School leadership research in German speaking countries has been subject to various changes in the course of time. Its development can be divided into different trends, which are mainly formed by prevailing governance, different functions or positions of school leaders and learners as well as other actors, which persue different directions of thinking. The actors within each trend have differing thoughts regarding an overall system, which impacts their scientific activities to a large extent. The different trends are presented as a “confluence model” of school leadership research (Wiesner et al., in print), in which research on school leaders is regarded as a stream order in the sense that (small) streamlets and (larger) streams meet and then combine to form currents (paradigms), to ultimately form sections of a confluent river for a certain period of time. Currently, the different paradigms appear side by side (competing paradigm), as complementary paradigms (integrative paradigm) or merged (fusion paradigm), or flow together as interrelationships, thereby forming possible future paradigms (transformative paradigm). FieldTransFormation 360 offers a research instrument which helps to assess school leadership competencies based on the definition of a culture of leadership. The paper describes how issues and objectives have changed over time, the different methodological approaches used in the research, and the various stakeholders involved in the research interests. Momentum for a re-vision of the research focus is given by problems with implementation, theory gaps, a too vague understanding of leadership and organisation, but also questions concerning the significance of emotions, personalisation, relationships and mutual creative input in development processes are numerous angles of the processes of stabilisation and change in schools that still require clarification beyond today’s practice and problems (see also Bonsen et al. 2008; Wiesner, 2010; Schratz & Westfall-Greiter, 2010). Hence school leadership 4.0 requires a set of creative forms that helps individual schools as well as the entire school system to engage with new forms through a process of finding mutual purpose, mutual inspiration and a common creative design (see Käufer & Scharmer, 2013). School leadership research is thus faced with the task of designing studies in such a way as to include both practical and academic perspectives.

Schratz, M. (2016) Overcoming a Bureaucratic Heritage as a Trigger for Research on Leadership in Austria. In Helene Ärlestig, Christopher Day, Olof Johansson (Eds) A Decade of Research on School Principals: Cases from 24 countries (Dordrecht: Springer),