Creating Collaborative Leadership and Shared Governance at a California Community College

This title examines how the California Community College System has adjusted to the shared governance mandate under California law AB 1725. This law requires the consultation and involvement of various interest groups within each community college. Globalization, technology and higher degrees of social and economic integration have challenged traditional organizational leadership paradigms. Commerce, government, and educational institutions are seeking responses to these challenges. The California Community College System, the largest institution of higher education in the world, is seeking to adjust to these changes while meeting governmental mandates. One of these mandates is shared governance under a California law called AB 1725. This qualitative research study utilized a participant observation process conducting individual interviews with the leadership of each of the groups within a community college district. These leaders were the presidents, the trustees, the administration, faculty, staff, and student government organizations. The research sought to discover the meaning, the development of individual understanding, the enactment process, and resulting policies from shared governance praxis. The research also included observations of the leadership within their respective interest group organization to explore the enactment and resulting policies creation. A triangulation process sought patterns of understanding, meaning, enactment, and policy results from the research. The findings included similar patterns of collaboration, communication, and cooperation among the participants both in the interviews and meeting obse