Context-specific leadership and the governance of work-integrated learning in Alberta's higher education policy

Abstract

Educational leadership in higher education increasingly unfolds under conditions of policy ambiguity, governance complexity, and reform pressure. Leaders are required to interpret indeterminate mandates, negotiate competing institutional and political logics, and sustain higher education's civic and educational purposes amid growing demands for market alignment. This study examines how leadership is enacted as context-specific policy work within Alberta's postsecondary system, focusing on the implementation of work-integrated learning (WIL) under Alberta 2030: Building Skills for Jobs strategy. Drawing on a contextual-interpretive framework of leadership enactment, the study conceptualizes leadership as a set of interrelated processes ‐ interpretation, mediation, translation, adaptation, and reflection ‐ that traverse macro, meso, and micro contexts. Based on interviews with fifteen leaders across universities, colleges, and polytechnics, the findings show that leadership emerges through sense-making, relational governance, moral judgment, and ongoing redesign rather than through positional authority or formal control. The study advances the context turn in higher-education leadership by offering a mechanism-based account of leadership enactment, highlighting how institutional actors construct coherence, equity, and purpose within uncertain and evolving policy environments.

Keywords

Context-specific leadership higher education policy enactment work-integrated learning governance and reform sense-making

Introduction

Educational leadership is central to organizational change and improvement, yet the conditions under which leadership is enacted have become increasingly complex. Across educational systems, leaders must navigate shifting policy environments, fragmented governance arrangements, and intensifying demands for accountability, equity, and inclusion, often without clear guidance or stable resources (e.g., Altbach et al., 2009; Elken and Borlaug, 2024). In such contexts, leadership extends beyond technical management to involve ongoing sense-making (Weick, 2000), negotiation (Stensaker et al., 2021), and ethical judgment (Shields, 2010). These conditions challenge universal models and renew attention to how leadership is shaped by the contexts in which it unfolds (Hallinger, 2018).

This shift can be described as a context turn in leadership research (Hallinger, 2018), reflecting recognition that leadership is embedded in social, institutional, and political environments. Early approaches, including contingency and situational leadership theories, acknowledged contextual influence but treated context largely as an externally managed or controlled variable (Fiedler, 1967; Hersey and Blanchard, 1977). More recent scholarship conceptualizes context as dynamic and co-constitutive, emphasizing how leadership practices and contextual conditions mutually shape one another through interpretation, interaction, and adaptation (Ganon-Shilon and Schechter, 2017; Osborn et al., 2002). From this perspective, leadership is a relational and interpretive practice (Uhl-Bien, 2006) enacted through ongoing sense-making and action (Weick, 2000). These conceptualizations guide the present study.

While contextual approaches to leadership are well developed in K-12 education (e.g., Leithwood et al., 2020; Liu and Hallinger, 2018), their application in higher education remains comparatively limited (Esen et al., 2020; Johns, 2024), particularly in contexts shaped by policy reforms, accountability measures, and equity mandates (Elken and Borlaug, 2024). This uneven development reflects differences in sectoral research traditions. K-12 leadership scholarship has long centred on school improvement and policy enactment within highly regulated systems (Ball et al., 2012), fostering sustained attention to context, relational dynamics and sense-making processes (Brauckmann et al., 2023; Hallinger, 2018). By contrast, higher education research has more frequently emphasized governance structures (Eastman et al., 2022; Elken, 2024), leadership models (Bolden et al., 2008; Macfarlane et al., 2024; Raza et al., 2025), and institutional strategy (Saunders and Sin, 2015), with comparatively less focus on interpretive enactment across organizational levels (Esen et al., 2020). Extending contextual approaches to higher education, therefore, represents not a sectoral transfer but a conceptual application of interpretive tools to a distinct governance environment. Postsecondary institutions operate within distinctive governance ecologies, understood here as formal and informal arrangements of authority, coordination, and accountability that influence decision-making and system enactment (Asaduzzaman and Virtanen, 2016). Leaders must reconcile public accountability with professional autonomy while navigating multiple and often competing institutional logics (Stensaker et al., 2021). Higher education thus represents a critical site for examining how leadership is enacted under conditions of policy reform and institutional differentiation.

This study addresses this gap through an in-depth examination of leadership enactment within Alberta's postsecondary system. In this paper, the terms postsecondary education and higher education are used interchangeably to reflect Canadian policy and governance contexts, where universities, colleges, and polytechnics operate within an integrated postsecondary system. Alberta offers a particularly instructive case due to its recent system-wide reform agenda under Alberta 2030: Building Skills for Jobs (Government of Alberta, 2021a, 2021b), which positioned Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) as a central policy instrument for aligning higher education with labour-market needs. Institutions were expected to expand experiential learning opportunities and demonstrate employability outcomes, yet policy guidance on implementation, quality, or resourcing remained limited. Consequently, institutions developed locally coherent responses within a context marked by ambiguity, performance pressure, and uneven capacity, positioning leadership as a context-specific practice through which actors worked to sustain coherence, equity, and educational purpose.

To examine how leadership operates under these conditions, the study is guided by a contextual-interpretive framework of leadership enactment that attends to three interdependent contextual layers: macro, meso, and micro (Hallinger, 2018). The framework conceptualizes leadership as an ongoing process of meaning-making and action through which actors navigate, connect, and recalibrate these layers (Macfarlane et al., 2024). Drawing on sense-making theory (Weick, 2000) and equity-oriented leadership scholarship (Shields, 2010), the study foregrounds the moral and political dimensions of leadership enactment in higher-education reform contexts. Guided by this framework, the study addresses the following questions:

How do higher-education leaders interpret, mediate, and translate policy reforms within complex governance environments to create coherence between provincial mandates and institutional purposes?

How do leaders adapt and reflect on their practices to sustain equity, inclusion, and the moral purpose of higher education amid policy ambiguity and resource constraints?

Theoretical framework

Leadership scholarship has increasingly emphasized how leadership is shaped by the social, cultural, and institutional systems in which it is enacted (e.g., Bolden et al., 2008; Elken and Borlaug, 2024). As a result, context has become central to leadership research, despite longstanding challenges in theorizing its multi-layered and interactional nature (Hallinger, 2018; Johns, 2024; Osborn et al., 2002). Whereas early leadership theories treated context as an external set of variables to be managed or controlled (Fiedler, 1967; Hersey and Blanchard, 1977), more recent perspectives conceptualize context as dynamic and co-constitutive, emphasizing the mutual shaping of leadership practices and contextual conditions through interpretation, interaction, and adaptation (Osborn et al., 2002; Porter and McLaughlin, 2006; Raza et al., 2024).

Defining context is particularly complex because it operates across interconnected levels. Hallinger (2018) distinguished three interrelated levels: the micro (interpersonal relationships and departmental cultures), the meso (organizational structures and governance systems), and the macro (policy frameworks and socio-economic conditions). These levels interact to create an ecology of constraints and affordances that shape leadership practice. In higher education, these interactions are especially pronounced, as institutions are simultaneously accountable to internal governance bodies, local communities, and national or provincial policy systems (Altbach et al., 2009; Elken and Borlaug, 2024; Stensaker et al., 2021). Context, therefore, functions not as a backdrop but as a relational system that leaders must continuously navigate and make sense of (Hallinger, 2018).

Within this context turn, leadership effectiveness is increasingly understood as contingent on alignment between leadership practices and contextual realities rather than on universal competencies (Bolden et al., 2008; Osborn et al., 2002). Empirical research in higher education illustrates how leadership is mediated by institutional culture, governance arrangements, and policy environments. Drawing on qualitative interviews with members of strategic advisory boards across universities in multiple national systems, Stensaker et al. (2021) showed that leadership is enacted through informal shadow governance arrangements shaped by collegial norms and legitimacy rather than formal authority. Elken (2024) demonstrated through qualitative analysis of policy documents and interviews in the Norwegian higher education system that leadership and governance unfold through context-specific processes of dialogue, trust, and interpretation embedded in institutional traditions and policy cultures. This work underscores that effective leadership in higher education is inherently context-specific.

Research in higher education has thus expanded the concept of context beyond physical setting to encompass structural, relational, and moral-political dimensions (Bolden et al., 2008; Scott, 2011). Context is reflected in policy frameworks and organizational design (Saunders and Sin, 2015), enacted through relationships, trust, and meaning-making (Bolden et al., 2009; Stensaker et al., 2021), and infused with ethical concerns related to equity, inclusion, and justice (Raza and Eslami, 2024; Shields, 2010). Leadership is therefore best understood not as a set of decontextualized behaviours but as a practice of sense-making (Weick, 2000), through which leaders interpret policy demands, align institutional goals, and negotiate tensions between local needs and systemic pressures, particularly during periods of reform (Elken and Borlaug, 2024).

Building upon this scholarship, this study adopts a contextual-interpretive framework of leadership enactment to examine how leaders navigate shifting policy environments in higher education. Synthesizing insights from sociocultural, ecological, and interpretive perspectives, the framework conceptualizes leadership as relational (Uhl-Bien, 2006), distributed (Bolden et al., 2009) and contextually situated (Hallinger, 2018; Johns, 2024). Leadership is understood to emerge through collective sense-making across multiple organizational roles (Weick, 2000), including vice-provosts, deans, managers, and coordinators, whose interactions form an ecology of leadership practice. Context is treated not as an external backdrop but as an active, multi-level force that both shapes and is reshaped by leadership enactment (Hallinger, 2018; Johns, 2024).

To operationalize this perspective, the framework distinguishes three interconnected layers of context: macro (postsecondary, labour-market, and immigration policy systems and broader socio-political conditions), meso (institutional governance, organizational culture, and intermediary networks), and micro (program-level, relational, and community dynamics) (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Contextual-interpretive framework.

In the Canadian higher education context, the meso level is further shaped by longstanding bicameral governance arrangements in most universities, in which academic authority is formally vested in Senates while financial and administrative authority resides with Boards and senior administration. Although these structures have remained largely stable since the mid-twentieth century, universities have become increasingly complex, regulated, and corporatized, placing strain on traditional collegial governance processes (Eastman et al., 2022). Faculty participation in Senate and committee work is often uneven, and while professors retain formal governance prerogatives, many report feeling marginalized within institutions that have expanded administrative capacity and accountability pressures (Bruneau, 2012). This layered and sometimes loosely coupled governance environment means that leadership is enacted within differentiated spheres of authority, where advancing institutional strategy may require negotiation across academic and administrative domains (Eastman et al., 2022). Colleges and polytechnics, while also operating under provincial legislation and Boards, often exhibit more centralized administrative structures, potentially altering how authority is distributed and how reform initiatives are advanced across sectors (Doern, 2008).

Leadership is positioned as the interpretive bridge across these layers. The five analytical mechanisms identified in the findings capture the processes through which leaders move across, connect, and recalibrate macro, meso, and micro contexts in practice. Through these mechanisms, leaders act as sense-makers (Weick, 2000), translate policy discourses into institutionally coherent strategies (Ball et al., 2012), align internal priorities with external expectations (Elken and Borlaug, 2024), and mediate among competing educational, economic, and social logics (Saunders and Sin, 2015). Leadership is also enacted within shadow governance spaces, including sectoral networks, consortia, and third-party intermediaries, that exert informal but consequential influence on policy enactment (Stensaker et al., 2021). By integrating these levels of analysis, the framework foregrounds the reciprocal relationship between leadership and context (Hallinger, 2018; Johns, 2024), setting the stage for the empirical analysis that follows.

Figure 1 presents the framework that underpins this study and visualizes macro, meso, and micro contexts as interconnected layers, emphasizing that leadership is not located at a single level but enacted through boundary-spanning work across contexts. Leadership is represented through five interrelated analytical mechanisms - interpretation, mediation, translation, adaptation, and reflection, depicted as curved, non-directional arcs traversing the contextual layers.

Each mechanism captures a distinct mode of leadership enactment within this layered context. Interpretation reflects leaders’ sense-making work at the macro-meso interface (Weick, 2000), where policy discourses are framed in relation to institutional values and mandates (Ball et al., 2012). Mediation foregrounds relational governance at the meso level, emphasizing dialogue, negotiation, and trust-based alignment among actors and institutional logics (Saunders and Sin, 2015). Translation captures meso-micro processes through which shared meanings are operationalized into organizational systems, curricula, and pedagogical practices (Ball et al., 2012). Adaptation reflects iterative redesign under constraint, as leaders respond to resource limitations, regulatory conditions, and participation barriers (Swanson et al., 2010). Reflection represents normative recalibration across macro and meso contexts, through which leaders critically interrogate policy assumptions, metrics, and equity implications, feeding ethical learning back into ongoing enactment (Wei, 2024).

Collectively, Figure 1 emphasizes leadership as context-specific policy enactment rather than implementation. By integrating contextual layers with processual mechanisms (Hallinger, 2018), the framework operationalizes the study's theoretical orientation, enabling analysis of how leaders in Alberta's universities, colleges, and polytechnics engage with WIL reform initiatives, such as Alberta 2030 strategy (Government of Alberta, 2021a, 2021b), in ways shaped by distinct institutional histories, governance logics, and socio-political conditions.

The study context

The Government of Alberta aims to align postsecondary education with labour-market needs through Alberta 2030: Building Skills for Jobs strategy that emphasizes WIL as the instrument to achieve this goal. WIL refers to educational approaches that intentionally connect academic study with structured, real-world work or practice experiences. Conceptually, WIL draws on traditions of experiential, reflective, and socially situated learning associated with Dewey's (1938) philosophy of education. In practice, WIL encompasses a range of activities, such as internships, placements, co-operative education, practicums, and applied projects, typically developed through structured partnerships among students, educational institutions, and external organizations (CEWIL Canada, n.d.; McRae et al., 2019). While historically understood as a pedagogical strategy to support learning and professional development (McRae and Johnston, 2016), WIL has increasingly become a policy instrument through which governments seek to align education systems with labour-market needs, workforce development, and global talent mobility (Reinhard et al., 2016). In Canada, federal and provincial initiatives such as the Student Work Placement Program (Government of Canada, 2017), Ontario's Career-Ready Fund (Government of Ontario, 2020), and Alberta 2030 (Government of Alberta, 2021a) position WIL as a mechanism linking employability, migration, and economic competitiveness.

In Alberta, WIL has become a central mechanism in the province's postsecondary reform agenda, particularly under the Alberta 2030 strategy, which reorients universities and colleges toward labour-market responsiveness and economic renewal (Government of Alberta, 2021a). Within this policy framework, WIL functions less as a pedagogical approach and more as a governance instrument that aligns institutional mandates, funding arrangements, and curricular priorities with employability outcomes, employer partnerships, and graduate labour-market performance (Arney and Krygsman, 2022). This alignment is reinforced through policy tools such as performance-based funding, Investment Management Agreements (IMAs), and targeted initiatives like the Work-Integrated Learning Industry Voucher Pilot Program, which steers institutional behaviour through financial incentives and reporting requirements (Government of Alberta, 2021b). Legislative amendments to the Post-secondary Learning Act further consolidate ministerial authority by formalizing labour-market responsiveness as a core purpose of higher education and expanding centralized oversight of institutional outcomes, including WIL targets (Government of Alberta, 2003, 2021b).

At the institutional level, these centralized policy instruments intersect with Alberta's governance structures, particularly the bicameral systems that separate academic authority from administrative and financial authority. Although these formal structures have remained relatively stable, universities have become increasingly regulated and administratively complex, creating layered processes of consultation and approval within academic decision-making (Sale, 2022). Advancing WIL targets within this environment requires leaders to work through collegial governance processes while responding to performance-based accountability pressures. Differences in governance arrangements across universities, colleges, and polytechnics may, therefore, shape how reform mandates are interpreted, negotiated, and enacted across sectors. While this model reflects Alberta's long-standing reliance on economic rationalization and performance accountability in higher-education governance (Klingbeil, 2023), it also narrows the meaning of WIL by privileging measurable participation and economic alignment over reflection, contextual learning, and equity (CEWIL Canada, n.d.).

This shift has blurred the boundaries between education, economy, and governance, reshaping the conditions under which postsecondary leadership is exercised in Alberta. Policy instruments such as performance-based funding, IMAs, and labour-market alignment metrics position WIL as a high-stakes site of institutional accountability and strategic decision-making (Arney and Krygsman, 2022). For postsecondary leaders, this environment demands more than technical implementation; it requires interpretive judgment about how provincial priorities are understood, resourced, and enacted within institutional missions, disciplinary norms, and equity commitments. Leadership is thus exercised through ongoing mediation between compliance and autonomy, standardized metrics and local practice, and economic imperatives and educational values (Elken and Borlaug, 2024; Newman, 2020; Saunders and Sin, 2015). This study examines how leadership is enacted across institutional levels, where senior administrators, deans, and program leaders encounter WIL policy pressures differently but are collectively responsible for translating provincial mandates into locally meaningful practice. It is within this contested governance landscape that context-specific leadership becomes analytically salient, as leaders shape how WIL policy is enacted in ways that directly affect programs, faculty work, and student opportunities.

Methodology

This qualitative study adopts an interpretive and context-sensitive analytical orientation consistent with the multi-level contextual-interpretive framework of leadership enactment (Figure 1). Leadership is understood here as a socially constructed and relational practice shaped by multi-layered contexts (Hallinger, 2018). Rather than evaluating leader effectiveness through prescriptive metrics, the analysis focuses on how higher-education leaders make sense of, negotiate, and enact leadership practices within shifting postsecondary policy environments. Specifically, it examines how institutional actors interpret Alberta 2030 strategy (Government of Alberta, 2021a) and the province's WIL agenda (Government of Alberta, 2021b), how they mediate between government priorities and institutional cultures, and how their interpretive actions reshape local governance and practice. This interpretive purpose aligns with policy enactment scholarship (Ball et al., 2012) and educational-leadership research that views leaders as sense-makers (Weick, 2000) who work within and across structural, cultural, and political systems to construct meaning (Ganon-Shilon and Schechter, 2017).

A purposeful sampling strategy was employed to ensure representation across diverse institutional roles and postsecondary sectors. The final sample consisted of fifteen participants, including eight individuals working in administrative positions and seven as WIL coordinators (Table 1). All participants were actively involved in the planning, coordination, or implementation of WIL within their respective institutions. Postsecondary institutions were selected because of the provincial directive requiring the integration of WIL into academic programming (Government of Alberta, 2021b). While participants occupied different formal roles, the analysis did not assume hierarchical equivalence or uniform influence; rather, role differences were treated as analytically meaningful in shaping how WIL policy was interpreted and enacted across contexts.

Table 1.

Participant demography details.

Participant	Position	WIL-related responsibilities
1	Vice-Provost Academic	Strategic governance at macro and meso levels
2	Assistant Dean	Program and faculty leadership at meso level
3	Executive Director	Operational practice at meso and micro levels
4	Program Chair	Operational practice at meso and micro levels
5	Dean	Strategic governance at macro and meso levels
6	Associate Dean	Program and faculty leadership at meso level
7	Associate Dean	Program and faculty leadership at meso level
8	Academic Program Manager	Strategic governance at macro and meso levels
9	WIL Specialist	Operational practice at meso and micro levels
10	WIL Specialist	Operational practice at meso and micro levels
11	WIL Specialist	Strategic governance at macro and meso levels
12	WIL Specialist	Program and faculty leadership at meso level
13	WIL Specialist	Program and faculty leadership at meso level
14	WIL Specialist	Operational practice at meso and micro levels
15	WIL Specialist	Program and faculty leadership at meso level

Following institutional ethics approval (H24-02250), potential participants were invited via email. Recruitment messages were sent to institutional WIL offices and general contact addresses. Individuals who expressed interest were provided with an information letter and consent form and were invited to schedule an approximately one-hour Zoom interview. Informed consent was obtained from all participants prior to participation. The study followed established ethical standards, including voluntary participation, confidentiality, and the right to withdraw at any time. Participants were also given the opportunity to review and revise their interview transcripts to confirm the accuracy of their statements and their comfort with the use of data.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted between 2024 and 2025 and encouraged participants to reflect on their responsibilities and experiences related to implementing or supporting WIL. The interviews were framed as a collaborative dialogue (Josselson, 2013) about how governance processes operate in practice, prompting participants to describe moments of discretion, negotiation, and adaptation. To reduce the potential for social desirability bias (Bergen and Labonté, 2019), the researcher emphasized that the study sought to understand institutional processes rather than assess individual performance.

Data were analyzed using a reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2021) informed by the five constructs and mechanisms of the contextual-interpretive framework (Figure 1). The approach combined deductive and inductive strategies. Deductively, coding drew on the framework's analytic categories ‐ interpretation, mediation, translation, adaptation, and reflection ‐ and on three contextual levels: macro (policy and socio-political systems), meso (institutional governance and culture), and micro (program, community, and relational practices). Inductively, it remained open to emergent patterns reflecting the specific institutional realities and leadership experiences articulated by participants. To avoid constraining the analysis, themes were not forced into predefined categories but were refined through iterative engagement with the data and the framework.

Analysis proceeded iteratively. First, transcripts were read repeatedly for familiarization and memoing about how participants described their WIL approach and its relation with the provincial government's approach. During the first coding cycle, descriptive and NVIVO codes captured leaders’ own language and experiential accounts. The second cycle employed conceptual coding, grouping related ideas under the theoretical constructs of the framework. Finally, contextual mapping organized the resulting themes across the macro‐meso‐micro structure, tracing how leaders’ sense-making and interpretive actions connected these layers. This iterative process mirrors qualitative research protocols (Braun and Clarke, 2021), positioning leadership as a process of translation and mediation between competing logics of policy, governance, and academic culture.

Credibility and rigour were maintained through reflexivity, triangulation, and analytic transparency, consistent with qualitative standards in educational research (Braun and Clarke, 2021). A reflexive journal documented the researcher's positionality and evolving interpretations, acknowledging how prior professional experiences within higher-education governance informed the reading of data. Analytic memos linked codes to developing themes, creating an audit trail of interpretive reasoning (Appendices 1 and 2 in the supplementary materials). Peer debriefing with scholars familiar with Alberta's postsecondary policy context and higher education scholarship helped to refine thematic coherence and ensure contextual accuracy. These practices reinforced dependability and confirmability, while recognizing that interpretive research seeks credibility through reflexive transparency rather than procedural objectivity (Braun and Clarke, 2021).

Findings

The analysis shows that leadership within Alberta's WIL reform context is best understood as a context-specific and interpretive practice enacted through five interrelated mechanisms (Table 2). These mechanisms capture how leaders across institutions made sense of Alberta 2030, navigated competing institutional and governmental logics, and constructed locally coherent approaches to experiential learning. Leadership unfolded through iterative cycles of sense-making and action (Weick, 2000), as these mechanisms overlapped and intersected across macro, meso, and micro contexts. The following sections examine each mechanism in turn.

Table 2.

Summary of leadership enactment mechanisms.

Mechanism	Phrasal definition
Interpretation	Constructing locally meaningful understandings of ambiguous policy mandates
Mediation	Aligning competing institutional, governmental, employer, and student logics
Translation	Materializing shared interpretations into institutional systems, quality criteria, curricular designs, and pedagogical routines
Adaptation	Redesigning programs, practices, and partnerships under conditions of resource loss, regulatory constraint, and learner diversity
Reflection	Engaging in collective ethical and normative critique to interrogate policy assumptions, performance metrics, and inequities

Making sense of policy and purpose through interpretation

Operating primarily at the macro-meso interface, interpretation represented the foundational layer of leadership enactment through which participants sought to make sense of Alberta 2030's WIL agenda (Government of Alberta, 2021a, 2021b) and reconcile it with their institutional missions. Across the 15 cases, leaders described Alberta's WIL strategy as simultaneously ‘directive’ and ‘ambiguous’. It was interpreted as a reform that demanded visible compliance, but offered limited guidance on ‘quality’, ‘funding’, or ‘scope’. Interpretive work therefore centred on defining meaning amid uncertainty and aligning the government's workforce-oriented vision with institutional educational values.

Many participants underscored that policy ambiguity was both a constraint and an opportunity for leadership. Participant 1, a Vice-Provost, explained that ‘the government's vision is grand but not granular. They want everyone to do WIL, but what that actually means is left to us to figure out’. Similarly, Participant 5, an academic Dean, noted that ‘Alberta 2030 tells us where to go but not how to get there. In that vacuum, we end up creating our own definitions, which is empowering but also exhausting’. These accounts show that leaders transformed policy ambiguity into professional discretion (Elken and Borlaug, 2024) by exercising interpretive agency to construct locally meaningful responses to an indeterminate provincial mandate. This discretion was evident in Participant 8's account: ‘we aligned our work with the province's agenda by saying, look, we already do WIL in every program, so we reframed what counted as WIL to show leadership rather than compliance’. For these leaders, interpretation was not passive acceptance but strategic framing; it was a process of shaping institutional identity in response to external expectations (Fowler, 2021).

Interpretation also carried a strong moral dimension as leaders struggled to reconcile economic rationales for WIL with the civic and educational purposes of higher education (Newman, 2020). Participant 5, an Academic Dean, described this tension: ‘The language of skills and jobs dominates the conversation, but our responsibility is broader. It is to prepare citizens who can think critically and contribute ethically’. Similarly, Participant 15, a WIL Coordinator, reflected that ‘the government doesn’t care about quality; they just want a check mark. Our job is to protect the learning, not just produce numbers’. These comments reflect leadership as an interpretive bridge between competing institutional logics (Elken and Borlaug, 2024), with leaders positioning WIL as an extension of academic learning in order to safeguard educational integrity. Participant 3, an Executive Director, captured this moral stance, explaining that ‘WIL should be about transforming experience into understanding, not filling labour gaps. The policy forgets that distinction’. Through these interpretations, participants collectively reasserted higher education's civic mission within a politically instrumental environment (Newman, 2020).

Interpretation was not confined to senior administrators but occurred across multiple organizational roles, demonstrating that sense-making is a collective and relational practice (Weick, 2000). Participant 7, an Associate Dean, described how their ‘conversations with employers, faculty, and students became reflective sessions. We were all figuring out what this reform really meant for us’. Likewise, Participant 14, a Graduate WIL Specialist, explained that ‘departments without internships saw WIL as something foreign, so we had to reframe it as capacity building, showing how every discipline has transferable skills’. These accounts illustrate how contextual interpretation was co-produced through dialogue across roles, rather than imposed through formal hierarchy (Bolden et al., 2009). At the program level, Participant 9, a WIL Coordinator, observed: ‘We spend half our time explaining to employers what WIL actually is’.

Interpretation emerged as a strategic and moral form of leadership through which actors transformed policy ambiguity into professional discretion, reframed employability mandates as educational purpose, and generated shared meaning across institutional networks, thereby anchoring the broader ecology of context-specific leadership enactment.

Building relational coherence through mediation

Situated at the meso level of relational governance, mediation functioned as the connective practice through which leaders aligned competing priorities across government, institutions, employers, and students (Saunders and Sin, 2015). Enacted through dialogue, negotiation, and ethical trust rather than formal authority (Shields, 2010), mediation positioned leaders as boundary-spanners navigating divergent values while sustaining institutional integrity and educational purpose.

For many leaders, this relational work replaced traditional hierarchies of command with cultures of trust (Cerna, 2014). Participant 2, an Assistant Dean, explained that ‘my role isn’t to tell faculty or employers what to do; it's to make sure they see each other's perspective. We talk about WIL as a shared responsibility, not a top-down directive’. Similarly, Participant 8, an Academic Program Manager, described a system built on communication rather than surveillance: ‘We don’t police placements. We support people. If a problem arises, we intervene through conversation, not compliance checks’. Such accounts illustrate relational governance where leadership depends on interpersonal trust rather than procedural control (Cerna, 2014). As Participant 6, an Associate Dean, noted, ‘faculty buy-in only comes when they feel heard, not managed. This work is mostly about listening and translating everyone's priorities into something workable’. In these examples, mediation humanized governance, ensuring that institutional and policy demands were enacted through reciprocity rather than managerialism (Tight, 2014).

Mediation also extended beyond individual institutions into distributed networks across Alberta's postsecondary system. Participant 12, a WIL Coordinator, highlighted how advisory committees fostered shared understanding: ‘Our advisory committees meet twice a year and include students, graduates, and industry partners. Those conversations are where alignment really happens’. Participant 9, a Polytechnic WIL Coordinator, similarly emphasized the role of provincial networks, explaining that ‘the Alberta WIL Practitioners group filled a huge gap. We all face the same issues with visa limits and funding gaps, and we learn from each other instead of waiting for direction’. Through these networks, leaders cultivated sector-wide coherence across divergent interpretations, constructing informal governance arrangements consistent with shadow governance (Stensaker et al., 2021).

At the same time, mediation carried an ethical charge (Cerna, 2014), as leaders confronted inequities and exploitative practices within employer partnerships. Participant 3, an Executive Director, recalled dissolving placements where ‘students were treated as unpaid labour’, while Participant 9, a WIL Coordinator, noted the need to challenge employers who viewed students as ‘free help’. For international students in particular, mediation involved advocacy and protection (Shields, 2010). Participant 11, a Manager of International Student Services, explained that ‘industry partners need education around international students. Many assume they can’t work or will just leave’. These practices reflect ethical boundary work, through which leaders reconcile institutional pragmatism with moral responsibility (Cerna, 2014). Mediation thus functioned as a mechanism of equity repair, aligning organizational action with higher education's ethical commitments (Shields, 2010).

Mediation emerged as the relational infrastructure of context-specific leadership, enabling leaders to convert shared interpretations into coordinated practice through trust (Cerna, 2014), dialogue (Tight, 2014), and ethical negotiation (Bolden et al., 2009) across institutional and sectoral networks. By privileging connection over control, leaders fostered shared accountability and coherence within a fragmented policy landscape, setting the conditions for translation into operational systems and practices.

Translation: Turning policy into practice

Operating at the meso‐micro interface of policy enactment, translation represented the process through which leaders transformed meanings developed through interpretation and mediation into tangible systems, procedures, and pedagogical practices (Ball et al., 2012). The findings show that translation unfolded through institutional quality design, the curricular embedding of reflection and learning outcomes, and cross-institutional coordination via shadow governance, enabling leaders to convert policy ambiguity into learning systems aligned with institutional missions and moral priorities.

The first dimension of translation involved institutional design and quality definition. Participant 10, a WIL Coordinator, explained how her team developed internal criteria to standardize practice: ‘We cross-referenced our own definitions with CEWIL's [Co-operative Education and Work-Integrated Learning, Canada] and the province's. If an employer called it a capstone, we looked at whether they were engaged throughout. If not, we didn’t label it WIL’. Similarly, Participant 13, a WIL Coordinator overseeing program and faculty leadership at the meso level, recalled designing wage-subsidy processes, employer contracts, and approval templates, noting that ‘keeping it simple was the secret. We focused on mentorship, pay, and meaningful work’. In the absence of detailed provincial guidance, institutional actors assumed policymaking roles, redefining accountability through institutionally designed quality mechanisms grounded in professional judgment (Fowler, 2021). Translation thus blurred the boundary between governance and pedagogy, illustrating leadership's capacity to reconstruct context through practice (Elken and Borlaug, 2024).

A second layer of translation involved embedding reflection and learning outcomes into WIL design. Leaders across institutions positioned reflection as a pedagogical tool and quality assurance practice mechanism (Saunders and Sin, 2015). Participant 15, a Graduate WIL Coordinator, described using structured workbooks to ensure students ‘don’t just do tasks but actually recognize what they learned’, while Participant 14, another WIL Specialist, explained how required courses linked internships to graduate-level learning outcomes. Even at the program level, reflection functioned as a quality assurance device; as Participant 4, a Program Chair noted, ‘we require students to submit weekly reflections because that's the only way to ensure learning happens in real workplaces’. Through these practices, leaders translated commitments to learning quality and student development (Ball et al., 2012).

Translation also operated through collective and networked processes. Participant 9, a Polytechnic WIL Coordinator, emphasized the importance of provincial collaboration: ‘We share templates, employer forms, and definitions because everyone's struggling with the same policy gaps’. Similarly, Participant 12, another WIL Coordinator, described cross-sector efforts to align language and expectations so that ‘employers aren’t confused by ten different versions of WIL’. These collaborations exemplify sense-making networks (Weick, 2000), functioning as shadow governance mechanisms through which collective coordination and shared professional practice stabilized standards in the absence of formal policy direction (Stensaker et al., 2021).

Across cases, translation functioned as the practical core of leadership enactment, through which leaders, via institutional design, reflective curricular practices, and cross-institutional coordination, transformed under-specified policy requirements into coherent learning systems aligned with institutional missions and educational quality priorities (Fowler, 2021).

Adaptation: Innovating under constraint

Emerging through iterative micro‐meso redesign under constraint, adaptation represented the process through which leaders redesigned systems, practices, and partnerships to sustain WIL within Alberta's volatile policy and funding environment. The findings show that adaptation involved system redesign under resource loss, inclusive program reconfiguration to address participation barriers, and pragmatic innovation in response to regulatory constraints, all oriented toward preserving equity and educational purpose (Newman, 2020).

A central site of adaptation involved system redesign under resource constraints. Participant 13, a WIL Coordinator, described how her program survived the loss of provincial funding: ‘When the grant ended, we had to reinvent ourselves overnight. We turned it into a job posting and matching service so students could still access opportunities’. Participant 8, an Academic Program Manager, echoed this pragmatic creativity, noting, ‘We refused funding that excluded international students. Instead, we built our own internal stipend system using endowment funds’. These accounts illustrate adaptation as decision-making, where leaders restructured programs to maintain fairness and access, exemplifying context-sensitive flexibility.

Adaptation also took the form of inclusive redesign to address participation barriers (Shields, 2010). Participant 14, a Graduate WIL Specialist described creating an on-campus initiative for students unable to pursue external internships due to visa (e.g., international student status) or mental health (e.g., neurodiverse) constraints, while Participant 11, a Manager of International Student Services, emphasized educating employers and adjusting placements to ensure international students could participate without violating immigration rules. Similarly, Participant 9, a WIL Coordinator, noted extending internship durations to balance employer needs with student access. Across these cases, leaders modified rules, timelines, and formats to address inequity rather than enforce uniformity, enacting situated problem-solving grounded in empathy and inclusion (Shields, 2010).

Across cases, adaptation preserved equity and educational purpose through redesign under constraint (Swanson et al., 2010).

Reclaiming educational purpose through reflection

Operating at the macro‐meso level of reflection represented the mechanism of context-specific leadership through which participants critically examined the ideological assumptions shaping Alberta's higher-education reform. The findings show that reflection unfolded through critical engagement with policy metrics, collective learning embedded in institutional and sectoral routines, and renewed articulation of higher education's civic and social mission.

A recurring theme across interviews was critique of policy ideology (Fowler, 2021) and metric-driven accountability (Waitere et al., 2011). Leaders consistently challenged the reduction of education to measurable economic outputs, questioning governance approaches that prioritize performance indicators while obscuring educational purpose. Participant 15, a Graduate WIL Coordinator, observed that ‘the government only tracks numbers, not quality’, while Participant 5, a Dean, lamented the shift from ‘educating for understanding’ to ‘educating for output’.

Reflection also operated as a collective ethical practice embedded in institutional routines and professional networks. Leaders described intentionally creating spaces for shared reflection within meetings, placement reviews, and sectoral forums. As Participant 6, an Associate Dean, explained, ‘our leadership meetings always end with a question: what does this mean for our students?’ Similarly, cross-level discussions following placement challenges focused on system learning rather than blame. At the sectoral level, Participant 9, a WIL Coordinator, described peer learning across institutions through Alberta WIL Practitioners, where ‘examples, mistakes, and lessons’ were shared. These practices illustrate reflection as organizational learning through which actors think critically about institutional practices and assumptions (Wei, 2024).

A further dimension of reflection involved reclaiming higher education's civic and social mission (Newman, 2020). Leaders critically evaluated the dominance of workforce-oriented framings of WIL, emphasizing its implications for citizenship, responsibility, and inclusion. Participant 3, an Executive Director, argued that ‘WIL should cultivate citizenship, not just employability’, while Participant 11, a Manager of International Student Services, highlighted the ethical contradictions of international student policy. Through these reflections, leaders positioned higher education as a moral actor in public life, one that must engage critically with policy rather than merely implement it (Scott, 2011).

Through collective critique and dialogue, leaders transformed reform pressures into shared ethical learning, feeding reflection back into renewed cycles of interpretation, mediation, translation, and adaptation. Reflection thus sustained leadership as an ongoing practice of ethical purpose-building, enabling institutions to remain ethically grounded amid continuous reform (Wei, 2024).

Discussion

The findings show that leadership in Alberta's WIL reform environment is enacted as a context-specific, interpretive practice shaped by policy ambiguity, governance complexity, and institutional diversity. Across institutions, leaders navigated reform through five interrelated mechanisms ‐ interpretation, mediation, translation, adaptation, and reflection ‐ that functioned as boundary-spanning processes rather than sequential stages. These mechanisms illustrate how leadership emerges through ongoing movement across macro, meso, and micro contexts (Hallinger, 2018), enabling institutional actors to construct meaning, coordinate relationships, respond to constraint, and sustain ethical purpose (Altbach et al., 2009; Brauckmann et al., 2023; Fowler, 2021). In doing so, the study advances the context turn in higher-education leadership (Bolden et al., 2008; Esen et al., 2020; Scott, 2011) by conceptualizing leadership not as individual authority or formal role enactment, but as policy enactment shaped by institutional histories, governance arrangements, and moral commitments. By extending contextual and enactment-oriented approaches more commonly developed in K-12 scholarship (e.g., Ball et al., 2012) to higher education sector, the study demonstrates the analytical utility of these interpretive frameworks within environments characterized by distributed authority, collegial governance, and policy ambiguity.

This study advances the context turn in leadership research in three keyways. First, it shows how leadership is enacted through processes that traverse and recalibrate contextual layers, rather than treating context as an external or fixed variable. Consistent with scholarship that conceptualizes policy as something actors do rather than something they implement (Ball et al., 2012), leaders exercised interpretive agency to construct locally meaningful responses to Alberta 2030's broad mandates. Interpretation functioned as a boundary-spanning process through which leaders reconciled workforce-oriented policy discourses with institutional missions, educational values, and professional norms. This work unfolded across macro, meso, and micro contexts, as leaders read policy signals (Fowler, 2021; Johns, 2024), negotiated legitimacy (Cerna, 2014), and stabilized meaning through dialogue and practice (Bolden et al., 2009; Elken, 2024). By foregrounding interpretation as a relational process rather than an individual cognitive act (Ball et al., 2012), the study extends contextual leadership research that positions sense-making as central to leadership practice (Ganon-Shilon and Schechter, 2017; Weick, 2000). Importantly, interpretive work was neither neutral nor purely strategic; it was also moral (Porter and McLaughlin, 2006; Shields, 2010), as leaders resisted reductive employability framings and reasserted higher education's civic and educational purposes (Newman, 2020). Interpretation functioned as a foundation for subsequent enactment processes without serving as a first or privileged stage (Ball et al., 2012).

Second, the study contributes by introducing mechanisms of enactment (Ball et al., 2012) as an analytic lens that shifts attention away from roles or competencies toward the relational work through which leadership unfolds. The findings show that leadership enactment is distributed (Bolden et al., 2009) and relational (Uhl-Bien, 2006), particularly under conditions of fragmented authority and limited policy guidance. In the Alberta context, this fragmentation of authority is further shaped by the bicameral governance structures characteristic of most Canadian universities (Eastman et al., 2022; Sale, 2022). Although participants did not consistently frame this division as a source of overt conflict, the distribution of decision-making power across academic and administrative domains creates structural conditions through which reform must gain legitimacy (Elken, 2024). Leaders must work within collegial academic processes while simultaneously responding to performance-based accountability pressures and ministerial oversight. Differences in governance arrangements across universities, colleges, and polytechnics may therefore influence how authority is exercised and how reform initiatives are advanced across sectors.

Mediation (Saunders and Sin, 2015) emerged as a process through which leaders aligned competing logics and stakeholder expectations through trust-based dialogue rather than managerial control. Crucially, mediation was enacted across roles and sites, including vice-provosts, deans, managers, coordinators, and sector-level networks, challenging models that privilege formal authority or positional power (Fiedler, 1967; Hersey and Blanchard, 1977). These findings align with emerging research on shadow governance and informal coordination in higher-education systems (Stensaker et al., 2021) and extend relational (Uhl-Bien, 2006) and distributed leadership scholarship (Bolden et al., 2009) by showing how such practices are not merely organizational preferences but necessary responses to governance complexity (Elken and Borlaug, 2024). By situating mediation within a broader ecology of enactment processes (Ball et al., 2012), the study avoids elevating relational work as the core of leadership, instead positioning it as one of several interdependent mechanisms through which leadership becomes possible (Saunders and Sin, 2015).

In addition to their structural and relational dimensions, these sense-making processes (Weick, 2000) were also experienced as demanding forms of institutional labour. Consistent with policy enactment scholarship that emphasizes the interpretive and practical work required to translate reform into practice (e.g., Ball et al., 2012), participants described extended meetings, iterative consultations, and repeated recalibrations that required significant time, emotional energy, and perseverance. The absence of formal policy clarity intensified the burden placed on institutional actors, generating moments of frustration and fatigue even as networks worked to stabilize standards (Stensaker et al., 2021). These experiences highlight that distributed and relational leadership (Bolden et al., 2009; Uhl-Bien, 2006) entails not only coordination across fragmented authority structures but also sustained affective and moral engagement (Shields, 2010). Recognizing the human experience of policy interpretation underscores that context-specific leadership is not only analytic work but also temporal and ethical labour embedded in everyday governance practice (Elken and Borlaug, 2024).

Third, the study reframes WIL reform as a site of leadership enactment, illustrating how governance ambiguity, institutional diversity, and moral commitments shape policy-in-practice in higher education. Translation captured the work through which shared meanings were materialized into institutional systems, curricular designs, quality criteria, and pedagogical routines. In the absence of detailed provincial guidance, leaders assumed responsibility for defining what counted as WIL, engaging in localized policymaking grounded in professional judgment. This finding extends policy enactment scholarship by showing how governance and pedagogy become intertwined under conditions of ambiguity (Ball et al., 2012; Elken and Borlaug, 2024; Johns, 2024). Adaptation, in turn, highlights leadership as ongoing redesign under constraint rather than episodic response (Swanson et al., 2010). Leaders continually adjusted programs, timelines, funding models, and participation criteria to address resource loss, regulatory barriers, and equity concerns. Importantly, adaptation was not merely technical but deeply moral (Shields, 2010). Decisions about access, rule interpretation, and constraint negotiation revealed leadership as ethical problem-solving embedded in everyday practice (Waitere et al., 2011). By theorizing adaptation as a mechanism of enactment (Ball et al., 2012), the study contributes to leadership research calling for greater attention to contingency (Elken and Borlaug, 2024), relationality (Uhl-Bien, 2006), and moral pragmatism (Macfarlane et al., 2024) in organizational life.

Across the enactment processes identified above, reflection functioned as the mechanism through which leadership remained ethically grounded and responsive over time (Wei, 2024). Rather than operating as a final evaluative stage, reflection worked as collective normative recalibration, feeding back into interpretation, mediation, translation, and adaptation. Through reflective dialogue in meetings, networks, and institutional routines, leaders interrogated policy metrics, questioned ideological drift, and reasserted higher education's social and civic responsibilities. Reflection (Wei, 2024) is positioned not as individual self-assessment but as a governance practice that sustains ethical coherence under reform pressure. By conceptualizing reflection as an ongoing process embedded across contexts, the study aligns with calls to foreground the moral and political dimensions of leadership in higher education (Newman, 2020; Shields, 2010) and demonstrates how ethical leadership is enacted through collective sense-making (Weick, 2000) rather than personal virtue or formal codes.

The findings carry important implications for policy and governance. They suggest that efforts to standardize WIL through metrics and targets may underestimate the interpretive and relational work required to enact reform meaningfully across diverse institutional contexts (Ball et al., 2012; Fowler, 2021; Weick, 2000). Rather than relying solely on tighter control or clearer prescriptions, policymakers should recognize the role of professional discretion, dialogue, and contextual adaptation in sustaining educational quality and equity. For research, the study demonstrates the value of mechanism-based analysis for examining leadership enactment in complex systems (Elken and Borlaug, 2024; Johns, 2024). Future studies could apply this framework across other policy domains or comparative contexts.

Conclusion

This study examined leadership enactment within Alberta's WIL reform through a contextual-interpretive lens, foregrounding how leaders navigate policy ambiguity, governance complexity, and institutional diversity in higher education. By conceptualizing leadership as policy enactment rather than implementation, the study demonstrated how leadership emerges through five interrelated mechanisms ‐ interpretation, mediation, translation, adaptation, and reflection ‐ operating across macro, meso, and micro contexts. The research advances the context turn in higher-education leadership by moving beyond role-based or competency-driven models and offering a processual account of meaning, structure, and moral purpose in practice. The findings highlight the limits of standardized policy approaches and underscore the importance of professional discretion, relational governance, and ethical judgment in sustaining educational quality and equity. Collectively, the study contributes a mechanism-based framework for analyzing leadership enactment in complex governance environments and offers a foundation for future research on policy, leadership, and reform in higher-education systems.

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Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-ema-10.1177_17411432261446577 for Context-specific leadership and the governance of work-integrated learning in Alberta's higher education policy by Kashif Raza in Educational Management Administration & Leadership

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Supplemental material, sj-docx-2-ema-10.1177_17411432261446577 for Context-specific leadership and the governance of work-integrated learning in Alberta's higher education policy by Kashif Raza in Educational Management Administration & Leadership

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Kashif Raza

Ethical approval and informed consent statements

This research was approved by the Behavioral Research Ethics Board, University of British Columbia (H24-02250). Written informed consent was sought from participants before collecting data.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Data availability statement

The data can be made available by the researcher upon request.

Supplemental material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Author biography

Kashif Raza is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia. He received his PhD in Educational Leadership, Policy and Governance from the University of Calgary. His research examines the purpose of higher education and how educational policy, leadership, and governance shape opportunities to learn, work, and belong. By studying institutions, policies, and everyday experiences, he shows how governance decisions influence higher education, immigrant integration, and the balance between social inclusion and economic priorities.

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