Making Sense of Strategic Change at a University: How faculty understood their implementation of a cluster hiring initiative

Abstract

Over the past half-century, American universities have come under increasing scrutiny by their stakeholders, and numerous interdisciplinary initiatives have been launched in response to this trend. However, little is known about how faculty members understand their implementation of these initiatives. It is critical that the experiences of such faculty be understood because the outcomes of interdisciplinary initiatives can be diminished by a lack faculty support. A qualitative case study was conducted of faculty members’ implementation of the Interdisciplinary Faculty Initiative at the University of Michigan between 2007 and 2012. Over two years, 49 interviews were conducted and analyzed along with hundreds of collected documents. Guided by the theory of sensemaking, I find that faculty largely understood that the contributions of the initiative were realized through their cultivation of expertise. Essentially, faculty implemented the initiative in ways that they believed allowed their scholarly activities to reflect some distinctive aspect of their expertise. But rather than doing this by equipping specific subject matter they had mastered or by collaborating with other recognized experts, they also used a specific form of communication – reflective sensegiving – to do this work. They engaged in reflective sensegiving by asking a series of general and exploratory questions to a wide range of colleagues over time. Doing so surfaced discrepant cues that they incorporated into their ongoing sensemaking which allowed them to better understand exactly how they could cultivate their expertise through the initiative they implemented. These findings make a contribution to the literature by investigating the conceptual relationships that exist between sensegiving and the sensemaking process. By showing how faculty search out ways to cultivate their expertise, this work also provides a contrast to many existing depictions of faculty work as being essentially competitive, paradigmatic, or pedagogical in nature. Finally, the findings of this study have implications for the use of interdisciplinary initiatives to facilitate organizational change in large American research universities. They suggest that without ensuring that the expectations of the participating faculty are aligned with each other over time in complementary ways, the intended outcomes of interdisciplinary initiatives may be unrealized, diverted, or delayed.