‘It’s like dominoes’: middle managers transversal agency and the complexity of navigating transformation in post-conflict higher education

Abstract Universities are increasingly expected to contribute to societal development by promoting equality, inclusion and diversity, while preparing ethical individuals capable of navigating uncertain futures. In post-conflict contexts, marked by reconciliation efforts, oppressive legacies and intergenerational trauma, the imperative to transform higher education becomes critical to consolidating fragile democracies. This paper examines how middle managers in universities, who are strategically positioned to drive institutional transformation, experience, enact and interpret their agency. It explores how their gender and social location shape this agency, and how institutional structures both enable and constrain their capacity to act. The study draws on 14 in-depth interviews with mid-level managers from three universities in South Africa and Northern Ireland. Thematic analysis using NVivo revealed that participants’ sense of agency is situated at the intersection of their views of transformation as either a personal-political process or an instrumental task. We argue that the confluence of historical legacies, contemporary issues and identity significantly shapes mid-level managers’ transformative agency. In response to structural barriers and entrenched university hierarchies, their agency manifests through a form of transversal politics—characterised by both symbolic and practical micro-actions. We employ the concepts of ‘constructive interference’ and ‘domino effect’ to describe how mid-level managers’ ‘transversal agency’ may initiate incremental yet meaningful disruptions within hegemonic institutional structures. We conclude that while agency for transformation remains precarious—particularly under the weight of racial, colonial and neoliberal capitalist pressures—mid-level manager micro-affective interventions hold significant potential for enacting non-hegemonic and justice-oriented transformations in higher education.