Abstract
Organisational change processes are by nature complex and often highly contested. This is particularly true of the transformation South African institutions of higher education have been going through since the end of the apartheid era. Using a narrative approach, this article presents a multi-faceted range of stories by the University of the Free State (UFS) students who took part in a particular leadership programme designed to make a contribution to institutional, and even, societal change. The plurivocality of the identity work the UFS students’ stories display is based on their ethnic, gender and class diversity. It is the context-sensitive ‘tales of the field’ they tell that might help to understand why the transformation concept as well the various transformation-driven practices in higher education are so ambiguous and contested.
Highlights
World-wide, higher education is changing and increasingly characterised by diversity (Paradeise & Thoenig 2013). While this diversity has the potential of enriching the academic community and, in a broader sense, society as a whole, the underlying processes are often far from unproblematic
The very concept of diversity can be a source of contradiction, inequality and exclusion, and challenge the ideal of a cohesive academic community (Brink 2010; seen Cross 2004)
This article aims to demonstrate that student narratives are well suited to illuminate the complex, multifaceted, ambiguous and contested character of change processes, which are seldom straightforward and self-evident (Brown, Gabriel & Gherardi 2009:324; Humphreys & Brown 2002; Thomas & Hardy 2011; Thomas, Sargent & Hardy 2011)
Summary
World-wide, higher education is changing and increasingly characterised by diversity (Paradeise & Thoenig 2013). While this diversity has the potential of enriching the academic community and, in a broader sense, society as a whole, the underlying processes are often far from unproblematic. Higher education institutions sometimes stress the benefits of diversity for their organisations, pointing to their potential of safe spaces for reflection (Roux 2012). The ways in which higher education institutes deal with change coming with the challenge of diversity can be understood by studying the experiences of its main protagonists. This article aims to demonstrate that student narratives are well suited to illuminate the complex, multifaceted, ambiguous and contested character of (organised) change processes, which are seldom straightforward and self-evident (Brown, Gabriel & Gherardi 2009:324; Humphreys & Brown 2002; Thomas & Hardy 2011; Thomas, Sargent & Hardy 2011)
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