Session Information
32 SES 12, Values in Educational Organisations and Leadership
Symposium
Contribution
Leadership and organisation in education builds on values. The objectives, which are used to give leadership a direction are justified through values and ways of organising too are informed by values. Not least within educational institutions where the objective is to educate and influence people to develop and maintain citizenship for the future society, it is clear that values and ideas about what a good society is and requires, play a crucial role. In this sense it is justified to understand educational organisations (schools as well as organisations of adult education) as ideological, because the aim is to influence people in certain ways, and thus to favor certain values.
However, it seems that the actual discourse on value(s) in organisations is quickly narrowed to a particular economic interpretation. All across Europe, this tendency has been strengthened by the increased political preoccupation with replacing responsibility by accountability (Pätzold 2010) or getting “value for money” (c.f. Gil 2009), when debating how public resources are best spent. For the last 40 years (since the introduction of New Public Management) the public sectors in Europe have been considered over-bureaucratic and inefficient and have been reorganised over and over again in attempts to increase productivity and secure more “outcome”. Economic understandings of “value” are dominant in political discourses about the public sector and the welfare system, and they often go unquestioned as part and parcel of what has been labelled “the necessary politics”.
We regard this important for educational leadership and organisation in two ways. On the one hand, it can be argued that educational organisations require some orientation in terms of values ranging beyond pure economic (and, more general: quantitative) considerations (c.f. Biesta 2009). Moreover, as long as education is not defined as a mere social technology, educational organisations are by definition characterised by values. In line with this argument, any political understanding of the educational system will be value-based and therefore ideological – including understandings based on economic logics or evidence based methods (Oakley 2002; Rod & Jöhncke 2015; Vaaben & Bjerg 2015).
Thus we want to reopen the debate about educational organisations (be they for profit or not for profit) and the value(s) that underly the way they are organised and led. We want to broaden the perspective on value in a variety of educational sectors from the strictly economic perspective to something that may permit us to ask e.g.: What is being valued where, by whom or why? How do different understandings of fantasies about of value meet, clash or intersect? How are values translated into organizational structures, and how do they affect people? Or how come some professionals find it so hard to accept a certain value orientation in their organization that they feel they have to quit? What are “the necessary politics” according to other value understandings than the economic?
By discussing different approaches towards values in (educational) organizations and the maintenance of values as a pedagogical task, the proposed symposium shall eventually contribute to a multi-faceted view on leadership and organisation with respect to values.
References
Biesta, G. (2009). Educational Research, Democracy and TLRP. Retreived from http://www.tlrp.org/dspace/handle/123456789/1620. Gill, S. J. (2009). Developing A Learning Culture in Nonprofit Organizations. Los Angeles et al.: Sage. Oakley, A. (2002). Social science and evidence-based everything: the case of education. Educational Review, 54(3), pp.277–286. Pätzold, H. (2010). Responsibility and accountability in adult education – the unequal siblings. In R. Egetenmeyer, & E. Nuissl, eds.: Teachers and Trainers in Adult and Lifelong Learning. Asian and European Perspectives. Frankfurt/Main et al.: Peter Lang, pp. 135-143. Rod, M.H. & Jöhncke, S., 2015. The social Life of Evidence: Rationalising Professional Practice in the Welfare State. In V. Steffen, S. Jöhncke, & K. M. Raahauge, eds. Between magic and Rationality: On the Limits of Reason in the Modern World. København: Museum Tusculanum Press, pp. 43–70. Vaaben, N. & Bjerg, H., 2015, eds.. At lede efter læring. København: Samfundslitteratur.
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