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Part I
Conceptualizing and Contextualizing Leadership
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1 Clarifying and Conceptualizing Educational Leadership as Capacity Building
Key Issues of Contestation
We live in a leadership era. There is widespread recognition of the importance of leadership by governments, corporations, businesses and organizations of all kinds. Belief in the transformative influence of leadership seems to outstrip the research and scholarship that would underpin its justification. Few aspects of education are as fascinating, provocative and controversial as leadership, particularly as it pertains to schools. Leadership as a field of educational research, policy and practice has attracted burgeoning attention over the last 20 years. On the one hand, governments set increasing store by school leadership to raise the quality of schools and schooling, seeing both as essential contributors to the quality of their future human capital and their global competitiveness. Impressive investment by governments both to develop leaders (especially principals and aspiring principals) and to reward them financially reflects an apparently unshakeable faith in the efficacy of leadership to bring about reform and improvement at both whole-school and classroom levels.
Yet for all the attention educational leadership attracts as a field of study and research, it is under-developed. It has generated many theories and ideas, some complementary, others competing, but few have been tested empirically across a range of settings and contexts, so the field has a relatively weak and ambivalent knowledge base. It is a field noted more for its prescriptive literature advocating and espousing new ideas and trends than for its research-based trialled and implemented policies and practices; or as Hartley and Hinksman (2003) put it, ‘a field of enquiry high on exhortation and low on evaluation’ (p. 39). It is difficult to discern, for instance, a generally agreed body of research- or evidence-based knowledge that would serve to guide the everyday practices of school leaders. Some scholars have lamented the lack of such a professional body of knowledge and explained how this weakens the professionalism of leaders and the practice of leadership, while at the same time acknowledging the pitfalls and challenges in charting a course for how a more evidence-informed approach might be feasible (see Hargreaves, 1996; Levacic & Glatter, 2001; Wallace, 2001). They have gone on to draw unfavourable contrasts with medicine and law, professions in which practitioners are able to appeal to evolving bodies of professional knowledge as ways of informing and professionalizing practice.
The aims of this chapter and Chapter 2 are to lay a clear conceptual foundation for the key issues of educational leadership that form subsequent chapters of the book. Both chapters are centrally concerned with understanding the complexities, confusions and clarifications surrounding key issues of leadership research and practice in relation to schools. They are also geared to a realistic assessment of the robustness or otherwise of the knowledge base, and claims made by advocates and proponents of specific theories and ideas.
Chapter 1 is structured as follows. First, an explanation is offered as to why leadership has gained such prominence of late in relation to school performance. Second, the concept and meaning of leadership itself is explored. This is extended, third, to a contextualization of leadership within a complex and uncertain world. The chapter then moves, fourth, to argue that research on school leadership has often failed to deliver clear results and outcomes because the questions posed may have been impossible to answer. In other words, the wrong questions may have been asked. Assuming this to be the case, more appropriate questions are suggested to frame future development of the field. Fifth, a suggestion is made that analysis and interpretation of the effects of leadership would be enhanced if researchers and commentators looked beyond the present fixation with successful leadership and distinguished between outstanding, mediocre and poor leadership; indeed, this could and should form an important research theme in the future. Distinctions between different levels of principal effectiveness in particular contexts prompt the question as to what extent successful and less successful leaders prioritize different purposes, and have different values as well as dispositions. Finally, the issues raised in the chapter – especially the fast-changing environment of schools – suggest that present conceptualizations of leadership are limited. Accordingly the chapter concludes with a new model of leadership.
Explaining the Ascendancy of Leadership
Good leadership has become the mantra for successful organizations in general and schools in particular. How can the ascendancy of leadership be explained? A key factor in addressing this question lies in the notion of schools as high-performance organizations (HPOs). At each point in the development of HPOs, the importance of leadership has been amplified. Since the mid- to late 1990s, the phenomenon known as high performance theory has swept across the globe. Sergiovanni (2000) claims that the theory was popularized by best-selling books in the 1980s, such as Peters and Waterman’s (1982) In search of excellence: Lessons from America’s best-run companies. The HPO theory differs from other theories by de-emphasizing top-down hierarchies and tight job descriptions. A central tenet of HPO theory is decentralization and the empowerment of schools and teachers to make their own decisions. Clients, customers and users of the organization’s services or products are also empowered, with the intention of increasing organizational responsiveness, efficiency and accountability. Above all, the theory borrows from efficient business organizations a premise that the way to get control is to connect people to standards rather than to bureaucratic rules or to procedural job descriptions and tasks. The standards tend to be seen in education (as in other public services) as ‘the one best system’ of outcomes – often measured by national high stakes standardized testing – that apply to all students, teachers and communities. Schools are free to decide the processes of achieving the outcomes or standards. Principals, teachers and parents are enabled to organize schools and make decisions about how they will meet the standards set by governments and reinforced by parental (voter) expectations. Data are then collected to determine how well teachers and schools are doing and to figure out ways to continuously improve their performance. The principle of community members and parents establishing their own schools and community services was taken a step further in the UK in 2010 with the election of a Conservative-led Coalition Government. David Cameron spoke of the ‘Big Society’ and the notion of groups of parents having the opportunity to set up their own schools, with community groups taking responsibility for local provision of social services, as in Sweden. With hindsight and taking a longer-term perspective, such moves are extensions to the concept of HPOs that started in the 1980s and 1990s. Critics and cynics argue that they coincide with increasing inability of governments to exercise effective control over organizations and services, particularly in times of austerity and cuts in public expenditure.
HPO theory – though emanating from modern business practice – has thus become pervasive in the public sectors of many countries, and connects with parallel trends and associated movements such as ‘managerialism’ and the New Public Management (NPM). Despite its drawbacks, HPO theory when applied in practice, in effect enables governments to exercise control over schools from a distance, by holding them to account for the standards achieved. On the surface, too, by appearing to leave the processes up to the schools and teachers themselves, there is an appeal to, and recognition of, teacher professional discretion in decision making, although critics argue this is illusory. Ball (2003), for instance, argues persuasively that teachers are caught up in a milieu of ‘performativity’ and ‘managerialism’ that prevents and diminishes their professionalism.
It is evident from the above account of HPOs and their associated trends that the centrality of leadership has been reinforced and amplified. The more governments push responsibility for performance down to the organization, the more they hold it to account for its achievements; and the more they have involved users, parents and consumers in influencing organizations, the greater has become the reliance of the organization on leadership to meet these multiple demands and expectations.
Schools are charged nowadays to deliver quickly and flexibly improved student learning outcomes year after year, in response to greater demands from government and parent expectations. Schools as traditional workplace organizations – featuring standardization, specialization and routine of work – are less relevant when twenty-first-century expectations demand that schools develop every child to their potential, and that students are prepared for a fast-changing global economy. New forms of work organization are needed. Stakeholders in schools as HPO workplaces increasingly focus on how to redesign their processes, methods, physical environment, and the technology and tools to enhance their work. Holistic organizational approaches (Dimmock, 2000) require flatter hierarchical structures, job rotation, self-responsible teams, multi-tasking and a greater involvement of lower-level members in decision making. Twenty-first-century workplaces in knowledge-based economies (KBEs) place a premium on investing in their human resources and supporting their technical and innovation skills as well as their social skills, since promoting good interpersonal relationships in the workplace is crucial to their success. This scenario is very different from the traditional Taylorist ways of organizing and running schools in the twentieth century. Leaders and leadership have thus become integral and central to the processes of transforming school (and other organizational) environments.
What does Leadership Mean?
Succinct definitions of leadership are usually partial and inadequate because the concept itself is complex, multi-dimensional and inseparable from the social and organizational context and conditions in which it operates. A typical definition of leadership sees it as an influence process over a group of individuals, workers or employees aimed at gaining their commitment to shared values and goals and subsequent goal achievement. Leithwood and Riehl (2005) define leadership as ‘the work of mobilizing and influencing others to articulate and achieve the school’s shared intentions and goals’ (p. 14). This latter definition takes us only so far, and in fact prompts further questions and multiple qualifications. For example, what kinds of influences and processes are at play, and what shapes them? How do leaders acquire and exercise these influence processes? Whose values are shared? What is meant by goal achievement? Rather than settle for short pithy definitions, many contemporary perspectives on leadership tend to emphasize its complexity, comprehensiveness and eclecticism. These more elaborate clarifications identify sets of conditions for, or propositions about, leadership. Leithwood and Riehl (2005, pp. 13–14), for instance, go on to identify five conditions for leadership as follows:
- Leadership exists within social relationships and serves social ends – leadership is primarily a set of group-oriented processes.
- Leadership involves purpose and direction – without pre-empting from where the group goals originate (from leader, followers or elsewhere), it is leadership to develop and champion group goals.
- Leadership is an influence process – such influence may be direct or indirect, and focused on either specific or more broadly based issues and problems.
- Leadership is a function – that is, it is a set of functions that may not be confined just to those in formal leadership positions; it may thus be exercised informally by people who do not occupy formal leadership positions, but who have a proclivity to exercise it.
- Leadership is contextual and contingent – most contemporary perspectives of leadership suggest there is no one best way of exercising it for all contexts; moreover, appropriate leadership responses depend inter alia on the nature of the organization, the goals pursued, individuals involved, time frames and characteristics of the leaders themselves.
It is helpful therefore to combine shorter, more succinct, reductionist definitions of the concept to capture the essence of the process but little more, with sets of propositions or conditions that are more comprehensive, informative and contextual. My preferred succinct definition of leadership is as follows:
Leadership is a social influence process guided by a moral purpose with the aim of building capacity by optimizing available resources towards the achievement of shared goals.
School Leadership in a Complex World
Most contemporary perspectives on leadership view it as a complex interactive social process. As Glatter (2004) states, ‘leadership is seen as embedded in relationships, context and task performance and operating in conditions of complexity and ambiguity’ (p. 215). Hartley and Hinksman (2003) argue that
the attributes (in leaders) that this conception implies, namely, the ability to live with uncertainty and learn from mistakes, agility, adaptability, preparedness to distribute leadership, work across boundaries and build trusting relationships – are likely to become even more important in future.
(p. 48)
Since the tasks and skills associated with leadership are thus forever changing, the concept itself is continually shifting and evolving. Notions of a knowledge-based economy and associated configurations of schools preparing young people for the changing workplace of the future imply dynamic changes in the nature and form of leadership itself.
That leaders are increasingly expected to exercise leadership in ever more uncertain and unpredictable situations has led some to link leadership with complexity theory (Clarke, 2003; Morrison, 2002). On the one hand this raises the spectre not only of how leaders should approach their work, but of how they may best be prepared and trained for such turbulent environments. However, when we observe schools and schooling processes, their overriding features – even today – are regimentation, structure and predictability. If we connect these two apparently contradictory phenomena, we might argue that a prime task of leaders, especially senior leaders and principals, is to create schools that engage with change conditions and with the task of preparing young people for an uncertain world, but do so through an education that provides individual and personal resilience and stability. This line of argument – while not denying that schools need to be responsive to the complex and uncertain environment – foregrounds an important function of leadership responsibility, namely to create schools that are safe and secure learning environments, with trusting relationships and curricula that emphasize stable sets of values for young people to cope better with the fast-changing social and economic world outside school. This, after all, is a compelling reason why so many parents favour faith or religious schools for their children.
Asking the Right Questions about Leadership
Despite the topicality and generally acknowledged importance of leadership as a field of practice, theory and research, it remains an elusive concept, with no dominant paradigms for studying it, and little agreement about the best strategies for developing and exercising it. Could it be, as Hackman and Wageman (2007) argue, that leadership scholars have pursued questions that have no general answers? One might also posit that besides the pursuit of such questions and the fixation with generalization, much of the research and writing on leadership has failed to make subtle yet important distinctions. So what are the misguided questions we may have been asking, and which questions should we have been addressing? The following discussion elaborates on some of these.
We Have Asked, Do Leaders Really Make a Difference? We Should Have Asked, Under What Conditions is Leadership Influential?
As Hackman and Wageman (2007) argue, the long-standing debate between leader-centric and structural/situational explanations of collective performance will probably never be resolved. This is because we seek answers to the wrong question. These authors argue that the right question is: How can we distinguish – conceptually and empirically – the conditions and circumstances in which leaders’ actions are highly consequential for system performance from those in which leaders’ behaviours and decisions make essentially no difference?
This is a critical question, the more so since it goes against the grain of contemporary thinking and modern-day media and social hype. Leaders are assumed to make the important difference. They are sometimes paid enormous salaries, perhaps less so when their responsibilities and workloads are taken into account. When a national football team fails at the World Cup, it is usually the manager (not the players) who takes the blame. When BP had a catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, it was the chief executive – who had come into office three years previously and made safety his priority – who was replaced. There is a tendency today to view the leader as the dominant infl...
