Anna Neumann

Constructing the Presidency: College Presidents' Images of Their Leadership Roles, a Comparative Study

College presidents and other institutional leaders differ in their beliefs about what a college organization is and how college leadership should be exercised [8, 16]. Their fundamental conceptions, or implicit personal theories [1, 2, 19], of organization and leadership direct their attention to certain aspects of their organizational worlds and away from others [22, 42]. That is, a college presidents personal or implicit theories about organizational life and about the presidential role simultaneously guide and delimit what she or he sees, hears, or otherwise senses, and how she or he interprets perceptions and responds to them. As a result of their differing beliefs about the organizational world and the leadership role, presidents are likely to differ in their agendas and in how they carry out the presidential job. For example, some presidents may be guided by the personal theory that good leadership

Strategic Leadership: The Changing Orientations of College Presidents.

Abstract: This study considers the thinking, or “strategy,” that underlies presidential behavior. The findings suggest that, in recent years, presidential strategy has become more complex and that it focuses more on shaping organizational members’ perceptions and attitudes. Changes in presidential strategy may result from changes in the environment or in the presidents themselves as they learn on the job.

Context, Cognition, and Culture: A Case Analysis of Collegiate Leadership and Cultural Change

This article, presented as an interpretive case study, examines how members of an established college culture experienced change related to the entry of a new college president and how the new president changed as a result of his entry experience. The study analyzes the evolving relationship between the new president and campus participants in five phases: (a) the president entering and making sense of the new setting, (b) the president selectively adjusting the setting, (c) the president stirring the setting, (d) campus participants discovering and responding to changes the president makes in their shared setting, and (e) the president addressing these responses, including their effects on him.

Leadership in Higher Education: A Multi-dimensional Approach to Research

Abstract: The American college and university presidency has been under intense scrutiny for some time. This essay sets forth the aims and methods of the National Center for Postsecondary Governance and Finance research team that has been studying institutional leadership. It also serves as the introduction for the five articles that follow in this issue.

Colleges under pressure: Budgeting, presidential competence, and faculty uncertainty

Abstract This article reports on a two-case comparative study of college presidential leadership during times of financial stress, and it focuses on how presidents interpret financial hardship to their faculties rather than on how they address it instrumentally. The study concludes that a college budget, like many administrative tools and processes, is simultaneously an instrument and a symbol, and that feelings of financial stress (often induced by a president) may heighten the budgets symbolic meaning for faculty and other members of a college community. College leaders who are not sensitive to this kind of interpretive variability may fail to meet their facultys expectations for leadership during pressured times.

On Experience, Memory, and Knowing: A Post‐Holocaust (Auto)Biography

AbstractIn this article I describe how my studied recollections of how I learned about my father’s life, in the Holocaust and beyond it, have led me to make my scholarly work, existing for years apart from myself, much more a part of myself. I describe what it meant to me, years back, to learn of my father’s life—a personal narrative that for much of my life I purposefully separated from my professional narrative of what (I thought) it meant to learn and teach in scholarly ways. I describe my efforts to rethink and revise this distinction, and how, as it blurred, my understanding of my work began to change.

To Glimpse Beauty and Awaken Meaning: Scholarly Learning as Aesthetic Experience

1. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Free Press, 1997), 174. 2. Quoted in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 169. 3. Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 202. 4. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 126; also see 351-52. 5. For an illustrative example of the importance of perception in research, see David Tyack, “Ways of Seeing,” in Complementary Methods for Research in Education, 2d ed., ed. Richard M. Jaeger (Washington, D.C.: American Educational Research Association, 1997). 6. For a fuller treatment of this idea as it bears on the practice of teaching, see David T. Hansen, “A Poetics of Teaching,” Educational Theory 54, no. 2 (2004): 119-42. 7. William Wordsworth, “The Prelude,” 1805 version, Book III, lines 124-129, in The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. J. Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams, and S. Gill (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979), 98. 8. This essay derives from presentations at The Ways of Knowing Conference, Teachers College, Columbia University, 5 March 2004, and at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, 12 April 2004.

Double Vision: The Experience of Institutional Stability

Abstract: This analysis of a financially and structurally stable college suggests that resource stability, rational structuring, and orderly operations may not be sufficient administrative goals. In fact, in pursuing such goals, administrators may fail to discern how faculty perceive and experience their institutional realities. The study suggests that stability may be as stressful to faculty as instability and decline.

The Science Glass Ceiling: Academic Women Scientists and the Struggle to SucceedThe Science Glass Ceiling: Academic Women Scientists and the Struggle to Succeed, by RosserSue V.. New York, NY: Routledge, 2004. 192 pp.

Adlers are skilled observers and well-practiced ethnographers with a style that is easy and engaging. The book excels at balancing the voice of workers with an informed analysis of resorts. Their discussion of the research process and methodology will be especially useful for younger scholars interested in constructing similar types of ethnography. The Adlers are clearly deserving of the 2005 Outstanding Book Award from the North Central Sociological Association. Still, despite being well-written, easy to read and insightful, I did find that the organization of the book could have been different. Two chapters on careers could have been collapsed into one, or better yet, arranged thematically with already existing chapters on trapped laborers and transient laborers. The transient worker lifestyles could also have been added into the chapter on transient workers, instead of being its own chapter. Similarly, a very good discussion on the “local” racial category would have been better placed in the chapter on stratified labor. These alterations would have reduced the book’s eleven chapters to eight. Aside from these minor organizational criticisms I highly recommend this book as the first workplace ethnography of Hawaiian resorts. It will be welcomed most by those interested in resort labor relations, organizational cultures, and travel and leisure.