38: Between Coordination and Consensus: Discussing a New Role for University Leaders in Addressing Societal Challenges (Mabel Sanchez Barrioluengo, Hendrik Berghäuser, Knut Blind, Susana Borras, Cecilia Garcia Chavez, Henning Kroll, Debananda Misra, Rhiannon Pugh, Torben Schubert, Sylvia Schwaag-Serger)
There is an increasing expectation that universities contribute to building solutions for complex societal problems including e.g. sustainability, responsible research and innovation of emerging technologies or energy and green technology transitions. Given the open-ended, context-specific and often ill-defined nature of such problems, universities must coordinate among involved actors and stakeholders in the ecosystem, build consensus, and resolve conflicts (Fam et al. 2020; Rittel and Webber 1973). While in more hierarchic organizations, such as corporate firms, leadership levels are often able to provide this degree of strategic coordination, there have been doubts both in theory and in practice that university leadership is effectively able to perform a comparable leadership role (Orton and Weick 1990; Horta 2022). At the same time, some strands in the higher education literature have stressed that university leaders can resort to more enabling soft-control forms of leadership (Courpasson and Clegg 2012). In particular, if university leaders manage to address effectively the tensions between interdisciplinary strategic coordination and the power of disciplinary communities, they can often play a fruitful role in addressing grand societal challenges more effectively than pure bottom-up types of self-organization (Kroll and Schubert 2023).
In this Special Session, we propose to bring higher education scholars and university leaders as well as policy practitioners together to explore both the promises and challenges of how university leadership – academic and managerial - might transform universities to address grand societal challenges through research, teaching and third mission roles. The set-up of the Special Session shall comprise both a selection of scholarly contributions but also shall feature prominent keynote pitches from practitioners in higher education management and policy. The overall aim of the Special Session is to create a forum where academic scholars and practitioners in higher education can exchange their experiences and views on the question of which roles university leadership can play when addressing problems of societal relevance.
Part of the Special Session shall be reserved for keynote speeches from practitioners sharing their experiences about real-world problems.
Moreover, the Special Session will accept thematically matching scholarly abstract submissions, which could address but are not limited to the following questions:
- How can university leaders exert strategic control and how can they contribute to interdisciplinary coordination?
- What is the role of universities in addressing societal problems and how can university leaders support this mission?
- What role do contextual conditions play in the efficiency of universities in addressing societal problems and how could leadership mitigate such differences?
- How can university leaders exert soft control or bureaucracy light types of leadership and what are their limitations?
How can university leaders build up the organizational capacity of their universities to tackle grand challenges?
Keywords: strategy, university, challenges, leadership, coordination