To Örebro University

This paper explores crisis management discourses in academia through a gender lens. It investigates, through these discourses, which academic management ideals dominate in HEI during and after immediate, emerging, and sustained crises (cf. Parsons, 1996). It addresses the research questions: Which crisis management ideals are performed and expressed by vice-chancellors/university presidents?; Which crisis management ideals are preferred, favoured, and promoted by HEIs?; To what extent are these ideals permeated by gendered management ideals?

The paper builds on a theoretical framework that combines critical masculinities studies and critical feminist theory on gender, management, and leadership, particularly focusing on crises (e.g., Ericson & Mellström, 2016). These theories have demonstrated that crisis management is male-coded, emphasising risk taking, risk management and mastering fear as characteristics closely connected to masculinity and the performativity of masculine heroism (Whitehead, 2002). Other studies, however, suggest that interpersonally oriented leadership traits emphasising communication, and (stereo)typically associated with women, are particularly useful and relevant for crisis management (Bruckmüller & Branscombe, 2010; Gartzia et al., 2012; Ryan et al., 2011).

The analysis draws especially on Branicki’s (2020) definition of rationalist approaches to crisis management characterised by authoritarian leadership, determination, masculine logic, and militaristic language, privileging of the quantifiable, and a conceptualisation of crises as rational and linear processes. She contrasts this with an alternative feminist conceptualising of crisis management based on an ethics of care, with normative assumptions about interpersonal relationships, reciprocal care, situated knowledge, and a focus on marginalised issues and positions, improving lives, and social transformation, which also echo the servant leadership philosophy (Peterson, 2018).

The paper empirically draws on a study of academic crisis management discourses and narratives expressed in interviews with vice-chancellors/university presidents in blogs and in written documents produced by the HEIs, published on the websites of HEIs and in media. The discourses analysed were produced during and after immediate, emerging, and sustained crises (Parsons, 1996), with the analysis specifically focusing on when a vice-chancellor/university president steps down and a new is appointed: To what extent are the crisis management narratives of the outgoing and incoming vice-chancellors characterised by similarities/differences? The study followed frame analysis, and reveals not only expectations on, and performances of, ideal crisis management during and after these crises. The analysis also distinguishes between framings of crises, and if different crisis management ideals are associated with different internal and external crises.

The paper concludes by discussing to what extent crises management ideals have the potential to challenge and transform gendered structures and power relations in academia and/or to what degree ideal academic crisis management can produce academic glass cliffs for women, i.e., situations where women are being appointed to precarious, challenging, and risky leadership roles during turbulent times (Bruckmüller & Branscombe, 2010; Gartzia et al., 2012; Peterson, 2018; Ryan et al., 2011).