Abstract
Government agencies, foundations, business and industry, and other important higher education stakeholders continue to invest in important and deep changes they think are necessary for the vitality and health of higher education particularly interdisciplinary teaching and research. But we know little about how transformational changes happen, particularly bottom up approaches required for altering the teaching/learning environment. This article reports on one of the few studies of transformational change describing case study research of 28 institutions attempting to fundamentally shift toward interdisciplinary work. The results identify the key role of sensemaking and sensegiving and build on earlier research showing how these processes change from mobilization to the implementation of change.
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Notes
Bottom-up initiatives are those lead by individuals not in positions of authority—in higher education typically the administration has formal delegated authority. On some campuses, they delegate authority to deans and even department chairs, although it is rare to have significant delegation to that level. Thus, bottom-up initiatives are typically led by faculty, staff, or students, or low-level administrators without significant authority such as department chairs. There are studies of sense making that focus on bottom up change agents responding to top-down mandates and these are reviewed in the theoretical framework section. The focus of this paper is on initiated and implemented changes bottom up, which has not been the focus of any studies.
It is also important to note that Kezar and Eckel break new ground in that sensemaking had been studied in isolation of other areas such as change strategies. Thus, identifying how change strategies can play a sensemaking role, they begin to link various parts of change processes that tend to be studied in isolation.
As a reminder, Kezar and Eckel (2002a, b) note criteria for transformational change, “1. transformational change alters the culture of the institution by changing select underlying assumptions of institutional behaviors, processes and products; 2. is deep and pervasive and affects the whole institution; 3. is intentional; and, 4, occurs over time” (pp. 295–296).
While the project was only 3 years, institutions were chosen that had already made progress toward their initiative, because research demonstrates that transformational change takes between 5 and 10 years (Kezar and Eckel 2002a, b). This approach follows the method taken in the Kellogg study in which they identified institutions that were already 2–3 years into the change process for study.
Only one campus was at the early institutionalization phase therefore it was folded into the late implementation campuses.
Due to space limitations, the other facets that helped propel the institutions towards transformation cannot be reviewed within this particular article.
We determined intentionality from the participants noting that they were engaging in a sense making or sense giving effort in order to address a barrier that emerged or create facilitation.
Other papers from the project examine nuanced differences by institutional culture or type noted in Kezar and Eckel’s earlier work. However, in this paper, we focus on some commonalities that are shared by campuses in the sensegiving and sensemaking process.
Given space limitations, we present less voice from the campus teams than desired, but this was the only way to keep the paper within word limit.
Based on space purposes, details of each campus that stalled and a better understanding of the distinctive campus contexts cannot be provided.
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Appendices
Appendix 1
See Table 1.
Appendix 2
Table 2.
Appendix 3
Table 3.
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Kezar, A. Understanding sensemaking/sensegiving in transformational change processes from the bottom up. High Educ 65, 761–780 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-012-9575-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-012-9575-7