Session Information
26 SES 06 C, Researching Educational Leadership
Paper Session
Contribution
Background
‘Peopleseek knowledge for reasons, purposes, so why would we want to study leadership?’ asked Catherine Marshall (1995) at a time when the educational leadership field was establishing itself. This ECER paper addresses Marshall’s question. It is a conceptual paper that is intended to provoke outside-the-box thinking and perspectives on educational leadership as a field of study, and its knowledge base.
Statements such as ‘School leaders are essential to the success of schools’ (Anderson et al. 2022); ‘School principals play an invaluable role in schools’, teachers’, and students’ success’ (Woong Lee and Mao, 2023); ‘Effective school leadership is a critical aspect to improve the quality of education.’ (Lumban Gaol, 2021) pervade the field’s mainstream literature and are often accepted without question. Such causality assumptive belief is a prominent feature of mainstream educational leadership scholarship in any country – but is particularly prevalent in North America.
In an editorial for a special issue on school leadership in Europe, Bush (2014) noted that ‘the literature on school leadership has been dominated by academics from the USA, the UK and Australia’, but European countries other than the UK, he pointed out, were greatly under-represented in the field. More recent bibliometric analyses (Hallinger and Kovačević, 2021, 2022; Kovačević and Hallinger, 2020; Tintoré et al., 2022) have revealed that ‘such "geographical imbalance" (Kovačević and Hallinger 2020) persists. In their 2021 review, these authors (Kovačević and Hallinger 2020) sought evidence of ‘a distinctive European scholarship’ of educational leadership and management, and of its characteristics.
This ECER paper incorporates consideration of the notion of a distinctive European scholarship of educational leadership. In addressing the question of whether educational leadership is worth studying, it necessarily examines the epistemic worthiness (or justification) of this field of study, and then goes on to consider leadership-sceptic and leadership-agnostic scholarship that questions whether leadership exists, or is, in fact, a myth that we have reified. This consideration is then developed into a proposed research agenda that, in scrutinising the beliefs and assumptions underpinning the kind of mainstream scholarship that, whilst evident in many countries, is particularly prevalent in North America, has the potential to become a distinctive European scholarship whose ground-breaking knowledge contributes to the field’s epistemic development.
Theoretical framework
The paper is framed by two complementary theoretical perspectives. The first, drawn from the philosophy of science, is focused on the related issues of epistemic justification (or worthiness), and the epistemic development of research fields – which, Kitcher (2000) argues, requires a ’field of disagreement’, in which controversy and divergent perspectives unsettle a field’s ‘epistemic state’. Epistemic justification considers whether the beliefs underpinning the knowledge base meet the criteria for inclusion in a grand corpus of scientific knowledge. Epistemic worthiness is focused on separating ‘fact’ from ‘fiction’ in justifying the initiation or retention of a particular focus of study or research.
The second theoretical perspective at play is ‘new wave’ critical leadership studies, which is distinct from social-justice-focused criticality. It is essentially ‘about the nature and limitations of the scientific study of leadership’ (Kelly, 2014). Encompassing what Alvesson and Sveningsson (2012) describe as ‘an expanding sceptical literature on leadership, questioning a range of dominant assumptions’, this scholarship, Spoelstra et al. (2021) explain, ‘takes aim at the romanticization, essentialism, and positivism at the heart of leadership studies and offers an alternative set of theoretical perspectives that subject the phenomenon of leadership to a broader sociological and philosophical analysis’. ‘New wave’ critical leadership scholarship concerns itself with epistemology, concepts and conceptual frameworks, and methods and methodologies. Its more radical proponents (e.g. Gemmill and Oakley 1992, Niesche, 2018) label leadership ‘a social fiction’.
Method
To assess the epistemic justification of leadership as a field of study – i.e. whether leadership is worth studying – BonJour’s (1985) framework of criteria for epistemic worthiness will be applied. This framework incorporates assessment of belief systems, and within these systems, what BonJour calls ‘component beliefs’, that underpin knowledge bases. The paper will briefly analyse three specific component beliefs – described as ‘dominant mainstream beliefs’ (Evans, 2022). First, the ‘causality belief’ – expressed as ‘leadership is a, if not the, key determinant of student achievement’ – is examined. Next, the ‘leadership dependency belief’ is examined. This belief holds that, when they carry out their work ‘well’, headteachers or principals, along with others categorised as ‘(senior) leaders’, are pivotal to the effectiveness (however that may be defined) of, and are therefore indispensable to, their schools. The third belief examined is the ‘conceptual belief’, which is explained as ‘leadership is what those identified as “leaders” do’ (Evans, 2022). BonJour’s criteria for epistemic worthiness are applied to each of these component beliefs, to see if his three conditions are met. These conditions are explained: ‘For a person A to know that P, where P is some propositions, three conditions must be satisfied: 1) A must believe confidently that P, 2) P must be true, and 3) A’s belief that P must be adequately justified’ (Bonjour, 1985). Finally, the coherence of the three beliefs within the overarching belief system will be examined, since coherence is one of BonJour’s criteria for belief systems’ epistemic worthiness. The analysis will be supported by research-based evidence from the leadership literature. For example, in the case of the ‘causality belief’, mainstream causality claims - e.g. ‘considerable amounts of evidence now indicate that school leadership matters a good deal to students’ learning’ (Leithwood et al. 2020) - will be counterbalanced by perspectives reflecting the ‘new wave’ critical leadership discourse, and empirical research evidence that underpins this discourse’s leadership-scepticism, such as Gronn’s (1996) observation that ‘the validity of the causal role being attributed to school leaders … [has] … been called into serious question’, and Eden’s (2021) concern ‘about the endless flood of nonexperimental, causally ambiguous, observational research that simply cannot yield actionable X→Y conclusions … for want of a better term, such research is causally impotent, which often uses fancy statistical procedures to try to justify causal conclusions’. Both sides of this debate will be represented.
Expected Outcomes
Conclusions The epistemic worthiness-informed analysis, based on BonJour’s criteria, reveals the leadership→student achievement causality chain to be a highly contestable knowledge claim. Yet it cannot be dismissed as untrue, for consensus that no compelling research-derived evidence of such causality has yet been presented simply means that researchers have not (yet) found ways of evidencing it with the rigour that BonJour’s conditions 2 and 3 call for. The leadership dependency belief is assessed as unreliable on the basis of its being an anomaly – for BonJour’s criteria identify anomalies in belief systems to cast doubt on epistemic worthiness. The anomaly in question – France; more specifically, the French education system - brings us back onto the European stage, for, with no original French word for it, leadership as a concept is evidently absent for the most part from the French imagination or psyche, and from policy discourses or rhetoric. The case of France exposes a functioning alternative to the default perspective of attributing all manner of success and failure in the education sector to the quality of institutional leadership. Who, then, is getting it right: leadership-sceptic France, or the leaderist world? As an abstract conceptualisation, it will be argued, the conceptual belief cannot be fully assessed in relation to BonJour’s three conditions, since, reflecting subjectivity, any conceptualisation of leadership is as acceptable as another. Concluding that the analysis indicates, at best, mainstream educational leadership scholarship’s limited epistemic worthiness, a ‘new wave’ critical leadership-based research agenda for the field is proposed – one that shifts its focus of study from the contentious, second-order, concept of ‘leadership’ to the higher order concept that, it will be argued, really counts: influence. Insofar as it challenges American-centric epistemology, such an agenda has the potential to become a distinctive European agenda for recontouring the educational leadership field.
References
Alvesson, M. and Sveningsson, S (2012) Un- and re-packing leadership. In Uhl-Bien, M and Ospina, S. (eds.) Advancing relational leadership research, Information Age Publishing. Anderson, E. et al. (2020) State of states: Landscape of university-based pathways to the principalship, Journal of School Leadership, 32(2). BonJour, L. (1985) The Structure of empirical knowledge. Harvard University Press. Bush, T. (2014) Editorial: School leadership in Europe: Growing the field. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 42(4S): 3-4. Eden, D. (2021) The science of leadership: A journey from survey research to field experimentation. The Leadership Quarterly, 32(3):1-18. Evans, L. (2022) Is educational leadership (still) worth studying? An epistemic worthiness-informed analysis. Educational Management, Administration and Leadership, 50(2): 325-348. Gemmill, G. and Oakley, J. (1992) Leadership: An alienating social myth. Human Relations, 45(2): 113–129. Gronn, P. (1996) From transactions to transformation: A new world order in the study of leadership? Educational Management & Administration, 24(1): 7-30. Hallinger, P. and Kovačević, J. (2022) Mapping the intellectual lineage of educational management, administration and leadership, 1972–2020. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 50(2): 192-216. Hallinger, P. and Kovačević, J. (2021) Science mapping the knowledge base in educational leadership and management: A longitudinal bibliometric analysis, 1960 to 2018. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 49(1): 5-30. Kelly, S. (2014) Towards a negative ontology of leadership. Human Relations, 67(8): 905-22. Kitcher P (2000) Patterns of scientific controversies. In: Machmaer P, Pera M and Baltas A (eds) Scientific Controversies: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 21–39. Kovačević, J. and Hallinger, P. (2020) Finding Europe’s niche: science mapping the knowledge base on educational leadership and management in Europe, 1960–2018. School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 31(3): 405-425. Leithwood, K. et al. (2020) How school leadership influences student learning: A test of ‘The Four Paths Model’. Educational Administration Quarterly, 56(4): 570-599. Marshall, C. (1995) Imagining leadership. Educational Administration Quarterly, 31(3): 484-492. Niesche, R. (2018) Critical perspectives in educational leadership: A new ‘theory turn’? Journal of Educational Administration and History, 50(3): 145-158. Spoelstra, S. et al. (2021) Measures of faith: Science and belief in leadership studies. Journal of Management Inquiry, 30(3). Tintoré, M. et al. (2022) A scoping review of problems and challenges faced by school leaders (2003–2019). Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 50(4): 536-573. Woong Lee, S. and Mao, X. (2023) Recruitment and selection of principals: A systematic review. Educational Management, Administration & Leadership, 51(1).
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