bureaucratic procedures is likely to rise, thus increasing the number of decisions that middle managers and a more decentralized staff must make. In order to accommodate the volume of decisions, the time of middle managers becomes compressed; they work through as many decisions as they can, but they lack time to analyze problems, reflect on potential solutions, or explore the possibility of adopting new practices to address organizational challenges. Thus, problems may get “solved,” but organizational members lose opportunities to learn from their experiences. Furthermore, competitive pressures in the external environment place a premium on timely institutional action. Competition among institutions of higher education is increasingly time constrained, and institutions may seek to gain a competitive advantage by shortening the lead times associated with developing

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TIME COMPRESSION AND DECISION-MAKING In 2009, administrators at Clark Atlanta University eliminated the jobs of 55 faculty, including 20 with tenure, without faculty consultation. At the time, the institution was bordering on financial insolvency. Faculty claimed that they had offered the administration dozens of ideas for saving money, including salary reductions, only to be ignored. A university spokesperson noted that the staff reduction decisions were made by a committee of deans and other administrators, and that faculty involvement in the process would have resulted in the university taking too long to achieve a better financial position. In other words, there was no time for faculty participation; the financial conditions were too dire. In response, faculty argued that the current time constraints were the result of previous inaction by administration. If administrators had responded to the ideas that faculty had offered months earlier, then the institution would have been in better financial shape, and last-minute efforts to save the institution would not have been necessary (Jaschik, 2010, January 14).

and implementing new programs (Hedaa & Tornroos, 2002). However, when lead times get shortened, the ability of faculty and administrators to fully vet the quality of a new program may be significantly constrained. In addition, if organizational members perceive external competition as highly threatening, then their subsequent decision-making will likely be quick, rigid, and ultimately deficient. Citing the work of Staw et al. (1981), McGrath and Tschan (2004) note: decision makers under time pressure or other threats may have difficulties in adapting their strategies to changing demands. In such situations, they have a tendency to show more rigid behavior, described as the failure to alter and adapt behavior to a new situation. (p. 59) Perceived threats often lead organizational members to process less information and narrow their field of attention to only a few issues (Ravasi & Schultz, 2006). Under threatening conditions, individuals revert to familiar, habitual responses, ignoring their potential lack of appropriateness to the situation. A latent effect of the increased pace or compression of decision-making is the creation of a social value that rewards people whom Bourdieu (1996) calls “fast thinkers”—thinkers who are rapid problem-solvers. The concomitant social loss is the value provided by sharp minds that need more time to think deeply and laterally (Eriksen, 2001). These losses are likely to have organizational consequences as well. Fast thinkers may solve problems quickly, but they may solve

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the wrong problem or solve a problem that others did not want fixed. The temporal press for decision-making has important implications for college and university governance systems that are expected to address external expectations or capitalize on emerging markets quickly and effectively. The valuing of fast thinking over deep thinking, however, may lead to overexpansion or mission drift, as the institution responds to external stimuli quickly but unreflectively. Some faculty may resist an orientation toward the present, and note that their work has a longer time horizon. As a result, they may become “out of sync” with administrators who attempt to direct organizational behavior toward performance outcomes that can be measured by the tools of the present. Whipp, Adam, and Sabelis (2002) suggest, however, that an excessive present orientation—or a “radical present orientation”—makes “parasitic use of the future,” leading to “volatility and with it a massive reduction in security, stability, and predictability but also a loss of time to reflect and act in the intervening period between cause and effect” (p. 21). In our view, this time pressure is felt profoundly by faculty in the highly competitive research and publication field, where grant funds and research support are in short supply. The impact of this pressure is mitigated somewhat by the opportunity that faculty have to review and amend their research manuscripts without immediate consequences. For administrators, delay is less tolerable, because they are intimately involved in time-constrained decisions that are more closely connected with other parts of the organization and with externalities. It may be argued that faculty members retain more control over information cycles from their external environments than administrators. Faculty frequently have discretion regarding whether and how they respond to various external expectations. In fact, faculty are frequently buffered by administrators from the effects of turbulent environments, thus making the temporal pace of administrative work more discontinuous, yet providing more temporal stability for faculty members. It is important to note, however, that the temporal domains of nearly all workers have become more subject to the influence of external power holders who operate in different time environments (Nowotny, 1994). Hence, the ability of organizational members, including faculty, to shield themselves from time-based expectations imposed from the outside may be diminishing rapidly. GOAL ATTAINMENT AND TIME Parsons’ second functional prerequisite pertains to organizational goal attainment. Goals help organizations determine priorities and regulate and manage the use of time.To attain goals, organizations first devise systems to determine goals and allow workers to attempt to achieve consensus—or at least a degree of consensus— about the appropriateness of those goals to guide their individual and collective work (Aberle, Cohen, Davis, Levy, & Sutton, 1950). The subsystems typically

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utilized by an organization to manage its goals and foster goal achievement are: (1) employee recruitment and hiring practices that select individuals who fit the culture and goals of the organization (Amos, 2008); and (2) the organization’s authority structure, including rewards for goal achievement and sanctions for deviance. Goals are usually measured in relation to time; organizational leaders determine whether objectives can be achieved within a predetermined period of time. Time enters into the relationship between faculty and administration in the calculation and adjudication of the appropriate time frames for projects that inevitably involve both groups. In the give and take of organizational politics, compromises and/or conflicts over preferred goals and priorities will occur. In both cases, there must be an adjudication of the time frames that are adopted by the organization as a whole, as well as by its subunits. This adjudication is a continuously negotiated process that is shaped, at least in part, by the relative power positions of the negotiating parties. Beginning with the development of the modern assembly line, time and power have been inextricably linked in organizations. Specifically, the power to set organizational goals determines how time will be allocated within the organization. Managerial power can be used to change the pace of work. For example, an increase in class sizes or teaching loads would compel the faculty member to work more quickly to achieve all necessary tasks. The faculty member might need to grade 50 papers rather than 20, thus having the effect of speeding up the metaphorical assembly line of production. In relation to managerial power, informal power in workgroups may emerge and resist such efforts and restrict output (for example, work-to-rule edicts on unionized campuses). Organizations use different technologies (transformation processes) to achieve their various goals. The type of technology used by an organization will determine the extent to which the pace of work can be controlled by management (Perrow, 1986). Routine technologies can be more easily controlled. Non-routine technologies, which are characteristic of faculty work, are less susceptible to managerial control (Cohen & March, 1974). Many disputes between faculty and administrators can be viewed in terms of resistance to administrative efforts to standardize non-routine technologies. For example, the unbundling of faculty roles into distinct tasks completed by different personnel (for example, curriculum developer, instructional designer, assessment specialist) may lead to greater standardization in teaching and result in less control for faculty over the pace and timing of their work. The ability to set the pace of one’s own work is inherent in conceptualizations of professional autonomy (Breaugh, 1985; Freidson, 1994;Vollmer & Mills, 1966) and is central to the values of the faculty subculture.Yet, as interactions between faculty and administrators become more managerial (Bess, 2006; Rhoades, 1998) and as the faculty role itself becomes unbundled and disaggregated into component

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parts that can be standardized (Schuster & Finkelstein, 2006), the power to set the pace of academic work may be shifting from the faculty to the administration. This shift in power is likely to generate conflict, as underlying values regarding time are challenged. Thus, discovering who controls the pace of work can provide important clues to understanding the impact of time orientations on the effectiveness of relationships between faculty and administrators. THE PACE AND TIMING OF WORK AT DSU Teaching loads are large and class sizes are growing at DSU. Given the heavy workload, faculty are experiencing the effects of time compression. They reported that they have almost no time for discussion, thinking, or reflection. “My colleagues are exhausted with no time for academic discourse,” noted one faculty member. “Part of being a professor is to have time to cogitate, but if you work that hard, then you don’t have time to think.” Faculty at DSU described working long hours and experiencing high levels of stress. “There isn’t enough time to do grading during the week, between preparing for class and students coming by, teaching, advising,” explained a faculty member in the social sciences. “So I spend about 15 to 20 hours on the weekend grading. Pretty much every weekend.” A faculty member in the humanities described the time-based pressures that she experienced as an assistant professor: “For my first six years, I had a horrific workload. I taught four writing-intensive classes every semester. I was overwhelmed with grading papers. I was very close to burning out. My stress level was extremely high.” A faculty member in the natural sciences indicated that she lacks the concentrated, extended periods of time that she believes are necessary to produce high-quality research: “I am anxious about keeping up with my field, because I lack the time. Scholarship cannot be done in bits and pieces. It requires sufficient time for thought. I’ve learned to manage it, but I haven’t accomplished what I would have liked.” DSU administrators also described time compression, largely due to their involvement in planning and implementing multiple simultaneous reforms. “Everything is linked together,” noted an academic administrator. “The reform of the core curriculum, the assessment initiative, the new strategic plan. You can’t separate these things.” To manage these multiple initiatives, administrators indicated that they were participating in several meetings each day. The daily grind of meetings had generated a certain amount of “committee fatigue,” according to an academic dean. “It’s just like these huge waves of work coming in, one right after another.”

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INTEGRATION AND TIME Whereas adaptation and goal attainment, as functional prerequisites, are concerned with cross boundary issues for the organization, integration and latency deal with intra-organizational matters. Integration is the need of an organization to ensure “stable systems of social interaction” (Parsons, 1951, p. 36) among the departments and units of the total organization. One of the key challenges of organizational leadership is developing effective mechanisms to integrate the work of highly differentiated structures found in complex organizations (Bolman & Deal, 2003; Burns & Stalker, 1961). Coordination across the structural divides of an organization may become more challenging to establish and maintain when there are significant differences in the ways that individuals or groups conceive, make use of, and want to make use of time. Therefore, when organizational leaders attempt to achieve better integration among the departments and divisions of an organization, it is important that they consider workers’ preferences and beliefs about time and its use. Parsons (1951) notes that organizations attempt to achieve integration in two primary ways: through formal structures and through the selection and hiring process for new employees. In most organizations, beliefs about time contribute to the design of formal work structures, as well as the pace of work processes (Lynch, 1992). In turn, these design decisions have an important impact on the selection and hiring of new organizational members. Where productivity is assumed to depend on strict time discipline, the resulting organizational structures are likely to emphasize integration and coordination of effort through hierarchical authority, close supervision, and tight control. Here, productivity is viewed as a linear function of time; the more time put in, the more productive the person, unit, or organization will be. Therefore, leaders will seek to maximize time on task in order to enhance productivity. More flexible assumptions regarding time, in contrast, may lead to the use of coordination mechanisms that rely on mutual adjustment or shared professional norms to ensure integration of effort across organizational units and departments. If leaders assume that workers’ control over their own time is more important to productivity than time on task (and this may be the case in many knowledge-based organizations), then integration of effort can be achieved largely through interactions among the workers themselves, rather than through formal managerial control (Orton & Weick, 1990). Another way to think about integration pertains to the temporal rhythms of work in an organization (May & Thrift, 2001). These rhythms emerge in response to external conditions, as well as to the dominant technology employed at the organization (Perrow, 1986) and the concomitant conformity of organizational members to those imperatives. When a significant proportion of the subunits in an organization follow the same rhythmic press, it is called entrainment, which is “the process by which different rhythms fall into synchronization with each other

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and then work in a parallel manner” (Clemens & Dalrymple, 2005, p. 99). When different organizational units are in sync with each other, there is no need for extensive oversight or formal coordination. Instead, workers within those units act on their own volition in ways that are consistent with the needs and expectations of other organizational members.They begin to anticipate each other’s needs and align their behaviors accordingly. Ancona and Chong (1996) suggest that when an organization is experiencing entrainment, organizational performance improves. Less effort needs to be exerted in coordinating the work of different units in the organization, and interpersonal relations among organizational members are enhanced. Entrainment, however, may be difficult to achieve in colleges and universities because of the diversity of technological processes involved in teaching and research, especially across different fields, and because of the differences in the pace of decision-making for the administration. Although entrainment may be difficult to achieve at the level of the whole organization, for specific organizational functions, it may be possible for organizational members to fall into a common rhythm that structures their work together. The rhythm and pace of the academic year, for example, causes nearly all faculty members to think about common issues at similar points in time. Academic administrators can reinforce that level of entrainment by seeking input on policy changes during times in the academic year when faculty would be most interested and engaged in contributing to decisions in those domains (for example, seeking input on admissions policy in the spring). As mentioned above, integration can be achieved through both organizational structure and organizational hiring practices. Usually, workers are hired in organizations to fit their work environments as closely as possible. This placement includes not only matching skills to jobs, but also an assessment of fit regarding temporal preferences, although it is unlikely that hiring committees and job applicants assess temporal fit in any explicit way. Nevertheless, some workers prefer to be engaged deeply in a few tasks, while others want to be involved in many tasks simultaneously. Preferences for one or the other are known as “polychronicity” (Bluedorn, 2002; Hall, 1983). Research has shown that “highly polychronic people tend to change plans more often and easily than less polychromic individuals” (Bluedorn, 2007, p. 182, emphasis in original). Organizational members with high levels of polychronicity will prefer to work in flexible, decentralized structures with low levels of formalization (that is, few rules and more flexible time frames). Those with lower levels of polychronicity will prefer centralized structures with standard operating procedures and consistent work schedules (Hall & Hall, 1990). According to Hall (1976), monochronic cultures tend to see time as material, linear, and tangible. Cultures that embrace those ideas tend to emphasize punctuality and deadlines. On the other hand, in polychronic cultures, time is treated more loosely. Schedules are more loosely attended to, deadlines are more

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flexible, and organizational members tend to work within their own pace without undue concern for negative sanctions for lack of adherence to deadlines (Whipp et al., 2002). Clearly, these two contrasting values can be a source of great conflict when both sides are attempting to collaborate toward common goals (Glennie & Thrift, 1996). The faculty subculture may assign a higher value to polychronicity than the administrative subculture, and the structures of faculty and administrative work appear to reflect those preferences (Bess, 1988; Del Favero, 2003). However, as Levine (1997) argues, when organizational units differ in their preferences toward polychronicity, it will be difficult for them to collaborate. Administrators, for example, may wish to focus institutional attention on specific strategic initiatives or managerial practices. The desired outcome, here, is to have organizational members devote more extensive time to fewer tasks (low polychronicity) in areas that are likely to have an impact on organizational performance. Faculty, on the other hand, may prefer to be engaged in multiple tasks and projects simultaneously (high polychronicity), and, therefore, may resist administrative efforts that call for them to spend more time on specific foci such as assessment or accreditation self-studies. Thus, an important challenge for college and university governance is finding ways to focus institutional attention on strategic priorities, but do so in ways that account for different orientations toward time. LATENCY AND TIME Parsons’ latency function refers to pattern maintenance and tension reduction in organizations. All organizations have a need to preserve and sustain a set of basic values that serve as guides to individual and collective action.The stability of these values acts to ensure that patterns of activity are maintained and tensions kept to manageable levels. In highly decentralized organizations, such as the typical college or university, which is differentiated by departments and disciplines, it is difficult to establish and promulgate a unifying set of values. For faculty, there are common professional values that have usually been inculcated in graduate schools. But the underlying set of institutional values is often in flux and is more amorphous. Over a period of time, with a turnover of personnel, institutional values come to have different meanings and intensities. Even in organizations where values systems are ambiguous or inconsistent, organizational members will attempt to infer values through their own observations of the actions of others (Schein, 1992). They may, for example, assess the degree of importance of various issues or projects by estimating the amount of time that others in the organization (for example, top-level leaders) devote to those endeavors.The amount of time that a college president devotes to attending faculty senate meetings, for example, can convey the level of importance attributed to shared governance.

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Organizational values are also conveyed and sustained through references to precedent.Time is the medium through which individuals are able to construct precedents that can justify that decisions are consistent with prior action. Administrators and faculty members may support or oppose proposed actions based on their understandings of precedent. The value of precedent may also vary across subcultures. Faculty members may be especially attuned to issues of precedent, as they collectively represent a more stable, longer-term employment group than administrators, whose turnover levels are higher and whose institutional memories are therefore shorter. In addition to organizational values and precedents, it is important to assess the level of psychological harmony that exists within an organization. Again, the latency function refers to the need of all organizations for tension reduction in order to facilitate productive exchanges among people and departments. Harmony can be fostered in the workplace when workers experience a high level of fit between their individual goals and those of the organization (Argyris, 1954). A proper fit can result in some reduction in the consciousness of time passing. Under these circumstances, a “flow” mentality develops (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, 1997), largely as a result of an increase in intrinsic motivation. Individuals in this state report a transformation of their experience of time. They have an “autotelic” experience where the experience itself, quite apart from any external reward, becomes an end itself, and the perception of time passing largely disappears when they are engaged in that activity. In this conceptualization, flow and harmony are associated with the intrinsic rewards of the work itself. This has important implications for relationships between faculty and administrators. Specifically, extrinsic rewards may not be sufficient incentives for faculty members to engage in institutional activities desired by administrators. Time spent attending to externally imposed work demands may be perceived as passing more slowly than time spent in work that produces a “flow” of experience and that provides intrinsic rewards from the work itself. Administrators may stress extrinsic rewards and distribute them in accordance with achievements that the administration values. Often, administrators will fall into the unfortunate posture of “overjustifying” the external reward, which, in turn, diminishes the possibilities for internal satisfaction (Deci, 1971; Deci, Koestner, & Ryan, 1999). Instead, a potentially more productive posture would be to design tasks and committee assignments in ways that enhance the intrinsic rewards that faculty can obtain from the work itself (Hackman & Oldham, 1980). ADDRESSING DIFFERENT ORIENTATIONS TOWARD TIME Investments of time, energy, and emotional commitment are essential ingredients in all organizational activity. In return for these investments, organizational members expect some tangible and/or intangible rewards. Some investments are

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made in anticipation of immediate returns; others in expectation of long-term results. Faculty investments of time in academic projects, for example, may not reap rewards until far in the future. Thus, faculty may have a variable sense of the impact of time on their careers. Indeed, the uncertainty of future returns on investments makes those investments quite risky, especially for groundbreaking ideas and innovations. Similarly, administrative leaders recognize that growth of reputation and/or institutional improvement may take years to evolve and is the result of the impact of incremental investments in faculty, facilities, programs, and recruitment of students. For individual administrators, the work context often creates a situationspecific time frame that must be accommodated within the local cultural and normative institutional history. Budgets, for example, are symbols of “expected value” over time. Time for administrators, then, becomes a tool for translating an abstract idea into an actionable plan. Rigorous linear connections among administrative departments also demand attention to timing. Admissions, financial aid, and registration processes, for example, are interdependent and must be temporally linked to ensure that students are moved through those processes efficiently. Faculty, on the other hand, have a looser time framework and often can indulge at their own discretion in exploration and experimentation without fear of oversight or punitive actions from higher ups—at least in the short run. This individualized and largely unsupervised control of faculty time may appear to result in wasted energy or unproductive outcomes, though it has been argued that “wasted” time is a necessary investment for organizational learning and innovation (Lawson, 2001). The efficiency and effectiveness of decision-making in institutions of higher learning depends on the willingness of faculty and administrators to utilize knowledge about time—its philosophical underpinnings and practical uses—to reconcile differences that arise between these two constituencies. In this chapter, we argued that communication problems between faculty and administrators often result from differences in actual work-related time constraints, as well as from differences between two cultures that differ in “tightness” of normative constraints. Based on this analysis, we offer several recommendations for decision-making and governance. First among these recommendations is that an understanding of time and orientations toward time is critical for addressing the communication difficulties that often challenge shared governance systems. Second, we suggest that governance systems themselves need to reflect different temporal orientations with some structures designed to enhance polychronicity (which may require a deceleration of decision-making processes) and some structures designed to accommodate needs for targeted, accelerated responses, such as reacting to emerging competitors or addressing new policy mandates from government agencies (Hedaa & Tornroos, 2002). Third, faculty and administrators can develop skills in

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accommodating these different temporal frames.The time-based demands imposed by the external environment on higher education administrators are unlikely to change.Therefore, faculty members may need more sophisticated understandings of the temporal context of administrative work. Concurrently, faculty preferences for arriving at optimum solutions that maximize professional opportunities (regardless of the length of time needed to arrive at those solutions) are unlikely to recede. In response, administrators can support some organizational structures that are oriented toward optimizing, rather than “satisficing” (that is, relying on the first available option that minimally addresses the problem—Simon, 1997). Such structures may include centers for teaching and learning, or faculty development centers, where faculty can explore new teaching practices without the expectation that they will translate immediately into more effective instruction (although that is certainly the long-term goal). Similarly, administrators may appoint a planning committee where the group’s charge is not related to a specific outcome such as accreditation, but instead is empowered to explore a range of innovations that may improve organizational performance. These types of structures, akin to self-managed teams (Manz & Sims, 1993), are freed from the rigid confines of productivity expectations tied to specific time frames, and therefore may yield significant benefits in organizational learning and innovation. Finally, rather than aiming for temporal congruity between faculty and administrators, we argue that having different organizational groupings with different orientations toward time can actually serve as an organizational asset. Decision-making systems that include both polychronous and non-polychronous elements can foster the flexibility to change strategic foci frequently, the capability to deliberate extensively and thoroughly, and the capacity to systematize and rapidly implement institutional responses to ever-changing environmental conditions. THE UTILITY OF UNSTRUCTURED TIME Over the past several decades, colleges and universities have increasingly been driven by rationales of global competition, academic capitalism, and accountability (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). In this context, efficiency and responsiveness have become the watchwords of the day. Institutional leaders may seek to allocate funds toward the programs and initiatives that appear most promising in relation to strategic priorities. If redundant or slack resources are identified, then they are cut from the budget. The mantra “do more with less,” while perhaps never spoken publicly, is certainly a guiding force in the budget decisions of many colleges and universities. In this hypercompetitive environment, the resource of time is also carefully monitored so that organizational effort can be directed toward specific outcomes. Faculty are called upon to account for how they use their time, and institutions

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have designed more complex systems for keeping track of faculty productivity in teaching and research. How administrators use their time is also under greater scrutiny, either from more senior administrators, trustees, or the media. Furthermore, the pressure to “do more with less” results in having fewer full-time faculty and fewer administrators to do the work of the institution. Faculty are compelled to teach larger classes, bring in more grant funding, and participate on more institutional committees, in part because there are relatively fewer full-time faculty available to do the work on their campus (Schuster & Finkelstein, 2006). Likewise, administrators may be compelled to don “multiple hats” as functions that previously reported to several administrators now report to a single individual. The time-based pressures of academic work certainly exact a toll on individual faculty and administrators, who are likely to experience more stress and less worklife balance (Lester & Sallee, 2009;Ward & Wolf-Wendel, 2012). Higher education institutions also pay a price. Specifically, the time that might previously have been available for thinking, reflection, and learning no longer exists. Here, creative ideas are less likely to emerge, and the organization as a whole becomes less innovative. Furthermore, when new opportunities emerge in the external environment, the organization will struggle to marshal the resources necessary to develop an effective response. Administrators and faculty will be so busy doing their required tasks that they simply will not have time to pursue any new endeavor. If faculty are grading papers during their evenings and weekends, how will they have time to pursue a new grant-funding opportunity? If every hour of an administrator’s day is filled with meetings, when will he or she have time to think about what the institution could be doing better? Lawson (2001) suggests that organizational learning and innovation depend upon the maintenance of some level of unstructured surplus time. During unstructured time, organizational members can reflect on their practice and collectively construct a knowledge base that shapes and informs their future actions. The construction and use of organizational knowledge requires some amount of unstructured time, so that organizational members can interpret new information and then articulate principles, metaphors, or “rules of thumb” to guide their work. In the absence of unstructured time, organizational members are constantly “doing,” rather than thinking, reflecting, or sharing knowledge. College and university leaders can take several steps to foster and protect unstructured time. First, although faculty have historically had large amounts of unstructured time, their workdays are now much more time-compressed (Schuster & Finkelstein, 2006), and institutions need to take steps to protect unstructured time for faculty. Faculty reward systems, for instance, can be more accommodating toward activities that do not immediately yield productive outcomes, such as an unsuccessful grant proposal or an unpublished manuscript. If reward systems take a more long-term view of productivity, then faculty might feel more comfortable

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allocating their time toward tasks that have uncertain, but potentially innovative, outcomes.To promote collective thinking, department chairs can reserve a portion of their meeting agendas for faculty to talk about their teaching and research practices. As faculty learn more about what their colleagues are doing, they might identify new approaches for their own practice or discover new areas for collaboration. Second, the workdays of administrators also need to include some unstructured time to foster individual and collective thinking. Administrators could carve out a portion of their workday for professional reading.To promote collective thinking, administrators could form reading groups in which they discuss books that relate to common professional interests and goals. Finally, higher education institutions can generate unstructured time in which administrators and faculty think and reflect together. Seldom do administrators and faculty get together without a specific agenda. Informal interactions between administrators and faculty could foster more sharing of ideas and information, build trust, and establish a more extensive basis for future collaboration. CONCLUSION In this chapter, we have depicted time as an arena of conflict between administrators and faculty. In their efforts to advance the effectiveness of the institution as a whole, administrators are attentive to the efficient and appropriate allocation of time as a resource. As with other resources, time should not be wasted. Instead, according to this view, its allocation should be aligned with institutional priorities. Furthermore, as participants in a global competition for resources and prestige, college and university leaders may feel compelled to accelerate the pace of decision-making and prod the institution toward greater intensity of effort in various domains of activity (Walker, 2009). Delays of any sort may compromise the ability of an institution to compete for available resources or to capitalize on emerging opportunities. Faculty, in contrast, tend to have a different perspective regarding time. They may also view time as a limited resource, but one that they seek to protect from outside intrusions, including those from administrators. The pace and intensity of faculty work are governed more by individual goals such as tenure and promotion, rather than by organizational goals. Of course, at a broad level, the individual goals of faculty—directed toward particular outcomes in research, teaching, and learning—are aligned with the organizational goals of the college or university in which they work. However, at the more precise level of allocating time to particular tasks, tensions between individual and organizational goals are likely to emerge. Efforts to tighten the alignment between the work activities of faculty and the goals and priorities of the institution might result in a more efficient allocation of time, but come at the cost of hindering innovation and diminishing the autonomy

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and freedom of the academic profession. If faculty were not permitted to deviate beyond the established set of organizational goals and priorities, then innovation and knowledge production would be significantly constrained, and higher education institutions would be less able to fulfill their broader social functions associated with advancing the human condition. A complete decoupling of faculty work from institutional goals is not a viable alternative, either. Service to the institution and participation in its decisionmaking bodies has long been a component of the faculty role (Schuster & Finkelstein, 2006). Allowing faculty to disengage from the demands of organizational leadership and to allocate their time however they see fit would be a recipe for organizational decline. Too many needed organizational changes would lack sufficient capacity due to lack of faculty involvement. We argue that colleges and universities need to develop the capacity for operating simultaneously in multiple timescapes (Adam, 2004). Administrators and faculty can collectively determine the temporal needs of a given situation, and then move the decision into a venue that accommodates either faster or more deliberative processes. Some decision-making venues could specialize in careful, deliberative processes that unfold over months or years. Faculty senates and other governance committees could provide a space for such deliberations. Other decision-making venues could specialize in rapid, intense decision-making. Furthermore, any higher education institution is likely to have individuals who are quick-and-effective thinkers, as well as personnel who add significant value through their extended engagement with a single idea or concept. Mixing these individuals across decision-making venues could help the institution move forward more quickly when new opportunities emerge, or slow down when important contingencies have not been considered. All of this requires that administrators and faculty are able to work with those who have different orientations toward time. This appreciation for different temporal perspectives, we argue, is critical for the long-term success of any college or university. For a college or university to be successful, its administrators and faculty must be able to work effectively with those who embrace a different paradigm than their own. Most of their professional socialization and prior training, however, has been oriented toward working with others who adhere to the same paradigm as they do. Therefore, they lack the skills, language, and knowledge to work effectively across paradigms. In the next chapter, we examine communication techniques such as appreciative inquiry that can be used to build understandings and foster productive exchanges across paradigm boundaries.

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IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE Making time to talk about time. Research suggests that people have different orientations toward time (Bluedorn, 2007). Some prefer to engage deeply with a few ideas or tasks. Others enjoy being involved in multiple projects simultaneously. Some desire a fast-paced work environment, while others prefer large concentrated blocks of time during which they can focus intently on a single initiative. These multiple orientations toward time can be an asset for institutional decision-making. Fast thinkers will prod the organization toward task accomplishment and problem-solving, while the deliberative thinkers will alert the organization to contingencies that have not been fully considered. The challenge for administrators and faculty is to find a way to unite multiple orientations toward time in campus governance and decision-making processes. We argue that governance needs to be both fast and slow—fast to capitalize on emerging opportunities within and outside the organization, and slow to ensure that the institution is addressing the “right” problem and is considering a wide range of alternatives. Below, we offer some recommendations for incorporating different orientations toward time into governance and decision-making practices: n

n

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When forming a committee or team, administrators and faculty can consider orientation toward time as a personal characteristic that enhances the diversity of the group. They can appoint members who have different preferences regarding time and its use. Groups may be more effective in their decision-making when members have a range of orientations toward time. When a new committee or team forms, its members can discuss time and its use. People should be encouraged to share information about their own preferences regarding time. Then, group members can be matched to tasks that are well suited to their temporal preferences. Fast thinkers would likely excel at the task of gathering data about the problem from multiple sources, while deliberative thinkers could take those data and think about them deeply and carefully, before the group makes a decision. Fast thinkers could generate a large number of alternative solutions, while deliberative thinkers could identify important criteria by which to assess those alternatives. New committees and teams can establish norms for the use of time. These groups can agree to allocate a specific amount of “thinking time” to a particular task. Members can also identify a transition point at which the group will move from analysis toward decisions and actions. Group tasks will vary in their time horizons. Some decisions will need to be made within a matter of days or weeks, particularly if an external deadline has been set; for example, by trustees, government agencies, or grant-funding organizations. Other tasks might unfold over the course of an entire academic

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WHEN TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE year, such as an accreditation self-study or a strategic planning process. Regardless of the time horizon, all groups can benefit from the input of participants who represent different orientations toward time. In the case of a decision that needs to be made within days or weeks, deliberative thinkers could still devote a concentrated block of time to consider the problem, the available evidence, and the range of alternatives. Even an hour of concentrated thinking time can generate new insights or uncover unexamined issues. Likewise, fast thinkers can be strong contributors to longterm projects. Fast thinkers will likely be engaged in many initiatives on campus, and, therefore, they will be able to envision and establish productive linkages across different domains of activity; for example, between a strategic planning initiative and a new community engagement program.

Making “time” for part-time faculty. The temporal pace of academic life is likely quite different for part-time faculty than for full-time faculty and administrators. Part-time faculty might be teaching courses at multiple institutions, or they might have full-time employment outside higher education but want to remain connected to the world of teaching and learning. The amount of time that they spend at a particular institution might be quite limited, particularly if they teach primarily or exclusively online. Part-time faculty might be on campus teaching courses at night or on the weekend, when full-time faculty and administrators are not present. As a result, part-time faculty might experience time as fragmented and disconnected. Despite the fact that part-time faculty have become important partners in advancing student learning, they are excluded (though perhaps unintentionally) from many of the decision-making processes developed at colleges and universities. In our DSU case, part-time faculty reported that they were not invited to department meetings and that these meetings were often scheduled at times when they could not participate. “We are ignored,” indicated a part-time faculty member in the sciences. “We have been spoken down to and made to feel like we have no status or nothing of value to offer.” Part-time faculty also noted that administrators “often schedule programs and workshops at times that are bad for part-time faculty. There is nothing offered by the university geared toward part-timers.” Administrators and full-time faculty can find ways to accommodate the temporal pace of life for part-time faculty. Administrators can offer stipends to encourage part-time faculty to participate in governance committees. When professional development workshops and seminars are offered on campus, they can be video-recorded and distributed to part-time faculty. Full-time faculty can schedule at least some department meetings during hours in which part-time faculty can attend. In instances where schedules cannot be made more accommodating, full-time faculty can make meeting minutes and other materials available to part-time faculty via websites.

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Chapter 6

Enhancing Communication and Collaboration between Faculty and Administration

INTRODUCTION We acknowledge that improving communication in higher education organizations is a complex and challenging endeavor. In fact, a primary aim of our text is to help administrators and faculty leaders move beyond the simplistic calls for more communication, and instead embrace the complexities associated with conflict in the academic workplace. We argue that conflict itself can become an organizing principle for higher education institutions; the expression and effective management of conflict can empower both faculty and administrators in advancing the aims and missions of their institutions. In fact, it is possible to imagine a flexible and functional system of governance, guided by norms and commitments shared by both faculty and administrators, which promotes the expression of, and constructive responses to, conflict. The conflicts that emerge between faculty and administrators are especially difficult to resolve—partly because the underlying paradigms of both groups are themselves both subtle and often conflicted. As noted earlier, faculty and administrators may not be aware of the reasons that conflicts between the two groups arise. They attribute the causes to more superficial immediate issues or to long-standing disputes that both parties have agreed to let simmer, rather than bring them to open conflict stages. From the earlier chapters, it can be seen that our basic approach to reconciling disparate belief systems that interfere with the effective operation of colleges and universities is different from the usual modes of approaching conflict. Instead of head-on confrontations of faculty and administration over policies and practices preferred by each, even if those confrontations are dealt with civilly, we consider new methods of opening up the emotional and attitudinal positions held by each group, usually unconsciously. Moving to this more profound level will necessitate some serious effort to be transparent not only about the positions currently being taken formally by each

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side, but also to be open to discussions, considerations, and reconsiderations of the positions taken by all protagonists in the conflict. The communication of paradigm meanings is itself subject to potential paradigmatic differences. Even if two conflicting groups were able to determine that their conflicts arose because each adhered to a different paradigm, there is no guarantee that the two parties would be able to agree upon an appropriate way to talk about and work through their paradigmatic differences. Hence, a “meta-language” for communicating about paradigms will be necessary. In this chapter, we suggest that appreciative inquiry can provide such a language for communicating across multiple paradigms. APPRECIATIVE INQUIRY One approach to the problem of reconciling organizational conflict because of paradigm differences is through the use of appreciative inquiry. Appreciative inquiry is a rapidly growing field of organizational development that: is best talked about as a way of living with, being with, and directly participating in the core of a human system in a way that compels each one of us to inquire into the deeper life-generating essentials and potentials of social existence. (Cooperrider & Avital, 2004, p. xiv) The method involves the conduct of dialogues in which participants engage in “relaxed, non-judgmental curiosity” (Bohm, 1996, p. ix). In its practical application, appreciative inquiry can be contrasted with organizational problem-solving. Cooperrider and Srivastva (1987) noted that the underlying assumptions of appreciative inquiry differ substantially from the problem-solving mode that tends to prevail in most organizations: In problem solving it is assumed that something is broken, fragmented, not whole, and that it needs to be fixed. Thus the function of problem solving is to integrate, stabilize, and help raise to its full potential the workings of the status quo. (p. 153) [T]he knowledge-interest of appreciative inquiry lies not so much in problem solving as in social innovation. (p. 159) Appreciative inquiry “assumes that every social system ‘works’ to some degree” (Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987, p. 160). The task of organizational members is

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to identify what is currently working well in the organization, and then envision and implement plans for fostering even more of what works. Rather than identify problems that need to be fixed, which can make people feel defensive and anxious, appreciative inquiry focuses on positive accomplishments. Appreciative inquiry is not oblivious to organizational challenges; instead, this technique “suggests that it is better to surface the desire behind the problem or reframe it as what is wanted” (Cockell & McArthur-Blair, 2012, p. 15). While the “appreciative” side of appreciative inquiry focuses on what is currently working, the “inquiry” side encourages organizational members to ask questions that will bring forth images of a desired future. Appreciative inquiry practitioners note that the questions need to be framed with a focus on bringing forth positive change, rather than fixating on why previous initiatives might have been unsuccessful: “Asking about problems leads people to focus on the deficit, on what is not going well. This makes it difficult to create a desired future” (Cockell & McArthur-Blair, 2012, p. 18). Skeptics may ask whether appreciative inquiry is realistic, given the significant resource constraints that many higher education institutions encounter. A focus on the positive is ideal, the argument may go, but our institutions simply do not have enough resources to implement these types of changes, and, instead, we must focus on fixing our immediate problems. However, the use of appreciative inquiry in higher education appears most prevalent in the community college sector, where resources are often the most limited (Cockell & McArthur-Blair, 2012). When appreciative inquiry is used to guide institutional strategic planning and other collaborative activities between faculty and administrators, resource constraints are not allowed to serve as impediments to the imagination of individuals and groups. Appreciative inquiry practitioners have developed sets of guiding questions that organizational members can use to focus attention on building a positive future. Stavros and Hinrichs (2009) offer questions that organizational members can use in strategic planning processes.These questions focus on strengths, opportunities, aspirations, and results (SOAR), which is a reframing of the more traditional approach to strategic planning that focuses on strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT). The focus on weaknesses and threats in SWOT would be contrary to the aims of appreciative inquiry. The example below illustrates the SOAR questions that leaders at one college used in their strategic planning process: Each table group answered the following SOAR questions for their particular strategic theme and submitted their top three ideas for each of Strengths, Opportunities, Aspirations, and Results. Strengths: What are our strengths in this area? What’s working? What are our greatest assets/resources?

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Opportunities: What opportunities for growth, improvement, or change do we have in this area? What can we do more of? What can we do differently? Aspirations: What are our highest aspirations in this area? What does our preferred future look like? When this area is at its best, how will it be different? Results:What results do we expect for our efforts? How will we know we have succeeded? What will be different? What will we measure? (Cockell & McArthur-Blair, 2012, p. 148) As the focus on results suggests, appreciative inquiry is not merely an abstract exercise in dialogue. The intent is to improve interpersonal relationships in organizations and ignite positive change. Appreciative inquiry frameworks, therefore, include a stage in which innovations are implemented or extended. Mohr and Watkins (2002) provide a common set of processes: 1. Focus on the positive aspects of current organizational performance. 2. Inquire into exceptionally positive experiences, through sharing stories of success. 3. Encourage organizational members to share their stories of success. 4. Build a shared image of the preferred future. 5. Implement or sustain innovative practices that create that future. Appreciative inquiry is thus a communication technique that can allow conflicting parties to move beyond the norms and perceived stances that often serve as obstacles to effective interaction.This technique suggests that carefully designed dialogues can open emotional and intellectual boundaries between groups so that their separate characteristics can be shared and understood (Leal, 1998). Such reframing of stances leads opposing blocks to re-conceive themselves as part of the same community. Furthermore, the removal, or at least reduction, of affective attachment to any single stance can increase the civility of discourse and open the possibility for greater understanding of initially conflicting positions (Cooperrider & Avital, 2004). When accepted as a useful tool, appreciative inquiry compels protagonists to see the situation in its own terms, rather than biased by any prior value schema. For appreciative inquiry to be effective, Rodgers (2004) indicates that five conditions are necessary: (1) intention to locate what is life affirming; (2) questions that guide a search for the positive and the life affirming; (3) having the whole system engaged in interaction; (4) relational space for trust and affirmation; and (5) reflection. In the context of this book, these conditions may give the sense of the transformations that are needed to make communications between faculty and administration more meaningful and supportive of both the organization as a whole and individual faculty and administrators.

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STRATEGIC PLANNING AT APPRECIATIVE COMMUNITY COLLEGE (ACC) Prior to the arrival of a new provost three years ago, ACC had used rather traditional forms of strategic planning: “We did the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats,” explained an academic dean. “Then, a group of people—some administrators, some faculty—would go write a draft of the plan. We would circulate it for feedback, make a few changes, and that was it. We would put the plan on our bookshelf, let it gather dust, and go back to work.” A faculty member conveyed a similar perspective; strategic planning “was just something that we did every three years or so, just so we could check it off a list and say we did it.” The new provost was an outside hire; typically, senior administrators at ACC were promoted from within. “So I brought in a different perspective,” explained the provost. “I thought the culture needed to shift a bit.” Another administrator was more direct in her criticism: “The culture around here was very insular. We had a lot of people who had been at the college for a long time. They had gotten very good at what they do, but then they didn’t want to change. They didn’t want to collaborate.” Furthermore, some people suggested that the college’s top-down management style had aliened the faculty. As a faculty member explained: “Part of the frustration was that there were not a lot of faculty signing up for these larger college projects. You had a lot of people from enrollment, admissions, support services, disability services, but very few faculty. If there were 30 people on a committee, probably only 10 percent of them were faculty.” The provost had learned about appreciative inquiry (AI) at a leadership retreat that he had attended prior to taking the job at ACC. After becoming provost, he sought advice from his counterpart at a community college that had been using AI for a number of years: “So I met with him at this statewide retreat, and I said, ‘tell me more about AI.’ And their provost spent a lot of time with me, and he talked about how it could really impact the culture in terms of people’s perspectives and their

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ability to really celebrate what has occurred at the institution and what is good at the institution. So all of that sort of resonated with me, but I did not necessarily think it was going to resonate with everyone, because people who want to get right to the problem are not going to be really happy with this.” Next, the provost pitched his idea to the college’s president and senior leadership team: “I said that I have a new idea of how I would like to do the strategic plan, and this is what I think the end product is going to look like. And I don’t think it is what the college is used to, but I think it’s what the college needs at this time.” After explaining the basic principles of AI, the provost received approval from the president to use AI in the upcoming strategic planning process: “They basically said, ‘If that’s how you want to do it, we will follow along.’ I think part of it was being the new guy on the block. They were more than happy to let me get out on a limb and see how it went.” With top-level approval secured, the provost established a strategic planning team that included nearly 50 administrators and faculty from a wide range of units across the college. As an initial task, the team participated in a two-day appreciative inquiry retreat. Resistance emerged almost immediately. “It happened at the very first strategic planning meeting,” explained a faculty member who participated on the team. “We had some of our more vocal faculty stand up and say, ‘What are we doing? When are we going to talk about the problems?’ There was definitely that push back. It wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns.” The provost explained that the concept of reframing helped people understand that they could still address areas of concern through AI. “You can still get to the problems through AI,” explained the provost. “But instead of fixating on the problem, you frame the issue as an opportunity.” A faculty member provided an example of reframing: “Someone [at the strategic planning retreat] stood up and said, ‘Great, we’re going to go for two days like this, but we aren’t going to address the fact that our developmental students aren’t passing math?’ So I think the power of AI was being able to say, ‘We can look at that, but let’s look at it in a different way.’ We can do it by looking at the students who are passing math and figuring out what is working for them, and then figure out how we can make it work

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for the other students who aren’t passing math. So you can reframe the problem as an opportunity to improve.” Following the two-day retreat, the strategic planning team organized a series of summits, which focused on specific themes that the president and senior leadership team had identified. “All of the themes were framed as strengths and opportunities,” noted the provost. “Student success, fiscal stability, workforce alignment. They were all framed as the outcomes that we wanted, not as the problems that we needed to fix.” Participation in each summit was open to all faculty, administrators, staff, and students. Work schedules were adjusted to accommodate participation in the summits. As the provost explained: “If you were a faculty member, staff member, if you worked in the cafeteria, if you were on our custodial staff, you could sign up and attend, and every supervisor knew that they were to give you that time to attend.” An administrator added, “We also found ways to get adjunct faculty involved. We did the summits at different times of day, different days of the week, so we could bring together a larger audience.” Eight summits were held across the academic year, and participation grew over time. “We had over 650 people participate over the course of a year,” noted the provost. At each summit, participants would be randomly assigned to discussion tables. Each discussion table was led by a facilitator—specifically, an administrator or faculty member who had received AI training at the strategic planning retreat. The discussions at each summit were structured around a series of questions based on the strengths, opportunities, aspirations, and results (SOAR) framework (Stavros & Hinrichs, 2009). “A good appreciative inquiry always begins with a really well-developed set of questions,” explained an administrator who served as a summit facilitator. “Good questions get to the heart of what the organization is hoping to achieve through that inquiry.” Responses to the questions were recorded on flip charts or in handwritten notes. At the end of each summit, each facilitator would input the data from his or her group into an electronic spreadsheet, which would then be uploaded to the college’s website. “That way, the strategic planning team, or anybody for that matter, could look at the data as it comes in, rather than looking at it all at the end,” explained an administrator. “It’s a better strategy.” After all summits had concluded, the strategic planning team began to work in subgroups. “We had the data team, the communications team, the design team, the writing team,” explained a dean who had participated in the process. A faculty member who served on the data team explained their work:

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“We took a look at the data, organized by the SOAR categories, for each of the themes like student success and workforce development. The strengths really came out clearly in the data. And for the opportunities, people [in the summits] had identified really concrete things that we should be doing—things that will get us to where we want to be. That’s our aspirations. And the aspirations also came out clearly in the data. So now we have a better sense of where we want to go as an institution and how we can get there.” The end result was not just a strategic planning document; a working group of faculty and administrators was established for each theme identified in the plan. Each working group served as a hub of activity for its respective theme. Administrators on each working group sought to ensure that resources and opportunities were available for people who wanted to engage in activities related to that particular theme in the plan. Faculty members on the working groups communicated with their departmental colleagues about the focal themes, and provided a point of contact for other faculty who wanted to become involved in particular initiatives related to the plan. “The plan actually led to something this time,” commented a faculty member. “Stuff started happening.” Participants agreed that the AI process had improved relationships between administrators and faculty. “We don’t have the grievances that we used to,” noted an administrator. “On an overarching union basis, they are much less.” A faculty member noted, “There’s a whole different flavor around here now. There’s not the dread of going to meetings and being talked down to. The communication around here is much, much better.” The improved communication has provided a basis for additional collaboration across the college. “If there’s a process that breaks down silos, it’s AI,” concluded the provost.

CRITICAL APPRECIATIVE INQUIRY Power imbalances and historic patterns of discrimination can make the promise of appreciative inquiry seem hollow to those who have been marginalized within their organizations. As Cockell and McArthur-Blair (2012) note: In AI, we are asking people to be part of something. But what happens for those people who are not part of something to begin with? They can participate in the AI, and yet they may return to being excluded in the very organization they have chosen to be part of. (p. 55)

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Furthermore, appreciative inquiry’s focus on strengths and opportunities may be perceived as precluding any discussion of the issues and practices that are marginalizing people in the first place. Is there room within appreciative inquiry to focus on racism, sexism, or homophobia? Cockell and McArthur-Blair (2012) have introduced concepts from critical theory into the practice of appreciative inquiry. Issues of power and privilege can be addressed by acknowledging prior discrimination and by using AI as an opportunity to build an inclusive future. In this framework, issues of bias and discrimination can be reframed to reflect a desirable future state. The issue of racism, for instance, can be addressed through an appreciative inquiry that focuses on building highly effective relationships across race.This reframing must be done in a way that does not trivialize the struggles of those who have been marginalized. According to Cockell and McArthur-Blair (2012), critical appreciative inquiry “recognizes that a bridge must be created between the current and future positive states” (p. 59). Critical appreciative inquiry also focuses attention on the issue of inclusion, particularly during the planning stages of AI. Inclusion refers not just to who is invited to participate, but also who is empowered to design the inquiry. Those who design the inquiry will determine how the topic is framed and which questions will be asked. If the planning group for AI is not inclusive of diverse perspectives, then the AI process will likely exclude the voices of less powerful individuals and groups. APPRECIATIVE INQUIRY AND DIVERSITY AT ACC According to faculty and administrators who had been deeply engaged in advocating for social justice, the most significant challenge presented by appreciative inquiry at ACC was whether people would deal honestly with diversity. One of the AI summits addressed diversity, but several participants were dissatisfied with the dialogue. “With the diversity question, it really didn’t go deep enough,” noted an administrator. “You have to allow people time to think, especially about a topic like diversity.” A faculty member raised similar concerns regarding the AI question that was used for diversity: “I worry that we don’t ask the hard questions sometimes. They needed to have a better question [at the AI summit]. I really can’t remember what the question was, but people just didn’t get it. It was evidence of just how much more work we need to do around diversity, because people’s understanding of it was thin. If they don’t have an understanding, then it doesn’t matter how you framed the question. You could use the word ‘inclusive excellence’ and people have no idea what the heck you’re talking about.”

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The provost explained that the AI summit on diversity attempted to reframe thinking regarding the achievement gap for students of color. The expressed vision was to view diversity as a resource, rather than a deficit: “So when we talked about the achievement gap here, we didn’t approach it from an achievement gap or deficit approach. We approached it from the perspective that we have a remarkably diverse community, and we sort of embody inclusive excellence. We talk about it in the strategic plan that this diverse and rich culture exists here, and how do we make sure we do more of that? So from there, we were able to talk about what we might be able to do to deal with the gap without really using those terms and words.” Some participants in that summit, while agreeing with the provost’s general premise, found the discussion to be superficial. “I mean, after a while, everyone was just a bunch of bobblehead dolls, nodding and agreeing with whatever was said,” explained the faculty member. “You’ve got to have space still for the uncomfortable conversations. But with this [AI summit], you just end up veneering things.”

CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS Another mode for improving communication between faculty and administration is a diagnostic one. Here, we explore critical discourse analysis (CDA) as a promising tool that can serve as a useful complement to appreciative inquiry. CDA began in the late 1970s and was intended to “identify the social meanings that were expressed through lexis and syntax and to consider the role that language plays in creating and reinforcing ideologies. Its underlying presupposition was that linguistic choices relate to ideological positioning” (Bayley, 2004, p. 28). CDA allows an understanding of the ways in which discourse is profoundly affected by political factors and power relationships as embedded in ideologies. More specifically, when people of different cultures attempt to communicate through speech, they automatically employ norms for the kinds of language they use, as well as for the stances they expect others to take (Kiesling, 2004). These norms or “frames” in discourse analysis (Bateson, 1972) help communicants try to make sense of other’s speech, or, in less optimistic terms, to impose their frames on others. As such, CDA permits an analysis of these interactions through the lenses of power, ideology, and legitimacy. Another helpful framework for discourse analysis comes from the work of Sara Mills (1997) in her explication of the concepts and theories of Foucault. She points out that for Foucault:

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discourse causes a narrowing of one’s field of vision, to exclude a wide range of phenomena from being considered as real or as worthy of attention, or even as existing; thus, delimiting a field is the first stage in establishing a set of discursive practices.Then, in order for a discourse or an object to be activated, to be called into existence, the knower has to establish a right for him/herself to speak. Thus, entry into discourse is seen to be inextricably linked to questions of authority and legitimacy. Finally, each act somehow maps out the possible uses which can be made of that statement (although of course that is not necessarily what happens to it). Each statement leads to others and, in a sense, it has to have embedded within it the parameters of the possible ways in which future statements can be made. (p. 46) In short, if a colloquy between members of different cultures (for example, faculty and administration) is to be effective at any level—superficial or paradigmatic—the participants must agree on the very legitimacy of each party’s participation in the dialogue, as well as the semantic and lexical parameters of the language(s) to be used. For meaningful discourse to occur, the participants must have an agreement regarding “collusion.” As McDermott and Tylbor (1986) note: collusion literally means playing together (from the Latin col-ludere). Less literally, collusion refers to how members of any social order must constantly help each other to posit a particular state of affairs, even when such a state would be in no way at hand without everyone so proceeding. Participation in social scenes requires that members play into each other’s hands, pushing and pulling each other toward a strong sense of what is probable or possible, for a sense of what can be hoped for and/or obscured. (p. 124) What often interferes with this desirable propensity is the level of misunderstanding that stems from different paradigmatic positions and from differences in the use and understanding of the languages being used by members of different organizational subcultures. CONCLUSION As we noted at the beginning of this book, simply fostering more communication between administrators and faculty will not effectively address the persistent conflicts that emerge between them. Instead, administrators and faculty will need to use specific forms of communication that direct their attention to the underlying paradigmatic differences between them. These types of communications focus on values and beliefs, so that each party can become aware of its own paradigm and

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those of others. With an awareness of and sensitivity to paradigm differences, administrators and faculty can avoid some common missteps when conflicts emerge. Specifically, they can avoid the common tendency to intensify one’s own argument in the course of conflict. Such tactics only make the boundaries between paradigms more rigid and the prospects for inter-group collaboration less likely. In addition, they can avoid attempts to persuade the other party to abandon its paradigm and adopt the competing paradigm. This tactic assumes that a group would willingly surrender values and beliefs that it holds deeply, an unlikely prospect. Rather than attempt to get all parties to agree to a single paradigm, administrators and faculty can work to identify shared commitments that transcend their paradigm differences. In other words, they can identify future courses of action that accommodate the values and beliefs of multiple paradigms. Here, the parties move beyond incommensurable positions to identify a shared commitment to collective action. Staw (1980) defines a shared commitment as a mutually agreed upon justification for action. Shared commitments do not assume a commonality of values. Instead, different parties can develop a commitment to the same action through different sets of values. Bergquist and Pawlak (2008) identify several structures and practices in higher education that can serve as bridges between groups that hold different sets of values: Service learning can accommodate administrative values for connecting the institution with the community, and faculty values associated with pedagogical innovation and advancing the public good. An emphasis on learning-centered teaching practices can unite faculty beliefs in professional autonomy in the classroom, and administrative values for responsiveness to student needs. The scholarship of teaching and learning can address the value that faculty place on using research-based findings to guide practice, while also fulfilling administrative values for fostering ongoing institutional improvement.

n

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Some other potential bridges include the following: When faculty development programs are shaped by faculty leadership, these programs can support faculty values for professional autonomy, while also linking to administrative values for ensuring high levels of faculty performance across the career span (Dee & Daly, 2009). Assessments such as the Diversity Scorecard Project (Bensimon, 2004), which examine student outcomes data disaggregated by race and ethnicity, can connect to faculty beliefs in the importance of valid and

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reliable data, and link to administrative values regarding the need to be accountable for persistence and degree attainment. These types of shared commitments can be identified through communication processes such as appreciative inquiry.When utilized by administrators and faculty, appreciative inquiry can evoke effective cross-paradigm interactions by directing the dialogue away from problems toward a focus on what is currently successful. A focus on problems can provoke defensive responses and more rigid adherence to one’s own paradigm, while a focus on success allows all parties to experience a sense of accomplishment. Furthermore, as organizational members collectively identify what is working well in the organization, they also form commitments to maintain and strengthen those positive attributes of organizational performance. Thus, in spite of significant paradigm differences, administrators and faculty can collectively form shared commitments, which then guide their individual and collective efforts to advance and improve their institutions. In the next chapter, we consider the practical implications of these new forms of communication. Colleges and universities may need new structures and policies to ensure that these forms of cross-paradigm communication will be successful. More broadly, the socialization and training of future faculty and administrators may need to be reshaped to accommodate new perspectives on how these two groups can interact effectively in spite of their differences.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE Integrative model for conflict management. In this chapter, we discussed appreciative inquiry as a communication technique that can enable parties to transcend their paradigm differences and arrive at shared commitments to guide their work together. These shared commitments do not require that administrators and faculty share the same set of values and goals. They can establish a commitment to the same initiative or action from the vantage point of their own paradigm. While the specific values of these subgroups do not need to be in alignment, overarching values for trust, collaboration, and inclusion likely need to be in place before administrators and faculty can have authentic conversations about their paradigmatic differences or engage in dialogue about the substance of their conflicts. In Figure 6.1, we link appreciative inquiry to some of the conflict management concepts that we discussed in previous chapters. The figure provides an integrative model of conflict management that can be used by administrators and faculty to address interpersonal, task, and ideological/paradigmatic conflicts. We do not claim that this model will have the capacity to address every possible conflict

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that can emerge in a college or university. Instead, our goal with this model is to integrate, in a usable form, the many ideas that we have presented in this book. We also acknowledge that the model is limited because it depicts a linear process for conflict management. In all likelihood, the management of conflict periodically requires a reassessment of the conflict and a return to previous steps in the analysis of the situation. The model begins with an assessment of the conflict. If the conflict is interpersonal, then the parties can attempt to redirect the conflict toward tasks. If that effort is unsuccessful, then other strategies, such as compromise or the use of a third-party mediator, may be needed. If the conflict focuses on substantive tasks, then the parties need to assess whether the conflict is within or between paradigms. If the participants are engaged in a within-paradigm conflict (that is, administrators and faculty share common values and beliefs regarding the issue under consideration), then they can use conventional conflict management strategies, such as collaboration, competition, or compromise. The use of Thomas’s (1977) conflict management framework could be beneficial here. If the participants are engaged in a between-paradigm conflict, then the source of their disagreement was not the task per se, but rather their underlying paradigmatic differences. In other words, they are actually engaged in an ideological conflict, rather than a task conflict. Here, the parties can engage in dialogue so that each can become aware of its own paradigm and that of others. The parties can also assess the extent to which the culture of their institution is characterized by values for trust, collaboration, and inclusion. Those values might need to be strengthened so that administrators and faculty can communicate authentically about their differences. If the parties determine that the culture of their institution is characterized by values for trust, collaboration, and inclusion, then they can engage in appreciative inquiry to identify shared commitments, which, in turn, can foster productive interactions aimed to create a desired future. On the other hand, if trust, collaboration, and inclusion are lacking in the culture of the institution, then appreciative inquiry can be conducted first to strengthen those values. With those values strengthened, the parties can then use appreciative inquiry to identify shared commitments.

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Conventional Conflict Management Strategies (e.g., collaborate, compete, compromise)

Compromise, Third-Party Mediator

WithinParadigm Conflict

Interpersonal Conflict

Assess the Conflict

Task Conflict

BetweenParadigm Conflict

Dialogue on Underlying Paradigm Differences

Ideological Conflict Assess Organizational Culture (trust, collaboration, inclusiveness)

Appreciative Inquiry (to enhance trust, collaboration, and inclusiveness)

FIGURE 6.1 Integrative Model of Conflict Management

Appreciative Inquiry (to identify shared commitments)

Chapter 7

Summary and Conclusions Toward Improved Understanding, Cooperation, and Effectiveness

As higher education suffers through another challenge to its legitimacy as a functional and efficient social institution, it is becoming apparent that most of its long-standing problems either have not been addressed or have seen that most of its “square peg” solutions are still not fitting into the round holes that have been salient for many years. Indeed, the holes themselves have now evolved into multifaceted, interlocking dilemmas that seem to defy and discourage creative and innovative approaches to advancing the missions of higher education institutions. The failure to recognize new parameters of the system and new variables that influence those parameters has not led to changes in the approach to solutions; rather, faculty and administrators seem determined to make the “square pegs” more malleable to fit the same round holes. Unfortunately, we are compelled to agree with Morgan (1998), who suggests that people often become unconsciously trapped in a psychic prison, which provides only a limited understanding of our taken-for-granted world, and does not offer insights into alternative worlds that might far better illuminate more meaningful and useful ideas and practices. In this final chapter, we reiterate and restate the basic thesis of this book. Attempts to improve governance practices have not yielded their intended results. Faculty and administrators are still at odds, and the conflicts between them threaten to compromise the effectiveness of these institutions. While faculty and administrators have focused on the issues that often divide them, they typically have not examined the underlying sources of the conflicts in which they are engaged. We argue that paradigm differences constitute the underlying sources of faculty-administrator conflict.These paradigm differences are deeply rooted in the occupational subcultures and professional identities of these two groups.The means to address this communication challenge lie not in the traditional structures and practices of colleges and universities, but instead in alternative frameworks that acknowledge and transcend paradigm differences. History has clearly discounted simple structural solutions to complicated problems with conflicted organizational participants. As Lam (1997) notes:

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for firms engaged in collaborative ventures involving intensive knowledge sharing and technology transfer, many of the difficulties encountered cannot easily be resolved through the appropriate design of governance structures.This is because many of the problems lie not in structural barriers but in the nature of knowledge itself and its social embeddedness. (p. 974) It is important to note that identity formation precedes selection of perspectives. Identity formation, however, is not a solipsistic enterprise. The self (both individually and collectively) is created through communication with others (Martin & Nakayama, 1999). Further, as suggested by social identity theory, selfconcept emerges from the interaction of personal and social identities. Thus, both faculty members and administrators develop images of themselves and the responsibilities they see attached to those images as a result of interactions and negotiations among similar status colleagues and through education, the media, and connections with others in the organization. Further, the strength of the identity of the differentiated and separate groups (faculty and administration) is modulated by the interactions between them. The two entities will diminish or enhance their self-images depending on the character of these interactions. However, it is not only the interactions themselves that influence the effectiveness of the communication; it is also the norms and values of the organization that help orchestrate how faculty and administrators behave toward each other. A collaborative climate in the organization as a whole, for example, will influence the particulars of faculty-administration relationships and behavior at all levels. It should also be noted that it is rare that individuals identify with a single group (Ellemers & Rink, 2005). Thus, competing or incompatible psychological and sociological pressures within a group constantly demand choices, which, in turn, require decisions by group members. MOVING FORWARD Bridging the divide between faculty and administration will require the development of new pathways of connection. Esterberg and Wooding (2012), in their study of faculty-administrator communication, argued that “we need to trouble the boundaries between the faculty and administrators” (p. 143). Some degree of role sharing or role rotation could foster stronger linkages between faculty and administrators. Colleges and universities can create quasi-administrative positions in which faculty serve for a fixed amount of time, and thereby gain a greater appreciation for administrative life. Faculty who have no interest in shifting their careers to administration may still be enticed by temporary or part-time administrative positions that relate closely to their professional goals and expertise. Esterberg and Wooding, for example, studied an institution in which rotating

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administrative fellowships were created for faculty to serve in three areas: service learning, first-year experience programs, and assessment. Similarly, boundaries can be opened for academic administrators to reconnect to their faculty roots. McLellan (2007), in her study of academic administrators during their first year on the job, found that new administrators expressed a strong desire to retain some degree of connection to their previous work as academics. Such connections could be maintained through co-teaching arrangements, in which faculty and administrators teach courses together, thus enabling the administrator to remain connected to the day-to-day challenges of faculty life. Administrators can also retain a connection to the faculty world by collaborating with faculty on grants and research projects. A potential challenge, though, is that the hierarchical distinctions between faculty and administrators could simply be replicated in the grant project. Administrators might develop grant proposals and then attempt to entice faculty participation in the project. That arrangement, however, would reinforce the hierarchical authority of administrators and position faculty as junior partners in the project. Instead, grant proposals can be developed with an administrator and a faculty member as principal investigators, so that power and authority can be shared and so that administrators and faculty can transcend the hierarchical divides that routinely distance them from each other. Connections between faculty and administrators can be further enhanced by establishing a common professional development agenda. Esterberg and Wooding (2012) suggest that relationships can be strengthened when faculty and administrators attend conferences together. A team of faculty and administrators from the same institution could attend a conference on an issue of common concern, such as college student retention, diversity, or internationalization. In a related approach, colleges and universities could convene campus-wide seminars on issues of importance to the institution.The seminars could be co-led by a faculty member and an administrator. For example, a vice president for student affairs and a faculty member who teaches in a residential living-learning community could lead a seminar on connections between curricular and co-curricular learning. Or a vice president for administration and finance and the faculty chair of the budget committee could lead a seminar to help people understand how the institution’s budget works. Academic department chairs can serve as another important bridge between faculty and administrators. Given their position at the nexus of administrative and faculty work, chairs can translate and interpret the communications of administrators. They can help faculty understand the context of administrative statements and policies. Similarly, chairs can help administrators understand the concerns of faculty. Department chairs are well positioned to convey faculty perspectives to administrative leaders. As a result, administrators can gain a stronger understanding of how organizational strategies, budgets, and decisions

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are being received by the faculty. Such communications with department chairs could constitute an early warning system to detect emerging faculty resistance to a new policy or strategy. Alternatively, administrators might discover that faculty are more open to change than they initially assumed. Bridging the divide between faculty and administration will also require the development of new forms of communication. Specifically, we have identified the need to reframe communications in formal venues, such as governance committees and strategic planning groups.This reframing would allow the participants to move beyond their identity-based stances and transcend their paradigm differences. As noted in Chapter 6, appreciative inquiry is one approach for reframing the formal communications of faculty and administrators. By shifting the focus from problems to opportunities, appreciative inquiry can enable faculty and administrators to move beyond blaming each other for organizational shortcomings. Instead of trying to prevail in contested terrain, the participants engage in a collective process of inquiry in which they identify the distinctive aspects of their organization that generate energy, vitality, and cooperation. Faculty and administrators can then work together to ensure that these distinctive aspects are supported and sustained at high levels. In short, when faculty and administrators collectively identify what is working, they can then work together to design new initiatives that sustain and extend the momentum achieved from those successes (Bushe, 2001). In addition to reframing formal communication, faculty and administrators can rethink their informal communication. Research suggests that informal communication between faculty and administrators may be in short supply (Esterberg & Wooding, 2012;White et al., 2010). Administrators may avoid casual conversations with faculty because they do not want to be seen as playing favorites, and faculty may avoid such interactions because they do not want to be perceived as currying favor with the administration. The resulting low level of informal communication, however, can interfere with the development of trust (Sitkin & Roth, 1993). Informal communication contributes to trust development by providing opportunities for spontaneous interactions, which may be perceived as more authentic and genuine than formal communications (Malhotra & Murnighan, 2002). People may restrict their communications in formal settings, where records of statements may be kept in the minutes of meetings, and where the consequences of those statements may have direct bearing on organizational policies and practices. In contrast, through informal communication, organizational members are allowed to step out of their formal roles, at least temporarily, and express thoughts and ideas that are not directly tied to existing goals, strategies, or processes.These loosely structured interactions can foster a sense of openness and trust that spills over into interactions in formal venues. In this way, the trust-based relationships that emerge through informal communication can serve as an important foundation for formal communication practices in venues such as shared governance (Kezar, 2004).

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Casual dinners, coffee hours, and other interactions that are not structured by specific agendas can foster the types of informal communications that generate trust and cooperation (Granovetter, 1985; Sitkin & Roth, 1993). In contrast, some attempts to improve informal communication, such as open door policies, may fail to foster authentic dialogue. Open door policies assume a level of trust that may not exist.When administrators tell faculty that they have an open door policy, faculty will be unlikely to enter the open door if they do not trust that what they say will remain confidential. Furthermore, open door policies are more likely to be used by well-organized groups who use the open door to advocate and lobby for their interests. In contrast, members of marginalized groups may lack the time and resources needed to organize and capitalize on an open door policy (Hammond et al., 2003). For example, while tenured faculty may seek to advance their interests by meeting with a dean during open office hours, part-time and adjunct faculty may lack the capacity to organize effectively. Thus, leaders need to be sensitive to who might be omitted from existing informal communications, and seek alternative paths toward inclusion. In this example, if many part-time and adjunct faculty teach evening courses, then the dean could stay late a few nights each semester, to meet informally with them. In addition to improving formal and informal communication, we should also consider the need to reshape the training and socialization of future faculty and administrators. Currently, the graduate programs that prepare future faculty members focus intently on research, might provide some guidance on teaching, but direct little, if any, attention toward institutional service and collaboration with faculty colleagues and administrators. We suggest that graduate programs should include learning experiences that prepare future faculty for effective participation in institutional governance and decision-making. These learning experiences should include a focus on strategies for managing conflict in the academic workplace. These strategies need to be sensitive to the power dynamics that confront pre-tenure and adjunct faculty, but also be able to foster a sense of agency among new faculty, so that they can gain sufficient confidence and expertise to address the conflicts that they are likely to encounter in their departments and institutions. Faculty who seek to shift their careers toward academic administration can participate in workshops and professional development opportunities that focus on communication and conflict.Training in appreciative inquiry could also enhance the capacity of new administrators for dealing with the complex, paradigm-based conflicts that they will encounter in their interactions with faculty. Administrators without prior faculty experience can engage in activities that enhance their understanding of the faculty role. Many graduate programs in higher education offer a course on the professoriate, giving students an opportunity to learn about this unique professional culture. Non-academic administrators can also engage in

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professional reading about faculty careers and the academic workplace. Some useful starting points include Gappa, Austin, and Trice’s (2007) Rethinking Faculty Work; O’Meara, Terosky, and Neumann’s (2008) Faculty Careers and Work Lives; and Levin, Kater, and Wagoner’s (2006) Community College Faculty: At Work in the New Economy. FINAL THOUGHTS Our thesis is that a better way to attempt to understand the differences among the different constituencies in institutions of higher learning is to get behind the differences by examining qualitatively the paradigms underpinning them. As we noted, appreciative inquiry can provide modes of dialogue that lead to deeper, more authentic understandings among faculty and administrators. Appreciative inquiry promotes collective reflection and the identification and generation of a desired future. The capacity of appreciative inquiry for generating innovation and change is linked to the level of inclusiveness achieved in organizational communications. The expression of diverse voices from multiple corners of the organization can generate data that are “practical, applicable, and replete with new and provocative possibilities as the system attempts to understand itself and its positive potential in a particular time and context” (Finegold, Holland, & Lingham, 2002, p. 237). As noted at the outset of this book, we observed that colleges and universities are among the most dynamic of organizations in society. Their energy and ideas feed the economic and social systems in which they exist. One might easily imagine, however, an entropic tendency in higher education, as external systems such as government agencies, corporations, or powerful alumni attempt to control and standardize colleges and universities. Under those conditions, the centralization of power and the implementation of top-down change initiatives would become the norm. Such a shift would likely spell disaster for colleges and universities as the creativity that lies within the members of faculties and administrations becomes stifled. One would hope that each institution is supported and encouraged by external forces continually to renew itself. The spark of innovation and enlightenment needs constant support from the collective energies of both faculty and administration. Conflict must be seen as a source of ideational change, and when supported by organizational modes of operation such as appreciative inquiry, conflict can be a self-sustaining avenue of creative organizational life for all institutions.

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IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE Here, we summarize the recommendations for practice that were offered in this chapter: n

n

n

n

n

n

Practices associated with role sharing and role rotation can enhance understandings and create stronger linkages across the boundary between faculty and administration. Colleges and universities can establish rotating administrative fellowships in which faculty serve for a fixed amount of time. Academic administrators can reconnect to their faculty roots through coteaching arrangements or via collaboration with faculty on grants and research projects. Common professional development experiences can establish a basis for future collaboration between administrators and faculty. A team of administrators and faculty from the same institution can attend a conference on a topic of common concern, such as student success, diversity, or internationalization. On campus, administrators and faculty can co-lead seminars on issues of importance to the institution, such as teaching and learning or budgets and strategy. Department chairs can serve as a communication conduit between administrators and faculty. They can help faculty understand the context of administrative statements and policies, and they can convey faculty perspectives to administrative leaders. Administrators and faculty can be attentive to communication dynamics in formal decision-making venues, such as governance committees and strategic planning groups. Based on their assessment of formal communication practices, administrators and faculty may choose to implement appreciative inquiry to enhance levels of trust, collaboration, and inclusiveness. Informal communication practices, which include opportunities for interactions that are not structured by a specific agenda, can enhance trust and cooperation. Open door policies, however, may not be perceived as inclusive by less powerful groups and individuals, and, therefore, should not be the only informal communication “policy” pursued by administrators. The training and preparation of future faculty and administrators can more explicitly address their roles in shared governance, and should include opportunities to develop skills in communication and conflict management.

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180

Index

academic capitalism 5–6, 16 academic freedom 16, 24 academic values 5 accountability 6–7, 14, 111–112 accreditation 6, 8 Adam, B. 114–115, 117–118, 123 adaptation and time 119–123 administrator, identity see identity, professional administrator roles 10 ambiguity 62, 64, 66, 92; strategic 69–71 American Association of University Professors (AAUP) 17–18 Ancona, D. G. 127 appreciative inquiry 140, 145–146, 149, 157; contrasted with problem solving 138–139; strategic planning applications 141–144 Argyris, C. 35 assertiveness and conflict management 40–41 assessment 8–9, 68, 87, 92, 97, 104, 106 Austin, A. E. 157 authority 21 autonomy 10, 14, 16, 23–24, 65, 81–82, 87; professional 124, 148 baffling phenomena 62–63 Bales, R. F. 98

Bartoo, H. 71 Bensimon, E. 10 Bergquist, W. H. 148 Birnbaum, R. 21 boundary spanning 9 Bourdieu, P. 122 budgets 13, 17, 25, 154; organizational 130 bureaucracy 11, 68, 120–121 Burrell, G. 46 Cameron, K. 100 China 58 Chong, C. 127 class size 12 Cockell, J. 144–145 cognitive frames 61 cohesion-accuracy trade off 95 collaboration 3, 6, 11, 15, 24, 31, 41–42, 99, 112, 128 commercialization 4 common knowledge 73 communication 59; formal 79–82; informal 79–82; openness 58 communication media 66–67 community colleges 4, 6, 139, 141–144 competing values model 97–100 competition 41; external 3–5 compromise 42

181

INDEX

conflict: between paradigms 49, 51, 53–55; constructive 79; defensive reactions 36–37; definitions 30; dysfunctional 30–31; and effectiveness 33; functional 31, 35, 37–38; meansends distinction 33–34; relational 31–32; task 31; within paradigms 50 conflict avoidance 2, 26 conflict management 53; and appreciative inquiry 149–150; definition 35; strategies 38–43 consultation 20; governance 18–19 Cooperrider, D. L. 138 Corley, K. G. 87 corporate sector 119–120 cosmopolitans 23–24 Coupland, D. 61 Cox, J. W. 118 critical analysis 22, 32–33 critical appreciative inquiry 144–145 critical discourse analysis 146–147 critical theory 77, 145 cultural differences 112 Daft, R. L. 65, 67 Daly, C. J. 71 decentralization 17, 128 decision making 3, 6, 17–20, 22, 122, 130, 133 decoupling 13–14 Dee, J. R. 71 Deetz, S. 75, 77 department chairs 154 Derrida, J. 111 discourse 75–78 discrimination 144–145 diversity 67–68, 70–71, 77, 148, 157 division of labor 10, 17 Dovidio, J. F. 85 efficiency 6–7, 9, 25, 100, 131 Eisenberg, E. M. 69–70 Ellul, J. 94 email 66–67, 71–72

182

embedded knowledge 79 entrainment 126–127 equivocality 64, 66–69; and differentiation 65 Eriksen, T. H. 110 Esterberg, K.G. 5, 19, 23–24, 153–154 external environments 120–122; pressures from 3, 6; relationships with 9 external rewards 129 faculty: evaluation of 92–93; identity see identity, professional; roles 10 faculty development 131 faculty senate 17–19 Fairhurst, G. T. 59 Farace, R. V. 80 fast thinkers 122 Fine, G. A. 86 Follett, M. P. 79, 105 Franco, L. 78 functionalist paradigm 46–47, 49, 51–52, 77, 100 funding 2–5, 7, 16, 46–47, 50, 72, 99–100, 105, 132, see also budgets Gadamer, H.-G. 94 Gaertner, S. L. 85 Gappa, J. M. 157 Gee, J. P. 75 Germany 58 Gersick, C. 33 Gioia, D. A. 46, 48, 99 goal attainment and time 123–125 Goffman, E. 61 Gouldner, A. 23–24 government 2, 6 Granovetter, M. S. 81–82 Habermas, J. 78 Hall, E. T. 127 Hassard, J. 74, 118 hierarchies 10, 13, 16, 73, 83, 154 Hinrichs, G. 139

INDEX

Hoschschild, A. 117 Husserl, E. 115 ideal speech situation (ISS) 78 identity, professional 23–25, 85–86 ideological disputes 52 ideology 79, 146 incommensurability 43, 46, 49, 90, 92, 100, 148 Industrial Revolution 110 information overload 71–74 information processing 64–65 information underload 71–74 innovation 1, 6, 31, 92, 132 institutional goals 11, 21, 68, 92, 132 institutional status 34 integration and time 126–128 intercultural discourse 59 interpersonal communication, defined 59 interpretivist paradigm 47–48, 50–52, 77, 99 intrinsic rewards 129 inventive integration 79 isomorphism 21 Japan 58 Jehn, K. A. 31, 33 job satisfaction 32, 55, 71 jurisdictional conflict 21–22 Kater, S. 157 Keleman, J. 75, 118 Kelly, J. R. 115 Kerr, C. 23 Kezar, A. 6 Kilduff, M. 87 Lam, A. 152 language 94; defined 59–60; games 83; practices 76 latency and time 128–129 Lawrence, P. 120 Lawson, M. 132 learning outcomes 3, 8, 19, 35, 68, 106 Lengel, R. H. 65, 67

Lester, J. 6 Levin, J. 157 Levine, R. 128 liberal arts 4–5, 8–9 liberal education 12 Lincoln, Y. S. 43 locals 23–24 loose coupling 12–14, 64 Lorsch, J. 120 McArthur-Blair, J. 144–145 McConnell, T.R. 20 McDermott, R. P. 147 McGrath, J. E. 115, 122 McLellan, M. 24, 154 McLuhan, M. 66 managerialism 3, 7, 23 March, J. G. 38–39, 61 marginalization 58 market-oriented strategies see academic capitalism Martin, J. 84 matrix structure 112 media richness 66–68 meta-language 138 migratory knowledge 79 Mills, S. 146 Minor, J. 31 Mohr, B. 140 Monge, P. R. 80 Morgan, G. 46, 152 morphology 60–61 Mortimer, K. P. 20 motivation 129 negotiated temporal order 116–117 Neumann, A. 72, 157 non-academic administrators 16, 25 non-routine tasks 32–33 Nunan, D. 59 occupational rhetoric 86 occupational subcultures 3, 23, 25, 56, 84–87, 100, 112, 128, 147, 152

183

INDEX

O’Meara, K. 157 online education 4–6, 22; massive open online courses (MOOCs) 63 open door policies 156 open systems model 99–100, 105 organizational: behavior 4; commitment 73; communication, defined 60; culture 17, 49, 83–85; learning 32, 35, 37; objectives 6; systems 95–97 organized anarchy 11–12 paradigm of the moment 104–106 paradigms 79, 87, 90–92, 99–101, 104, 112, 137–138, 147–148, 152; defined 43, 46; effectiveness criteria 94–95; and language 74–75, 77–78 paradox 11–12, 16, 48 Parsons, T. 98, 112, 118, 123, 126, 128 part-time faculty 136 Pawlak, K. 148 Pearson, A. R. 85 permeability of boundaries 92 Pfeffer, J. 47, 94 Pitre, E. 46, 48, 99 pluralism 48 polychronicity 127–128, 130–131 Porter, L. W. 59 postmodernism 48–52, 77, 83, 105, 112 power dynamics 13, 22–23, 48–51, 77, 82–83, 144, 146, 156 professional development 153–154 program development 22 proximity 15, 61 public good 5, 7, 148 punctuated equilibrium 34 Putnam, L. L. 59 Quinn, R. E. 97–99, 105 radical humanist paradigm 48, 99 radical structuralist paradigm 48, 99 Rahim, M. A. 35–38, 43 rational goal model 100 reification 112

184

Rescher, N. 62–63 research effectiveness 101, 103–104 resource allocation 6 retrenchment 21 reward structures 37, 57, 124; faculty 15–17 Rhoades, G. 5, 7 Riek, B. M. 85 Roberts, K. H. 59 Rodgers, J. 140 Rohrbaugh, J. 97–99, 105 role sharing 153 Ross, A. 120 Russell, H. M. 80 Sabelis, I. 121, 123 Schein, E. 84 Scherer, A. G. 46, 49 scholarship of teaching and learning 148 Schön, D. 35 sciences 8 self-managed teams 131 service learning 148 Shannon, C. E. 61 shared commitments 148–150 shared governance 3, 16–18, 20, 128 Shils, E. A. 98 Sias, P. M. 71 Simon, H. A. 38–39, 61 Slaughter, S. 5 social capital 58, 81 social construction perspective 47, 91, 113, 115, 117 social identity theory 85, 153 sociolinguistic approach 83 speech communities 83 Srivastva, S. 138 stakeholders 4, 9, 120 standardized testing 4 Star Wars 24 status quo 1, 15, 21, 23, 31, 35–37, 49, 52, 114 Stavros, J. M. 139

INDEX

Staw, B. M. 122, 148 Steinmann, H. 46, 49 Stohl, C. 60 strength of weak ties 81–82 structural differentiation 11, 67–68 structural holes 81–82 sub-optimization 11, 14 systems theory 95 Taylor, F. W. 114 teaching effectiveness 101–102, 104 technology 12, 64; diversity of 127; nonroutine 103; routine 124 tenure 15–16, 80; and promotion criteria 91, 103–104 Terosky, A. 157 Thomas, K. W. 40, 42–43, 150 Tierney, W. 31 tight coupling 13–15 time: compression 121; intangible 111; Newtonian view 113–114; postmodern view 117–118; unstructured 131–133 timescapes 115 transformation processes 96

Trice, A. G. 157 trust 17, 103, 155–156 Tschan, F. 122 Tylbor, H. 147 UK 58 uncertainty 64, 66–67, 69; and interdependence 65, 68 unions 18, 22 USA 4, 23, 58 values, organizational 129 vested interests 21 Wade-Benzoni, K. 53 Wagoner, R. 157 Watkins, J. M. 140 Weaver, W. 61 Weick, K. E. 61, 65, 95, 103 Whipp, R. 123 White, C. 71, 73 Witten, M. G. 70 Wooding, J. 5, 19, 23–24, 153–154 work-life balance 132 working language 86

185