Topic

Contemporary universities are increasingly governed through quality assurance, performance monitoring, standardisation, and demands for public accountability. At the same time, higher education remains anchored in collegial decision-making, disciplinary professionalism, and ideals of academic freedom and trust-based governance. These competing logics converge most sharply at the meso-level—programmes, departments, and faculties—where institutional strategies must be made workable in the day-to-day realities of teaching and learning. In Sweden, this tension is especially visible due to a dual governance structure that combines formal line management with collegial bodies. While policy reforms inspired by new public management and expanded monitoring have reshaped steering and accountability, these developments coexist with strong counter-movements emphasising trust-based governance, professional responsibility, and collegial autonomy, resulting in a hybrid and contested governance landscape rather than a fully managerialised system.

Research questions

1. How do educational leaders articulate and interpret their roles at the intersection of managerial governance demands and collegial academic practices?

2. How can leaders’ situated experiences inform a broader theoretical understanding of educational leadership as a mediating practice under hybrid governance conditions?

Objective

To provide an empirically grounded account of meso-level educational leadership as it is articulated and understood between governance demands and pedagogical practice, and to refine a non-affirmative understanding of leadership by detailing how mediation is described in terms of translation, collegial engagement, and judgement under complex organisational conditions.

Conceptual framework
The paper is grounded in non-affirmative education theory (Elo & Uljens, 2023), conceptualising leadership as a pedagogical and ethical practice that mediates between the “system world” of policy and institutional governance and the “life world” of educational meaning-making, values, and responsibility. Rather than framing leadership as either policy implementation or professional autonomy, the non-affirmative perspective highlights leaders’ reflexive agency and their role in sustaining educational purpose in contested institutional contexts. This lens is used to interpret educational leadership as an enabling and interpretive practice that holds competing institutional logics in productive tension.

Design and data The study draws on a large-scale qualitative interview study conducted in 2023–2024 as part of a national project on educational leadership in Swedish higher education (Ewins, Svedmark & Hultgren, 2025). The empirical material comprises 93 semi-structured, role-homogeneous focus group interviews with 335 academic leaders across all 36 major Swedish higher education institutions. Participants represent leadership roles spanning programme directors, directors of studies, heads of department, deans, and vice-chancellors. Research instrument Interviews (45–60 minutes) followed a shared thematic protocol focusing on leaders’ mandates, leadership practices, and the organisational, professional, and policy conditions shaping their work. Role-homogeneous groups were used to enable peer-based reflection on shared conditions and dilemmas. Analytical approach The material was analysed thematically using an interpretive approach. A first inductive coding phase focused on meaning-making, tensions, and leadership practices as described in context. This was followed by collaborative analytical clustering and refinement of themes in dialogue with the non-affirmative framework, with attention to: - responsibility–authority gaps and role ambiguity - collegial infrastructures and legitimacy - translation and mediation between governance and practice - judgement and ethical responsibility under constraint Ethics All activities followed Swedish ethical guidelines: informed consent, anonymisation, secure data handling, and ongoing ethical reflection due to the sensitivities of interviewing leaders about responsibility, values, and institutional tensions.

The study shows that meso-level educational leadership is enacted in conditions marked by structural ambiguity where leaders carry substantial responsibility for educational quality, development, and coordination, but often operate outside formal lines of authority and with limited resources. This produces what the paper conceptualises as “mandates without maps”, a situation where expectations are high, but mandates are vague, overloaded, and weakly prioritised. Empirically, the analysis identifies four interrelated leadership patterns: 1. Between mandate and means: Leaders describe persistent responsibility–control gaps. Formal role descriptions frequently fail to match the actual complexity of the work, leaving leaders to navigate competing demands through negotiation rather than directive power. 2. Collegial leadership as embedded practice: Collegiality functions as a key leadership infrastructure—providing legitimacy through trust, proximity, and shared responsibility—but is increasingly strained by administrative expansion, time scarcity, and erosion of informal dialogue arenas. 3. Leadership as translation and mediation: Leaders act as intermediaries who make governance demands workable in local pedagogical contexts while also voicing educational concerns upward. This translation work is a central mechanism through which hybrid governance regimes are navigated and reconfigured in practice. 4. Judgement and ethical commitment: Leadership is consistently described as judgement-based work under constraint, involving prioritisation, discernment, and care for educational integrity and collegial well-being. Rather than compliance or resistance, leaders sustain educational purpose through ethically charged mediation. Contribution The paper contributes an empirically grounded refinement of non-affirmative leadership theory by showing how mediation is enacted in the operational contexts of higher education work. It also contributes to higher education governance research by demonstrating how policy intensification and managerial reforms are not simply “implemented” but actively translated, negotiated, and reshaped through meso-level leadership practices, often in ways that protect collegial legitimacy and pedagogical coherence.

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