Government policy agendas across Europe and beyond emphasise the importance of leadership in improving the educational outcomes and life chances of young people. This has stimulated interest in better understanding the nature of educational leadership/management. Knowledge produced about educational leadership has focused particularly on theorizing types of leadership and their intended outcomes. Much of the literature focuses on the attributes of leaders and/or on techniques for improvement.

Social scientists have long struggled to understand the organisation, production, reproduction and transformation of social life. Disciplines such as philosophy, sociology and psychology have endeavoured not only to document but also to theorise social practices embodied and operates within specific fields and places, operating at specific times and scales. However, very little of this corpus of academic work has influenced the field of leadership and management. We argue that this limited engagement with the social sciences  and humanities restricts the kinds of questions that are asked in and of leadership/management, the studies that are mounted , the explanations that are offered  and the potentials and ambivalences  highlighted. We suggest that this in turn affect how actual headteachers/principals and other educational leaders think about and do their jobs. 

In this symposium we bring understandings from feminist , poststructural  and postcritical psychology, philosophy and sociology to bear on the kinds of knowledge that are produced in the field of educational leadership. We focus on four  overlapping ‘ forms’ of leadership – transformational, emotional, psy-leadership and creative leadership – and interrogate texts that promulgate these terms. Across the papers a perspective developed by Niklas Luhmann (2000) of ‘observing observers observing’ is mobilised  to focus on performativity and the effects of knowledge and language , asking, “What does the knowledge and the language in these  texts do/ make us capable of thinking about management/leadership? In each paper the texts that construct a ‘form’ of leadership have been subject to the following questions:

• What counts as leadership in this text? How have the writers named/framed the leadership they are  advocating?
• What does it mean to think about leadership in this way? What practices does it encourage and which are backgrounded/ignored? What other ways of thinking about leadership might be possible in this situation?
• What assemblage(s) is/are brought to this research/text? How has this set of cultural practices, relationships, events, things and systems worked to produce this way of thinking about leadership as ‘findings’? How much of this apparatus is represented as reflexively interrogated and modified/adapted/changed? Where are mess and ruptures ?
• How is the school represented? How is it temporalised/set in networks of relations? How are relationships and trajectories understood and named? What are the implications for knowing about leadership that are constructed through these rationalities?  

Our emphasis is on considering the material and virtual implications of thinking about leadership in this way.

The papers collectively suggest that a more nuanced, complex and ambiguous field of possibilities is created for actual leaders through the four ‘types’ of leadership, than their producers actually claim.