The Misrecognition of Transactionalism in Leadership

Author(s):

Ruth McGinity(presenting / submitting)Steven Courtney(presenting)

Conference:

ECER 2015

Network:

Emerging Researchers' Group (for presentation at Emerging Researchers' Conference)

Format:

Paper

Session Information

ERG SES H 05, Leadership and Education

Paper Session

Time:

2015-09-08

11:00-12:30

Room:

309. [Main]

Chair:

Philippe Masson

Contribution

In this paper, we explore the ways in which transactional leadership practices predicated on neoliberal exchange relations are being misrecognised as forms of leadership constructed as transformational and/or distributed. Our purpose is to understand and examine the tensions between leadership practices and the discourses and/or models leaders draw on to explain and understand these practices.

Transactional leadership appears in the literature predominantly as a conceptual foil to demonstrate the supposedly superior characteristics and effectiveness of transformational leadership (Bass, 1990; Burns, 1978). Transactional leadership consists in explaining followers’ wanting to do the will of leaders through exchange relations. Rewards and sanctions govern behaviours and practices to achieve organisational objectives. Transformational leadership has itself transitioned to more distributed forms as fashions progress (Gunter, Hall, and Bragg, 2013), and the normativity of leadership models has meant that what we argue is the necessity of recognising transactionalism as a mechanism for explaining current leadership has been overlooked or dismissed. This necessity arises from neoliberalism as the dominant framework for thinking about and doing educational leadership across Europe and internationally where “modernising”, “reform” agendas aim at raising standards, and where standards are conceptualised as pupils’ attainment in standardised tests (Ravitch, 2014). Neoliberalism constructs subjects as rational, economic actors engaged in individualised, transactional relationships (Ong, 2007). Consequently, a range of technologies underpin the “leadership” of performance including accountability through performance management, inspection and targets (Courtney, 2014).

Nonetheless, it is discursively constructed that leadership be transformational or distributed; consequently, these transactions are couched in transformational language invoking vision (Courtney and Gunter, 2015), motivation and development, and also in distributive terms, where the substantive content of leaders’ utterances belie any real democratisation of leadership. We argue that this, following Bourdieu (1990), constitutes a misrecognition of how leadership is actually done. Misrecognition permits actions and identifications which might otherwise prove dissonant or disruptive to identities operating according to doxa, or a set of unspoken assumptions, within a field of power.

Method

Our findings are drawn from two empirical studies. First, an ethnography, in which 21 teachers from a school in the north west of England, took part in two interviews and a series of meeting observations over two years. Data were analysed using thematic coding to construct an understanding of how leading and leadership was being ‘done’ at a particular site undergoing extensive structural reorganisation during a period of rapid reform. The second study explored the school leadership of rapidly diversifying school types in neoliberal times. First, a typology of school types was created to map the terrain using primary and secondary sources. Then, the secondary schools in a large metropolitan area were mapped against this typology; leaders of nine schools whose types were deemed relevant to the phenomenon of purposive, market-driven diversification were subsequently selected to participate in three semi-structured interviews of 60 to 90 minutes each over 18 months. The generation of data over this time period was to capture the consequences of any flux, policy shift or policy intensification. The data were analysed thematically; key meta- and sub-themes were coded and memos attached to significant utterances to develop an understanding of meanings. Emerging findings were continually related to the relevant literature and to Bourdieuian thinking tools. The two studies have been conjoined for the purposes of this analysis for three principal reasons. First, there is some overlap in participating schools, and so we see this interpretation of our data as an opportunity to learn from different perspectives. Second, the studies both speak to similar themes of conceptualising leadership practice in neoliberal times. Third, Bourdieu’s thinking tools have been employed in both studies to illuminate the phenomena under scrutiny. The data codes arrived at by the processes described above were re-interrogated for this new analysis, with originally unencoded data being re-interpreted in both cases against the developing meta-themes of transactionalism and misrecognition.

Expected Outcomes

Our findings, following transactionalism’s framing as positive or negative, suggest that transactions may involve rewards or serious consequences for followers. Rewards include career advancement/ professional development, professional trust in pedagogical practices and benign neglect. Consequences range from marginalisation to dismissal. In exchange, followers are expected to perform not just required behaviours but attitudes: these are codified as the leader’s vision and enforced through the technology of transactionalism. Codifying leadership in these visionary terms is what enables the enactment of particular strategies to be celebrated as distinct and successful which in turn contribute to a system in which individualised and competitive approaches to schools and schooling have become normalised even as “educational” goals are homogenised and conform to the requirements of the reform agenda. These visions are the same, and focus on raising children’s scores in standardised assessments. We argue that our analysis matters to practice and policy because leadership forms are happening whose proper scrutiny and understanding are prevented through their misrecognition and concealment. These processes disguise also the way power operates, whereby transactions favour and marginalise school staff along familiar lines of structural and discursive privilege. It matters to theory because conceptualising the field through normative models has limited more than illuminated scholarly understanding of leading and leadership. This speaks to the conference theme of transitions in problematising the conceptualisation of leadership as consecutively practised, normative models and in questioning the capacity of neoliberal-inspired transactionalism to effect a transition to the democratic sorts of educational processes needed.

References

Bass, B. M. (1990). From Transactional to Transformational Leadership: Learning to Share the Vision. Organizational Dynamics, 18(3), 19–31. Bourdieu, P. (1990). In other words: Essays towards a reflexive sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Burns, J. M. (1978). Leadership. New York: Harper & Row. Courtney, S. J. (2014). Post-panopticism and school inspection in England. British Journal of Sociology of Education. doi:10.1080/01425692.2014.965806 Courtney, S. J., & Gunter, H. M. (2015). Get off my bus! School leaders, vision work and the elimination of teachers. International Journal of Leadership in Education: Theory and Practice. doi:10.1080/13603124.2014.992476 Gunter, H. M., Hall, D., & Bragg, J. (2013). Distributed Leadership: A Study in Knowledge Production. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 41(5), 555–580. doi:10.1177/1741143213488586 Ong, A. (2007). Neoliberalism as a mobile technology. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 32(1), 3–8. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/4639996 Ravitch, D. (2014). Hoaxes in Educational Policy. The Teacher Educator, 49(3), 153–165. doi:10.1080/08878730.2014.916959

Author Information

Ruth McGinity (presenting / submitting)

University of Manchester

Manchester

Steven Courtney (presenting)

University of Manchester, United Kingdom

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