Special Issue "Sustainable Higher Education and Leadership"

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Management".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 January 2022.

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Wendy M. Purcell
E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University, Boston, MA 02215, USA
Interests: leaders on purpose; transformational leadership; change management; sustainability as strategy; change agency; empowerment; networks; stakeholder engagement; radical collaboration

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Given its primary role as a knowledge producer, higher education can serve as a powerful means to help to create a more sustainable future through its academic mission. Universities and colleges can play a critical role in developing new systemic and transformative solutions through multistakeholder collaboration. However, as organizations that have stood for many centuries in some cases, the ability of higher education insitutions to deliver on sustainability demands that they too adapt to this new global agenda for change.

Change for sustainability must be led. Rather than a regulatory or discretionary activity, sustainability is reframed as a strategic agenda and essential for long-term value creation in higher education. Drawing on global megatrends and conditions of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, higher education is positioned as a force for good.

For an organization to change, individuals need to change—organizations do not change, people do. The importance of aligning actions with values to empower people to change and support others in transition draws on formal and informal leadership, networks, and power that can be leveraged to drive change in support of embracing sustainability. 

Concepts such as adaptive leadership, leading beyond one’s authority, the targets of leadership, followership, and change agency at the levels of the individual and higher education insitution are of great interest. How leaders choose to frame and talk about sustainability to promote engagement and empower others to lead change across the higher education landscape is relevant to this issue. The influence of students and wider networks and associations is also important to building our understanding of leadership of sustainability in higher educational contexts. The role of university and college boards of non-executives/governors/council members in strategic leadership of governance is also relevant.

This Special Issue of Sustainability will focus on the role of leadership at all levels from the executive/administrative/board to the faculty and staff, students and alumni, and partners and stakeholders and regulators and governments, examining sustainability as a driver of change and transformation in higher education and beyond. Manuscripts will be illustrated by cases drawn from regional, national, and international levels. 

Dr. Wendy Purcell
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Higher Education
  • Leadership and Governance
  • Sustainability
  • Transformation

Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

Article
A Dialogical Approach to Readiness for Change towards Sustainability in Higher Education Institutions: The Case of the SDGs Seminars at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
Sustainability 2021, 13(16), 9168; https://doi.org/10.3390/su13169168 - 16 Aug 2021
Viewed by 284
Abstract
The transformation for sustainability requires a paradigm shift towards systems thinking and interdisciplinary collaboration, which entails, above all, a process of cultural change affecting individual mindsets, organizations and society as a whole. Sustainability in higher education institutions (HEIs) has been a recurrent research [...] Read more.
The transformation for sustainability requires a paradigm shift towards systems thinking and interdisciplinary collaboration, which entails, above all, a process of cultural change affecting individual mindsets, organizations and society as a whole. Sustainability in higher education institutions (HEIs) has been a recurrent research field in the past decades. However, little attention has been paid to the processes of internal and cultural change and, in particular, to the first steps to prepare academic communities for change. Understanding “readiness for change” as a core organizational competency to overcome continuous environmental changes and considering the diluted hierarchy at HEIs, this article proposes the adoption of dialogical and developmental approaches in a single action case, the SDGs Seminars at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. This methodology was used to diagnose organizational and individual readiness for change considering cognitive, affective and behavioural components, and to identify consequences in organizational structures and culture. Our findings reveal that reframing dialogical spaces in HEIs to experience a collaborative and sustainability culture can unlock change, breaking down organizational silos, reducing resistances and engaging academic communities in the cocreation of institutional strategies. Furthermore, the case suggests that acting at the group level has impacts both on the individual and institutional levels. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Higher Education and Leadership)
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