Principle of Singularity

Abstract

This paper provides insight into the legislative process behind the current Education Act of Sweden. The aim is to shed light on how and why it came to prohibit joint leadership for principals. Joint leadership is a sub-form of shared leadership between managers characterised by complete formal authority, hierarchic equality and merged work tasks. The sharing of a principal’s position is, in previous research, identified as potentially favourable for principals and schools as it decreases principals’ often heavy workload. Five retrospective interviews were done with people involved in the legislative process. The analysis points out both distrust in the governing line and uninformed notions of leadership among legislators as explanations behind the prohibition. In the legislative work, joint leadership was at most a marginal issue. Thus the legal prohibition was an unintended side-effect, yet completely in line with traditional and uninformed notions of leadership. The principle of singularity ruled and joint leadership was extinguished for principals without considering whether this favoured or harmed the overarching aims of the Education Act: increased peda-gogical responsibility and leadership with a focus on the students’ learning, results and democratic upbring-ing.

Changing Organizational Conditions: Experiences of Introducing and Putting Function-Shared Leadership (FSL) into Practice in Schools and Pre-Schools

“…FSL as a solution challenges the Swedish Education Act (2010:800), which is essentially based on a belief in the solo qualified leader, and on that basis identifies the principal/pre-school manager as responsible for a wide range of tasks (Döös et al, 2018a;Örnberg, 2016). It remains an open question whether or to what extent the present change would have been easier had the Education Act not restricted the use of the titles principal and pre-school manager.…”

“…We argue that using West's (1978) terminology (principal of instruction and principal of administration) would have made a favorable difference in addressing the status problem identified. Court (1998), Eckman (2007) and Döös et al (2018a) have all identified problems concerning legal obstacles and questioning from outside.…”

“…In the Swedish school world, as in the society as a whole, there is a hierarchical mind-set that a leadership position is held by one person (Döös, Madestam, Wilhelmson, & Örnberg, 2018a). The novelty level of the studied organizational change meant that there was no previous knowledge in the school system to turn to.…”