‘You do not have to be the boss to be a leader’: contested meanings of leadership in higher education

Abstract

In this article, I explore some of the contested meanings of leadership coexisting within the context of higher education. I report from my study about how academics at one university in Aotearoa/New Zealand experience and understand themselves as leaders in their everyday working contexts. From the participants' accounts and their institution's documents, four particular meanings of leadership predominated. These meanings were ‘position’, ‘performance’, ‘practice’ and ‘professional role model’. Employing a poststructuralist approach, I examine the discursive and material effects of these meanings, focusing on how they constitute certain ways of thinking, practising and ‘becoming’ for individual academics. My findings offer a way to critically understand leadership beyond positional and instrumental paradigms which, I argue, is necessary for creating more inclusive higher education institutions.