New Directions in Educational Leadership Theory

Scott Eacott, Colin Evers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138648883
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317234081
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Educational leadership has a rich history of epistemological debate. From the 'Theory Movement' of the 1950-1960s, through to Greenfield's critique of logical empiricism in the 1970s, the emergence of Bates' and Foster's Critical Theory of educational administration in the 1980s, and Evers' and Lakomski's naturalistic coherentism from1990 to the present time, debates about ways of knowing, doing, and being in the social world have been central to advancing scholarship. However, since the publication of Evers' and Lakomski's work, questions of the epistemological preliminaries of research have become somewhat marginalised. This is not to suggest that such discussions are not taking place, but rather that they have been sporadic and piecemeal.

In New Directions in Educational Leadership Theory, the contributors sketch possible alternatives for advancing scholarship in educational leadership. The coherence of this volume comes not from the adoption of a single theoretical lens, but rather from its engagement with epistemology, ontology, and methodology. The choice of the plural 'alternatives' is deliberate, and its use is to evoke the message that there is more than one way to advance knowledge. The approaches adopted across this collection offer fruitful directions for the field and hopefully will stimulate substantive dialogue and debate in the interest of advancing knowledge. This book was originally published as a special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory.

Problematising the Intellectual Gaze of the Educational Administration Scholar

SCOTT EACOTT

School of Education, University of New South Wales

Abstract

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.

Introduction

Administration has been a central element in the trajectory of human society. As Gronn (2010) notes, above a certain numerical threshold, humans, much like many examples in the animal kingdom, tend to establish hierarchies and the self-organisation of numerous (collaborating) societal groups proves difficult. Although frequently thought of as little more than a technology of control, administration and its key activity of policy are intimately connected to our understanding of the social world. What remains rarely, if ever, addressed, at least in educational administration discourses, is the extent to which being embedded, and embodying, this world view shapes the intellectual gaze and by virtue, ‘scientific’ inquiry. In this article, I mobilise Bourdieusian social theory to challenge the nature of scientific inquiry in educational administration. Although Bourdieu never wrote on educational administration per se, and earlier claims that his work is minimally used in educational administration despite his theoretical attention to the relationship between individual agency and structural determinism (Lingard & Christie, 2003), the increasing use of Bourdieusian social theory is part of the re-emergence of a sociological approach to educational administration (Gunter, 2010). However, while Bourdieu has been used to interrogate aspects of educational administration, such as school reform (Gunter, 2012), leadership preparation and development (Eacott, 2011), leadership standards (English, 2012), strategy (Eacott, 2010), autonomy (Thomson, 2010), educational leadership at large (Thomson, 2013) or even the intellectual field of educational administration (Gunter, 2002), the focus of this article on epistemological preliminaries through a Bourdieusian lens is rarely, if ever employed, in educational administration.

The primary point of departure I make with mainstream educational leadership, management and administration discourses is my attention to matters of epistemology and ontology or, more generally, knowledge production. The methodological perspective I mobilise throughout this article were first sketched out in a text written by Bourdieu, Chamboredon and Passeron (1968/1991) entitled The Craft of Sociology: Epistemological Preliminaries (le métier de sociologue). My use of Bourdieusian theorising, however, is neither with utmost loyalty or reverence. That being said, this article contains a theoretical intervention informed by Bourdieu to demonstrate how attention is required into the construction and ongoing maintenance of the research object/s of educational administration as a discipline. As Ladwig (1996) argues, built within the very French, Durkheimian sociological tradition, Bourdieu’s methodological stance begins from the epistemological presumption that (in Poincare’s words) ‘facts do not speak’. My mobilisation of Bourdieu in this article is guided by my singular (theoretical and empirical) task of trying to describe what I see happening in the scholarship of educational leadership, management and administration.

Much of the Bourdieusian-inspired work in educational administration gives primacy to his thinking tools of field, habitus and capital and this is understandable given the centrality of these concepts to his theory of practice. After all, establishing boundaries for the topic (field), exploring the dispositions of key players (habitus) and the value of items within the game (capital) is important for building an argument. However, what this does though, is to highlight the need to engage with the epistemological preliminaries—the underlying generative features—of the work. For example, Lingard and Rawolle (2012) argue that school leaders, interpreted as principals, sit at the intersection of multiple fields and that the work of leaders, or leadership practice, is the mediation and expression of cross-field effects. Embedded within this argument is that school leaders need to be multi-lingual to engage with the discourses of multiple fields. Thomson’s (2010) contribution, on the other hand, is that head teacher practice is caught between different social fields. In making this argument, Thomson articulates how the work of head teachers is both within the individual school (as a sub-field of the larger field of schooling) and beyond, where head teacher practice is about advancing—through the acquisition of capital—both the school and the individual in the broader social space. Pivotal to Thomson’s argument is the boundary work of head teachers and the constant negotiations in which school leaders push for greater autonomy. Both contributions add to our knowledge of educational administration; however, in advancing a theory of educational administration, I see two major limitations: first, the centrality of the principal (even if defined relationally); and second, the argument for a field of educational administration.

Neither Thomson or Lingard and Rawolle claim to be describing any role other than the principal; yet, contemporary thought and analysis in educational administration is that leadership, management or administration is no longer—if it ever was—the property of a single individual or title within an organisation. This challenges, if not forces, us to problematise the very concept of administration and the identification of administrators and, by virtue, non-administrators. The long-standing problematic matter of the separation—which was arguably the original stimulus for the establishment of departments of educational administration and the domain as a topic of inquiry—needs to be acknowledged and engaged with. In making an argument for a field of educational administration, there is the constitution of what Kerr and Robinson (2011) label an ‘elite field of leaders’, where a class habitus serves to stratify the social world through links to organisational, not necessarily social, positions. The primacy given to Bourdieu’s thinking tools in such studies, as opposed to his epistemological arguments, leads to a situation where it is difficult to get beyond the reproductive nature of the administration of schooling. Therefore, much of the Bourdieusian work in educational administration does not move beyond the role of the state in maintaining existing asymmetrical power relations of the social world, something primarily achieved through schooling (see Bourdieu, 1989/1996; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1970/1990).

There has been intense critique of the administration and/or policy, of contemporary Western democratic-capitalist societies, particularly in sociology, management (at least in critical management studies) and education, among other domains of inquiry. This critique, especially in educational administration,¹ has privileged the empirical problem over the large-scale theoretical problem—that is, the monopoly of legitimation of the social world—embedded in the research object. I do not mean this in the sense that invokes the (false) dichotomy of theory and practice, but rather as a means of highlighting the intimate relations of the theoretical problem and empirical object in the scientific enterprise. Through the explicit privileging of the empirical, robust discussion around the ways of perceiving the social world are censored or even dismissed as unnecessary intellectualism. Following the work of Pierre Bourdieu, it is the contention of this article that an important element of scholarship is to take as one’s object the social work of construction of the pre-constructed object (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992/1992, p. 229). I build my argument on two key points: first, the centrality of administration in our understanding of the social world; and second, the intellectual gaze of the embedded agent, to argue for a re-thinking of scientific inquiry in educational administration. As with Bourdieu, I seek to cast doubt on orthodoxy or to make the familiar strange. This is a necessary, and important, task when working in the social world that the researcher is involved. Importantly, such a move requires explicit attention to the epistemological break of the embodied agent and the construction of the research object, rather than just the confirmation, or disconfirmation, of the researcher’s model of reality (see Bourdieu, Chamboredon, & Passeron, 1968/1991). To engage with these issues, I do not offer a fully articulated theory, research programme or even ‘how to’ description; rather, I sketch an argument centred on the need to interrogate the construction of the research object as a means to extend current debates on the leadership, management and administration of educational institutions in new and more fruitful directions. In doing so, and to borrow from Berger (1966), this article is an invitation to the reader and therefore warrants a generative reading, but it will become clear that ‘the reader will need to go beyond this article if the invitation is to be taken seriously’ (p. 7). Therefore, I encourage the reader to think with, beyond and where necessary, against what I argue in the spirit of the scientific enterprise.

Some Preliminaries

My use of the label ‘science’ throughout this article is deliberately provocative. It is through the mobilisation of this label that I seek to both engage with, and contribute to, the discourses in educational administration. As with Bourdieu, I have a belief in science, but not science in the mainstream Anglophone employment of the label, mostly tied to logical empiricism and displaying an ‘exhibitionism of data and procedures—where one would be better advised to display the conditions of construction and analysis of these data’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992/1992, p. 65). Rather, I align with the view of science and more specifically, scientific inquiry, as an act of distinction from ordinary language and the under-problematised view of the social world as it is. Therefore, for me, science is, and should be, the goal of all inquiry into the social world.

The labels of ‘science’ and ‘scientific’ have a long association with educational administration. The establishment of departments of educational administration in US universities aligns loosely with the publication of Taylor’s (1911) The Principles of Scientific Management and these principles were strongly advocated for by leading figures at the time, including George Strayer at Teachers College Columbia, Edward Elliot at Wisconsin, Franklin Bobbit at Chicago and Ellwood Cubberly at Stanford.² Taylor, like other classic administration thinkers such as Lyndall Urwick and Henri Fayol, was a practitioner/researcher rather than scientist. However, the prominence of ‘science’ and the ‘scientific’ study of educational administration were at its peak during the so called Theory Movement of the 1950–1960s. Primarily through the work of Andrew Halpin and Daniel Griffiths, this US-centric school of thought, whose genesis was in Denver, Colorado, in August 1954 at the annual meeting of the National Conference for Professors of Educational Administration but owes many of its underlying principles to Simon’s (1945) Administrative Behavior, marked the beginning of a systematic traditional (natural) science approach to educational administration. This new ‘scientific’ movement drew heavily on the (early) writing of Herbert Feigl—linked to the Vienna Circle—and sought to characterise educational administration inquiry through ‘objectivity, reliability, operational definitions, coherent or systematic structure, and comprehensiveness’ (Griffiths, 1959, p. 45). Interestingly, the Theory Movement sought to break educational administration inquiry away from the atheoretical knowledge of the practitioner/researcher, yet did this not by embedding (social) theory per se, but rather by a rational technique of inquiry. In doing so, ‘science’ was constituted through the neutrality and apparent distance between observer and research object.

Twenty years later, at the 1974 International Intervisitation Programme at Bristol, England, Thomas Barr Greenfield challenged the American pragmatic empiricism of the Theory Movement and the epistemological assumptions of an objective science of administration.³ Greenfield’s core epistemological claim is that all our knowledge of reality, natural and social, contains an irreducible subjective component. That is, objectivity is a myth—in both the natural and social sciences. In arguing for a subjectivist/phenomenological approach to educational administration scholarship, he called for a ‘humane science’ (see Greenfield & Ribbins, 1993). Through the rejection of objectivity and submitting his argument to the subjectivity of social phenomena, Greenfield does, however, leave himself in a situation where anything goes—a situation which is arguably equally problematic. He was not alone in the critique of logical empiricist inquiry, as Bates’ (1980, 1983) Critical Theory of educational administration also made the claim—so too have sociological approaches to educational administration (see Gunter, 2010). Significantly, these critiques led to many believing that the pursuit of a science of educational administration was neither worth pursuing or even possible. In contrast, Evers and Lakomski (1991, 1996, 2000, 2012) have consistently argued that it is not science that is the problem, but rather the model of science. They contend that it is the narrow operationalisation of science as logical empiricism that is the problem, not the pursuit of scientific study.

What remains in educational administration, and education at large for that matter, is the canonical opposition between ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – New Frontiers in Educational Leadership, Management and Administration Theory
• 1. Problematising the Intellectual Gaze of the Educational Administration Scholar
• 2. Toward an Ontology of Practices in Educational Administration: Theoretical implications for research and practice
• 3. Practice Theory: Viewing leadership as leading
• 4. Thematic Approach to Theoretical Speculations in the Field of Educational Administration
• 5. Advocating a Post-structuralist Politics for Educational Leadership
• 6. Leadership in a Performative Context: A framework for decision-making
• 7. Naturalism and Educational Administration: New directions
• Index