Foucault and Educational Leadership

Disciplining the Principal

Richard Niesche

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415571708
• eBook ISBN: 9781136739903
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

School principals are increasingly working in an environment of work intensification, high stakes testing, accountability pressures and increased managerialism. Rather than searching for the latest leadership fad or best practice model, this book suggests that in order to better understand these pressures, the work of educational leadership requires more sophisticated theorisation of these practices. In so doing, the book draws upon the work of Michel Foucault to provoke new thought into how the principalship is lived and 'disciplined' in ways that produce both contradictions and tensions for school principals. Amidst claims of a shortage of applicants for principal positions in a number of Western countries, what is required are more sophisticated and nuanced tools with which to understand the pressures and constraints that face principals in their work on a daily basis. This book provides a powerful example of theory working through practice to move beyond traditional approaches to school leadership.

Key features of the book:

• provides a well theorised analysis of leadership practices
• acknowledges the messy reality of life for school principals
• provides key insights to the 'real' work that principals undertake every day
• examines the production of principals' subjectivities in education, foregrounding issues of gender and race
• includes the principals' voices through rich interview data.

The book will be of significant interest to principals and those working and researching in educational leadership, including researchers in the field and academics who teach into educational leadership and administration courses. The book will also be of great interest to those working with the ideas of Foucault in education.

1 Introduction

My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do.

(Foucault, 2000a, p. 256)

If you ask most people what they think of when they hear the word leadership, they will typically relate stories of exceptional individuals with a variety of characteristics or attributes that have brought about a transformation in a particular field. In both the popular media and academic literature, studies of leadership are similarly dominated by studies of ‘great’ individuals and the repetitious search for a blueprint of competences, capabilities and models that can be implemented to achieve similar results (Wood & Case, 2006). If we need any reminding that, in fact, we haven't moved away from such crude understandings of leadership, one only need look into recent government policy documents outlining leadership frameworks. In countries such as the US, the UK and Australia, government policy directives typically outline leadership approaches that require transformational, charismatic, heroic models of leadership. For instance, in the UK, documents such as the National Standards for Headteachers (DfES, 2004) and bodies such as the National College for School Leadership (NCSL) not only privilege ‘top-down’ notions of leadership but are also involved in what Peter Gronn calls ‘designer leadership’ (Gronn, 2003a).

Similarly, in the state of Queensland, Australia, the Leadership Matters framework and technical paper, developed by the state education authorities (Education Queensland, 2005, 2006), cite the following capabilities as necessary for quality leadership: ‘courage, tough mindedness, intuition, passion, self-confidence, optimism, wisdom’ (2005, p. 14). What is particularly alarming here is the similarity of these capabilities with the characteristics of sound battle command in Sun Tzu's The Art of War from around 600 BC. For example, Sun Tzu states, ‘By command I mean the general's qualities of wisdom, sincerity, humanity, courage, and strictness’ (2005, p. 93). Perhaps our understanding of this complex phenomenon called ‘leadership’ has not come as far as we'd like to think.

The problem with many of these frameworks of leadership is that they not only fail to acknowledge much of the work that is being done by numerous leaders across a range of areas, but also construct leadership as something that exists as ‘exceptional practice’ and results in a normalising of leadership into models dominated by stories of heroic endeavours. Drawing on Foucault's quotation above, such concepts of leadership are ‘dangerous’ and need continual problematising and questioning. Just as a new fad of leadership comes around, there is new work to do to unmask the power relations that ascribe particular meanings to the work of leaders and, the focus in this book, school principals.

In the current educational climate of Western countries such as the UK, the US and Australia, school leaders are finding themselves increasingly confronted by governance structures that are heavily based upon principles of high-stakes accountability, competition, work intensification and manageri-alism (Anderson, 2009; Thomson, 2009). In response to such demands placed upon school leaders, the field of educational leadership has predominantly been preoccupied with research into exploring models of ‘best practice’. Without doubt educational leadership is a key aspect of schooling, however, the normative assumptions underlying many of these traditional approaches to leadership at best largely ignore the complex and messy reality of the day-to-day work of school leaders and at worst normalise leaders into highly gendered, racially stereotyped ‘hero’ paradigms. As a result of this constant search for an idealistic model, some have become disillusioned with studies of leadership (Sinclair, 2007), and others have questioned the futility of studies of exceptional leaders for the ‘right’ model (Gronn, 2003a). Pat Thomson has also recently provided a thorough and sobering look into the ‘risky business’ of school headship in the UK (Thomson, 2009). Such examinations that provide necessary illumination into the difficulties faced by school leaders are still too rare in the field.

In order to better understand the complexities of school leadership, there is a need to cast a wider theoretical net in order to analyse the multitude of challenges that face many school principals. In this book I use the work of Michel Foucault to provoke new thought into how the principalship is lived and ‘disciplined’ in ways that produce both contradictions and tensions for school principals. If, indeed, the principal is an essential ingredient for effective school improvement and the development of sound teaching and learning environments, then more insights are needed into the work that principals are required to do, not from the perspective of job competences, capabilities or job requirements but their daily work practices themselves. ¹

Throughout this book I draw upon the examples of the work practices of two white, female school principals of Indigenous schools in Australia. These choices indicate a complex intersectionality of the issues of leadership, gender and race that provide fertile ground for examining the complexities of daily life for school principals. The two case studies have been chosen to allow for a richness of data through the use of portraiture and the voices of the two principals in telling their stories. However, it is not their life stories that I share. Not that these do not play an important role in their work. They do. Rather, it is an examination of their work practices that I use to illustrate the positioning of these women within a range of power relations and discursive regimes. These portraits will, hopefully, resonate with the experiences of a range of school leaders, not just women leaders or principals of Indigenous schools. Instead, more important is the exploration of principals' work practices through a range of discursive regimes evident across numerous contexts that construct school principals as particular subjects.

To do this I draw upon Foucault's notion of genealogy, as well as his concepts of disciplinary power, governmentality and ethics. It is through these concepts that I interpret these principals’ work practices and demonstrate the multiple subjectivities of these principals. School principals are constructed as subjects through school leadership and management discourses (Lingard et al., 2003) and I aim to show that these ‘theories’ of leadership and management fail to adequately recognise and explain the positioning of these principals in the complex arrangements existing in the two case studies.

Foucault's work is important for providing an alternative way of understanding principals’ work through examining educational leadership from the level of the principals’ practices themselves in specific, local contexts. I argue against using over-arching theories in an attempt to explain and understand what goes on in schools. It is through their work practices and the power relations invested in these actions that the principal is made a subject. Progressively through the book I provide a rich tapestry of these principals’ experiences of working in their respective schools and explore both the constraints and possibilities for action that occur for these principals.

While the use of Foucault has been extensive in educational research generally,² there has been very little use of his work specifically in the field of educational leadership. However, Foucault's work can be valuable for providing fresh insights into our understandings of principals’ work and principals’ subjectivities. By examining the principal as a site of power relations and exploring principal subjectivities, it becomes possible to find the cracks and spaces in which principals are able to operate within normalising discursive regimes such as leadership frameworks and self-management. It is then a further aim in this book to explore how principals may be able to use these spaces and avenues to act within a variety of disciplinary regimes to influence their daily work practices and, in turn, the outcomes of their students.

Research context

It is my aim that this book is read as much a text drawing on empirical research as a theoretical text. There is a huge corpus of literature discussing Foucault and his work across numerous disciplines, and education is no exception. However, there is still a need for research that ‘uses’ Foucault rather than discusses Foucault. Sawicki (1991) argues for the need to do more genealogies and while I do not regard this book as a genealogy of leadership per se (and this still needs to be done, in my opinion), it is a book that uses a number of Foucault's concepts through which to analyse and make sense of empirical research. This is why I use the term ‘toolkit’ from which I take out particular Foucauldian concepts to use at my disposal. As Foucault states:

I would like my books to be a kind of tool-box which others can rummage through to find a tool which they can use however they wish in their own area … I would like the little volume that I want to write on disciplinary systems to be useful to an educator, a warden, a magistrate, a conscientious objector. I don't write for an audience, I write for users, not readers.

(Foucault, 1994, pp. 523–524)

This book is not designed to be a blueprint for how research using Foucault should be conducted. This book is an example of one of numerous possibilities for employing Foucault's work to understand, analyse and interpret how school principals undertake their work. Methodologically this book draws upon the notions of Foucauldian genealogy and Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot's concept of portraiture (1983; and with Jessica Hoffman Davis, 1997), the first of which I explain in the next section.

Genealogy

This book is in part a study of the principal; more specifically, a ‘genealogical reading’ of the principal's work. It is my aim here to take up Foucault's challenge of writing genealogies: to use his analytical tools and to use genealogy as a method of analysis. For Foucault, ‘Genealogy is a form of research that is aimed at activating “subjugated” historical knowledge, that is, knowledge which has been rejected by mainstream knowledge, or which is too local and specific to be deemed of any importance’ (O'Farrell, 2005, p. 68).

It is this subjugated level of knowledge that I highlight using elements of Foucault's genealogy. That is, knowledges that exist at the local and specific level which cannot be explained or understood by mainstream discourses of leadership and management. It is at this level where power/knowledge operates, where the division between true and false exists (O'Farrell, 2005). Genealogy questions the truth that is claimed by ‘scientific’ discourses of leadership and management. Genealogy entails a questioning of our existence, that is, an historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves as subjects (Bernauer & Mahon, 2005). Foucault states that ‘beneath what science knows about itself is something that it doesn't know’, and through genealogy we can identify ‘its history, its becoming, its periods and accidents’ (Foucault, 1996, p. 54). Thus, Foucault's notion of genealogy is primarily concerned with tracing the descent of particular discourses, the emergence of different interpretations that serve to dissolve the unity of the subject (Foucault, 1977a). The playful analogy by Kendall and Wickham perhaps provides a simpler way of understanding what it is that Foucault's notion of genealogy aims to do. They claim that genealogy is:

A methodological device with the same effect as a precocious child at a dinner party: genealogy makes the older guests at the table of intellectual analysis feel decidedly uncomfortable by pointing out things about their origins and functions that they would rather remain hidden.

(Kendall & Wickham, 1999, p. 29)

Central to the notion of genealogy are the different modalities of power (Davidson, 2005) and the way that the relationship between power and knowledge produces particular subjectivities for these school principals. The specificities of power relations in local settings are central themes of this approach. Others have used the notion of a policy genealogy (Gale, 2001) to seek out discontinuities in the emergence of certain policy frameworks to problematise the valorisation of certain policies and discourses rather than viewing them in a continuous sequential fashion. Therefore, I undertake in this book a reading of the principal's role and practices in these two schools that targets the emergence of the principal as a discursive construct within systems and policy that through its own limitations cannot acknowledge other conditions of possibility. This use of ‘genealogy as critique’ (Visker, 1995) provides a useful method of analysis of the modern power–knowledge mechanisms of subjectivity of the principal that have emerged under systems of self-governance.

Foucault's analysis of a ‘regime of practices’ is central to this process. I examine how the relations of power invested in policies of self-governance are rationalised, how the discursive practices and techniques are affected upon, through and by principals. This is not to focus on the institution of schooling itself but those regimes of practices, ‘practices being understood as places where what is said and what is done, rules imposed and reasons given, the planned and the taken for granted meet and interconnect’ (Foucault, 1991a, p. 75). It is these practices that discipline principals and construct them as subjects in these discursive regimes. Practices such as management teams, shared governance councils, parent involvement models (Anderson and Grinberg, 1998), alongside principal competence tables, school effectiveness and performance examinations all serve as disciplinary practices that attempt to control actions carried out in schools. These governmentalities all attempt to ‘know’ the principals, to prescribe a certain truth to their work and their being, and, as such, are both disciplining and self-forming. Anderson and Grinberg further argue that empowerment also needs to be seen as a disciplinary practice that ‘embodies forms of unobtrusive control or non-overt control in contemporary organisations in which control no longer appears to come from outside the organisational members’ sphere of activity’ (1998, p. 337). It is this notion of ‘steering at a distance’ (Ball, 1994) inherent in models of self-governance that subjectifies principals through methods of accountability, while governments are seen to have less of a direct role. Therefore, I analyse the self-forming practices that principals must employ through self-governance by studying the ‘interplay between a code that governs ways of doing things and a production of true discourses that served to found, justify and provide reasons and principles for these ways of doing things’ (Foucault, 1991a, p. 79). A genealogical approach to leadership and management is about retracing specific ways of doing and knowing, to identify how particular assumptions work together and change over time. Typically, mainstream historical approaches tend to look at the development of policies and changes over whole periods of time with little examination of the multitude of specific and often minute events through which these discourses and policies are formed.

The difficulty in employing the work of Foucault is that there is no such thing as a Foucauldian theory or methodology (Tamboukou & Ball, 2003). It is not my aim to search for a singular, best perspective as this would be against the intent of Foucault's work, but to examine the discursive regime of practices of self-governance of the principal through a multifarious range of methodologies. I do not aim to improve current best practice in educational administration and leadership, but rather to analyse the practices and discourses that create principals as subjects particularly under recent educational reforms to self-governance. It is through these examinations that it may be possible to understand the subject formations of principals within regimes of self-governance opening up lines of inquiry into the possibilities and constraints for action.

These representations of principals’ practices are all saturated in discourses, histories, biographies, local narratives and situated perspectives (Thomson, 2001). It is important to note that these representations are not simply reflections of reality. They are constructions with the intention of ‘developing contestatory political and public spaces which open up in relation to existing systems of governance’ (Yeatman, 1994, p. ix). For example, views such as that of self-governance as a disciplinary practice that I present in Chapter 4 are but one of many representations of the practices of self-governance.

I have used multiple methods of gathering data for the purposes of creating this in-depth portraiture of the schools and their principals, not so much as a means of triangulation but as providing a ‘venue’ for dialogue between the differing approaches, or that of ‘building bridges’ (Miller, 1997, p. 25). Specifically I use a comparative case study method incorporating qualitative measures such as interviews with the principals, teachers, school staff and community members; observations of the principals at work; and school and government document analyses. For this book I use Yin's definition of a case study: ‘A case study is an empirical inquiry that investigates a contemporary phenomenon within its real life context, especially when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident’ (Yin, 2003, p. 13).

The research project consisted of case studies of two Indigenous schools and their principals over a period of 18 months. The research findings have been reflexively interpreted in relation to the broad literature on educational leadership and self-governance using the work of Michel Foucault. More specifically, I have analysed the data through the lens of the Foucauldian concepts of disciplinary power, governmentality and ethics. These concepts are used to undertake three different levels of analysis: the broader systemic level (governmentality), the school level (disciplinary power) and the individual (ethics). It is important to note, however, that the issues represented in these analysis chapters occur concurrently and are intertwi...

Table of contents

• Frontcover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 A Foucauldian toolbox for educational leadership
• 3 Discourses of educational leadership
• 4 Disciplinary regimes under self- governance
• 5 Leading and managing as ethical work
• 6 ‘Doing’ leadership differently
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index