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Summary

Leadership

Educational leadership is a field that draws on differing disciplinary backgrounds with distinctive epistemologies that produce knowledge claims that are arguably mutually incompatible. Leadership knowledge intersects with policy in diverse ways that reflect its underpinning epistemology. Here, specifically, the field may be broadly understood as composed of functionalist and critical parts (see Gunter [2016] for a more detailed mapping). Functionalist scholars tend to locate their work in the school improvement and/or effectiveness tradition (see, for example, Leithwood and Jantzi, 2005). This draws on a positivist epistemology that is often explicitly atheoretical or even anti-theoretical (Courtney et al, 2018); the legitimacy of such research lies in its unmediated responsiveness to questions regarding ‘what works’ in education. Courtney et al (2021a) describe how functionalist researchers largely render professional practice through leadership models denoted by adjectives such as ‘transformational’, ‘distributed’ and ‘system’, which they deploy in an often unproblematised and normative manner. Functionalist assumptions include that leadership is an ontologically valid concept and is necessary to improve education, whose goal is to improve students’ outcomes in standardised tests. Here, the leadership style/model is operationalised through the leader's vision, which inspires and motivates followers in ways that take little account of context. This decontextualisation is purposive: it enables an illusory universalism that underpins a leadership industry (Gunter, 2012). Privileged models change over time in a way that responds to state political agendas. For example, transformational leadership was imported from business into the field of education where it comprised a key mechanism for education reforms internationally. Charisma is integral to, but implicit within, this broader transformational model, with its focus on the single ‘heroic’ leader (see Courtney, 2021a). As heroism failed, the focus moved to distributed and then system models, all of which focus instrumentally on delivery and performance. Functionalist research into educational leadership is designed to be amenable to policy making through its claimed capacity to produce solutions to complex problems, for example.

The functionalist part of the field can be contrasted with the critical (Gunter, 2016; Courtney et al, 2021a; Courtney and McGinity, 2022). Drawing on social constructionism, critical scholars may problematise the very existence of leadership, noting that conceptual distinctiveness arrives only with the addition of the sort of adjectives mentioned earlier (Gronn, 2003).