PurposeThe paper explores university leaders' employee-focused sensegiving discourse during the COVID-19 health crisis. The aim is to reveal how leadership sensegiving narratives construct emotion in the rhetor-audience relationship.Design/methodology/approachA social constructionist, sensemaking approach centres on the meaning-making discourse of university leaders. Using rhetorical discourse analysis (RDA), the study analysed 67 emails sent to staff during a three-month period at the start of the global pandemic. RDA helps to reveal how university leaders help employees make sense of changing realities.FindingsThree core narratives: organisational competence and resilience; empathy, reassurance and recognition; and community and location reveal a multi-layered understanding of leadership sensegiving discourse in which emotion intersects with material and temporal sensemaking dimensions. In supporting a process of organisational identification and belonging, these core narratives help to mitigate audience dissonance driven by the antenarrative of uncertainty.Research limitations/implicationsAn interpretivist approach was used to analyse qualitative data from two UK universities. While focused on internal communication, the employee perspective was not examined. Nevertheless, this paper extends the human dimension of internal crisis communication, building on constructionist approaches that are concerned with emotion and sensegiving.Originality/valueThis paper expands the domain of internal crisis communication. It integrates the social construction of emotion and sensemaking with the underexplored material and temporal dimensions in internal crisis communication and applies RDA.

No abstract

No abstract

This paper suggests the need for a pedagogical re-orientation in UK higher education (HE) to prepare students better for a liminal, precarious, and complex world that affects work, civic and political life. This world has been termed wicked, a concept from systems theory and planning (Churchman 1967;Rittel and Webber 1973) which describe issues, such as poverty, food insecurity and climate change, that appear to defy collective solutions and agreement.As Grewatch, Kennedy, and Bansal (2021) argue systems takes a relational view of the living world focusing on interconnectedness, interaction, and adaption. According to Krawczynska-Zaucha (2020), the twenty first century is characterized by VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) to reflect an increasingly global system that is entangled, technologically driven, and fragmenting. Such wickedness presents challenges for UK HE in its role as a strategic actor in whatBarnett (2017a) suggests is a challenging complex societal ecosystem that requires graduates to be life-deep/life-wide learners, problem-solvers, and engaged citizens. We contend the sector needs to recognise that we are educating and preparing individuals to enter the unknown (Furr and Dyer 2014). We also suggest the concepts of wicked and VUCA are amplified by the neoliberal condition that privileges individualism, competition, and the market, that shackles UK HE. We contend the political economy of UK HE is characterised by marketisation, stratification, and performance metrics (Busch 2017;Schulze-Cleven et al. 2017), that mitigates against embedding pedagogical practices that contribute to supporting ACCEPTED TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION -16 TH NOVEMBER 2022

No abstract