The genesis of this research initiative is situated in a very challenging and troubling
period in my career as an associate dean in a public post-secondary educational
institution - a time during which I led our first significant initiatives into costrecovery
program delivery. This mission gave rise to contentious issues about our
values as educators and about bureaucratic norms that were being challenged. The
issues cried out for discourse and values based decision making about what and how
we "ought" to be as an institution. Instead, too often, power differentials and
bureaucratic imperatives played the central roles in decision-making processes about
this new form of programming. Fundamental questions of goodness and justice were
left unresolved and often even un-discussed. The events of my practice form the
"object of study" in this research as I seek both an understanding of why the
experience was thus and also how it might have been otherwise. Through the work of
Jiirgen Habermas I explore the difficult problem of achieving social order, grounded
in moral agency, in a world characterized by divergent values and perspectives. I
discover hope and potential promise in his conceptually proceduralistic approach to
the task of social coordination. Examining my experiences in light of Habermas'
notions of social coordination, I find some possible explanations for these events and
some concepts that offer hope for new approaches to governance and administration.
There remain, however, very real and complicating barriers to the ideal posited by
Habermas - barriers located in the complexities of human behaviour and
interpersonal relationships. Seeking better ways of understanding those barriers and
of responding to their impact, I turn to Hannah Arendt and Susan Bickford whose
work provides insight into the personal and interpersonal dimensions of human action
in creating just communities. Examining my practice experiences through their
conceptualizations yields additional insights about what occurred and why, offers
guidance about my own actions, and affords a new appreciation of my own
complicity in the events as they transpired. The result is new ways of understanding
power, discourse, and moral agency - and therefore of understanding my role in
educational leadership.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/13587 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Shapiro, Lorna Patricia |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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