Vice-Chancellor Narcissism and University Performance
Autor/in:
Khoo, Shee-Yee; Perotti, Pietro; Verousis, Thanos; Watermeyer, Richard
Quelle: Research Policy, (2023) , 72 S
Inhalt: Universities hold a prominent role in knowledge creation through research and education. In this study, we examine the effects of VC narcissism on university performance. We measure VC narcissism based on the size of the signature, in line with a methodological approach which has been widely used in the recent literature and repeatedly validated in laboratory experiments.
We exploit a quasi-natural experiment of VC changes and employ a Difference-in-Difference research design, which alleviates concerns related to endogeneity and identification bias. We show that the appointment of a highly narcissistic VC leads to an overall deterioration in research and teaching performance and concomitantly league table performance. We further identify excessive financial risk taking and empire-building as possible mechanisms explaining the main results and provide evidence on the moderating role of university governance. Our findings are consistent with the view that narcissism is one of the most prominent traits of destructive leadership; they also have practical implications for leadership recruitment and the monitoring of leadership practices in the higher education sector. The results of this study extend prior research in several ways. Extant literature on executive leadership and narcissism yields inconclusive findings; this literature has mainly focused on for-profit organisations and has not considered universities. In addition, prior research in higher education on the determinants of university performance has not yet examined the role of leadership personality traits.
Schlagwörter:leadership; Leitungskompetenz; Management; performance assessment; personality; university
CEWS Kategorie:Hochschulen
Dokumenttyp:Zeitschriftenaufsatz
University housing reinforces the negative relationship between interpersonal violence, psychological distress, and suicidality in undergraduates, particularly among gender diverse students
Autor/in:
Heller, Abigail T.; Berg, Sergey S.; Prichard, J. Roxanne
Quelle: Journal of American College Health, 71 (2023) 1, S 102–110
Inhalt: OBJECTIVE
To compare academic and mental health outcomes across diverse gender identities in the context of interpersonal violence and campus housing.
PARTICIPANTS
45,549 students from 124 self-selected post-secondary institutions.
METHODS
Various academic and health measures from the National College Health Assessment Spring 2017 dataset were analyzed for differences across five gender identities (cis women, cis men, transwomen, transmen, and genderqueer students), and two housing categories (university housing and non-university housing).
RESULTS
When compared to cisgender peers, gender diverse students reported greater experiences of interpersonal violence and higher levels of negative academic and mental health outcomes. Living in university housing was associated with an increase in these disparities.
CONCLUSIONS
University housing, which usually reinforces fixed gender binaries, is associated with worse outcomes for gender diverse students. These data can help higher education institutions better understand and address problems that disproportionately impact transgender and gender diverse students, who represent a growing demographic.
Power and the perception of pregnancy in the academy
Autor/in:
Percival Carter, Erin
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2023)
Inhalt: Becoming pregnant as an academic is risky. Many who want to become or find themselves pregnant structure their lives and careers to try to mitigate the potential negative effects of pregnancy on their future careers. Yet research continues to suggest that having been pregnant or being a mother significantly reduces the likelihood of career success compared to either being child-free or a father. While in some cases success is defined as research productivity, in many cases, it is defined as simply remaining in academia. Governments, societies, and institutions bemoan the resulting “leaky pipelines” and speculate as to the causes of seemingly reinforced glass ceilings. Yet, underlying so many of the formal and informal conversations, norms, and policies surrounding pregnancy and academia is an implicit assumption that pregnancy and pregnant people are the problem to be solved and solutions thus require repairing some deficit created in the individual by pregnancy. In this article, I argue that pregnancy discrimination in academia is in large part a problem resulting from power and how it is wielded against pregnant people, both by institutions and by individuals. Using both a personal narrative account of the process, experience, and outcomes of pregnancy in the academy resulting in filing a formal Title IX complaint and a review of contemporary research on power, discrimination, and pregnancy, I explore how academic structures and systems nominally tasked with supporting equity can instead serve to exaggerate power differences and foster discrimination.
Belonging and loneliness as mechanisms in the psychological impact of discrimination among transgender college students
Autor/in:
Wilson, Laura C.; Liss, Miriam
Quelle: Journal of LGBT Youth, 20 (2023) 3, S 705–723
Inhalt: Although research has consistently shown that individuals who identify as transgender have increased rates of mental health difficulties compared to their cisgender peers, less is known about the psychological mechanisms that convey this heightened risk. The data analyzed here were collected through the Wake Forest Well Being Assessment, which was conducted at 28 U.S. colleges and universities. The sample included 372 transgender college students who completed measures of discrimination, belonging, loneliness, depression, and anxiety. The results demonstrated an indirect association such that participants who reported more domains of discrimination reported lower belonging, which was associated with greater loneliness, which was associated with greater depression and anxiety. Ultimately, the findings of the present study provided further support of the psychological mediation model and can be used to inform interventions.
Qualitätssicherung von Gleichstellungsmaßnahmen in der Wissenschaft: Ergebnisse aus dem Projekt StaRQ - Journal Netzwerk Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung NRW
Inhalt: Der vorliegende Beitrag fokussiert auf zentrale Ergebnisse aus dem BMBF-geförderten Projekt StaRQ (2019-2023) und zeigt Perspektiven sowie ausgewählte Erkenntnisse zum Handlungsfeld Geschlechtersensibilisierung auf.
Transforming academic research? Resistances to gender mainstreaming implementation in universities
Autor/in:
Tildesley, Rebecca
Quelle: European Journal of Women's Studies, 30 (2023) 4, S 486–501
Inhalt: Resistance hinders the potential of gender equality strategies to modify institutional arrangements and challenge the status quo. Applying the integrationist or agenda-setting distinction of approaches to gender mainstreaming and drawing on feminist institutionalism and gender policy implementation theory, this article analyses resistances that undermine a more transformative agenda-setting approach to gender mainstreaming in university research settings. The analysis of qualitative data from a selection of three Catalan universities reveals implicit institutional resistance and individual opposition from research managers that contribute to integrationist approaches to gender mainstreaming and the ineffective implementation of actions that aim to achieve distinct gender equality in research goals. Despite the favourable policy context and rhetorical commitments in university gender equality plans and in research managers’ discourse, norms of meritocracy underlie resistance to actions that imply greater structural and cultural change, including research managers who lack knowledge of gender mainstreaming and participate minimally in implementation. Entrenched norms around research autonomy and the non-prioritization of gender inform more explicit resistance to actions that aim for a more gender-aware science, to incorporate the gender dimension into all research and to promote gender research, where progress is particularly slow.
Vielfältige Verantwortungen : Anforderungen an diskriminierungssensible Organisationen am Beispiel der Hochschule
Autor/in:
Steinweg, Nina
Quelle: Supervision: Mensch, Arbeit, Organisation, 40 (2022) 1, S 19–26
Inhalt: Dieser Beitrag widmet sich den Herausforderungen von Hochschulen als diskriminierungssensiblen Organisationen im Spannungsfeld von New Public Management, Wettbewerb um die »besten Köpfe«, Unterfinanzierung und der Verantwortung für ein gerechtes und diskriminierungsfreies Bildungssystem. Er wirft einen Blick auf die Strukturen von Diversity Management und Antidiskriminierungspolitik im Lichte der rechtlichen Rahmenbedingungen.
Rethinking Gender Centres in Nigerian Universities
Autor/in:
Igiebor, Oluwakemi Temitope
Quelle: jgcs (Journal of Gender, Culture and Society), 2 (2022) 2, S 11–19
Inhalt: For the past three decades, discussions centred on gender equity have become buzzwords in academic institutions in Nigeria, which has led to an increasing effort to establish gender centres and adopt equity policies. Despite the awareness and presence of gender centres in Nigerian universities, institutionalising gender equity has been challenging. There is a struggle to explain how policy absence and gender centre mergers may constrain positive institutional gender change. This article explores why academic institutions have established gender centres but have not created gender policies. Taking into account the gender stakeholder’s perspectives in two purposively selected universities in Nigeria, this study utilises an integrated feminist approach to investigate why university gender centres are unable to advance gender equity within the institutions. Concepts like institutional resistance and layering offered tools that helped capture the dynamics of institutional change and stasis in the case studies. Findings showed that the existence of gender centres without formalised policies is a window-dressing approach that limits the potential for gender equity within the universities. It also revealed how the redirection of gender centres through mergers with other centres is ‘gendered’. Evidence showed that the prospect for institutional gender change is often tempered by merging incompatible and non-complementary centres. This study, thus, adds to the scholarly literature on institutional resistance, providing valuable insights into the subtle manifestations of resistance towards gender equity institutionalisation in academia.
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2022)
Inhalt: This paper examines the establishment of a feminist academic organization, GENMAC (Gender, Markets, and Consumers; genmac.co), serving gender scholars in business schools and related fields. In so doing, it builds on the emerging literature of feminist academic organizations, as situated within feminist organizational studies (FOS). Through a feminist case study and by assessing the reflections of GENMAC's board members, we tell the story of the emergence of GENMAC and detail the tensions the organization encountered as it formally established itself as a feminist organization within the confines of a business school setting, a patriarchal system, and a neoliberal university paradigm. We build on the FOS literature by considering how our organization counters cultures of heightened individualism and builds collective action to challenge sexism through the nexus of research, support, and advocacy pillars of our organization. We demonstrate how, through these actions, our organization challenges hierarchies of knowledge, prioritizes the care and support needed for the day-to-day survival of gender scholars in business schools, and spotlights and challenges structural inequalities and injustices in the academy.
Women’s refusal of racial patriarchy in South African academia
Autor/in:
Raymond, Zaakira; Canham, Hugo
Quelle: Gender and Education, (2022) , S 1–18
Inhalt: This paper explores the career experiences of women academics at three South African universities. To understand the experiences of women academics, we conducted an intersectional interrogation of the politics and practices of belonging in departmental cultures. The sample consisted of thirty women academics whose interviews were analysed through a discursive thematic frame. We found that while all participants experienced gender-based discrimination which hinders academic progression, the barriers experienced by black women academics are compounded by the intersections of race, gender, and motherhood. Patriarchal and racist institutional, disciplinary and departmental cultures served as further challenges to belonging. On the other hand, through counter storytelling and refusal, women created alternative spaces of sociality where suffering co-exists with pleasure, refusal and survival. Ultimately, the paper suggests refusal as a generative theoretical lens to surface the complexity of women academics.