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Abstract
This article focuses on the nature of power dynamics that faculty and staff grassroots leaders encounter as they attempt to create change. I identified five distinctive types of power dynamics – oppression, silencing, controlling, inertia, and micro‐aggressions from the most overt to more subtle and covert forms. Staff experience multiple forms of power dynamics that are extremely difficult to overcome; faculty experience less intense forms of power dynamics. The severe forms of oppression and silencing that staff face lead to turnover and lack of leadership for initiatives, and impact the resiliency of individuals involved in change. I also describe ways that grassroots leaders navigate power dynamics through networks, accountability structures, or flying under the radar.
Notes
1. Grassroots leadership is defined as efforts conducted by those without formal authority and power aimed at creating change. Grassroots leadership tends to involve a collective of individuals, but in some cases can be a single individual. I use the terms grassroots leaders and bottom‐up leaders interchangeably in the article because they are similar in meaning.
2. While certainly there are other authors and literature that we could review related to power, these two literature bases capture two of the main ways that power dynamics have been examined within organizations. It also captured much of the way that people discussed power dynamics in the interviews, so it was helpful framing. While scholars such as French and Raven (1960) and Etzioni (1964) have developed typologies of sources of power (including referent or charismatic, expert, legitimate, reward, and coercive [French and Raven] or coercive, calculative, and normative [Etzioni]), the dynamics described by interviewees reflected coercive forms of power rather than say reward, expert, or even charismatic power in interacting with grassroots leaders.
3. I see oppression as a subset of power and will use the broader term power to refer to the general phenomenon in the article and occasionally specify oppression when I see that operating in the cases.
4. This is not to say that top‐down leaders do not face resistance from faculty, staff, and students but that the type of power dynamics that top‐down leaders face may be quite different from grassroots leaders who do not have the same formal authority, bureaucratic power, and resources. We also have very little research that examines faculty and staff resistance to top‐down change. Instead, resistance among faculty and staff is often characterized as a psychological issue related to fear of change or breaking routines rather than as resistance to an idea that does not serve their interests (Eckel, Hill, and Green Citation1998; Simsek and Louis Citation1994).
5. Power dynamics or conditions refer to interactions between different people in an environment or social structure as they each try to assert control within the environment. Power dynamics relates to the social interactions and sometimes clashing of individuals as they attempt to shape an environment in potentially different ways. The literature on grassroots leadership examines the way people navigate formal authority structures that typically try to blockade or resist bottom‐up change efforts. Two related terms are important to define as they will be referred to in this article. Power is a person’s ability to control the environment around itself, including the behavior of other people. One way to control the environment is through influence, thus we may also refer to influence which is the ability to move or control something through power. Also, authority is often used in reference to power when speaking about legitimate forms of power within the social structure of organizations. One way to control the environment is through authority structures. Grassroots leadership itself is an expression of power, involves influence, and can collide with authority.
6. Staff within the study ranged from custodial and administrative staff to entry‐ and mid‐level staff in student and academic affairs. Because the range of staff differed and also the amount of power they possess, I examined different subgroups of staff separately in our analysis.
7. Morgan remains the most cited author on the concept of organizations as oppressors. Most texts that have been published since (Hearn and Parkin Citation2001, for example on sexual violence) begin by referring to his work and have not challenged, but built upon his assumptions. Therefore, this seemed the most appropriate framework.
8. I certainly do not believe that power is only unidirectional, and I recognize that grassroots leaders could also act in oppressive ways toward those in power. Therefore, I also examined and investigated the ways grassroots leaders might also act in oppressive ways toward those in dominant positions and conceptualized this with resistance theory. That however is not the topic of this article, but it was investigated.
9. Almost all of the current literature on workplace oppression focuses specifically on racism, sexism, and homophobia, and I know very little about oppression faced by individuals who have a different perspective or want to make a change (Hearn and Parkin Citation2001).
10. Traditional social movement theory tends to see grassroots and top‐down leadership as isolated from each other and see convergence as possible but not very probable. On very rare occasions, grassroots efforts change mainstream society, such as in the civil rights or abolition movements, but generally these two levels are not conceptualized as converging. Grassroots leaders and top‐down leaders are assumed to not share similar interests or concerns – for many social movement theorists, convergence of the two levels is contradictory (Tarrow Citation1998).
11. Not all administrators are aligned with the managerial elite. Many women and people of color, for example, based on discrimination or experience, may reject these interests (Casey Citation2002). However, alignment with corporate interests among administrators is more common, and deviation is the exception rather than the rule.
12. This methodology has been referenced in other articles for the project.
13. When I use the term ‘case’, I am referring to the site. When I use nested case, I am referring to the initiative within a site such as diversity or environmentalism.
14. This is not to suggest that conservative change movements do not exist in the academy. But generally, given that the corporate interest is aligned with and supports many of these initiatives, less grassroots leadership was perhaps needed around these changes. But, I did also hear about some conservative grassroots leadership around anti‐affirmative action or support for the lecture method.
15. I am not suggesting all faculty or staff championed these changes. Other faculty and staff more aligned with the corporate interests on campuses or not dissatisfied with the status quo did not work for change.
16. Bullying seemed to encompass many of these categories, but seemed overly broad, so I broke this up into several smaller categories based on severity and intent (the exception being oppression which was more overt and seemed to be a different category). As noted in the literature, bullying can include hundreds of different behaviors.
17. It is important to note that the data below are all based on perceptions of the individuals interviewed. At times it was awkward to note this in all instances, in terms of ease of writing.
18. With the diversity cases that I studied, there were additional forms of oppression specifically related to racism, homophobia, classicism, or sexism. While I do not specifically engage all the dynamics of oppression related to diversity initiatives in this article, I address this in other articles related to the project. Addressing these dynamics is quite complex and requires a whole other set of conceptualizations and more data to fully represent the issue.
