High Educ (2011) 61:95108

DOI 10.1007/s10734-010-9328-4

Conceiving land grant university community engagement

as adaptive leadership
Max Stephenson Jr.

Published online: 3 April 2010

 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Abstract This article asks land grant university leaders and faculty to think of their role
in community engagement not simply as the provision of technical assistance or of
research and development prowess, but as an opportunity for social leadership. It explores
the case of Virginia Techs effort to develop a regionally based model to secure long-term
social and economic change in an economically ailing part of Virginia. The article suggests
how land grant community engagement may be understood as adaptive leadership and
provides a conceptual frame to understand better the role of such research universities in
community change processes.
Keywords Land grant universities
Adaptive work

University community engagement
Third mission

Introduction
This article asks land grant university leaders and faculty to think of their role in civic
engagement, their third mission, not simply as the provision of technical assistance or of
research and development prowess, but as an opportunity for social leadership (Laredo
2007). The paper explores the case of Virginia Techs effort to develop a regional model to
secure long-term social and economic change in an economically ailing part of Virginia.
As it has sought to provide assistance throughout the Southside region, the university and
its participating faculty have had to re-imagine its role in civic engagement. This has
included thinking afresh about how best to share expertise. The university has had to
redefine engagement as leadership for community and cultural change rather than imagining that it is comprised of technical assistance programs alone. As it has addressed this
challenge faculty members from diverse academic programs have sought to provide support and services that both aligned with the university research mission and served the
M. Stephenson Jr. (&)
Virginia Tech Institute for Policy and Governance, School of Public and International Affairs,
205 West Roanoke Street, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA
e-mail: mstephen@vt.edu

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regions needs. For the most part, these have included discipline-based professionals from
professional graduate programs, but the initiative has also drawn the long-term interest of
researchers more interested in providing academic training. Whether praxis focused or not,
the universitys third mission effort in Southside reflects a now common view among
research institution leaders and their faculties. As Laredo has observed:
The expectation is not only that universities produce new knowledge, but also that
they do it with social and economic perspectives in mind (2007, 445).
Etzkowitz has labeled this trend the emergence of the entrepreneurial university (1997).
Whatever the descriptor applied, to say the challenge is daunting does not begin to
consider the issues that must be addressed. But it is important to develop a conceptual
approach that, however simplifying, provides faculty and decision-makers with a construct
to help them devise and launch ways to evaluate a range of activities directed at securing
their third mission when that construct is defined as social and economic change. This
paper begins that process. It makes no claim to be a fully realized model or theory. Instead,
it asks that analysts, university leaders and faculty alike broaden their perspective on
research university community engagement to capture how it may be linked to social and
cultural concerns as well as economic ones. Hopefully, the rubric outlined here will assist
others engaged in like efforts to refine further these initial ideas.
The article first outlines the nature of the problems confronted in community change
efforts. Second, the tale of how a research university came to be involved in an effort to reimagine an economically distressed region of its home state is sketched. Third, a tentative
heuristic of how university leaders have proceeded to address its challenge and why they
have moved as they have is outlined. The conceptual frame draws on the leadership, higher
education, community development, planning and nongovernmental/nonprofit organization
literatures to provide a description of the universitys role at various levels of scale and
across multiple social sectors and functions. The paper concludes with a discussion of
several implications of the research.

The character of the challenge

Southside Virginia is a far-flung region stretching from west to east along the states border
with North Carolina. The economic drivers of the area have long been tobacco farming and
textiles production (MDC Inc. 2000, 810). But, in recent decades, each of these has
suffered strongly as a result of basic changes in overarching economic conditions. In
consequence, for more than 30 years, Southside has seen its traditional employment sites
close or downsize with relatively few replacements. The strategic problem is clear: how
should these communities react to these changes? What sources of employment should
they look to and what steps should they take to change their social and economic infrastructures in order to attract employers once again?

A tentativeand initially narrowly basedcommunity response

In late 1999 a group of prominent business leaders in Danville (the Southsides largest
urban center) formed the Future of the Piedmont Foundation aimed at addressing the
regions economic slide. That organization in turn commissioned the Manpower Development Corporation (MDC) to study the area and to suggest a strategy for its economic

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re-founding (MDC 2000, 137). The firm proposed a shift to businesses that participated
in, and arose from, the knowledge-based economy. To call for such a transition from the
traditional blue-collar and agriculture-related livelihoods of the region was one thing. But
to realize that transformation quite another, and altogether intimidating, prospect. This
vision of community redevelopment implied potentially profound changes in at least the
following regional attributes:
Education at the elementary, secondary and post-secondary levels, as the workforce for
new business forms required both different and increased levels of education than did
the traditional employment base.
An assessment of the remaining sources of employment in the area and an evaluation of
whether and how they might be positioned better to provide comparative economic
advantage in the nations knowledge-based economy.
An analysis of the regions telecommunication infrastructure since firms offering these
services are now a key lever in the advancement of economic change and growth.
These technologies also require a rethinking of traditional forms of activity and
organization for collective enterpriseitself no small challenge.
Development of a set of strategies, by which to secure broad community awareness of
the need for change and the design of forms of intervention to assist area governments,
businesses, community organizations, churches and other nonprofit entities in
developing a shared vision of needed change in citizen values, attitudes and mores
(MDC 2000).
To induce shifts in any one of these communal characteristics involved large-scale
social learning and adjustment. More difficult still, however entrepreneurial and economically and socially significant to the region, Danville alone could not transform the
region for a new future. The areas largest city did not exist apart from its broader economy
and it was that region that was decliningboth in Virginia and just across the state line in
North Carolina. Ultimately, the critical questions for the Foundation became how to
conceptualize what its leaders now saw as necessary as well as how to identify and secure
the expertise and capacity to develop a strategy to undertake it. The intellectual capital,
research infrastructure and community engagement interests of Virginia Tech, the Commonwealths largest land grant university, represented one possible answer to the Foundations resource quandary.

Virginia Techs response

The university president responded to calls for help from the areas economic elites by first
asking Virginia Tech telecommunications and outreach/civic engagement leaders to work
together to see what might be done. As they did so they could rely on the universitys rich
land grant tradition of providing practical assistance to communities (Wallenstein 1997).
Virginia Tech, like its peers in every state, was established under the provisions of the
Morrill Act of 1862 that saw the national government provide plats of land to states for the
purpose of creating colleges of agricultural and mechanical arts (Edmond 1978). These
were to be aimed at pioneering advanced research and sharing best practices among
farmers and their families as well as in what today is thought of as the primary fields of
engineering. From their creation, land grant schools were expected to bring the fruits of
their efforts to the communities they served or to act as intermediary structures that would
bridge the gaps between the fruits of basic research and development (Nevins 1962). For

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decades, this aim was addressed principally through the Extension service, whose primary
remit was originally to assist rural America (McDowell 2003). But as the nation urbanized,
that mission shifted as did the populations Extension served. Now, land grants offer
services and engage with communities not only within their own states and among agricultural stakeholders, but also abroad. Moreover, these institutions are struggling to
determine just what engagement means if it is not simply the provision of technical
assistance to specific subgroups. That controversy extends not only to how to define and
pursue such interventions, but also to evaluate such efforts when faculty members
undertake them (Ellison and Eatman 2008). This was the context in which the Foundation
request occurred. Ferment over what constitutes engagement and how faculty engaged
within it should be regarded continues on land grant campuses across the nation todaythe
relevant national association (Bleiklie and Kogan 2007) the Association of Public and
Land Grant Universitiesmaintains a permanent group for this purpose.1 Meanwhile,
these institutions are daily approached to assist communities with complex social and
economic concerns for which there is no ready technical answer.
Virginia Tech outreach and telecommunications staff ultimately proposed the development of a university center, to be located in Danville, whose mission it would be to
secure social and economic change by drawing on the universitys intellectual infrastructure to galvanize political and popular support across the region. The new organization, dubbed the Institute for Advanced Learning and Research (IALR), initially received
support from Virginia Tech, from the Future of the Piedmont Foundation affiliated businesses and from the local city (Danville) and county (Pittsylvania) governments. Soon
thereafter the new facility garnered state support. Virginia Tech leaders also partnered with
the local community college and a nearby private liberal arts four-year institution to
develop a larger localized infrastructure to support community education and change
efforts.
Strategically, university leaders had agreed to develop means by which to begin to
initiate a movement in support of economic and social reinvention and, given the level of
local unemployment and political angst, to do so in ways that produced at least symbolic
wins as quickly as possible. While university and IALR leaders did not pause to develop a
grand strategy as they sought to provide aid, what follows describes their response to their
challenge in light of specific analytical constructs drawn from the leadership, nonprofit and
community development literatures.

Leadership for community regeneration: a problem in adaptive change

Robert Rodale of the Rodale Institute developed the idea of regenerative agriculture in the
early 1980s to call for forms of farming for developing nations that were modeled on
natural processes (Rodale 1983, 3235). He was struck by the fact that over time Nature
regenerated even the most devastated of landscapes. Accordingly, he argued that people
should act in a way that enhanced the environments natural capacity and argued that
farming should be undertaken first and foremost with that fact in mind. Virginia Tech
faculty and leaders involved with Southside initiative confronted an analogous challenge:
how could the university catalyze social and economic change while simultaneously
augmenting and sustaining the communitys capacity to develop and embrace its own
vision of its future possibilities? How could it confirm and renew the social, political and
1

http://www.aplu.org/Netcommunity/page.aspx?pid=255.

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economic landscape in which it was at work and which it sought to regenerate? This was
neither traditional economic development nor political grassroots organizing, but an effort
that appeared to demand that both of these somehow be addressed at once. The need to
develop a new way of thinking about the university role in civic engagement was thus
compelling.
University leaders responded by first assisting the communities in a high profile and
highly symbolic initiative to develop their information technology infrastructureto
install high-end pipe for improved access to the nations information highway. This
approacharguing that the problem these communities faced could be defined and that
it had an answer or authoritative solutionhas been characterized by Harvard Universitys Ronald Heifetz as assuming that one is addressing a Type I problem (Heifetz
1994, 74). Heifetz likened these approaches to physician efforts to treat identified medical
ailments:
These Type I situations are somewhat mechanical: one can actually go to somebody
and get it fixed. Many medical and surgical problems are of this sort and many are
life-saving. The patient appropriately depends on the doctors know-how, and the
doctor depends on the patients trust, satisfaction and willingness to arrange payment
(1994, 74).
However, Virginia Tech leaders and participating faculty quickly came to view this
technical understanding of the nature of the challenge as insufficient because it could not
secure the conditions necessary for effective use of the technology once obtained. These
circumstances had to come from other social processes. Moreover, defining the regions
woes as a Type I problem implied an accepted dependence by the Southside community on
the university as an institutional leader with the expertise and resources to provide
authoritative solutions to its complex social problems. These, Virginia Tech leaders came
to believe, they did not possess. The responses had, instead, to arise, in major part, from the
regions communities and their citizenry (Roper and Hirth 2005).
So, as the IALR was staffed, its leaders began to work across the university with other
faculty and staff to develop additional responses to its strategic problem. This task is
captured by a concept, also described by Heifetz, called adaptive work:
This study examines the usefulness of viewing leadership in terms of adaptive work.
Adaptive work consists of the learning required to address conflicts in the values
people hold, or to diminish the gap between the values people stand for and the
reality they face. Adaptive work requires a change in values beliefs or behavior. The
exposure and orchestration of conflictinternal contradictionswithin individuals
and constituencies provide the leverage for mobilizing people to learn new ways
(1994, 22).
Without anyone self-consciously identifying their efforts as such, Virginia Tech had
been called upon to help Southsides citizens engage in adaptive work designed to address
the complexities of Type II (defined problem, no clear-cut solution) and Type III (illdefined problem) situations (Heifetz 1994, 7475). This implied a need to develop processes that allowed a broad share of the citizenry to think about that future in light of their
beliefs and values. This responsibility suggested that no single fix would address the
regions woes (Baum 2000). The problems to be addressed were not technical but adaptive
in character. They required that area leaders and citizens rethink their assumptions and
values and, political temptations notwithstanding, avoid claiming nonexistent panaceas.
They had instead to design opportunities and strategies for change that allowed the regions

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population to engage in adaptive work (DeBruijn and Tukker 2002). The redevelopment of
the region was not a challenge that could be solved by the application of technical
expertise alone but one that required citizens to reflect actively on their own values and
cultural assumptions, a much more complex and long-lived task than simply providing a
fix for a technical problem.
The gaps that needed bridging in these communities were large: citizens did not much
value higher education or education in general, as they had never really needed to do so
(MDC 2000, 21). In fact, these communities had prospered for many decades without a
companion need for their populations to pursue higher education. Once one could raise a
family quite nicely on income earned in the local textile mill, furniture factory or on the
tobacco farms. Tobacco, particularly, was historically a very high value crop. As a population, Southside communities were proud of their long-time excellence in agricultural
and textiles production; however, these industries no longer provided the region anything
like the level of income they had previously. It was a paradoxical role for the higher
education institution. Virginia Tech was called upon at once to launch and to orchestrate
opportunities for the communities of the region to grapple with their long-time understanding of themselves in the face of economic decline without letting the conflicts implicit
in that effort get so strong that they either boiled over or undermined the universitys
legitimacy as a participating actor. Moreover, the university had also to keep all stakeholders focused on the tasks ahead rather than, as was tempting, to find a scapegoat to
blame for the regions existing woes.
Heifetz has argued that the responsibilities implicit in this role, of bringing disparate
groups to recognition that there is no easy fix for their collective problems, of holding
stakeholders feet to the hard work of reconciling and compromising among competing
values claims and perspectives, represent the critical and defining characteristic of adaptive
leadership and therefore of adaptive work and social learning. Adaptive leaders help to
define the nature of the work to be undertaken without ordaining the outcome of that effort
(Foster-Fishman et al. 2001). They seek to offer a vision sufficient to bring the parties to
focus on the claims before them without suggesting specifically how their search should be
resolved. It is a difficult and often conflict-filled balancing act:
In this view, getting people to clarify what matters most, in what balance, with what
trade-offs, becomes a central task. How can one sequence the issues or strengthen
the bonds that join the stakeholders together as a community of interests so that they
withstand the stresses of problem solving? Values are shaped and refined by
rubbing against real problems, and people interpret their problems according to the
values they hold. Different values shed light on the different opportunities and facets
of a situation. The implication is important: the inclusion of competing value perspectives may be essential to adaptive success (Heifetz 1994, 2223 Emphasis in
original).
For example, if the schools of the region need better-trained teachers with openness
toward developing technology skills, how do you raise this issue such that the communitys
citizens and institutions may decide how best to address it? Or, if citizens do not consider
higher education a priority because they have never needed it to obtain gainful employment, how do you catalyze broad-scale conversation about this question?
In short, when it offered to seek to assist Southsides communities Virginia Tech
confronted a need not merely to deliver a technical fix for the region (none existed in truth),
but to spark a process of social learning and change that might take years or even decades
to come to full fruition. Its leaders needed to spur social learning, but do so in a highly

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adaptive and evolutionary way. The essential question became how to begin this process
while sustaining the legitimacy of the universitys civic engagement role and providing the
community some degree of hope for the future. Too much focus on the university as
potential savior could interfere with the adaptive work necessary for long-term community
success. Too little visible progress could rob the citizens of hopeamidst ongoing and
highly publicized plant closings that together made that virtue even more preciouseven
as the effort began (Luke 1997). The third mission of the university became the successful
transfer not only of research-related knowledge, but shepherding a long-term process of
social change in concert with a range of local stakeholders from governments, businesses
and civil society.

The holding environment for social and economic change

The universitys community engagement role came freighted with a difficult responsibility:
as adaptive leaders, its representatives needed self-consciously to create, as Heifetz has
suggested, holding environments in which organizations or communities may undertake
the difficult work of adaptive change (Heifetz 1994, 104113). The concept requires that
leaders guide a social learning process that both tests reality and clarifies values on an
evolutionary basis. Such a process is innately stressful for those involved and managing
that stress becomes a central responsibility of leadershipin this case the responsibility of
the university officials and faculty who promised to facilitate change and provide support
in collaboration with local public officials and private and nonprofit sector leaders. The
stress is stronger and harder to manage when there is no easy fix available and scapegoating of a pantheon of possible villains can get in the way of developing constructive
responses to the realities confronting the community. For Heifetz, a holding environment
consists of any relationship in which one party has the power to hold the attention of
another party and facilitate adaptive work (Heifetz 1994, 102103). But that role is
dynamic and must be created and legitimated often on the basis of perceived reciprocal
ties, on mutuality. In Southside, it rests on little more than the perceived potential efficacy
of the university to deliver economic renewal and the social change that underpins it. So,
Virginia Tech must seek to ensure that the communitieselected leaders, business elites
and citizenry alikewith which it collaborates actually come to confront the unpleasant
realities of their situation and do so in a fashion that secures enough wins to continue to
ensure support for the hard sledding that adaptive work entails. In consequence, the university and its partners, or any adaptive leader engaged in seeking community development, must discern leverage points for change. It must identify places/spaces at which it
may intervene with results that ultimately encourage adaptive work among the areas
citizens.

The functional imperatives and levers for change in the holding environment
Given the character of its strategic challenge, the university has had to seek points of
comparative economic advantage for Southside while also facilitating social understanding
and learning among a wide variety of stakeholders in the region. Virginia Tech has sought
to take up both challenges by developing two basic strategic interventions or forms of
collaboration. The first might be labeled education and acculturation and has entailed the

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use of several different strategies. The second might be christened technology transfer and
research and development. These categories are not absolute and their boundaries are
porous. The first approach encourages community change and learning indirectly while the
second involves a more direct sharing of university intellectual capital for the principal
purpose of developing comparative economic advantage over time. But social learning can
yield comparative economic advantage and technology transfer can surely yield social
learning (Laredo and Mustar 1996; Coombs et al. 2003). Nevertheless, broadly, education
and socialization initiatives are aimed foremost at encouraging social learning while
technology and research knowledge transfer have been targeted to provide highly visible
gainswhether they encourage social learning directly or not. The explicit hope of Virginia Tech leaders has been that successful technology and research sharing will accord
social and institutional legitimacy to the university and encourage support for the change
process itself. Brief descriptions and examples of these collaborative initiatives in
Southside follow.
Category one: Collaboration with education and acculturation institutions
Few social processes are so potentially powerful as education in the development of
individual perspectives, values and beliefs. One key place to look to secure community
change is to public (and private) institutions of education. If dropout rates are high or
numbers of students going on to higher education are low as in Southside, and changes in
the economy demand that these trends be addressed, modifications in who teaches and how
as well as what they teach can help reshape social expectations and outcomes (MDC 2000,
2628). Accordingly, to facilitate or encourage a necessary rethinking of community
values concerning education, an adaptive leader might seek to seed changes in the forms of
that education, in curricula and in teacher training. Virginia Tech has advanced initiatives
related to all of these by developing a magnet school oriented to information technology,
by working with the Danville school system to develop new curricula that integrate
technology more effectively, especially in elementary and middle schools and by developing new forms of teacher training in information technology (Coombs et al. 1996). These
interventions may begin as technical assistance, but to succeed they must allow those
engaged to develop new capacities and fresh ways of thinking about their roles. Otherwise,
those targeted will not change their habits of mind and values and behave differently and
any apparent Type I gains attained will be rapidly undone by the citizenrys inability to
undertake needed adaptive work.
Education does not proceed in a vacuum. If parents do not consider higher education
a priority, do not encourage study or if they encourage exploration of only that which they
perceive to be useful in accord, in this case, with past employment opportunities in the
region which always provided a sufficient standard of living, the chances are high their
children will follow suit. So, formal education can only be part of the story in securing
community-based learning and change. Another way to reach family members is to
develop the community organizations with which they are engaged and which serve in part
to acculturate them to their habits, values and beliefs. Virginia Tech has sought to create
management and leadership development programs for the Southside nonprofit communitys institutions as well as to assist such organizations with increasing their organizational and fiscal capacities to play their roles more effectively. Such capacity-building
interventions allow those leading these organizations to share the vision that community
social change is necessary without demanding allegiance to one or another perspective
a priori.

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University representatives can encourage nonprofit organization leaders particularly, to

think about the challenges implicit in economic change for their organizational missions,
for the social fabric, for the shared belief sets of their members as well as for the broader
community in which they live. This process is critical to adaptive work. As these possibilities are multiplied, individuals engaged in rethinking begin to constitute a network for a
potential new vision of the community, one that they develop for themselves and which is
linked to their own identities and understanding of the organizations they animate. Ultimately, social learning requires the engagement of hearts and minds and that process must
occur individual by individual as new social norms and expectations are built and shared.
Partnerships with area governments
Governments can support adaptive work and the social learning that such work encourages.
Their representatives, especially elected and high-level institutional leaders, can communicate the need for change and what it requires, can provide resources to help to institutionalize the possibility of community learning through one or more formal decision
processes (budgeting, zoning, planning and regulation), can design and launch participatory planning processes that seek to permit citizens to confront the needs of their community for themselves, and can offer more appropriate workforce training and
development programs. Virginia Tech has thus far partnered with local governments in
Southside to help develop the physical facilities for IALR and to garner resources from
other levels of government to secure its public education and work force development
related efforts.
Category two: Collaborating to transfer technology or to apply the fruits of research
This category of partnership finds university faculty researchers and representatives
working jointly with economic entities in the region to refine and/or develop potentials for
comparative economic advantage. For example, Southside has several firms involved with
polymers in some form in their production processes and leaders of these companies are
working with Virginia Tech chemistry faculty at IALR to refine and develop their products
in light of the latest research. Similarly, horticulture researchers are working with interested tobacco farmers to replace their crop with ornamental plants that can often yield
equivalent profit margins. Mechanical engineers are developing a new generation of
unmanned vehicles for the U.S. Department of Defense at a state-of-the-art racetrack in the
region. And forestry researchers are working with landowners and wood products companies to determine how best to use existing timber stands to better effect to build more
sustainable yields with fewer detrimental environmental impacts. These examples find
Virginia Tech faculty seeking to help existing firms by providing research-based knowledge that will help to develop a new product or to improve those already in production by
using existing infrastructure in new ways so as to develop possibilities for different forms
of employment. On one level, this role is very much in keeping with traditional land grant
efforts to assist communities to take practical advantage of the fruits of ongoing
research. But, at another level, these new initiatives involve a twist in existing efforts as
they define the role for research as both technical booster and vanguard purveyor of
changing opportunities for a new economy for the region.
These two basic types of intervention are linked: at their best and in the long pull,
education and other related interventions will home grow individuals for these new roles
as they evolve. If these efforts prove successful and are sustained across organizations in

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all three sectors of the regions political economy, synergies among them hold the promise
of reshaping the workforce over time to equip it for new kinds of knowledge-based
employment. Notably, none is adequate by itself and none may properly be viewed as
addressing a Type I problem for which a technical fix is available.

Thinking of partnership building and interventions as learning-action networks

One useful way to conceive of the universitys efforts is to suggest that its interventions
help the organizations and citizens with which it engages to develop learning action
networks (LANs) or sets of relationships which lay over and complement formal organizational structures linking individuals together by the flow of information, and ideas
(Clarke and Roome 1995). Importantly, these networks are embedded in the complex of
organizational and social relationships, management structures and processes that constitute business and its social context (Clarke 1999). LANs, once developed, represent
multi-party mechanisms by which those engaged can develop new ways and forms of
knowing and can construct and test fresh forms of cooperative action. Thus, one can
conceive of the universitys technology transfer efforts as developing LANs that may
encourage economic change and also result in new paths of communication and social
interaction that may lead to shared understandings among business, government and civil
society actors that otherwise would not have occurred. Similarly, education-related change
could mobilize new ways of thinking about curricula and the relationship of formal
schooling to lifes possibilities by encouraging the development of different networks of
interaction and cooperation than those that had existed previously. Learning action networks represent inter-organizational and inter-sectoral linkages. They are typified by frequent interaction and, ultimately, when successfully established, norms of mutuality and
trust. These inclusive networks of learning and action link disparate stakeholders and
promote negotiation of differences and conflicts. LANs bridge multiple stakeholder groups
whose memberships might otherwise not come to know the positions and perspectives of
their counterparts. As individuals animate these networks they develop new capacities and
skill sets, innovative forms and volumes of communication and thereby promote social
learning and change. Taken together a map of action networks is likely to resemble far
flung and connected nodes of the equivalent of organizational and social cytoplasm (Roome and Clarke 2002, 80). These pathways represent the possibility of informed and
cooperatively derived change, they also are likely to improve the effectiveness of the
organizations whose bounds they traverse. To the extent that they do so they may literally
be the social conduits by which sectors of the regions (in this case) community come to
articulate a vision for change that includes a fresh identity and a new orientation to the
future.
If this represents the potential of these networks, Virginia Techs community engagement test as an institution is clear. It must help LANs to form, must encourage the norms of
reciprocity and mutuality on which their construction and success depends and must help
to build the organizational capacities that together permit their growth and vitality (Roome
and Clarke 2002, 9799). None of these tasks is easy but the construct clarifies the
geography in which efforts to secure regenerative change must proceed while suggesting
how important conflict management and genuine collaborative efforts are likely to be to
succeed. Network analysis of this sort suggests that process interventions must be
accompanied by initiatives aimed at providing glimpses of new social and economic
possibilities if new thinking and new forms of interaction are to emerge.

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Learning action networks as sketched here bear a close kinship to what David Booher
has recently dubbed collaborative complex adaptive networks (2008, 111148). He offers
his conception as an ideal type and emphasizes many of the same concerns developed here.
For example, he contends that to be successful, community change must involve actors and
institutions from all three sectors in a community. Those seeking change (the university as
catalyst in this example) must work with nonprofit organizations, with government officials, with business leaders and with families to offer opportunities for reflection and
adaptive work as well as for technical change. Booher captures this idea neatly:
Complex adaptive networks are networks of agents that interact dynamically and
nonlinearly in an open system so as to generate novelty and emergent adaptive
patterns. These patterns create a tension that maintains the system between falling
into stasis and spinning off into chaos (Booher 2008, 113).
Leaders engaged in catalyzing adaptive change must work with other leaders of a wide
range of stakeholders, that cross sectors to develop forums that allow broad groups of
citizens to ponder what must change and how and why and whether they are prepared to
support the social, political and economic costs that such choices imply. These leaders
must finally also develop the long-term conditions and strategies that conduce to the
realization of citizen-supported aspirations. Booher notes that collaborative complex
adaptive networks exhibit the following characteristics which align neatly with Heifetz
conceptions of adaptive work and holding environments:
Distributed networks mediated or catalyzed by facilitators whose aim is to elicit
community voice and not to provide one or another solution. Initiatives coming
from grassroots as well as leaders, evolving goals determined by processes aimed at
maximizing stakeholder involvement, system outcomes determined by the interaction of multiple stakeholders rather than by top down fiat, no single actor in charge or
authoritatively able to speak for the community alone, multiple and varied opportunities to inform and discuss goals and aspirations and their implications for their
values and beliefs (Drawn from Booher 2008, 135).

Catalyzing social learning and community change

This analysis suggests that land grant research universities, like Virginia Tech, seeking to
engage in community might do well to define their responsibility as a specific form of
adaptive leadership, one aimed not alone at technical assistance or economic development,
but at encouraging social learning and change. That is, the land grant community
engagement role may usefully be viewed as adaptive leadership that must be undertaken in
collaborative complex adaptive social networks. That view yields a number of
propositions:
The would-be leader of such efforts (the university, whether through its executives or
faculty or both, as here) should begin from a position of humility and with an eye to
helping those with whom the leader will engage actively and successfully in their own
adaptive work. This implies that while the university might suggest direction and even
offer strategies, it cannot and should not pretend thereby to orchestrate the processes it
has unleashed (Luke 1997).
Nevertheless, the university faculty, staff and students are responsible for helping to
create and maintain a holding environment that encourages citizens and institutions

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alike to grapple with the central questions confronting their communities. This role is
the university equivalent of Boohers facilitator in collaborative complex adaptive
networks (2008, 132133). Unmediated conflict or poorly constructed understanding of
the issues in play can poison an opportunity for a community to reconceive its
possibilities and the university engaged in a community intervention may properly be
held accountable if it allows conflict to come to such a level that it undermines the
possibility for constructive change. Just as physicians caring for the sick and dying
must manage the coping processes of both their patients and their families, university
faculty must do the same for those citizens and their communities with whom they
engage when the aim is to secure basic social change. The role entails deep ethical
tensions between the potential for paternalism or manipulation and dignifying
empowerment that are best mediated by active and ongoing attempts by university
representatives to ensure that those who are involved are consistently engaged and
viewed as critical participants and decision-makers who bring vital knowledge and
experience to social choice-making processes.
University faculty and officials playing these roles should conceive of the levers or
tools of change they may possess in light of how they might interact and affect social
learning. Will they help to form learning action networks? Will specific interventions
offer opportunities directly or indirectly for public, nonprofit and business organizations to rethink their strategic assumptions and roles? (Rowley 1997, 887893).
Will citizens find ways and means by which to share their concerns and especially their
fears as an integral part of any decision processes undertaken? If not, learning action
networks are unlikely to arise.
The leader (university officials or faculty members seeking civic engagement) should
be open to learning and should see all of the processes in which it plays roles in
adaptive and evolutionary terms. Circumstances and contexts change and these deserve
attention for their own sake. Values, mores and cultural assumptions do not shift
overnight. Thus, initiatives aimed at securing such adjustments should be built on
norms of patience, honest experimentation and openness to rethinking paths for
encouraging network development.
All network development activities, whether direct or indirect as distinguished above,
should be viewed as opportunities to encourage collaboration and cooperation. The
more dense and variegated those relationships the better.

Concluding reflections
Virginia Tech cannot yet claim success in its attempt to lend its human and social capital to
assist in a regions mobilization to secure adaptive social and economic change, but much
has occurred. The university and its allies have founded an important institution, IALR,
now actively engaged in diffusing the products of research in ways that inure to the
comparative advantage of the region. University faculty have similarly galvanized concern
over continuing low education levels in the region and sought to assist local officials and
civic leaders as they develop strategies to address these including the development of a
new magnet school for science and technology and new pedagogic strategies exhibiting a
renewed emphasis on arts, science and mathematics in school curricula.
It can also be said that the university can now identify its internal contradictions and
challenges. Its representatives may now also possess an organizing heuristic for their

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efforts: adaptive work to encourage learning action networks or collaborative complex

adaptive networks, which may permit it to undertake its efforts more self-consciously and
strategically. That proposition does not imply control over social forces, nor over the
processes and outcomes tied to them. That fact suggests a difficult paradox. Virginia Tech
could succeed even if the Southside region ultimately fails to reinvent itself because so
much of the process must unfold beyond the purview of the university and, it is difficult not
to conclude in a democracy that such is how it should be. Such a stance roots the observer
in reality and in humility. Adaptive leaders may work to launch change, they may channel
it to some extent, but they can neither ordain its character nor pretend that they alone did
anything but encourage a process that yielded it. Perhaps that is a powerful lesson unto
itself for would-be research university civic interveners.
Finally, and as an organizing proposition, viewing these community redevelopment or
civic engagement initiatives through the lenses of adaptive leadership and learning action
network development implies that land grant universities will need to address at least two
large looming organizational problems of their own even as they seek to assist others in
their social and economic change efforts. First, universities are extraordinarily sub-specialized and siloed organizations whose members do not often speak with one another
across organizational lines (Glasser et al. 2003). Thus, environmental engineers may share
many substantive interests with environmental policy analysts and with crop and soil
scientists, for example, but never realize that fact since little would ever bring them
together across disciplinary boundaries within the universitys formal organizational
structure of colleges and departmental organizational silos. To overcome this difficulty,
university leaders need to devise ways to provide incentives for their faculties to provide
their professional assistance and know-how while encouraging communication and
cooperation among those faculties. Interestingly, the problem is something of a mirror
image of that confronting the community. Without such a self-conscious effort, one hand at
the university may literally have no clue what the other has undertaken and the likelihood
of failure will rise exponentially. Universities engaged in community development initiatives must develop networks of cooperation, mutuality and reciprocity that result in
levels of trust that mirror those they seek to encourage in the communities they aim to
assist. Secondly, Land Grants will need to develop individuals with strong interpersonal
skills who can communicate why inter-organizational collaborative networks may matter
and do so in ways that suggest what steps might help in securing those linkages, even when
conflict and distrust or worse initially characterize such relations as may exist. Such
interventions create an internal environment capable of addressing and managing conflicts
effectively. And on such success an entire edifice of possible community learning and
regeneration ultimately must rest. Finally, adaptive work demands that university officials
self-consciously manage holding environments that honor and dignify the citizenry that is
struggling to define its understanding of itself in new ways. Those processes are painful
and conflict-filled and are not fixable by attracting a new company or developing a new
product for export beyond the region. They are instead Type II and III problems and
require that university officials and faculty define their roles not simply as technical fixers
but as individuals privileged by a community to assist it in grappling with its need to
change. That responsibility in turn demands a breadth of vision equal to its audacity.
Viewing civic engagement broadly as adaptive leadership may just provide it.
Acknowledgments The author wishes to acknowledge with sincere gratitude the support and research
assistance of Katherine Fox Lanham.

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