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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.

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.

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]