Conceptualization and development of intellectual leadership : perspectives of women scholars in Hong Kong

Abstract

Situated in Hong Kong, this study investigates women professors’ perceptions and development of intellectual leadership across different academic disciplines in public-funded universities. The research analyzes intertwining advantages and disadvantages for female scholars at the disciplinary, institutional, and gender levels. In recent decades, with growing participation in higher education, women scholars have been prominent intellectual contributors in academia. Intellectual leadership, as one type of informal leadership, means scholars’ competence to pursue critical and open inquiries, conduct research that may challenge authority in the academic community, and have empirical, theoretical, institutional, or social impacts. Numerous studies have been done on women’s formal leadership and gender inequality in higher education globally, yet comparatively little is known about intellectual leadership from established women professors’ experience. This thesis adopts a theoretical framework integrating cumulative (dis)advantage theory (CAD) in science (Merton, 1968, 1988; Zuckerman, 1977), the model of intellectual leadership (Macfarlane, 2013), and cultural legacies on gender (including Confucian heritage culture and non-Chinese patriarchal cultures) to examine the career trajectories of individual women professors in different disciplines. An explanatory multiple case study was conducted and data collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews with 22 women full professors in the humanities and social sciences, science and technology, and medical sciences fields. Supplementary data, including women professors’ online academic profiles and publication records and regional policy papers in Hong Kong were also utilized. Single- and multiple-case analyses were conducted using the qualitative data analysis software NVivo 11. Results showed that women professors used diverse patterns to develop intellectual leadership. Specifically, four modes of developing intellectual leadership were identified: 1) strategic gamers; 2) persistent navigators; 3) unconventional fighters; and 4) opportunistic achievers. Findings suggested that disciplinary features saliently affected women professors’ views of intellectual leadership and their development of their careers. Strategic gamers, most of whom worked in the hard and applied sciences, tended to gain recognition in the early period of their scholarly life by concentrating on knowledge production. Despite having different concerns in life and opinions on intellectual leadership, the other three categories of women professors, working in the fields of soft and pure, or new and interdisciplinary subjects, received rewards in their middle or senior career stages, and were apt to accrue advantages by steering among research, teaching, and services in the academic community and university. Compared with strategic gamers, they associated gender with more challenging and negative intellectual leadership development experiences. The thesis enriches understanding of female scholars’ academic development in the global city affected by cultural legacies on gender. The influence of neoliberalism in higher education has posed various obstacles for intellectual leadership, on top of which Confucian heritage culture has exerted profound influences on family life and strengthened the gender divide in labor in universities. The study reinterprets women scholars’ accumulation of both advantages and disadvantages in disciplinary, institutional, and cultural aspects and calls for further reflections on enhancing the academic ecological environment for women and other disadvantaged members.