Chapter 11: Navigating the Rapids: Leading for Social Justice in Higher Education

The basis for this chapter is an autoethnographic analysis (Day, 2002) of my experiences attempting to exercise leadership for social justice in a highly bureaucratized and heavily unionized institution of higher education. The analysis draws on scholarship from micropolitics, organizational theory, and transformative leadership to examine the challenges experienced. The narrative comprises an examination of attempts to implement the eight tenets of transformative leadership (Shields, 2012) including the deconstruction of knowledge frameworks that perpetuated inequity and the introduction of more deeply democratic processes. The analysis demonstrates the utility of attending to the components of Simeon’s (1976) micropolitical framework comprising five independent variables (environment, institutional frameworks, prevailing ideas, the process of decision making, and the distribution of power) and three dependent variables (scope, means, and distribution) and of the particular importance of attending to levels of trust in the environment and to the distribution of informal power in the organization one is attempting to lead.