Due to the verities of the postmodern condition, in this ‘Runaway World’ (Giddens, 2003), grand-narratives have fallen on hard times. Similarly, ‘heroic’ leadership is increasingly re-presented as inadequate to the task of leading schools in challenging times and in challenging circumstances, or too costly to individuals and their work/life balance to be sustainable over time. Having metamorphosed from instructional through transactional to transformational while seeking inter alia to embrace—contingent, moral, ethical, authentic, sustainable, passionate, servant and other conceptualisations of leadership, more recently teacher leadership, distributed leadership, and leadership for learning have gained some credibility along this evolutionary path, even if empirical evidence is not entirely convincing. As Harris ((2007, p. 323) recently asserted: “… distributed leadership practice in schools is expanding extensively and rapidly without the benefit of any empirical steer”. In similar vein Spillane and Diamond readily acknowledge that a distributed perspective has taken on chameleon-like characteristics in the hands of other scholars: The appeal of a distributed perspective lies partially in the ease with which it becomes many things to many people. Frequently, used as a synonym for democratic leadership, shared leadership, collaborative leadership, and so on… (Spillane and Diamond, 2007, p. 1). More importantly, in the context of the set of papers proposed for this symposium, to what extent is it possible and/ or appropriate to continue to attribute the term leadership to these mutations within the education field? Is it possible, as Spillane suggests to extend the term, to ‘stretch over’ an entire organisation and continue to use the term leadership meaningfully? Are there limits to the plasticity of the term, or are there underlying continuities hidden behind new and emergent rhetorics that belie fashion? Alternatively, are new and emergent conceptualisations necessary, timely and apposite, born out of the vicissitudes of school realities, part of a response to forked policy—decentralisation, devolving decision-making to the level of the school, while simultaneously re-centralising through various technologies of accountability? From a socio-cultural and linguistic perspective, are some national myths more fatally attracted to the reinvention of the heroic, battling against the elements, the odds and/or the gods?! Perhaps, leadership for and by mere mortals of necessity needs to be shared, distributed even, thus building organisational capacity to deal with relenting demands for change, renewal and transformation? Even if there is some substance to these assertions, from a conceptual perspective, there continues to be a need to separate wheat from chaff, to identify the extent of conjuncture and disjuncture within the conceptual terrain, while simultaneously sifting the often flimsy empirical evidence; identifying also potentially fruitful lines of inquiry that may lend additional ballast thus anchoring leadership practice more securely in turbulent times.

Document analysis, mixed method, meta-analysis

Reconceptualisation of key leadership concepts Identification of new lines of research