Conference Agenda

With the rapid development of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), higher education in Europe and around the world face an unprecedented crisis of institutional trust. Recent research reveals a growing discrepancy between institutional academic policies and students’ GenAI use for learning, teaching and assessment. While 92% of university students now use AI tools, only 36% receive support from their institutions (Freeman, 2025). More importantly, dominant institutional GenAI policy discourse is driven by vague, compliance-focused language underpinned by untransparent and uncritical framings. Luo et al. (2024) conducted a critical analysis of 20 world-leading universities' GenAI policies and found that dominant problem representations frame AI as a threat to academic integrity, resulting in surveillance-oriented, prohibition-based governance. This contradicts emerging evidence that authentic dialogue builds institutional trust and develops the very capacities higher education seeks to cultivate: critical thinking, student agency, and democratic citizenship (Tian & Nutbrown, 2021).

This paper seeks to address: How can academic leaders reconceptualise institutional AI governance toward a trust-building, dialogic model that foregrounds student agency? The research objective is two-fold: first to empirically examine game-based dialogic approaches to critical AI literacy development; and second to explore the role that dialogue plays in mediating trust-building and institutional culture shift in response to AI disruption. Taking a dialogic and sociocultural approach (Mercer et al., 2019), this study assumes that learning through games is mediated by social interaction. In a game-based learning environment, games serve as dialogic tools and create dialogic spaces for opening up potentialities which would otherwise be restricted by settings. Hanghøj et al. (2021) set out the key considerations when researching the role of dialogue in game-based learning. They argue that it should include a clear conceptual understanding of what is meant by dialogue, the meaningful dialogic interaction underpinned by a complex relationship between the affordances of game and pedagogical approaches, and the theoretical assumptions of dialogic education—the ontological and epistemological aspects.

For AI governance to support deep learning higher education, student shared epistemic agency needs to be at the centre (Damşa et al, 2010). It is the fundamental capacity for students to act with autonomy, make responsible decisions and take the lead for their own learning (Darvishi et al., 2024). In addition to critical AI literacy, this study is also interested in students’ development of feedback literacy as a proxy for student agency. Previous research demonstrates that dialogue can enhance students’ perception of feedback and their follow-up actions that improve their future work (Er et al., 2021). Furthermore, Steen-Utheim and Wittek (2017) argue that engaging learners in dialogue around feedback through negotiation of meaning built on trusting teacher-student relationship creates potentialities for learning in higher education. This is in line with Pleschová et al. (2025) who argue that authentic dialogue builds trust between academic leaders and students. Trust is not merely a precondition for effective conversations about teaching and learning; rather, teaching where staff and students engage in candid conversations about where the ethical line sits may lead to the development of trustful relationships.

Higher education institutions increasingly operate in contexts where crisis is no longer an episodic disruption but a persistent organisational condition. Contemporary research in education and leadership has begun to acknowledge this shift through the concept of polycrisis, which refers to multiple, interrelated crises that interact and reinforce one another, producing heightened uncertainty, instability, and systemic tension (Henig & Knight, 2023). Despite its growing prominence in the social sciences, leadership research in education has largely remained focused on singular crisis events, most notably the COVID-19 pandemic (Striepe & Cunningham, 2021). As a result, there is limited empirical and conceptual understanding of how leadership is enacted and experienced in higher education institutions operating under sustained polycrisis conditions.

This study addressed this gap by examining leadership practices in higher education under conditions of polycrisis, with a particular focus on middle-level leadership. The overarching objective was to investigate how leadership was enacted in a higher education institution shaped by prolonged and overlapping crises, with specific attention to decision-making, communication, and accountability mechanisms. Rather than concentrating solely on leaders’ actions, the study sought to understand how middle-level leaders interpreted, experienced, and made sense of their leadership roles when crisis constituted a stable feature of organisational life.

The study was guided by the following research question: How do middle-level leaders in higher education enact and experience leadership practices—specifically decision-making, communication, and accountability—under conditions of polycrisis? Addressing this question enabled a closer examination of leadership as a situated and relational practice shaped by uncertainty, competing expectations, and institutional tensions. The focus on middle-level leaders was analytically significant, as these actors operate at the intersection of strategic governance and operational academic work, where the effects of polycrisis are often most acutely felt.

The theoretical framework underpinning the study was hybridity theory, which conceptualises organisations and leadership as operating at the intersection of multiple, often competing, institutional logics. In higher education, such logics commonly include academic autonomy, managerial accountability, and external political or societal pressures. Previous research, particularly in Nordic higher education contexts, has demonstrated the value of hybridity theory for analysing how institutions and leaders navigate contradictory demands and legitimacy concerns during periods of crisis (Perkins et al., 2024). Building on this work, the present study applied hybridity theory to examine how leadership practices were shaped by value conflicts, competing rationalities, and shifting responsibility structures under polycrisis conditions.

By foregrounding leaders’ interpretations and lived experiences, the study moved beyond instrumental accounts of crisis leadership and offered a deeper understanding of how leadership roles, boundaries, and responsibilities are reconfigured when polycrisis becomes the norm in higher education institutions.

The NW 22/NW 26 special call highlights how academic leadership is challenged by intensified competition, contested public trust, and polarised environments. These conditions raise urgent questions about how universities can contribute to a fairer world while sustaining legitimacy. This paper addresses these concerns by focusing on a core (often implicit) arena of academic leadership: how leaders govern research norms and evaluation regimes that shape integrity, fairness, and societal trust.

The normative foundations of academic research are widely seen as in flux amid changes in the higher-education landscape. Mid-twentieth-century sociologists of science articulated an “ethos of science” grounded in academic freedom, communal knowledge and the disinterested pursuit of truth. Merton’s (1942) formulation became especially influential: four institutional norms—communism, universalism, disinterestedness and organised scepticism—capture a liberal ideal of science, commonly referred to as CUDOS. These norms emphasise open sharing of knowledge (communism), judging claims by universal criteria rather than personal attributes (universalism), separating inquiry from personal interest (disinterestedness), and subjecting findings to rigorous critical scrutiny (organised scepticism). At the same time, longstanding critiques note that CUDOS is an ideal-typical ethos rather than a consistently dominant descriptive code.

By the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, marketisation, audit regimes and competitive stratification transformed university governance and the environment of academic research. Against this background, commentators argue that classical norms have been inverted or supplanted by new ones. One such alternative proposed by Macfarlane (2024) synthesises perceived shifts in academic culture as DECAY—differentialism, egoism, capitalism and advocacy. DECAY is treated here as a heuristic diagnosis of emergent counter-norms—foregrounding managerialism, performativity and individualisation—rather than a stabilised normative code equivalent to CUDOS.

While many studies document specific flashpoints—commercialisation versus communalism, managerialism versus collegial values, open science versus subscription-based quality control, and impact imperatives versus curiosity-driven inquiry—scholarship still lacks an integrative lens to explain how multiple, potentially contradictory norms co-exist and interact within universities. To address this gap, the paper synthesises CUDOS and DECAY through the institutional-logics perspective and develops an institutional-logics wheel of research norms: a relational, spatial heuristic that positions norms within a multi-logic configuration and generates propositions about where logics are likely to be compatible, in tension, or combined into hybrid arrangements. The wheel recasts research norms as positions within plural institutional logics (profession, market, corporation, state and community), clarifying when they are likely to align or clash and where hybrid logics and bridging mechanisms emerge.

The paper addresses three research questions: (RQ1) How do the classical Mertonian ethos (CUDOS) and emergent norms (e.g., DECAY) map onto identifiable institutional logics in contemporary higher education? (RQ2) When do co-existing institutional logics align or clash in academic research, and how are these relationships enacted and managed? (RQ3) Which emerging or potential hybrid logics and bridging mechanisms can reconcile conflicting norms in practice?

The European/international dimension is addressed through attention to transnational research-governance frames—particularly open science and related accountability agendas—that reshape research norms, evaluation regimes, and public expectations across systems. The institutional-logics wheel provides a basis for comparative analysis of how academic leadership navigates institutional complexity to sustain trustworthy research governance under different national and regional governance conditions.