Cultivating Collective Sensemaking: Exploring How Academic Deans Shape Academic Priorities During the Annual Budget Review

Abstract

While academic deans have long influenced academic governance, they now serve as chief executives more than middle managers at many universities. This increased stature stems from many universities implementing decentralized, revenue-centered budget models, which situates authority for academic and budgetary affairs with deans more than provosts. Despite their critical work, and increasing significance, scholars have yet to investigate how academic deans enact their authority as the chief academic and budget officers of their colleges.

To close this research gap, this qualitative case study explored how six academic deans shape academic priorities during the annual budget review at Sprawling University, a pseudonym for a prominent American public research university. The theoretical framework was anchored in the organizational concepts of sensemaking and sensegiving, while data analysis was disciplined by grounded theory. Data was collected from extensive interviews and observations: 63 semi-structured interviews with the profiled deans, college-level administrators, other deans and senior central administrators; and 21 observations, including meetings with the profiled deans and their senior administrative teams.

The findings advance our understanding of how academic deans shape academic priorities during annual budget reviews in three important ways. First, a rich tapestry of individual and organizational factors influenced how deans conceptualize their role in shaping academic priorities. While shaping academic priorities, the profiled deans affirmed their faculty identities by espousing collegial norms such as collaborating with faculty and administrators, enacting skills that validate their disciplinary orientations and privileging perspectives that reflect their faculty experiences.

Second, most profiled deans framed the annual budget review as an opportunity to craft a collective sense of academic priorities with their senior administrative teams. The most significant milestone of the budget review was authoring an annual budget memorandum for the provost. Most deans co-constructed this memorandum with their senior teams, initiating a collective form sensemaking to generate ideas for priorities and deepen commitments to priorities. To cultivate collective sensemaking, these deans enacted discursive behaviors that stimulated open dialogue during team meetings such as waiting to reveal their own ideas, specifying problems rather than imposing solutions and empowering disagreement. In contrast, deans who excluded their senior teams from authoring the budget memorandum alienated associate deans and administrative directors, which created confusion over priorities.

Third, deans aligned the priorities of their colleges with the provost’s priorities for the university. Despite retaining authority over academic and fiscal priorities in their colleges, deans embraced the provost’s priorities as well as the provost’s preference for articulating priorities in quantitative terms while authoring the annual budget memorandum. This alignment revealed the sensitivity of academic deans to resource dependence; deans wanted to demonstrate a commitment to the provost’s priorities and preferences in hopes of securing scarce discretionary resources from the provost’s office, regardless of whether their college reported a surplus or deficit.

In addition to specifying how deans shape academic priorities during the annual budget review, significant contributions of this study include illustrating how deans depend on their senior administrative teams and illuminating the interdependent relationship between deans and provosts in decentralized budget models. Moreover, the findings indicate a dynamic, reciprocal interplay between managerial sensemaking and sensegiving, which advances theorization of sensemaking in organizations. The study reveals numerous opportunities for future research on deans, including probing accountability in decentralized budget models, and recommendations for practice, including orienting deans to decentralized budget models.