Wallace III Southerland

Money, Power and Influence - the Politics of How Academic Department Chairs Secure Campus Budget Resources Wallace III Southerland

Securing campus budget resources is one of the most critical functions for an academic department chair. Department chairs may sink or swim, succeed or fail, depending on their ability to secure resources to support academic priorities. Given the importance of securing budget resources, little empirically-grounded evidence exists in the literature on strategies depart­ment chairs may develop and employ to influence allocation decisions. The context and findings from research on reputedly exemplary department chairs and their influence efforts shed light on chairs' strategies and bridge empirical gaps in the literature between technical perspectives on budgeting and strategies for securing campus funding. A political orientation of higher education settings and the budgeting process is used to explore targets of influence, purposes of influence efforts, power resources, strategies, and lines of evidence that assess chairs' influence. The research and findings also provide new chairs with clear strategies as they take on the challenging role and offer to both new and veteran chairs empirically-based insights into the politics asssociated with securing campus funding.