The Language of Leaders: Executive Sensegiving Strategies in Higher Education

Abstract

This study explores how college and university presidents strategically negotiate institutional pressures and competing social norms in an attempt to maintain organizational legitimacy. It examines how presidents strategically frame organizational events in ways that help constituents make sense of their actions. Using archival and qualitative methods, I examine executive sensegiving strategies in the presidential communiqués of university magazines from eight tuition-driven universities during a 15-year period (2000–2014). Data revealed presidents employed three strategies—foundational, configurational, and transformational—driven by connecting different cues (i.e., events) with frames (i.e., institutional logics). Although prior literature has described actors draw on logics as a “toolkit,” this study illuminates how they modify those “tools” over time. In the transformational strategy, university leaders engaged in boundary work, acting as “institutional entrepreneurs” to change the microfoundations—or core elements—of an institutional logic over time and especially the meanings associated with its symbols and language.