The emergence of academic leadership in higher education

In the decades since the 1980s, “leadership for learning” displaced “administration” as the defining construct in research on the organization and management of K–12 schools. However, it is only in recent years that “academic leadership” has begun to attract significant attention among higher education scholars. This is evident in the relatively few published research reviews synthesizing academic leadership studies in higher education. This review employed bibliometric methods to analyze 2,178 Scopus-indexed journal articles on academic leadership in higher education (ALHEd) published between 1963 and 2023. The review identified a rapidly growing, globally diverse literature on ALHEd. Author co-citation analysis visualized four schools of thought that comprise the intellectual structure of this literature: Leadership Theory, Leadership for Learning, Transformational Leadership, and ALHEd. The review highlighted the emergence of distributed leadership for learning and transformational leadership as the most prominent conceptualizations of academic leadership. Implications drawn from the review include recommendations for integrative reviews of these topics, as well as several lines of empirical inquiry.