Over the past two decades, scholarship in educational leadership and management has undergone a gradual but increasingly noticeable sea change in the composition of the literature. Thirty years ago, EDLM research was generated almost exclusively from scholars located in a handful of economically developed, Anglo-American societies (e.g., USA, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Netherlands). Although the educational leadership and management scholarship has been the subject of 30 years of potent critiques (Bridges, 1982; Campbell & Faber, 1961; Erickson, 1979; Leithwood, Begley & Cousins, 1990), it was not until the mid-1990s that the cultural relativity of the educational leadership and management knowledge base was first acknowledged. Scholars working outside of mainstream centers of educational leadership and management scholarship began to question the tacit assumption of the universality of the educational leadership and management knowledge base (Bajunid, 1996; Cheng, 1995). These critiques led scholars to declare an urgent need for research from more diverse national settings in order to achieve the goal of building a truly global knowledge base in educational leadership and management (Oplatka, 2004; Ribbins & Gronn, 2000; Walker & Dimmock, 2002). Over the ensuing 20 years, scholarship from ‘emerging regions’ of the world (e.g., Asia, Africa Latin America) sought to address this gap in the educational leadership and management knowledge base (e.g., Clarke & O’Donoghue, 2017; Gumus, Bellibas, Esen, & Gumus, 2016; Mertkan, Arsan, Inal Cavlan, & Onurkan, 2017; Oplatka & Arar, 2017). Indeed, efforts to document the increased production of knowledge from specific regions have recently begun to appear in international education journals (e.g., Flessa, Bramwell, Fernandez, & Weinstein, 2017; Oplatka & Arar, 2017; Walker, Hu & Qian, 2012). Nonetheless, to date, scholars have yet to assess the changing composition of the EDLM literature with a focus on knowledge production from emerging regions of the world.

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