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A persuasive solution for governments and systemic authorities seeking to improve the quality and equity of outcomes for students has been the localized management of schools. Believed to provide opportunities for context-sensitive decision-making, what remains unclear is how does shifting increasing management to the school-level generate the type of leadership necessary to improve outcomes? Drawing from a subset from an Australian study of school autonomy, we argue that reforms simply cannot improve outcomes as they generate work that takes leaders and educators away from teaching and learning activities and sustain if not advance enduring inequities in the system.. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On an international scale, public administration is undergoing considerable restructuring as principles of private enterprise are becoming the orthodoxy. At the same time, economic instability (or crisis) is gripping both national and global financial markets, suggesting a flaw in the system or even that capitalism has reached it limits. Crises in capitalism are frequently met with shifts in the rhetoric of management. In this article we mobilize an emerging research program (Relational Administration) to argue that contemporary discourses of school leadership in Australia have a hybrid—part normative part rational—management rhetoric as a result of the unique economic conditions compared with many developed nations. With particular attention to the role of accountability in constituting and sustaining this hybrid rhetoric, we craft an argument for greater attention to sociogeographic location and temporality when thinking of, with, and through leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]