Critical Literacy as Leadership Praxis: Reading, Recognising, Re-purposing and Re-designing Value in Higher Education

Abstract

Higher education institutions must sustain purposes that cannot be reduced to a single measure: educational quality, student development, regulatory and professional obligations, staff capability and financial viability. In private and hybrid institutions, these demands are especially visible because educational provision and organisational sustainability are tightly coupled. Existing scholarship offers rich resources for understanding such tensions, yet the organisational mechanism through which competing definitions of value become embedded in everyday institutional life remains under-theorised. This conceptual paper argues that institutional texts and organisational design constitute that mechanism. Strategic plans, key performance indicators, quality frameworks, learning outcomes, assessment regulations, appraisal systems, workload models and participation formats do not simply describe institutional priorities; they produce and reproduce them by making some forms of value visible, measurable and rewardable while rendering others difficult to evidence. Drawing on institutional logics and Bourdieusian field theory, Janks' critical literacy, recognition theory and ethics of care, and MacIntyrean accounts of practice and purpose, the paper reconstructs critical literacy as a praxis of senior institutional leadership. It proposes a framework of four mutually correcting practices (Reading, Recognising, Re-purposing and Re-designing) and tests it against assessment and generative artificial intelligence, which together expose the gap between what institutions claim to value and what their evidence systems can actually establish. Five propositions are advanced to guide an empirical research programme.