Questioning Leadership offers a diverse mix of cutting-edge research in the field of educational leadership, with contributions from expert and emerging leadership scholars. It contextualises school leadership within broader social and historical contexts and traces its influence on school performance through time, from its relatively modest role within a systems theory paradigm to its growing influence from the 1980s onwards, as exercising leadership came to be perceived as being largely responsible for improving educational outcomes. This book invites the reader to challenge the current orthodoxy of leader-centrism and instead reflect more broadly on the various structural and institutional interrelationships that determine how a school functions successfully. It poses challenging questions, such as: Is leadership really necessary for high-quality school performance? Can schools function effectively without leadership? Is it possible to describe the work that principals do without using the word 'leadership'? How do we challenge the assumption that leadership simply exists and that it is seen as the appropriate default explanation for school performance? This book does not assume that leadership is the key to organisational performance, although it acknowledges the work that principals do. It goes against current orthodoxy and offers varied perspectives on how leadership might be repositioned vis-a-vis organisational and institutional structures. It also suggests some new directions for leading and learning and throws open a discussion on leadership that for too long has been captured by the assumption that the leader is the cause of organisational performance and learning outcomes in schools. At a time when leadership's dominance seems unshakeable, this is a bold book that should appeal to postgraduate students of educational leadership and management, those undertaking training in educational administration and current school leaders interested in exploring the value of leadership for educational organisations.

An accelerating pattern in Australia and internationally is the dismantling of public education systems as part of a long-standing trend towards the modernisation, marketisation and privatisation of educational provision. Responsibility for direct delivery of education services has been shifted to contracting and monitoring under the clarion call of school and leadership autonomy and parental choice. Part of this pattern is an increasing blurring of boundaries between the state and private sector, a move from government to new forms of 'strategic' governance, and from hierarchy to heterarchy. Challenges for Public Education examines the educational leadership, policy and social justice implications of these trends in Australia and internationally. It maps this movement through early shifts to school-based management in Australia, New Zealand and Sweden and recent moves such as the academies programme in England and charter schools in the United States. It draws on recent studies of a distinct new phase in Australian school reform - the creation of 'independent public schools' (IPS) in Western Australia and Queensland - and global policy moves in public education in order to provide a truly international dialogue and debate on these matters. This book moves beyond critique. It innovatively brings together Australian and international perspectives and a rich range of diverse theoretical lenses: practice philosophy, feminism, gender, relational, and postmodernism. As such, it provides a crucial forum for illuminating alternate ways to conceptualise educational leadership, policy and social justice as resources for hope.

This book systematically elaborates Scott Eacott's "relational" approach to organizational theory in education. Contributing to the relational trend in the social sciences, it first surveys relational scholarship across disciplines before providing a nuanced articulation of the relational research program and key concepts such as organizing activity, auctors, and spatio-temporal conditions. It also includes critical commentaries on the program from key figures such as Tony Bush, Megan Crawford, Fenwick English, Helen Gunter, Izhar Oplatka, Augusto Riveros, and Dawn Wallin. As such, the text models an approach to, or social epistemology for building knowledge claims in relation rather than through parallel monologues. Eacott's relational approach provides a distinctive, post-Bourdieusian variant of the relational sociological project. Shifting the focus of inquiry from entities (e.g., leaders, organizations) to organizing activity and recognizing how auctors generate - simultaneously emerging from and constitutive of - spatio-temporal conditions unsettles the orthodoxy of organizational theory in educational administration and leadership. By presenting its claims in the context of other approaches, the book stimulates intellectual debate among both relational sociologists and opponents of relational approaches. Beyond Leadership provides significant insights into the organizing of education. As it does not fit neatly into any one field, but instead blends educational administration and leadership, organizational studies, and relational sociology, among others, it charts new territory and promotes important dialogue and debate.

Educational leadership has a rich history of epistemological debate. From the 'Theory Movement' of the 1950-1960s, through to Greenfield's critique of logical empiricism in the 1970s, the emergence of Bates' and Foster's Critical Theory of educational administration in the 1980s, and Evers' and Lakomski's naturalistic coherentism from1990 to the present time, debates about ways of knowing, doing, and being in the social world have been central to advancing scholarship. However, since the publication of Evers' and Lakomski's work, questions of the epistemological preliminaries of research have become somewhat marginalised. This is not to suggest that such discussions are not taking place, but rather that they have been sporadic and piecemeal. In New Directions in Educational Leadership Theory, the contributors sketch possible alternatives for advancing scholarship in educational leadership. The coherence of this volume comes not from the adoption of a single theoretical lens, but rather from its engagement with epistemology, ontology, and methodology. The choice of the plural 'alternatives' is deliberate, and its use is to evoke the message that there is more than one way to advance knowledge. The approaches adopted across this collection offer fruitful directions for the field and hopefully will stimulate substantive dialogue and debate in the interest of advancing knowledge. This book was originally published as a special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory.

An accelerating pattern in Australia and internationally is the dismantling of public education systems as part of a long-standing trend towards the modernisation, marketisation and privatisation of educational provision. Responsibility for direct delivery of education services has been shifted to contracting and monitoring under the clarion call of school and leadership autonomy and parental choice. Part of this pattern is an increasing blurring of boundaries between the state and private sector, a move from government to new forms of 'strategic' governance, and from hierarchy to heterarchy. Challenges for Public Education examines the educational leadership, policy and social justice implications of these trends in Australia and internationally. It maps this movement through early shifts to school-based management in Australia, New Zealand and Sweden and recent moves such as the academies programme in England and charter schools in the United States. It draws on recent studies of a distinct new phase in Australian school reform - the creation of 'independent public schools' (IPS) in Western Australia and Queensland - and global policy moves in public education in order to provide a truly international dialogue and debate on these matters. This book moves beyond critique. It innovatively brings together Australian and international perspectives and a rich range of diverse theoretical lenses: practice philosophy, feminism, gender, relational, and postmodernism. As such, it provides a crucial forum for illuminating alternate ways to conceptualise educational leadership, policy and social justice as resources for hope.

Educational leadership has a rich history of epistemological debate. From the 'Theory Movement' of the 1950-1960s, through to Greenfield's critique of logical empiricism in the 1970s, the emergence of Bates' and Foster's Critical Theory of educational administration in the 1980s, and Evers' and Lakomski's naturalistic coherentism from1990 to the present time, debates about ways of knowing, doing, and being in the social world have been central to advancing scholarship. However, since the publication of Evers' and Lakomski's work, questions of the epistemological preliminaries of research have become somewhat marginalised. This is not to suggest that such discussions are not taking place, but rather that they have been sporadic and piecemeal. In New Directions in Educational Leadership Theory, the contributors sketch possible alternatives for advancing scholarship in educational leadership. The coherence of this volume comes not from the adoption of a single theoretical lens, but rather from its engagement with epistemology, ontology, and methodology. The choice of the plural 'alternatives' is deliberate, and its use is to evoke the message that there is more than one way to advance knowledge. The approaches adopted across this collection offer fruitful directions for the field and hopefully will stimulate substantive dialogue and debate in the interest of advancing knowledge. This book was originally published as a special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory.

Questioning Leadership offers a diverse mix of cutting-edge research in the field of educational leadership, with contributions from expert and emerging leadership scholars. It contextualises school leadership within broader social and historical contexts and traces its influence on school performance through time, from its relatively modest role within a systems theory paradigm to its growing influence from the 1980s onwards, as exercising leadership came to be perceived as being largely responsible for improving educational outcomes. This book invites the reader to challenge the current orthodoxy of leader-centrism and instead reflect more broadly on the various structural and institutional interrelationships that determine how a school functions successfully. It poses challenging questions, such as: Is leadership really necessary for high-quality school performance? Can schools function effectively without leadership? Is it possible to describe the work that principals do without using the word 'leadership'? How do we challenge the assumption that leadership simply exists and that it is seen as the appropriate default explanation for school performance? This book does not assume that leadership is the key to organisational performance, although it acknowledges the work that principals do. It goes against current orthodoxy and offers varied perspectives on how leadership might be repositioned vis-a-vis organisational and institutional structures. It also suggests some new directions for leading and learning and throws open a discussion on leadership that for too long has been captured by the assumption that the leader is the cause of organisational performance and learning outcomes in schools. At a time when leadership's dominance seems unshakeable, this is a bold book that should appeal to postgraduate students of educational leadership and management, those undertaking training in educational administration and current school leaders interested in exploring the value of leadership for educational organisations.

This book systematically elaborates Scott Eacott's "relational" approach to organizational theory in education. Contributing to the relational trend in the social sciences, it first surveys relational scholarship across disciplines before providing a nuanced articulation of the relational research program and key concepts such as organizing activity, auctors, and spatio-temporal conditions. It also includes critical commentaries on the program from key figures such as Tony Bush, Megan Crawford, Fenwick English, Helen Gunter, Izhar Oplatka, Augusto Riveros, and Dawn Wallin. As such, the text models an approach to, or social epistemology for building knowledge claims in relation rather than through parallel monologues. Eacott's relational approach provides a distinctive, post-Bourdieusian variant of the relational sociological project. Shifting the focus of inquiry from entities (e.g., leaders, organizations) to organizing activity and recognizing how auctors generate - simultaneously emerging from and constitutive of - spatio-temporal conditions unsettles the orthodoxy of organizational theory in educational administration and leadership. By presenting its claims in the context of other approaches, the book stimulates intellectual debate among both relational sociologists and opponents of relational approaches. Beyond Leadership provides significant insights into the organizing of education. As it does not fit neatly into any one field, but instead blends educational administration and leadership, organizational studies, and relational sociology, among others, it charts new territory and promotes important dialogue and debate.

This book is dedicated to an analysis and synthesis of research on strategy and school leadership, with the ultimate goal of suggesting a new research programme. Each chapter takes up this challenge through different means, resulting in an overview of the construct of strategy within the practice of school leadership. It is hoped that each of these chapters encourages students, practitioners and scholars to continue to investigate this important topic and to undertake the methodological challenges set out to advance our understanding of strategy and school leadership in managerialist times. Despite maintain a primarily scholarly focus - as such a focus is exceedingly important for the advancement of any domain of inquiry - it is also recognised that many of the ideas discussed have profound practical significance for schools and those who lead and manage them. The arguments in this book, particularly those in the latter chapters seek to expand the horizons of scholarship and understanding on the topic of strategy and school leadership. Although this should not be interpreted as a prescriptive call for how further inquiry should be undertaken, it is but one voice in the conversation. The reviews, studies, analysis and proposed research programme of this book argue that the strategies of school leaders are of considerable theoretical and practical importance to schools, the governance of schooling and the behaviour and performance of schools. While this book offers a blueprint for further inquiry, it remains for the reader to accept the challenge. Doing so will enable important new insights into strategy and school leadership.