Ever since the establishment of the comprehensive school system in the 1950’s the interplay between educational research, policy and practice has been stressed and elaborated in various forms within the Swedish context. Research focusing curricula, management, organization, evaluation and improvement was developed to support educational reforms. Curriculum and leadership research have often been labeled in different ways and partly separately. However, in Sweden they emanate from the same line of studies with a tight connection between societal missions and research. The aim of this paper is to explore the relationship between curriculum and leadership research with the example of assessment cultures and leadership as interlinked activities of governance and school management. Three recently completed research projects with a mixed method research design are used. We employ curriculum theoretical concepts like e.g. codes and arenas to illustrate their usefulness as a point of departure to further theorize a changing educational landscape. In our study, we illustrate how curriculum and leadership research are historically linked. We put forward some concepts to address the increased complexity of the governance system and we stress the need to strengthen how different ways of forming the steering system interplay with key curriculum questions. Conclusively, leadership research have to a large extent studied school development on a municipality- and organizational level asking questions on how to manage and guide school development. In contrast, curriculum research have studied school development from a reform- and governmental perspective more asking questions on how to steer educational development through law, curricula and evaluation. We suggest that these research traditions ought to be further united in order to develop both traditions in less normative, and more, critical ways, and to answer crucial educational questions in glocal times (Marginson & Rhoades, 2001). With these changing conditions follow both a window of opportunity and a need to scrutinize the way we conceptualize and research various educational phenomena. In our study we argue that it is reasonable to introduce a new code due to major shifts including curriculum practices, message systems, levels, arenas and number of curriculum-makers engaged. A code we call the comparative curriculum code. We also find it crucial to continue asking questions of the reproduction of the society, the culture and the school and its relation to changes in the production.

Marginson, S. & Rhoades, G. (2001). Conceptualising Global Relations at the Glonacal Levels. Paper presented at the annual international forum of the Conference of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, Richmond, VA, November 15-18.