Conference Agenda

Topic: Academic leadership under resource constraints; teaching-oriented leadership; leadership emergence in non-elite and applied higher education institutions.

Research Questions and Objectives: Dominant European and international scholarship on academic leadership tends to associate leadership capacity with formal authority, research prestige, or cumulative advantage within elite institutional environments. Such approaches implicitly assume relatively stable resources, strong disciplinary positioning, and research-centred career structures. However, across Europe and globally, a large proportion of higher education institutions—particularly universities of applied sciences, regional universities, and teaching-intensive departments—operate under persistent resource constraints, including heavy teaching loads, limited research funding, and misaligned evaluation systems.

While existing studies acknowledge structural inequality in higher education systems, leadership research in resource-constrained contexts often remains deficit-oriented, focusing on what institutions and academics lack. Less attention has been paid to how leadership with substantive and sustainable influence can emerge under long-term scarcity, and how individual academic agency is transformed into collective and institutional capacity.

This study addresses this gap through three interrelated research questions:

RQ1: How does academic leadership emerge during early-career survival in weak disciplinary and resource-poor institutional contexts?

RQ2: How is individual expertise translated into collective capacity through sustained interaction under conditions of scarcity?

RQ3: How does such leadership become depersonalised and amplified to achieve sustainability beyond individual actors?

The objective is to develop a process-oriented conceptualisation of academic leadership that explains how leadership is built, rather than assumed, in persistently resource-constrained higher education environments.

Conceptual and Theoretical Framework: The study adopts a processual perspective on academic leadership, understanding leadership not as a formal role or personal trait, but as a dynamic capacity that emerges, evolves, and expands through sustained practice and interaction within specific institutional contexts. Drawing on international literature, the framework integrates three complementary theoretical lenses.

Firstly, Professional Learning Community (PLC) theory is used to explain how individual expertise can be transformed into collective capacity through joint practice, shared reflection, and mutual learning—particularly relevant in teaching-intensive settings where alternative forms of academic legitimacy develop outside research-dominated hierarchies.

Theories of professional identity and self-renewal conceptualise academic development as a longitudinal process in which earlier marginal or peripheral experiences can later be re-signified as strategic resources. This lens helps explain leadership emergence during early-career “survival” stages, a phase often overlooked in leadership research.

Resource bricolage and job crafting perspectives illuminate how academics creatively recombine fragmented or limited resources to generate new action spaces under conditions of institutional scarcity. Rather than compensatory resilience, this framework highlights directional transformation through collective adaptation.

Integrating these perspectives, the study proposes Symbiotic Breakthrough Academic Leadership (SBAL) as a three-stage process—Survival, Co-construction, and Empowerment—through which leadership emerges prior to formal authority, becomes embedded in collective practices, and is eventually institutionalised through shared infrastructures and routines.

Empirical Basis and European/International Relevance: Empirically, the study draws on a longitudinal qualitative case of a teaching-oriented academic and teaching team at a Chinese university of applied sciences. While situated in China, the case reflects conditions widely documented across European and international contexts, including applied universities in Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, and other systems characterised by academic drift, teaching-research tensions, and resource stratification.

Rather than offering a context-bound narrative, the study aims for analytical transferability by identifying mechanisms through which leadership capacity is collectively constructed under constraint. In doing so, it contributes to European and international debates on distributed leadership, equity, and sustainable academic development in non-elite higher education institutions.

Leadership that is attentive, relational, and accountable is not a luxury in disruptive times—it is the work. Our self‑study names micro‑practices that operationalise care ethics and rebuild trust in higher education.

RESEARCH QUESTION
How can senior academic leaders enact a human‑centred leadership approach—grounded in care ethics, attentive to relational trust, and practiced as transformative leadership—to keep people and communities at the centre of decisions during AI adoption, sector uncertainty, world disruptions, and financial instability; and which micro‑practices travel across international higher‑education contexts?

OBJECTIVE
We aim to (1) surface and theorize everyday leadership approaches that centre people under volatility; (2) offer a concise set of human‑centred, care-based practices that others can adapt; and (3) provide a self‑study protocol (duoethnographic‑informed) other academic leaders can use and reuse. This aligns with the NW22/NW26 special call to re‑imagine academic leadership for a fairer world and renewed trust.

THEORETICAL/CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
Our analysis integrates:

• Care ethics (Noddings, 2013) to orient leaders toward attentiveness, responsibility, and relationality in decisions.

• Frameworks for transformative leadership in higher education (Drinkwater & Waghid, 2024), highlighting the need for transformative leadership grounded in care during disruptive times.

This study builds on our published reflections on emotional labour, human‑centred teaching in the age of AI, and supporting students during bleak times, converting insights into an empirical, transferable model.

INTERNATIONAL DIMENSION
Across Europe, universities report steady—rather than radical—transformation under multi‑crisis conditions, with intensified focus on flexibility, equity, and the third mission. While our study takes place in a Canadian context, our emphasis on human‑centred leadership and trust‑building speaks directly to these priorities. At the same time, public trust in institutions has declined across many OECD countries, underscoring the need for leadership that visibly centres people, explains trade‑offs, and sustains legitimacy. We will map our micro‑practices to these European concerns (e.g., lifelong learning; inclusion; financial pressures) to enhance transferability.

Extant scholarship has catalogued well the recent transformations in higher education (HE) (Parreira do Amaral & Thompson, 2022; Leišytė et al., 2023; Pang & Niemczyk, 2026). Most of the research centres on the institutional and organisational transformations of universities and higher education institutions (HEIs), seeking to understand how policies, education systems, new digital technologies and enterprises interact in structuring and managing HEIs towards more efficient and globally competitive entities. The general understanding is that global HE has experienced at least three cardinal shifts over the last couple of decades: first, a paradigm shift in epistemic governance that favours transdisciplinary and applied research over basic, universal research; second, the growing importance of accountability, quality assurance, performance, and efficiency in the assessment of HEIs; and third, the introduction of market mechanisms and corporate rationales into educational systems, research, and teaching. While scholars have in great detail examined the implications and ramifications of these changes, they have paid limited attention to the individual and subjective changes in academia, i.e., to the ways academics and their subjectivity have been transformed along the broader paradigm shifts. Academic subjectivity refers to various forms of self-management or self-government that describe how individuals act, think, and behave as members of the academia. The concept of subjectivity goes back to Michel Foucault’s studies of governmentality and has been fruitfully applied in the study of academic transformations (Cannizzo, 2015; Ricken et al., 2019; Lenk, 2024; Montano Durán, 2025). In that respect, research on academic subjectivity demonstrates that organisational and institutional transformations are not automatically and fully translated into individual thinking and acting, but rather processed in complex actor-structure interactions with indefinite outcomes and forms of self-conduct (Ylijoki & Ursin, 2013; Mula-Falcón et al., 2022; Marques et al., 2024). The paper focuses on the production of entrepreneurial subjectivities as the, often hyperbolized, ideal types of academic career pathways and understandings of leadership. Fostering entrepreneurism in academic life courses fundamentally shapes the way academics understand themselves, their responsibility, and strategic thinking, but it equally impacts the notion and function of leadership at HEIs. The paper addresses the production of entrepreneurial academic subjectivities and asks, how academics cope with the various external demands and internal value systems and orientations. The proposed paper is organised in three parts: the first part contextualizes the debate on the changing academic nature under the neoliberal economic project; the second part, based on qualitative research with academics at an entrepreneurial university, analyses the process of their subjectivation as academic entrepreneurs; the third part opens a discussion on the side-effects and (possible) futures of academic leadership driven by the business model of academic entrepreneurs (Eriksson et al., 2021).