Leadership in Post-Compulsory Education

Marian Iszatt-White, Connor Graham, David Randall, Mark Rouncefield

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781441156181
• eBook ISBN:
  9781441132598
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The issue of 'leadership', the need for good, insightful and decisive leaders is a prominent theme in Education. Yet few can define exactly what leadership is. This book examines the phenomenon of leadership in post-compulsory education through the careful description and analysis of a long-term observational study of college principals at work. In contrast to other, more theoretical, attempts to understand leadership, this book develops an understanding of leadership by pointing to specific examples of what leaders actually do as they go about their everyday work of resolving organisational issues. Instead of presenting leaders as charismatic heroes this book investigates a number of familiar, routine, aspects of everyday leadership work: how leadership is 'performed'; the various technologies - email, documents, slide presentations - involved in leadership work; the everyday management of organisational personnel and meetings; and how success and failure is defined and understood by the leaders themselves. It concludes with some suggestions of what is learned from understanding leadership as everyday work and some 'cautionary tales' for those who would become educational leaders themselves.

Table of contents

• Foreword by Lynne Sedgmore CBE
• Acknowledgements
• About the Authors
• Introduction: The Practice of Leadership
• The Trouble with Leadership
• The Art of Purposeful Hanging Around: An Ethnomethodologically-Informed Ethnography
• Leadership as Mundane Work
• Leadership as Presentation, Production and Performance
• Technologies of Leadership: The Medium and the Message
• Leadership: Success and Failure
• Conclusion: Reflections and Cautionary Tales
• Notes
• References
• Index