Positioning Student Affairs for Sustainable Change: Achieving Organizational Effectiveness Through Multiple Perspectives

At a time of increasing student diversity, concern about security, demand for greater accountability, and economic difficulty, what does the future hold for higher education, and how can student affairs organizations adapt to these increasing and changing demands?

How can university leaders position existing resources to effectively address these and other emerging challenges with a sense of opportunity rather than dread?

How can organizations be redesigned to sustain change while achieving excellence?

As student affairs organizations have grown and become increasingly complex to meet new demands, they have often emphasized the expansion of their missions at the expense of understanding their roles in relationship to other units, reviewing their cultures and structures, or considering how to improve their effectiveness as organizations. This book provides the tools for organizational analysis and sustainability.

Intended for practitioners, graduate students, and student affairs leaders, this book presents key ideas and concepts from business-oriented organizational behavior and change theories, and demonstrates how they can be useful in, and be applied to, student affairs practice - and, in particular, how readers can use these theories to sustain change and enhance their organization's ability to adapt to complex emerging challenges, while holding to values and perspectives that support the human dimension of organizational life.

Each chapter opens with a case study, and closes with a set of reflective questions.

The authors have all served as practitioners within student affairs and now teach and advise graduate students and future leaders in the field.