ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that most attempts at university re-structuring have failed because they do not take account of how the principles, policies, and practices on which the re-structuring is based frequently become co-opted and reframed by the micro-politics that exist in the local organizational setting of academic units. The author examines this situation in order to suggest that academic leadership in university settings necessitates symbolic and cultural forms of leadership that use policy-making and legal-rational power to infuse the work of research and teaching with value, meaning, passion, and purpose. She also invoke the discourses of public interest theory and capture theory to show how the current neo-liberalist policy context has begun to undermine public interest discourse with its lionizing of capture theorizing. Public interest theory holds that minimum standards are a function of the technical expectations of the profession and that regulation seeks the protection and benefit of the public at large.
