‘It’s like dominoes’: middle managers transversal agency and the complexity of navigating transformation in post-conflict higher education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Universities are increasingly expected to contribute to societal development by promoting equality, inclusion and diversity, while preparing ethical individuals capable of navigating uncertain futures. In post-conflict contexts, marked by reconciliation efforts, oppressive legacies and intergenerational trauma, the imperative to transform higher education becomes critical to consolidating fragile democracies. This paper examines how middle managers in universities, who are strategically positioned to drive institutional transformation, experience, enact and interpret their agency. It explores how their gender and social location shape this agency, and how institutional structures both enable and constrain their capacity to act. The study draws on 14 in-depth interviews with mid-level managers from three universities in South Africa and Northern Ireland. Thematic analysis using NVivo revealed that participants’ sense of agency is situated at the intersection of their views of transformation as either a personal-political process or an instrumental task. We argue that the confluence of historical legacies, contemporary issues and identity significantly shapes mid-level managers’ transformative agency. In response to structural barriers and entrenched university hierarchies, their agency manifests through a form of transversal politics—characterised by both symbolic and practical micro-actions. We employ the concepts of ‘constructive interference’ and ‘domino effect’ to describe how mid-level managers’ ‘transversal agency’ may initiate incremental yet meaningful disruptions within hegemonic institutional structures. We conclude that while agency for transformation remains precarious—particularly under the weight of racial, colonial and neoliberal capitalist pressures—mid-level manager micro-affective interventions hold significant potential for enacting non-hegemonic and justice-oriented transformations in higher education.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".