Researcher/ Interviewer in intercultural context: a social intruder! "You just don"t understand" writes Deborah Tannen (1992) referring to women and men in conversation, across the gender divide but in a shared socio-cultural context. The question raised in this paper is how do people understand each other when they do not share common cultural experience?This query gains significance in the backdrop of growing emphasis on cross-cultural research in diverse fields of activity. The research imperatives and compulsions are changing. The research approach is changing from researching upon the other -"the insignificant deviant", to researching with the significant "different" to add to existing knowledge. The research needs are increasingly becoming outcome driven. For example, the educationists in the West would like to understand why and how learners in the East perform better in Maths as compared to their Western counterparts. The governments in multi-ethnic societies seek to enhance inclusion and participation of ethnic groups in education for national progress. The Americans need to find out how Japanese system produces cost-effective motorcars (Torrington 1994) and why their successful quality control (QC) circles fail to work in USA (Furukawa 1989). The multi-national enterprises are faced with internationalisation of policy and practices, and require explanations and resolutions of related issues in local contexts (Warner and Joynt 2003). The capitalist economies are astounded at the growth rate of the Chinese economy and wish to penetrate the secret. The need to gain knowledge of diverse phenomenon in other cultures is growing because of globalisation (Giddens 1993; Reeves 1995), communication explosion (Braun and Warner 2003), internationalisation of technology and economic universalism (Child 2003). This search for improved understanding in cross-cultural contexts has resulted in a corresponding high increase in cross-cultural studies. There is an abundance of cross-cultural research particularly in disciplines like communication studies (Bennet 1998) and business management (Warner and Joynt 2003). However, cross-cultural research in education is scarce (Dimmock 2002), particularly lacking in studies focusing on education policies, practices and management in poor and developing countries, which in majority of the cases happen to be nonWestern countries. This introduces a cultural dimension in educational research.Qualitative methodology, despite all the critiques, has emerged as the most commonly used approach in cross-cultural studies, particularly for exploring issues concerning education, sociology of education, and educational management and leadership. Interviewing, due to its ontological and epistemological relevance to the nature of crosscultural inquiries, is used extensively for data collection. There is abundant literature on
Ethnocentric concepts, theories and practices in education, predominantly embedded in western philosophy and values, tend to ignore the growing multicultural nature of educational institutions. This article draws attention to the knowledge gap in mainstream literature regarding diverse perspectives of educational leadership—an issue which is foreseen as gaining higher significance with the fast‐changing societal structures in Britain. Having worked as a Muslim woman educational leader/manager in higher education in an Islamic state for more than two decades, and now working at a British university, positioned as a non‐White woman Muslim, the author endorses the need to move beyond ethnocentrisms and to work towards developing complex theoretical constructs to reconceptualise educational leadership, drawing from perspectives held by diverse ethnic groups—students and communities. How learners from diverse philosophical and ethnic backgrounds conceive and perceive educational leadership, and how they receive it, is bound to interact with their learning experience and performance. This article briefly introduces leadership as a concept formulated in context. It presents philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of these conceptualisations from an Islamic perspective, and highlights the interplay between knowledge and leadership. The article deliberates how these discourses interact to formulate ‘educational leadership’ in Muslim societies, and explores the implications of these constructions with a focus on the British context, where Muslims are in a minority, pointing to the significance of understanding philosophical diversity for embracing population diversity.
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