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Neoliberal policies promoting school autonomy reform in Australia and internationally have, over three decades, appropriated earlier social democratic discourses of parental participation and partnership in school governance. Recent school autonomy reforms have repositioned school council/boards within a narrow frame of accountability and management operating in marketized systems of education. This paper considers the perceptions of 12 stakeholders in public education across four Australian states of how the latest school autonomy reform policies, including Independent Public Schools, supports corporatized and seemingly depoliticised repositioning of school councils. This data indicates there is a shift from elected parental representation to principal selection of 'skill-based' community members, with the greatest implications for those schools in disadvantaged communities experiencing difficulties gaining voluntary parental participation. We offer new theoretical insights into the links between school autonomy, governance, the role and composition of school boards and social justice informed by Nancy Fraser's theorising of social justice. We identify an emerging tension between first, parent movements as counter publics claiming participatory parity in decision-making in school councils; and secondly, principal selection of self-interested and politically influential actors onto school councils, potentially politicising school councils.

There remains strong political support for school autonomy reform within Australian public education despite evidence linking this reform to exacerbating school and systemic inequities. This paper presents interview data from key education stakeholders gathered from a broader study that is investigating the social justice implications of school autonomy reform across three Australian states. We focus on the concerns these stakeholders raise about the plight of principals and particular schools when policies of school autonomy converge with market imperatives of economic efficiency, competition and public accountability. Such concerns reflect the significance of education systems providing greater and more nuanced support for principals and schools to manage the extra responsibilities of greater school autonomy and accountability. While these aspects of support are central, we argue that systemic reform that is driven by educative, rather than market, imperatives is necessary for creating a context where school autonomy can be mobilised for social justice.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the quality of the current provision for school leadership in Kenya, the extent to which they have an impact on student outcomes and the return on school leadership preparation and development investment. Design/Methodology/Approach: The paper draws from educational leadership, management and administration courses delivered by universities and other institutions to aspiring and practising educational leaders in Kenya. It employs a method for evaluating return on leadership development investment first articulated by Eacott (2013). Findings: While there is growth in provision, consistent with international trends, this provision is more recognised for its standardisation than points of distinction; there is minimal attention to identified dimensions of leadership leading to higher student outcomes which raises questions regarding the universality of school leadership preparation and development curriculum; and the high course costs of current provision is an inhibiting factor in assessing the return on investment in school leadership preparation and development. Research Limitations/Implications: The study was limited to publicly available documents from a limited sample of institutions. There is a need for more studies in the area. Practical Implications: Institutions seeking to offer school leadership development have grounds on which to make decision about what programs their school leaders should undertake in terms of cost and quality. The study provides institution offering school leadership development courses evidence on which to base future policy direction. Social Implications: The findings provide a case for investing in school leadership development given the impact courses may have on student outcomes. Originality/Value: The paper provides a comprehensive overview of the current provision on school leadership preparation and development in Kenya. It contributes to its understanding in Africa in terms of quality, performance impact and return on investment.

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]

Purpose: Steiner schools represent a natural experiment in the provision of schooling. With a history dating back more than 100 years, leadership, leaders and the principal do not sit easily with Steiner educators. The contemporary regulatory environment requires a "principal" or legal authority at the school-building level, creating a tension for Steiner schools. This makes Steiner schools an ideal case study for understanding the contemporary role of the principal. Design/methodology/approach: This paper is based on an interview-based study with 24 heads of Australian Steiner schools. Conducted on Microsoft Teams, all by the principal investigator, the interviews generated a 171,742-word corpus subjected to an inductive analytical approach. Data reduction led to four themes, and this paper focuses on one (principles not prescription) and its implications for the principalship and school governance. Findings: Embedding the principalship in a philosophy (or theory) of education re-couples school administration with schooling and bases decision-making in principles rather than individuals. It also alters the role of data and evidence from accountability to justifying principles. Research limitations/implications: Rather than a focus on individuals or roles, this paper argues that the underlying principles of organisational decision-making should be the central focus of research. Practical implications: Ensuring organisational coherence, by balancing the diversity of positions on core principles is the core task of the contemporary principal. Originality/value: Exploiting natural experiments in the provision of schooling makes it possible to argue for how schooling, and specifically the principalship, can be different. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Temporality and in particular principals' time use is attracting increasing scholarly attention in educational administration and leadership research. There is a long history of studies looking at how principals spend or allocate their time. This paper draws on initial data from the Principals' Experiencing Time (PET) project which focuses on how principals experience their day rather than conceiving of time as an external resource that is spent (wisely) or wasted. Theoretically informed by Eacott's relational approach and working with data generated through document analysis, interviews, and web-based diary entries, it is argued that the principalship has a temporal foundation. This foundation is constitutive of and emergent from how principals experience their day. Understanding these experiences provides a sound empirical basis for preparation and development programs aimed at current and aspiring school leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Journal rankings are increasingly being used as proxies for assessing the quality and worth of individual faculty and their contribution to institutional performance. Problematic within this agenda is the historical mapping and projection of current journal rankings. Individual papers are being assessed against criteria far removed - temporally - from when decisions were made regarding where to publish. Drawing upon three examples of publishing in educational administration journals, this paper explores how the assessment of paper quality is dislocated from the scholarly labour that generates those outputs in the first place. Different ranking systems and often lengthy submission to publication processes mean that the worth of individual papers can dramatically shift independent of any actual engagement with the content of the paper. The value of an individual’s track record can fluctuate quickly and any intervention to alter the situation takes time to come into effect. This paper does not suggest replacing one ranking system with another, or even remove research assessment. Rather, it offers a means of problematising the application of journal rankings by calling into question their timelessness. In doing, it provides the intellectual resources to make strange the status quo and open the prospect of alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a field of knowledge production, educational administration and leadership scholars do a substantial amount of talking past one another. These parallel monologues are a major issue for the advancement of knowledge. Original contributions can only be made in relation to others. That is, the innovation or significance of scholarship is an act of (social) scientific distinction. This means purposely engaging with the other. In this paper, I argue that the knowledge frontiers of educational administration and leadership are highly fragmented and siloed. I do not, however, see diversity of scholarship as a fatal flaw nor do I argue for a form of knowledge centrism. Rather, my intervention is to propose a social epistemology for moving knowledge claims. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the past two decades, there have been calls by scholars for a more concerted effort to develop empirically grounded research studies on educational leadership management and administration in an indigenous context rather than hegemonic western contexts. This paper presents a review of contemporary literature on educational leadership from Africa in three internationally prestigious journals for the period 2008–2014. A descriptive and analytical perspective is used to understand the methodological approaches used by researchers studying educational leadership from and in Africa. The study identified a preference for qualitative research methods, an underdeveloped engagement with theory and causal claims. The volume of work published was relatively low, with a small number of countries being the focus of studies. We conclude that scholarship from Africa remains in its infancy and calls for greater attention to advance scholarship that is based on empirical evidence that is grounded in perspectives from different regions and societies in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As a field of study educational administration has a reputation for talking past one another. In this paper, I endeavour to pick up on some matters raised across the special issue with the explicit intent of advancing the relational research program. Due to the limitations on article length, but also the depth of some of the queries raised, I am unable to attend to all matters raised. I will be thinking through all matters and these will be presented in other forums. For this paper, my attention is limited to: the intellectual project -- or social epistemology -- that generated this special issue, the notion of productive theorizing, matters of context, what is a relation, and the audience or audiences of educational administration scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social sciences are paying increasing attention to relations. In contributing to this ongoing dialogue and debate Educational Leadership Relationally (Eacott, 2015) articulates a relational research program for the study of educational administration and leadership. This paper provides an overview of the relational program with particular attention to the five central tenets of the methodology. Key aspects of the relational program concern the complicity of the researcher with the ordinary language of the everyday, problematizing the research object, locating activity in spatio-temporal conditions, overcoming binary thinking, and productive theorizing. This paper and the collection of papers in the special issue, continue to dialogue and debate on the merits of the relational program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary discourses in educational administration have exponentially grown the number of adjectival leaderships, challenged traditional organisational structures, and offered autonomy as a solution to performance issues. In this theoretical paper, I askwhat does the principalship look like after autonomy?Despite the range of objections that could be raised in relation to thinking with and through an organisational role, it is the contention of this paper that it is in the principalship that we find important resources for theorising educational administration, even if, at first sight, these resources appear to bear little connection to, or resonance with, contemporary discourses of ‘leadership’ in education. Working within a relational approach to educational administration that I am advancing, my argument is built around three key markers: the centrality of temporality, the (im)possibility of the local, and the imposition of ‘quality’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents an introduction in which the authors discuss articles on topics such as the application of a naturalised epistemology and neuroscience to educational administration, the role of educational researchers, and the sociology and philosophy of educational administration.

Whereas epistemological debates raged in educational administration during the Theory Movement, or inspired by intervention from Thom Greenfield, Richard Bates or Colin Evers and Gabriele Lakomski, epistemology and the quest for the scientific study of educational administration has somewhat diminished in the era of managerialism and the pursuit of research that has a direct impact on practice. Theoretically informed by the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, I seek to re-engage with the epistemological preliminaries of scholarship in educational leadership, management and administration. In doing so, I argue that administration is central to our way of seeing the social world and raise questions about the embedded and embodied nature of the educational administration scholar and what this means for scholarship. A social ‘scientific’ approach to educational administration, as advocated for in this article, must break free of the ambition of grounding in (rational) reason, the arbitrary division of the social world (e.g. administrators/non-administrators) and instead, take for its object, rather than getting itself caught up in, the struggle for the monopoly of the legitimate representation of the social world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When it comes to organizational performance, leaders matter. Without significant attention to the preparation and development of school leaders, government initiatives aimed at building world class education systems are unlikely to succeed. Across the Anglophone world leadership preparation and development has become a key leverage point in education policy, with many nations establishing systems of licensing, accreditation and mandatory programmes. Outside the Anglophone world and central powers of the global north, school leadership preparation and development exists in a highly contested space that balances colonial legacy, deficit thinking and an unrelenting desire to compete on a global scale, with calls for localized knowledge, values and histories. In this article we problematize this context by arguing that the ontological complicity of policy interventions – particularly those funded by the global north – is shaping African developments in a manner that is exclusive of localized knowledge and in doing so, constrains that which it sort to improve in the first place. We build our argument on two key points: first, the centrality of preparation programmes in our understanding of educational leadership, management and administration, and second, the apparent absence of interrogation of the socio-political work of constructing the research object. What we propose is a greater need to focus on the epistemological preliminaries of research, rather than just the confirmation or disconfirmation, of the researcher’s model of reality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research is pivotal to the advancement of knowledge. Contemporary policy conditions have seen a significant shift in research policy stressing the importance of productivity in the form of outputs (e.g. publications), research income and research training. Most notably in this changing context is the necessity for academics to publish more and generate higher levels of research income. This article builds from an earlier published piece (Eacott, 2009) that looked at the production of peer-reviewed papers in a sample of internationally recognised educational leadership, management and administration journals over an extended period - 1977-2007. In this article, the analysis took place over the past five years (2008-2012) to investigate whether there have been any changes in the production of research papers in the sample journals. While raw numbers of outputs and contributors have plateaued, the spread across Australian universities has also flattened. On the basis of the data presented, Australian based researchers are producing a sizeable amount of published research on educational leadership, management and administration. In this unique time and space, the challenge now remains to effectively integrate research, policy and practice for the benefit of Australian schools, and most importantly, students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theoretically informed by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, this paper engages with the contemporary relationship between administration and policy in education. Significantly, rather than map or apply a Bourdieusian lens to educational administration and policy, I argue that the relevance of Bourdieu for advancing understanding may only be made explicit if we understand the contemporary policy conditions as concerning a reworking of relations between the state and administration. This paper therefore contains two interventions: i) the claim that the contemporary capitalist condition represents a decentring of the nation-state; and ii) this warrants a new image of the school -- to which I propose 'the firm'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we weave the auto-ethnographic narratives of the two authors with Bourdieu’s key concepts ofhabitus, fieldandcapital, as we seek to bring to a level of explicitness the reflexive lens which has shaped our scholarly work. In particular, we examine the process of becoming educational administration academics who share a scholarly disposition towards critical approaches to theory and practice. Such a location positions our work as marginal at best in educational administration scholarship and research, for it is a field characterized primarily by an orientation towards problem-solving and scientific rationality. We explore how our positioning as ‘outsiders within’ the field, combined with our multiple positions in fields such as feminism, unionism, schools and academia, has shaped a disposition towards critical scholarship. We suggest that the resources, which a disposition towards the critical may engender, are urgently required forms of capital at a time when there may be a powerful political investment in ignoring or overlooking the moral, ethical and political life force of educational administration scholarship as a potentially fertile site of intellectual activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the ‘practice’ turn in the broader management literature, very little work in educational administration has engaged in a theoretical discussion about what constitutes leadership practice. Theoretically informed by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, this paper contributes to the long-established critical tradition in the educational administration literature, to argue that: (i) ‘leadership’ is a label of the managerialist project of the state; (ii) leadership should be thought of as a disruptive practice; and (iii) Bourdieusian theory can enable this thinking, but not as it is frequently mobilised in the educational administration literature. The alternative put forth in this paper is not merely replacing one external narrative (managerialism) with another (Bourdieusian), but rather advancing a theoretical position on what is leadership that paves a way forward for a research programme. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In an era where managerialism is proliferating throughout almost all school practices it is easy for scholarship that mobilises social theory to present negative images of control. Drawing from a single case study within a larger ongoing research program on school leadership, this article explicitly seeks to ask questions of what is it we recognise as leadership. Using the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu, this article does not identify the various structures that inhibit leadership but rather provides a productive means of re-thinking leadership. In doing so, the central argument of the article moves beyond the reproduction of the status quo and provides potential avenues for further inquiry and discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – "Leadership" is arguably the central concept of interest in contemporary scholarship on educational administration. Within this scholarly discourse, there is an explicit assumption that leadership is a "real" phenomenon that is not only important, but also necessary for educational institutions. However, few scholars engage with issues surrounding the confusion of a socially constructed label with an assumed empirical reality. The aim of this paper is to mobilise critical social theory and to discuss the concept of leadership in educational administration. Design/methodology/approach – To engage with this matter, the author mobilises critical social theory, specifically that of Pierre Bourdieu, to discuss the concept of leadership in educational administration. Findings – In doing so, the author argues that: "leadership" is a label taken from common language into scholarly discourse for the purpose of solving a perceived problem in the empirical world, and that this is made possible through a particular constitution of the social space. Research limitations/implications – The central argument of this paper challenges the hegemonic position of educational leadership scholarship, particularly its mobilisation of context, both time and space. Originality/value – Unlike scholarship focused on developing an explanation of what constitutes leadership, this paper engages with the abstraction of "leadership" as an educational administration concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose -- This paper seeks to take up the challenge of complex social, political and cultural influences, uncertain economic conditions, ever advancing technologies and increasingly diverse student populations. The challenge for educational leadership scholars and practitioners is to figure out what their work as leaders should be in new times. The paper aims to discuss the issues. Design/methodology/approach -- Drawing loosely on the theoretical work of Pierre Bourdieu, and a continued research agenda, this paper outlines a framework for educational leadership that can be measured, but is not prescriptive. Findings -- The central argument of this paper is that viewing leadership as a complex social activity that is not directly observable has the prospect of moving scholarship and understanding beyond the superficial measurement of what is directly observed to a thick description of educational leadership. Originality/value -- The framework presented privileges the philosophical and scholarly elements of being an educational leader over the administrative and managerial. It is argued that this is what is needed in the leadership of educational institutions for the future and a framework for preparing the next generation of leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strategy is a much debated concept in the field of educational leadership. This article draws on a variety of data from a larger research programme focused on reconceptualising strategy in the specific context of school leadership. Rather than offering a definitive voice, this article lays the foundations for further inquiry on the topic through a greater 'practice' orientation. Drawing on policy analysis, questionnaire and interview data, this article proposes an alternate theoretical frame for strategy in educational leadership that takes into account the various social, political, historical and cultural forces which seek to influence the behaviour of both leaders and schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The quality of scholarship in educational leadership has frequently been questioned both within and beyond the field. Much of the work in the field is limited to the analysis of either individual or structural influences on practice. The resulting lists of traits, behaviours and organizational structures provide little in furthering our understanding of leadership. Theoretically informed by the work of Pierre Bourdieu and building on a previous special issue edited by Lingard and Christie, in this paper I contend that insufficient attention has been devoted to the temporal features of leadership actions. Analogies provided by practising principals are used to highlight the directly unobservable features of school leadership. The central argument of this paper is that heightened attention to temporal elements of leadership as a social action has the prospect of elucidating that which is not directly observable and consequently move scholarship beyond the superficial measurement of what is directly observable to a thick description of educational leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper contemporary literature on strategy in education is examined in an integrative and analytical manner. To achieve this, an empirical investigation on strategy in education was undertaken. As the goal is to understand and propose specific research directions, the findings are both descriptive and analytical. Initially, peer reviewed journal articles that had been published relating to strategy in education were identified. Such a list provides a valuable insight into contributions to this area of research and serves as the foundation for the paper's other purposes. The second purpose was to analyse strategy in education publications over time (1980-2005), to see how the topic has evolved. Third, an integrative analysis of works on strategy in education allowed an identification of needs for future research. The over-riding purpose of this paper was to ensure that there was an understanding of the contributions and their limitations, so that research on strategy in education can progress with an appreciation of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the use of strategy in education administration. The author discusses definitions of strategy in education and how they relate to planning and goal-setting. He notes how strategy has been discussed in educational literature and comments on how educational strategy has been influenced by conceptual models of corporate strategy. He suggests that the use of strategy in organizational leadership has resulted in a focus on best practices and defines qualities required in educational strategy such as envisioning educational goals, engaging staff and parents in management decisions, communicating school plans and implementing strategy.