Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/11159/677456
Book title: 
Revitalizing Collegiality: Restoring Faculty Authority in Universities
ISBN: 
978-1-80455-818-8
Document Type: 
Book Part
Place of Publication and Publisher: 
Emerald Publishing Limited
Year of Publication: 
2023
Open Content License: 
cc-by Logo
Abstract: 
Reality breakdowns generate reflexivity and awareness of the constructed nature of social reality. These pivotal moments can motivate institutional inhabitants to either modify their social worlds or reaffirm the status quo. Thus, reality breakdowns are the initial points at which actors can conceive of new possibilities for institutional arrangements and initiate change processes to realize them. Studying reality breakdowns enables scholars to understand not just how institutional change occurs, but also why it does or does not do so. In this paper, we investigate how institutional inhabitants responded to a reality breakdown that occurred during our ethnography of collegial governance in a large North American university that was undergoing a strategic change initiative. Our findings suggest that there is a consequential process following reality breakdowns whereby institutional inhabitants construct the severity of these events. In our context, institutional inhabitants first attempted to restore order to their social world by reaffirming the status quo; when their efforts failed, they began to formulate alternative possibilities. Simultaneously, they engaged in a distributed sensemaking process whereby they diminished and reoriented necessary changes, ultimately inhibiting the formulation of these new possibilities. Our findings confirm reality breakdowns and institutional awareness as potential drivers of institutional change and complicate our understanding of antecedent microprocesses that may forestall the initiation of change efforts.
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Language: 
English (eng)
Citation: 
In: Revitalizing Collegiality: Restoring Faculty Authority in Universities (2023). Emerald Publishing Limited, S. 77 - 109.
https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X20230000087004.
doi:10.1108/S0733-558X20230000087004.

Files in This Item:
File
Size

Items in Digital Archive are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated – Terms of use.