Political Philosophy, Educational Administration and Educative Leadership

Reynold Macpherson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415713313
• eBook ISBN: 9781134678259
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this book Reynold Macpherson initiates a politically-critical theory of educative leadership as a fresh line of inquiry in the practice, research and theory of educational administration and educational leadership.

Divided into four parts, the book introduces the sub-discipline of political philosophy to the field of educational administration, management and leadership. It does this by clarifying the knowledge domain of each and identifying how four political ideologies, specifically pragmatism, communitarianism, communicative rationalism and egalitarian liberalism, have primarily informed and surreptitiously provided contestable justifications for power in the development of practice, research and theory in the field of study.

The book goes on to offer three case studies illustrating how political philosophy can be used to interpret how people become leaders and administrators of educational institutions and systems. Additional case studies then demonstrate how crises in governance in educational institutions and systems can be analyzed and improvements made using the tools of political philosophy. The final part uses the sub-discipline to critique the author's decades of research into educative leadership, and concludes the book by both establishing the relativity of politically-critical critique and the ideology it favours; neo-pragmatism.

Political Philosophy, Educational Administration and Educative Leadership will provide practitioners, researchers and theorists in educational administration, management and leadership with a deeper appreciation of power by formally introducing them to the assumptions, limits and tools of political philosophy.

Part I

Introducing political philosophy to educational administration

1 Political philosophy

The person who wishes not to be troubled by politics and to be left alone finds himself an unwitting ally of those to whom politics is a troublesome obstacle to their well-meant intentions to leave nothing alone … the establishing of political order is not just any order at all; it marks the birth, or the recognition, of freedom. For politics represents at least some tolerance of differing truths, some recognition that government is possible, indeed best conducted, amid the open canvassing of rival interests. Politics are the public actions of free men. Freedom is the privacy of men from public action.

(Crick, 1982, pp. 16, 18)

If politics is to be the guarantor of freedom, then political philosophy is needed to guarantee the quality of politics. Political philosophy is a subdiscipline of political science, itself a social science discipline. It is an activity. It is thinking about how we think about political analysis. It is meta-analysis that focuses on how we understand and evaluate the nature, structures and the use and abuse of power.

Given that leaders hold the levers of power in education, such as the distribution of responsibility, information and communication systems and even how an organization is conceived, it follows that such politically critical analysis should be central to scholarship in educational administration. This has not been the case. However, there is considerable evidence to suggest that political philosophy has already had a largely unrealized, growing and major potential role in the growth of knowledge about educational administration.

To be sustained, these introductory claims require relevant definitions and a summary of the history and conceptual domain of political philosophy; the purpose of this chapter. They also require a brief history of the conceptual domain of educational administration to interpret the growth of knowledge related to politics in education, the remit of Chapter 2. The aim of these introductory chapters in Part 1 is to indicate the potential of political philosophy regarding the use and legitimacy of power and political structures and processes in education. In Chapters 3 and 4, I define and introduce the roles played by pragmatism, communitarianism, communicative rationalism and egalitarian liberalism in the growth of knowledge about educational administration. The first four chapters composing Part 1 culminate into two general propositions:

• The ideological controversies in the theory and practice of educational administration could be attended to much more effectively than in the past by engaging in political philosophy.

• Given the significant agency of educational administrators in the politics of organizations, the growth of knowledge in the field should be enhanced by the systematic development of politically critical practice, research and theory about educative leadership.

Part 2 consists of chapters that explore these two propositions using case studies of becoming an educational administrator in very different jurisdictions and organizations I was once familiar with. The three chapters of Part 3 are all cases where the legitimacy of the distribution of power was challenged, again in settings where I was engaged. The two chapters in Part 4 build on a prior practical theory of educative leadership to suggest an additional line of inquiry that employs political philosophy to understand and evaluate leadership and administrative services in education.

At this point, it is important to define the key term of this text, namely power, hopefully to avoid confusion later. At its simplest, power in educational settings is the capacity to guide the actions of others. And the ethical use of such power is to be evaluated against a meta-value of learning. When this capacity is perceived as appropriate and effective in its cultural or organizational context, it is regarded as legitimate positional power and endowed with authority. When power is regarded as lacking in legitimacy and authority, it tends to be described as arbitrary, unjust or evil, and becomes contestable.

Power can be directional in effect depending on the nature of the social system or organization. Where it is exercised through hierarchy, it is termed downward power. Where subordinates have influence over their superordinates, it is held to be upward power. Power can be exercised by recourse to coercion, which is to use force or the threat of force, or to influence people by using various forms of persuasion, including manipulation (Handy, 1976).

There are many potential sources of power in social and political settings. Power may be held due to delegated authority, law, tradition, electoral mandate, material wealth, social class or standing (mana), exchangeable resources (e.g., ascribed influence, money, property, food, etc.), charisma, celebrity status, persuasion (direct, indirect, or subliminal), knowledge (expertize, granted or withheld, shared or secret), moral and religious persuasion, coercive force and social and interpersonal dynamics. These sources have been summarized in many different ways.

A classic study proposed that the sources of power stem either from personality or leadership, property or wealth, or organization (Galbraith, 1983). It also suggested three types of power: compensatory power in which influence is purchased; condign power in which influence is achieved by making the alternative sufficiently painful; and conditioned power in which influence is gained by persuasion.

Power strategies and tactics have led to another set of definitions. A classic summary of the capacity to implement changes in human systems (Chin & Benne, 1984) employed three categories; empirical or rational, normative or re-educative and power or coercive strategies. Tactics used every day in social and political settings can include the manipulation of rewards, threats and information, including bullying, demanding, disengaging, evading humor, inspiring, negotiating, socializing and supplicating.

These power tactics in interpersonal relationships have been described (French & Raven, 1959) on three dimensions: softness or hardness, rationality or nonrationality, and unilateral or bilateral tactics. Whereas soft tactics are indirect and interpersonal and exploit a relationship, hard tactics tend to be direct, be harsh, be forceful and seek specific outcomes. Rational tactics make heavy use of reasoned examples, evidence and logic and wise judgment, whereas nonrational tactics seek to persuade using the emotions, such a put downs, bargaining, evasions and misinformation. Unilateral tactics rely on the passivity or ignorance of those to be persuaded, such as the use of edicts, disengagement and fait accompli. Bilateral tactics, including collaboration and negotiation, can evoke reciprocity.

The power strategies and tactics used and resultant actions in interpersonal, wider group and organizational settings are also dependent on the wider contexts of time, group, organization and society (Foucault, 1980).

In situations where power relationships are relational and reciprocal, the outcomes usually reflect a fresh balance of power or a new equilibrium that indicates the shift in power currency (McCornack, 2009). In situations where power is motivated by a desire to gain prestige, honor and reputation, power shifts can lead to psychological consequences, such as altering the empathy gap in relationships, and lead to strategic responsibilities instead of social responsibilities (Handgraaf, Van Dijk, Vermunt, Wilke, & De Dreu, 2008).

It has been observed (French & Raven, 1959) that professional organizations tend to value expert power over referent power, reward power and coercive power, all of which tend to suffer from diminishing returns over time and offend collegial norms. Even in situations where powers are socially constructed and deconstructed relatively freely, such as in voluntary and professional groups, the charismatic and interpersonal power of individuals to attract loyalty from followers, referent power, tends to be mediated or reinforced by the wider norms of host organizations, polities and societies, and their histories (Foucault, 1980). Because power is both the means of resolving conflicts of interest and determining who wins scarce resources over time, the analysis of sources of power in organizations has increasingly given equal weight to understanding the conditions for current power relations and to the historical forces that shaped the setting in which political actions are played out.

To illustrate the scope of comprehensive political analysis in complex organizations, Gareth Morgan argued (1986, pp. 158–185) that there are at least 14 important sources of power that can be used to shape the dynamics of organizational life: formal authority; control of scarce resources; use of organizational structures, rules and regulations; control of decision processes; control of knowledge and information; control of boundaries; ability to cope with uncertainty; control of technology; interpersonal alliances and networks; control of counterorganizations; symbolism and the management of meaning; gender and the management of gender relations; structural factors that define the stage of action; and the power that one already has.

Further, Morgan (1986, pp. 188–189) proposed that the political analysis of organizations could treat them as mini-states by substituting the relationship between individual and society with the relationship between individual and organization. He used unitary, pluralist and radical views of organizations to contrast how interests, conflict and power would be conceptualized from these perspectives. A unitary view or organization would ignore the role of power in organizational life, with authority, leadership and control used to describe the managerial prerogative of guiding the organization toward the achievement of common interests. A pluralist view would regard power as a crucial variable through which conflicts of interest are alleviated and resolved, with the organization seen as a plurality of power holders drawing their power from different mixes of sources. The radical view would regard power as a key feature of organization, yet unevenly distributed along class divisions, reflecting power relations in society, and closely linked to the wider processes of social control (e.g., control of economic power, the legal system and education).

Space precludes any further attention to the arts of political analysis apart from indicating below some of the tools introduced from political science into the research and theory of educational administration.

Let us now turn to the little elephant in the room whose name is political philosophy. A search of the full text of all articles published in the leading research journal of our field, the Educational Administration Quarterly, over 43 years found references to the subdiscipline in seven articles, most made in passing. We might hope that things will be very different in the next 43 years.

To examine the little beast in context, let us assume that the room represented by the Educational Administration Quarterly, educational administration, is a hybrid field of practice, research and theory that has been attempting to blend the more trustworthy ideas from education and administration through scholarship. Definitions are important to avoid confusion.

By scholarship, I mean the process of advancing knowledge through (1) discovery (disciplined investigation that creates new ideas and understandings, adding to the stock of knowledge), (2) integration (making connections across fields, in a disciplined way, to interpret, draw together and bring new insights to original ideas), (3) application (the responsible and rigorous application of knowledge to problems of consequence to people, institutions and peoples) and (4) teaching (disciplined interaction between learners and teachers intended to build skills, understandings and dispositions, and to interrogate knowledge; (Boyer 1990, pp. 16, 18).

By philosophy, I mean “thinking about thinking” in three ways; “rationally critical thinking in a more or less systematic kind about the general nature of the world (metaphysics or theory) … the justification for belief (epistemology or theory of knowledge) … and the conduct of life (ethics or theory of value)” (Honderich, 2005, p. 205).

These definitions indicate four conditions that are crucial to the organized growth of relatively trustworthy knowledge about educational administration through scholarship. The first is methodical movement toward a rationally critical account of the general nature of the field. Any rationally critical account must remain open to and subject to methodical correction—hence this book and, hopefully, subsequent refutation and improvement.

The second condition is a persuasive process of arbitrating knowledge claims in the field. The approach most convincing to me is that proposed by Evers and Lakomski (1991); a nonfoundational and coherentist epistemology. I only have two quibbles; they understate their apparent support for neopragmatism over pragmatism and favor metaphysical naturalism over the accommodation of plural perceptions of social reality in organizations, key issues I come back to below.

The third condition is a sophisticated method of evaluating the rightness of practice in the field. This was well advanced in a general sense by Chris Hodgkinson (1978, 1981, 1983, 1991), and although there are some technical issues yet to be fully resolved (Bates, 2006, p. 142; Evers, 1985; Hodgkinson, 1986), I focus solely on the use of political philosophy in educational administration to evaluate and improve the quality of political practice.

The fourth condition is an ongoing integration of educational and administrative theories and practices. This has been under active management by the editors of the Educational Administration Quarterly who, for example, have long understood that “knowledge and knowledge production are historically and culturally situated” (Pounder & Johnson, 2007, p. 270). They and others have facilitated an international scholarship of integration, as exemplified by the special edition of the Journal of Educational Administration and History edited by Peter Ribbins (2006), the themed issues of the Educational Administration Quarterly in more recent decades and the recent 40th anniversary edition of the Educational Management Administration and Leadership edited by Tony Bush and Megan Crawford (2012b). Because these outlets are among the leading American and British academic research journals of the field, this and the next chapter introduce political philosophy as a means of initiating significant and ongoing corrections to the first condition, often by reference to these special editions.

The correction proposed to the traditional rationally critical account of educational administration can begin with Hodgkinson's axiom that “power is the first term in the administrative lexicon” (1978, p. 217). If this is a reasonable axiom, and my experience and research provided a plethora of supportive examples, it follows that we need an orderly approach to “thinking about our thinking” concerning power, so that we can improve the justifications we use for the use of power, politics and current political arrangements in education at team, institution and system levels.

Without this capacity we can't know what we do with our powers, we can't know what is morally reasonable, and even more important, we can't know how to improve our use of power. If power is the first term and moral dilemmas over power are at the heart of administrative practice, then political philosophy is needed to help create appropriate answers about how we might think more effectively about power. The retarded role of political philosophy in the field has limited its capacity to evaluate justifications for the politics of educational administration in practice. In my time, it was only with Thom Greenfield's (1975) iconoclastic questions did the practices of leaders and the structures they created and sustained in educational organizations begin to be uncovered and questioned using the tools of interpretive and critical sociology. However, before we explore this exciting watershed, we need greater clarity on key terms.

The term political philosophy has two meanings in common discourse that are quite different and often confused. It is, technically, the branch of philosophy concerned with the ethics of and justification for political infrastructure and processes. It is often, however, used informally to refer to a personal credo or ideology that is being used to justify or ingratiate forms of political action or structures. This is most unfortunate. Political philosophy is something you do or you don't do. Rebranding a political ideology, a belief system, as a political philosophy, is verbal trickery and implies that it carries a justification with it. Not so.

The formal meaning, which is limited to a phi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Research in Educational Leadership series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedications
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Part I Introducing political philosophy to educational administration
• Part II Case studies of becoming an educational leader
• Part III Case studies of political crises in educational institutions and systems
• Part IV Questioning and suggesting theory
• References
• Index