The purpose of this conceptual paper is to explore the constructs of school leadership that have gained primacy over the past 20 years. In doing so, I discuss how structures limit the role of the leader in school organisations has been overlooked, particularly ignoring the resource dependency of schools and the external control of resources they…

There are relatively few studies of how representations of teachers, schools and educational administrators in popular films and television might be, and are, used in leadership preparation. This paper seeks to add to this small body of work; it reports on an exploratory study of the representation of headteachers in contemporary children's…

This concluding article attempts to review some dominant themes from the preceding contributions and relate them to my own preoccupations and perspectives. It focuses on the themes of agency, reform and the field. It points to the risk of polarising the debate about the relative influence of agency and structure but acknowledges and exemplifies…

There are two major categories of explanation for organisational performance: structural and individual. With the shift away from systems-theoretic accounts that occurred in the 1980s, structural explanations have been replaced increasingly by the individualism of leadership and leader-centric explanations, especially when it comes to schools. In…

In this article, we argue that leadership of schools is a form of performance that has become ritualised and routinised through the official scripting of policy texts that mandate how leadership of schools should occur. Our interrogation of recent policy scripts in Australia reveals that there is limited scope for leadership in schools to occur as…

This article provides a longitudinal analysis of leadership. In the first section of the article, the evidence reviewed indicates how, historically, leadership has been significant in various societal arrangements in the co-ordination of actions for collective purposes. Such co-ordination may also be facilitated through self-organisation, except…

Modes of organisation and control within educational organisations have tended to accord with those of the workplace. Bureaucracy has endured in both. Of late, it has been loosened. This has opened up a new conceptual space within educational management and leadership. Its underlying theme is collaboration. The analysis here extends the space…

The historic connection of religion and spirituality to women, education, advocacy, and leadership is prevalent in Black American histories in general and the role of the religion and spirit in promoting education and socialisation. Important in this history is the intersection of spirituality and leadership for Black American women. This research…

It is problematic enough trying to extract the lessons from the past to inform the present and the future; it is even more difficult when there is no history upon which to draw. This is the case with respect to a consideration of the impact of sustainable development upon school administration. Whilst there is a history of events contributing to…

This article explores governors' perceptions of the role played by school principals in the democratic governance of secondary schools in South Africa. The South African Schools Act No. 84 of 1996 has mandated that all public schools in South Africa must have democratically elected school governing bodies, comprised of the principal (in his or her…

Maori women teachers in nineteenth-century New Zealand have been little acknowledged in educational histories, and indeed, in some instances their contributions have been explicitly nullified. Those who have taken leadership roles have been no more visible. This article examines the silencing and exclusion from educational history of a young Maori…

The special edition of JEAH published in August 2006 on "Administration and Leadership in Education: A Case for History?" argued that history has been seriously undervalued in the study of administration and leadership in education. My introductory editorial explained why this mattered and outlined the framework in which the papers it contained…

The journey that a practitioner takes into the realm of postgraduate research can be one that is sometimes filled with an unexpected cycle of security followed by doubt, and learning as a means of rediscovering a sense of security; there can be a continual sense of "coming back again" to familiar ground. This article is an autobiographical account…

Policy changes in higher education internationally have led to greater institutional competition and performativity and a shift from academic to business management for institutional leaders. Major changes to tertiary education management in New Zealand, legislated in 1990, had a particularly marked impact on teacher education institutions,…

Biography and other forms of life writing were once considered vital sources of information on leadership. However, early in the establishment of the pursuit of a "science of leadership" in the first quarter of the last century, they were abandoned as too subjective and hence unreliable. Recently, however, as scholarship regarding leadership has…