Session Information
26 SES 10 B, New Approaches to Visualizing and Conceptualizing Educational Leadership
Paper Session
Contribution
This presentation reports on findings from a wider study exploring school leadership in a period of rapid and continual structural reform in England (Author 2015) and thereby speaks directly to the conference theme which foregrounds constant change in education reform across Europe. The project and this paper are structured in response to the research question, how may school leadership at a time of flux be understood and theorised? My objective is to illuminate through the resulting theorisation both school leadership and the reform processes themselves, bringing new insights to bear on conditions and possibilities for professional practice. These pertain not just in England, but across Europe, where a focus on leadership to provide neoliberal “solutions” for educational issues constructed as “problems” is promulgated by transnational organisations such as the OECD (2008). That the substantive focus of the research reported in this paper may be located within distinctly European experiences of education reform have been noted inter alia by Gunter, Grimaldi, Hall and Serpieri (2016).
In addressing the research question and objective, the paper uses a theoretical framework that draws on Bourdieu’s thinking tools, and in particular his concepts of habitus and hysteresis (Bourdieu, 1990a). The habitus is a set of embodied dispositions resulting from early inculcation and iterative experiences that are classed — Bourdieu called these ‘systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures’ (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 53). Similar histories produce similar habitus, and so it is productive to use the concept to explain and understand the actions and motivations of groups – here, school leaders – as well as individuals. Hysteresis results when the habitus that formerly produced success in the field ceases to do so following a change in field conditions (Kerr & Robinson, 2009; McDonough & Polzer, 2012), whether this be through technological developments or, as here, through a period of intense political reform to the field of education. It is a further objective of the present study to develop rather than simply use these theoretical tools.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Ball, S. J. (1995). Intellectuals or technicians? The urgent role of theory in educational studies. British Journal of Educational Studies, 43(3), 255–271. Bourdieu, P. (1990). Homo Academicus (Translated). Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (1990). In other words: Essays towards a reflexive sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice (Trans. Ric). Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (1998). Practical Reason: On the theory of action. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gewirtz, S. (2002). The Managerial School: Post-welfarism and Social Justice in Education. London and New York: Routledge. Gunter, H. M., Grimaldi, E., Hall, D., & Serpieri, R. (2016). New Public Management and the Reform of Education: European lessons for policy and practice. (H. M. Gunter, E. Grimaldi, D. Hall, & R. Serpieri, Eds.). London: Routledge. Retrieved from http://www.amazon.co.uk/New-Public-Management-Reform-Education/dp/1138833819 Kerr, R., & Robinson, S. (2009). The Hysteresis Effect as Creative Adaptation of the Habitus: Dissent and Transition to the “Corporate” in Post-Soviet Ukraine. Organization, 16(6), 829–853. http://doi.org/10.1177/1350508409337581 McDonough, P., & Polzer, J. (2012). Habitus, hysteresis and organizational change in the public sector. Canadian Journal of Sociology, 37(4), 357–380. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2008). Improving School Leadership: Policy and Practice. Paris. Retrieved from https://www.oecd.org/edu/school/49847132.pdf Pepper, C., & Giles, W. (2015). Leading in middle management in higher education. Management in Education, 29(2), 46–52. http://doi.org/10.1177/0892020614529987 Polkinghorne, D. E. (1995). Narrative configuration in qualitative analysis. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 8(1), 5–23.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.