Community College Leadership Discourses in Dissertation Abstracts, 1980 to 2020

ABSTRACT

Researchers have criticized the professional and academic literature on community colleges for its gendered construals of leaders and leadership. Through a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods associated with corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS), I identified discourses of leaders and leadership in abstracts of 9,863 dissertations about community colleges. All abstracts were published between 1980 and 2020. Findings suggest that discourses of community college leadership have evolved across five dimensions: (a) leadership models, (b) socially constructed categories, (c) roles and hierarchies, (d) leadership development, and (e) leadership crisis. Discourses related to the first three dimensions appear consistently throughout the 40-year period. Discourses related to the latter two dimensions emerge in the mid-2000s. I hypothesize a leadership imaginary in which the survival of the community college depends on a mythical, hero-president whose outstanding competencies and undivided commitment uniquely qualify him to defy organizational norms and lead transformation. The article concludes with a critique of this gendered imaginary and a call to reimagine the structure of leadership work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Collocates are not capitalized because, in preparing the data, texts were converted to lowercase.