Strategic Leadership of Change in Higher Education: What's New? (review)

This book is a product of the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education, which was formed in 2004 to address leadership development needs in the United Kingdom. The chapters, edited by Stephanie Marshall, Director of the Leadership Foundation and former Provost at the University of York, report on change projects initiated by the foundation's first cohort of "leadership fellows," who were selected through a competitive process and were awarded funding for a nine-month period in 2005.

In Chapter 1, Marshall describes the theoretical foundations in which the leadership fellows were trained. Here we encounter the well-worn works of major theorists in the planned change tradition: Kurt Lewin, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, and John Kotter. Neglected, however, are those theorists who view change as an organic process that is shaped by organizational culture and refined through collective sense-making. Missing, as well, are perspectives that view change as a political process characterized by bargaining, negotiation, and the emergence of power disparities that may marginalize people and departments viewed as peripheral to the organization's strategy. The book, therefore, reflects only a narrow swath of change theory—rational and teleological—to the neglect of political, social cognition, and cultural perspectives.

Taken as a treatise on rational, planned change, however, the book still misses the mark regarding practical lessons for higher education leaders. The chapters read as a reporting of activities rather than as a rich narrative of the challenges and obstacles encountered in the change process. A practitioner-oriented book on change could provide a window into the complexities of top-level leadership and yield insights for fostering innovation in highly differentiated and decentralized organizations. Instead, this text is laced with the jargon of total quality management and continuous process improvement.

Some readers may be taken aback by the unproblematized use of managerialist terminology and the associated application of top-down process control practices, which are central to many of the change projects described in this book. Yet even for those who believe that colleges and universities should function more like the corporate sector, the book provides little guidance for selecting appropriate strategies under different contingencies. The chapters provide nuggets of promising practices, but the reader is left to synthesize these insights without an overarching framework within which to integrate the various approaches.

For example, in Chapter 2, Paul Evans describes the use of "diagonal slice" teams, which include members from multiple functional areas with different levels of seniority. In Chapter 4, Simon Donoghue explains how he applied the "balanced scorecard" approach in developing a new strategic plan for the University of Leeds. But the book as a whole does not provide a framework that identifies the conditions under which the use of diagonal slice teams or the application of the balanced scorecard would be appropriate. So the reader is faced with the challenge of figuring out whether the practices described in each chapter make sense for his or her own institution. Deciding which ideas to apply in one's own organization is exceptionally important for engaging in reflective leadership. Excellent books on change provide conceptual frameworks to guide practitioners in this thinking; this book, instead, leaves the reader with disconnected fragments of advice.

Marshall initially lays out a potentially useful typology to guide the reader. She explains that the first section of the book will focus on structured, top-down frameworks for managing change, the second section will examine incentive-based approaches to generate "buy-in" for the change process, and the final section will explore a capacity-building approach to change that is both top-down and bottom-up. The chapters in the incentive-based section, however, differ only slightly from those in the first section on top-down change. Both sections describe change projects that are based on a set of rationalist assumptions, which suggest that colleges and universities can be (in fact, ought to be) managed in ways that maximize...