This article considers distributed leadership in the context of the extensive literature on post-bureaucratic organisations. It suggests that both distributed leadership and bureaucracy are ideal types. It outlines the development of bureaucracy as an organisational form, challenges the often-stereotypical criticisms that have damned the theory and questions the withdrawal of the field of educational leadership from constructive engagement. It explores the notion that bureaucracy is conceived as a means of shaping and containing power in a way that is sophisticated and has developed considerably since Weber’s original idea. The article also outlines the development of distributed leadership and critiques the assertion that it offers a means of redistributing power, arguing that there is little evidence that this happens in any reliable way. It suggests that such reliance is often based on a limited zero-sum concept of power and a sanitised view of staff and organisations. It concludes that bureaucracy offers a more realistic and deeper engagement with issues of power, and that its rejection, except as a butt of criticism, deliberately ignores an enduring and important aspect of leading organisations. It concludes that educational leaders need to engage positively with bureaucracy if they are to transform education.
Policy in England increasingly stresses the importance of enjoyment in education, both as a right in itself and as an essential support for learning. This paper draws on a large national dataset to focus on the perspective of young people aged 14–19 in England in 2007–2008. It considers alternative ways in which enjoyment and learning might be conceptualised. It analyses the evidence from young people to explore their experience of enjoyment at school or college and their perception of its relationship to learning. It concludes that the form of enjoyment most strongly perceived as enmeshed with learning is the least commonly experienced; and that policy that refers to ‘enjoyment’ as a general and undefined term fails to distinguish particular affective states that may or may not be supportive of learning.
Internationalization has attained great significance in Higher Education, driven by both educational philosophy and commercial imperatives. Cultural change is implied as both a related process and as a goal. The article considers the multifaceted ways in which culture might be conceived and linked to different orientations to internationalization. The metaphor of ecology is used to highlight the dilemmas faced by leaders attempting to use cultural exchange as a market product while they may be simultaneously eroding the distinctiveness of cultures on which such a strategy relies. The short termism of humans in general and business in particular is argued to militate against action to protect cultural assets other than one’s own. The article suggests considered and careful leadership of internationalization, preserving distinctiveness and promoting equality among cultures is in the long term commercial interest of universities, as well as offering individual and societal benefits.
Diversity has become a ubiquitous term within education, often harnessed with a second concept, that of inclusion. Despite heightened interest, theorists in education leadership have remained relatively uninterested in multiple aspects of identity and diversity. This article explores the epistemological and methodological implications of moving forward by considering the symbiosis of how diversity is theorised and researched, and how this relates to existing and future leadership power structures. It suggests that both theory and methodology are currently impoverished and a possible remedy of adopting theoretical and methodological interdisciplinarity. It also explores the structural impediments to progress in the orientation of researchers, practitioners, and those who mandate qualifications and fund research. Finally, it suggests that a concerted and determined effort at multiple levels to move diversity from the periphery to the centre might stand some chance of denting the embedded and disabling exclusion which currently prevails. So what are we talking about?This article contributes to the theoretical field of leadership and diversity by considering the symbiosis of how diversity is theorised and researched, and how this relates to existing and future leadership power structures. It suggests theoretical and methodological implications for educational leadership and management (ELM) research and particularly the need to adopt a theoretical and methodological interdisciplinarity.Diversity has become a ubiquitous term within education, often harnessed with a second concept, that of inclusion, and appears frequently in current policy and practice discourses. Justification for such a focus ranges from those who argue that historically educators have an enduring commitment to issues of diversity and equity, primarily focused on learners but also in relation to staff (Blair et al. 1998;Bush and Middlewood 1997), and those who argue that a current increased interest in diversity relates to a relatively new challenge (Lorbiecki and Jack 2000;Morrison, Lumby, and Sood 2006;Osler 2006). The latter perspective suggests that the contours of the world are metamorphosing; that global tides of people, ideas and values are qualitatively changing the environment of many schools, colleges and universities, and so changing the nature of the task in hand. The global incursion of the distant is matched by pressure from divergent ideas close at hand, evident in the increasingly heterogeneous local context. Scholte (2000, 170Á1) asserts that previously clear
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