The New Dean: Taking Charge and Learning the Job

This paper addresses the personal challenges academics face in successfully responding to the call for academic leadership, focusing on the organizational socialization process of a new dean. A 3-year qualitative case study of one dean is presented. It involved data from a personal daily journal of activities, beliefs, and reflections kept over 3 years; a record of daily schedules that documented each day's activities; a series of semi-structured, open-ended interviews conducted by an outside researcher; and documents of the events and challenges the college faces during the study period. Results indicated that incorporation of the new dean involved five predictable phases as he took charge (taking hold, immersion, reshaping, consolidation, and refinement). The paper examines six tactics used to assess the degree to which newcomers are formally socialized into their institution and position: individual versus collective, formal versus informal, sequential versus random, fixed versus variable, serial versus disjunctive