Following the fall of the Iron Curtain in December 1989, the Romanian system of education has started a deep process of reconstruction that asked for a comprehensive package of reforms among which decentralisation. Broadly the paper aims to make a contribution to the emerging knowledge base about the realities of restructuring of post-communist…

Recently scholars have called for more detailed historical study of the teaching lives of academics across countries, systems and institutions. This article contributes to the research on the professoriate in its widest sense. The article focuses on the disciplinary perspectives and cultures of academic staff employed in one of Australia's oldest…

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…

In this paper I explore how a woman secondary school headteacher and her colleagues talk about her gendered headship. To facilitate and contextualise the semi-structured interviews, participants were asked to categorise a range of attributes and qualities that have been seen as "masculine" or "feminine". They attempted to plot their perceptions of…

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…

In September 1939, two days before declaring war on Germany, the British government evacuated over half a million children from London to supposedly safer areas in the country. Schoolchildren went there with their teachers and infants with their mothers. Immediately after the event (and ever since) the impact of the evacuation on the children--the…

Australian vocational education has a history dating from the late eighteenth century. As Australian colonies and, later, federated states evolved each constructed its own version of vocational education provision. Generally the systems, consisting of community-based or state-controlled colleges for the training of operatives, apprenticeships and…

How do researchers and practitioners understand and interrogate education reform when it is heralded as the solution to many problems, not all of which are educational? As importantly, how can applied educational researchers delve "beneath the skin" of "given" problems to solve or report, and suggest a range of explanations? In this article, the…

This paper examines the theories of organisation that have informed our understanding of schools as complex social worlds and the practice of school leadership that seems to be required in such environments. This understanding has, in turn, determined the research approach we have adopted for investigating principals' work and for ascertaining the…

This article aims to present some tensions embedded in the Italian educational reform, arising both from the enactment of neo-liberal policies and the possibilities of democratic development opened up by the introduction of schools' site-based management and decentralisation. The article uses discourses as heuristic devices and presents two case…

This article discusses the impact of including gender in the analytical framework in a study of the management and provision of education in Zambia from 1900 to 1939. It shows that a focus on gender allows females to enter the historical narrative and the leadership of women such as Mabel Shaw, Hannah Frances Davidson and Julia Smith can be given…

In this paper I draw on my current research of writing a genealogy of women artists, focusing in particular on the life history of the American working-class artist, May Stevens (1924-). I am particularly interested in how an analysis of the textual and visual narratives in her work, seen in the context of her life history, can intervene in the…

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…

The literature provides insufficient data on women's experiences of the principalship across generations in the USA and thus provides little understanding as to how the writing of women into the history of educational leadership has changed or maintained the social order. Research that addresses biases experienced by women who wish to advance in…

It is time to situate distributed leadership as a critical conceptualisation of school leadership; its popularisation has generally preceded conceptual and empirical development. Over the last 10 years distributed leadership has often been presented as a new construct of school leadership, though critique against education policy reforms and…