Session Information
26 SES 05 B, Communication and Relations
Paper Session
Contribution
Recent understandings of education and educational leadership tend to focus primarily on economic dimensions and interpretations. Nussbaum (2010) believes that education has merely become a tool for economic growth, and a means for improving people’s capacities to act in their roles as economic agents. Educators all over the world do in fact experience increasing demands to educate children and young people for flexible labour and entrepre-neurship in knowledge-based economies (Hargreaves, 2003 and European Commission, 2002). Education is not only geared at improving people as economic agents, it is also in-creasingly governed by economic norms. The introduction of New Public Management (NPM) rests on the assumption that economic norms should have primacy in the governance of the public sector (Christensen and Laegred, 2002). Educational researchers frequently report how the primacy of economic norms in education shape and change the roles, identi-ties and relationships of school actors at different levels (eg. Bagley, 2006, Ball, 2009, Lindblad and Popkewitz, 2004, McInerney, 2003, Oplatka et al, 2007). However, educational change motivated by the primacy of economy is highly problematic, or so I will argue in this paper in relation to educational leadership.
The aim of this paper is to discuss a communicative alternative to managerial or economic traditions of educational leadership introduced in education over the last two or three decades. The first part of the paper is mainly inspired by cosmopolitan and critical sociology (Fine, 2007, Kendall et al 2009) and communication theory, and I argue that changed conditions for national education and the nature of educational institutions and processes are hardly captured by the dominant primacy of economic aims, norms and worldviews. In the second part, I discuss how assumptions of rationalization, action-coordination and conditions of success built into NPM can shape educational leadership and communication in highly problematic ways (Eriksen, 2001). I argue that the primacy of economic norms can shape communication processes in such a way that they bypass aspects one can count as essential to education and to educational leadership, such as learning, cooperation, democracy, autonomy and motivation based on reasons rather than sanctions. In the final part, I discuss how and why a communicative leadership based on communicative rather than instrumental rationality (Davidson, 2001, Habermas, 1998) can offer a fruitful alternative to managerial leadership in education. Such a leadership is essentially dialogical and it takes seriously rather than bypass crucial aspects of education, as well as the challenges increased cosmopolitanization constitutes to national education.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
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