Enhancing Campus Capacity for Leadership: An Examination of Grassroots Leaders in Higher Education (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Enhancing Campus Capacity for Leadership: An Examination of Grassroots Leaders in Higher Education
Enhancing Campus Capacity for Leadership by Adrianna J. Kezar and Jaime Lester is based on a three-year study of grassroots leadership at colleges and universities. The authors utilize a case study approach of five diverse institutions. Interviews with grassroots activists at each campus comprise the primary mode of data collection, supplemented by document analysis, researchers’ observations, and informant perceptions and observations.
Examples of activism and grassroots leadership initiatives include staff equity, childcare, environmental concerns, immigrant issues, and so forth. The study’s primary goal was to learn about the role of grassroots leadership among faculty and staff in producing change in higher education.
The book is divided in three sections with the first outlining the goals of the research study and the authors’ approach. The second section reports the findings of their research on grassroots leaders, the tactics and strategies such leaders use, how they overcome obstacles, and how they deal with power dynamics. It also reports how grassroots leaders navigate the resistance they encounter. The third section presents organizational concerns in understanding grassroots leadership efforts and positions the study within the field of leadership theory.
The authors do a persuasive job of explaining why such a study is important, especially now that the culture of higher education is changing perceptibly by adopting a corporate approach to managing institutions and as the faculty is changing from a full-time ladder-rank faculty to a more contingent part-time and non-ladder one. The authors also do an excellent job of defining and differentiating grassroots leadership from shared leadership and shared governance, and they discuss how grassroots leadership differs from leadership in social movements.
The book compares and contrasts grassroots leadership to shared or distributed modes of leadership in which the top-down leaders ask their followers to adopt and follow the leaders’ agenda.
Methodologically, each institution represents a case study with nested cases around various initiatives. The researchers interviewed 165 grassroots leaders (faculty and staff), about 33 per institution. They queried their leaders about their motivation, identity, strategy, tactics, obstacles, resiliency, power conditions, convergence, the impact of organizational context, and organizational support for grassroots leadership.
The book contains 13 chapters, each dealing with aspects of authors’ targeted inquiry. Chapters 1–3 provide the background and context for the study. Chapter 4 deals with motivation and identity. In it the authors present profiles of six leaders, representative of the total population. The chapter is very descriptive, designed to give the reader a sense of who these leaders are and what motivates them to engage in grassroots leadership. While I enjoyed reading the individual narratives in Chapter 4, I had hoped for more analysis and synthesis of commonalities that characterize grassroots leaders with respect to identity and motivation.
Chapter 5 examines the leaders’ tactics and strategies. It offers very helpful information and insights about successful strategies for fostering change in academia. A major contribution of the chapter is highlighting how successful tactics are contextualized within the academic environment and its norms. It was interesting to see, for example, how the choice of tactics varied depending on the type of institution (e.g., use of intellectual approaches in the liberal arts college versus use of data as the strategy in the research university).
Chapter 6 addresses obstacles that grassroots leaders encounter and contained no surprises. The chapter aptly describes how the weakening of shared governance and privatization have created obstacles for grassroots leadership, leaving faculty feeling more disconnected and overburdened with more work. It also discusses how contingent faculty face problems in being able to establish coalitions and network.
In Chapter 7 the authors discuss the power dynamics present in the academy and describe the forms of subtle and covert—as well as abusive—power that grassroots leaders face. The chapter includes a number of excellent quotations from the participants that crystallize their experiences with being oppressed...
