Mapping the terrain of educational leadership and management in East Asia

Abstract

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to gain perspective on the extent to which the vision for knowledge production in East Asia set forth by Bajunid, Cheng, Hallinger, Walker, Dimmock and others almost 20 years ago has been fulfilled. The authors undertook an effort to map the terrain of knowledge production in educational leadership and management in East Asia since the year 2000. Their method of mapping this terrain involves the analysis of trends in publication of articles about and/or from East Asia in eight core educational leadership and management journals. Design/methodology/approach -The authors' methodology employed a descriptive, quantitative form of literature review. They identified a clearly delimited body of literature, comprised of all articles published about or from East Asia between 2000 and 2011 in eight core educational leadership and management journals. Then they employed a systematic search for information within that literature and analyzed trends across the studies. This allowed them to map the terrain of recent research on educational leadership and management within East Asia. Findings -The volume of knowledge production from East Asia between 2000 and 2011 consisted of less than 6 per cent of total output in the relevant journals. Although there was a discernible increase in the annual rate of publication over the course of the 12-year period, the authors treat the increase as relatively unimportant given the small volume. A substantial majority of the publications not only came from a few societies, but from a small number of universities. Citation analyses were highly consistent with all of the above trends, and reinforced a picture of limited impact.Research limitations/implications -The authors' study focused on a clearly delimited region, East Asia. Although they believe that the study may have implications for other regions of the developing world, they do not speculate on the extent of relevance. The authors intentionally limited their definition of the corpus of knowledge to a specific set of international refereed journals that are published in English. This ignores the potential contributions of conference papers, books, book chapters, research handbooks, domestic journals, and even other international journals in which educational leadership scholars publish. Originality/value -To the authors' knowledge, there have been no efforts undertaken to understand the nature of knowledge production in educational leadership and management in East Asia. When approaching this review in 2012, the authors were not under the illusion that the regional knowledge base would be either overly dense in terms of the concentration of studies within particular areas or broad in scope. However, future scholarship may be aided by this systematic assessment of the current knowledge base on educational leadership in the region.

Exploring features of highly productive research contexts in Asia: a comparison of knowledge production in educational leadership in Israel and Hong Kong

“…Findings from the review confirmed anecdotal observations made by scholars over the preceding 20 years (e.g., Bajunid, 1996;Cheng, 1995;Hallinger, 1995;Walker & Dimmock, 2002). More specifically, the research review yielded four key findings of relevance for this paper (Hallinger & Bryant, 2013b, 2013c. (1) The overall level of research output from Asia contained in these eight journals was low, representing only 4% of the total corpus published between 1995 and 2013.…”

“…With these same concerns in mind, we recently undertook research aimed at assessing patterns of knowledge production in educational leadership and management in Asia (Hallinger & Bryant, 2013). We reviewed the Asian literature published in eight of the key international, refereed educational leadership and management journals between 1995 and 2012 (Hallinger & Bryant, 2013b, 2013c. Findings from the review confirmed anecdotal observations made by scholars over the preceding 20 years (e.g., Bajunid, 1996;Cheng, 1995;Hallinger, 1995;Walker & Dimmock, 2002).…”

“…The rationale for selection of this particular subset of eight journals for the review was, therefore, predicated on several criteria. First, these journals had been identified explicitly as "key journals" or "core journals" in several earlier studies of the educational leadership and management literature (Cherkowski, Currie, & Hilton, 2012;DuBois & Reeb, 2000;Hallinger & Bryant, 2013b;Harvey & Morris, 2008;Mayo, Zirkel, & Finger, 2006;Richardson & McLeod, 2009). Moreover, the journals overlap with the scope of publications incorporated into other scholarly reviews of the educational leadership and management literature conducted since 1995 (Hallinger & Bryant, 2013b;Hallinger & Heck, 1996;Leithwood & Jantzi, 2005;Robinson et al, 2008).…”

“…In order to obtain a picture of the Asian literature in educational leadership and management, we searched eight key journals that publish international research in English and employ blind review procedures: standard that aligned with emerging publication standards applied by higher education systems and universities in the region (Altbach & Umakoshi, 2004;Aydin et al, 2010;Chan et al, 2005;Deem et al, 2008;Fatt, 2012;Hallinger & Bryant, 2013b;Hien, 2010;Irandoust & Calvani, 2011;Marginson, 2006Marginson, , 2007Matthews & Hu, 2007;Menahem, 2008;Mok & Hallinger, 2013;Wan, 2011). The rationale for selection of this particular subset of eight journals for the review was, therefore, predicated on several criteria.…”

“…This gap in research productivity between these two societies and other societies in Asia led us to characterize Hong Kong and Israel as "positive outliers" in educational leadership and management. This unexpected finding suggested the need for more detailed analysis into the nature of knowledge production as well as into factors that may have contributed to the high levels of knowledge production in these two societies (Hallinger & Bryant, 2013b, 2013c. The purpose of this paper is to explore features of knowledge production in educational leadership and management in Hong Kong and Israel.…”