Session Information
26 SES 02 A, Educational Leadership - a Changing Discipline?
Paper Session
Contribution
This project is an attempt to taking the conference theme seriously, at least concerning the past and the present for educational research. Network 26 may be considered as a representation of European research in educational leadership. But is it suitable to talk about a European field of research in educational leadership?
From a partly other perspective, this work may follow in the path of the presentation last year of Ciaran Sugrue and Gerry Macruairc: “Patterns, Preoccupations and Re-presentations of Leadership: Inside Network 26—Back to the Future?”
The scope in my project is to investigate and analyze the formation of a (sub)discipline called educational leadership, and especially European educational leadership.
The first step is to discuss some aspects of the social organizing of science, focusing on the question concerning what characterize a discipline, a sub-discipline or similar kind of group of science or research. A discipline may be characterized by the development of journals, institutes or departments, and conferences etc. (Becher, 1989; Persson, 1993). Variations between different disciplines a to a large extend caused by variations in mutual dependency with other groups inside and outside the scientific community and task uncertainty concerning question to follow and method for use (Whitley 1984).
Some particular attributes with the sub-discipline of educational leadership is that the focus of the studies of course concerns the world of schools and education, but the theoretical origins in this field stems from many other areas as for instance organization, leadership, political science, psychology etc.
The second step is to focus on a specific European dimension of educational leadership research. A bibliometric view on European educational leadership may throw light on publications, institutions, and collaboration. This leads to the third step, namely the connection between research and publication. According to traditional scientific norms, a scientific claim cannot be said to contribute to the scientific knowledge base until it has been subjected to review by scientific peers, which means usually that research should lead to publishing. Contemporary research policy causes a pressure for specific kind of publication, i.e. articles in international (i.e. English) journals, while other kind of publications (e.g. books, book chapters, local journals, not English language journals etc.) is not considered as important any longer.
Evaluation of educational research are to a large extend related to journal publication (Oancea 2007; Diem & Wolter 2013).
The following step is to focus on the relationship between publication and the representation of publication, i.e. the most used databases. And here we have a problem, while the database coverage does not fit the publication patterns in educational research and the database are biased towards English-language journals and particularly US journals. Additionally a remarkable part of the educational journals are psychology oriented (Botte 2007).
These conceptual elaborations will to my aims and research questions. Among the trends and patterns, I will especially follow these questions:
Where are the authors affiliated?
What is the development of contributions from European countries?
What journals is the target for publication?
Is it possible to locate some patterns for cross-national collaboration?
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Becher, T. (1989) Academic tribes and territories. Intellectual enquiry and the cultures of disciplines. Buckingham: Open University Press. Botte, A. (2007) Scientometric Approaches to Better Visibility of European Educational Research Publications: a state-of-the-art-report. European Educational Research Journal, Vol. 6 (3). Diem, A. & Wolter S.C. (2013) The Use of Bibliometrics to Measure Research Performance in Education Sciences, Research in Higher Education, Vol. 54 (1), pp 86-114. Frederiksen, L.F. (2004) Disciplinary determinants of bibliometric impact in Danish industrial research: Collaboration and visibility Scientometrics, Vol. 61, No. 2 253 - 270 Oancea, A (2007) From Procrustes to Proteus: trends and practices in the assessment of education research, International Journal of Research & Method in Education, 30:3, 243 - 269 Persson, A. (1993) Att studera vetenskapliga discipliner, Conference paper, Nordiska sociologförbundets årsmöte 1993. T. J. Phelan, T.J. (1999) A compendium of issues for citation analysis. Scientometrics, 45 (1) (1999) 117-136. Whitley, Richard (1984) Intellectual and social organization of the sciences. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
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