Fantasies of Objectivity
Elwood Cubberly and George Strayer were appointed as professors in educational administration in 1905 (Popper, 1987). Their appointments are purported to have launched educational administration preparation programs in the United States (Willower & Forsyth, 1999). Cubberlyâs textbook Public School Administration went unchallenged for decades and was emblematic of the fieldâs allegiance to scientific management (Popper, 1987). In 1947, a significant shift of priorities occurred in the field when the National Conference of Professors of Educational Administration was formed to improve the training of administrators (Halpin, 1970). Prior to 1947, the bulk of professors in the field of educational administration were former school and school system administrators.
This shift in priorities led to a chorus of prominent scholars in the United States in the early 1950s to vociferously critique leadership training programs that were composed of the war stories inherited from seasoned practitioners (Griffiths, 1964). As an illustration, in 1956, the University Council for Educational Administration was created as one of the means to infuse theory into what was considered a practitioner-oriented discipline (Oplatka, 2012). During what is now referred to as the theory movement in educational administration, scholars and leading practitioners began to look for intellectual enrichment from the behavioural and social sciences (Popper, 1987).
Attempts were made to make the study of educational administration a subset of the pursuit of an all-encompassing theory of human behaviour. The positivistic turn created an opening for the management science introduced by Simon (1957) to be taken up by social scientists such as Halpin and Griffiths. They promised control-oriented science would improve the decision-making skills of administrators, accurately describe the inner workings of organizations and separate the ends of education from the theories that should inform the actions of educational leaders. Using broad strokes, the goals of the theory movement were to separate values from facts, incorporate research methodologies from the natural sciences (Griffiths, 1957) and apply universal laws of human behaviour to conduct inside of organizations. The eventual entrenchment of these assumptions provides an important bit of context to understand the impact of what happened in 1974.
In 1974, a significant rupture occurred during the International Inter visitation Programme (IIP) in Bristol that would alter the field of educational administration. At the conference, Thomas B. Greenfield presented a paper that disrupted the orderliness of the systems perspective and brought the discussion of social reality as a human invention to bear in the study of organizations. The controversy that erupted subsequent to the conference remains one of the most provocative disruptions in the field to date. I remember being introduced to Greenfieldâs work early in my PhD program by professors who described in elaborate detail the drama that resulted from Greenfieldâs epistemological challenges at the IIP. I found the descriptions of the conference debates very compelling, but it was his poetic writing, which Harris (1996) so aptly describes as, âan aesthetic shock that propels the reader to cast aside everyday assumptions in order to see things anewâ (p. 490), that struck me the most. The way he described organizations as manifestations of the mind left an indelible impact.
Greenfield (1991), influenced by the work of Max Weber, wrote about the seductive qualities of objectivism in the study of organizations. He wrote about organizations as expressions of will, intention and value (1980). More significantly, he criticized the fetishizing of objectivity (Murphy, 2005) because it was, in many ways, a strategic evasion of the âdefeats of lifeâ (1991, p. 215) that disorient heroic fantasies of the autonomous and rational leader. His arguments were framed in a physical reality that existed within a subjective reality (Greenfield, 1973), and he constructed organizations as compositions of the power plays exerted by those in the organization.
When Greenfield was pushed to account for the lack of applicability of his work to the training of leaders, he boldly claimed that his âsolution to the problem of training administrators [was] to recognize that administrative training is training for life and that only those who have some insight into life, its ironies, joys and tragediesâare fit to be administratorsâ (1993b, p. 112). As someone who has received criticism about the lack of prescriptive solutions to administrative problems in her work, I see Greenfield as a kindred sprit in this regard. His work provides a foothold for me when I make the case to graduate students that it is worth our time in our Introduction to Educational Administration class to read Melvilleâs Bartleby, the Scrivener to think together about what leading does to leaders, or that we might become more attuned to loss in the face of systems if we watched the film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
I believe we have not given Greenfield his proper due. Using Hans Loewaldâs psychoanalytic parlance, we might say that Greenfield remains a ghost, and it would serve us well to lay him to rest as our ancestor. If we are willing to look back, his work continues to challenge us to look for escape routes beyond the dominant managerial language (Hodgkin-son, 1978a, 1978b) in educational administration, a language that continues to dominate many parts of the field today. In this text, I take up Greenfieldâs challenge, but I locate the centre of my inquiry inside the affective currents and the psychic inheritances that obstruct oneâs escape routes. More concretely, I am trying to develop a relational psychoanalytic approach in the context of leadership studies to draw attention to how others co-construct an educational leaderâs sense of their identity and the messy feelings that infuse all aspects leadership encounters.
I am writing this book at a time when the talking points of authoritarian leaders, and those with authoritarian tendencies, have coarsened the public discourse and contributed to an upsurge in public acts of racism, misogyny and intolerance of the other. With the amplification of authoritarian leadership talk across a politically territorial social media habitus, the question of how to recognize the other within and beyond educational contexts has become increasingly urgent. Alternative assemblages of subjectivity (Hardt & Negri, 2017) are needed to develop artful leadership inquiries that intervene in group dynamics that entrench asymmetries of power between people, which make Greenfieldâs discussions about the ways in which people dominate or are dominated by others in organizations especially relevant.
More personally, some of the impetus to think about educational leadership in relational and affective terms comes from my eight years of experience as a school improvement consultant. Throughout those years, I often took notice of the disavowed autobiographies that leaked from the bottom drawers of principalsâ desks that created havoc with claims of rationality. Remarks from colleagues that I recorded in old journals such as, âMy father would have slapped me silly if I ever wore baggy jeans like thatâ or utterances such as, âSometimes I wonder if there is something happening to me because this stuff (referring to a violent episode in the school). It just doesnât seem to shake me anymore.â It is these types of what first appeared to be throw away comments that have exerted a strong influence on my work.
To interrogate the types of utterances reclaimed from hundreds of my journal pages and my experiences as a researcher and an instructor in educational administration, and to immerse us in the middle of an inter-subjective analysis of Greenfieldâs assertion that organizations are reflections of an inner order, I take up the relational psychoanalytic concept of complementarity in many of the narrative pieces that come later in the book. Complementarity is a term used by relational psychoanalytic theorists to describe moments in significant dyads when a person feels done to and not like a subject who is able to shape a co-created reality with the other person (Benjamin, 2018). This type of interrogation feels especially urgent in todayâs social climate.
Shortly before Greenfield died, he wrote at length about the state of research in educational administration in Canada and the United States. He observed,
The academic study of educational administration goes on in Sylvia Plathâs plangent term, like life from under a bell jar. It is sealed from the larger world but the barrier is noticed by virtually no one in the oppressive, airless environment.
(Greenfield, 1993a, p. 44)
Inquiries into the ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions of research in educational administration are often marginalized in leadership discourses (Eacott & Evers, 2015). Although I am not convinced that we have escaped the bell jar, I do believe there are more scholars in educational administration who are engaged in studies that are more attentive to the particular and open to the world. Let us continue to question the assumptions we hold close that keep us from feeling and living differently. As a way to begin, let us entertain some of the shadows in the field.
Affect Shadows
Skin is faster than the word.
Brian Massumi
Affects are sensations, intensities and traces that circulate whenever bodies meet. They seep through and leap between subjectivities. They are the unconscious forces beyond emotion that compel bodies to move and wonder (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010). In encounters between bodies, bodies are changed, and in turn, bodies reshape encounters which make affects social, contextual and irreducible to individual subjects. Affects stand apart from the intentions of the actors because they perpetually leak beyond the professed intent of the bodies in question and leave infinite traces in the future remains of encounters yet to come.
What is often referred to as the affective-turn has influenced work in cultural studies, the humanities and social sciences and increasingly education (Massumi, 2015; Niccolini, Dernikos, Lesko, & McCall, 2019; Probyn, 2004). Yet the affective turn has had a limited impact in the study of educational leadership (James, Crawford, & Oplatka, 2018). There have been some recent studies conducted that examine the suppression of emotions (Crawford, 2007; Oplatka, 2017) and critical feminist work that interrogates emotional labour (Blackmore, 2013), but because theory has traditionally been wielded in the field of educational leadership to disavow the potential of affect, it remains underexplored terrain. More to the point, affect studies in educational leadership are an anathema because tensions between intricate bodies are more acutely felt by those who typically concern themselves with rules, rationality and control.
The Researcher Who Wants to Know About Your Feelings
The researcher measured
each dilated pupil
to assess the relationship between
feeling words and the studentsâ
entrepreneurial joie de vivre
Confused by the relative results
textbook profiteers in paisley
launched head first into
the stained glass window
A smiley face psychologist
was called in to clean up tail feathers
and match blood splatter patterns with
appropriate sets of emojis
Thatâs the type of commitment
you need to win-place-or-show
in the new edu-anthropo-scene
In many structural-functional iterations of educational leadership theory, nasty feelings are syphoned away and sheathed in cocoons to leave situations and people undisturbed and emotionally intact. Cocoons can take the form of rigid methods, well-worn methodologies and research questions that strip emotion from the ends of education. An affective attunement to the study of relational leadership prompts a deconstruction of the compulsion to cocoon and plunges the body head first into the messiness of organizational life framed against the mysteries of living. In this way, a pedagogy of leadership is never fixed but a becoming poetics of rupture that opens up a space to reinterpret the swarms of feelings (Hickey-Moody, 2011) that overtake us in our work with significant others.
Those who study and practice leadership often speak of theories, programs, decisions and processes as if they can be separated from their affective intensities and connections. Leading, learning and teaching are saturated with emotionally charged events. These events are disorienting at times because they disturb fantasies of self-sovereignty (Niccolini, 2016) and rational deliberations within educational encounters. An affective pedagogy of leadership is sensual, filled with fleshy gestures and words that are saturated with past encounters. Take the vice-principal who recently appeared in my office with a crumpled assignment to challenge a grade. He asked me to show him âexactly where he failed himself in the assignmentâ and to âaccount for bias in my assessment practices.â As much as we try to dislocate ourselves through rubrics, checklists and strategic plans, we cannot separate an educational event from our viscid preoccupations with worthiness, approval and recognition. Messy feelings abound.
Attempts to orchestrate ...
