Irony has been selected as the organizing concept of this book because it offers a link between the authors' five main concerns. Their first concern is to bring to the fore a perspective on organizations that has existed for some time but has remained marginal to the prescriptive leadership and management literature. The second concern is to engage with the unintended consequences of the prevailing approach to the management of change: policy initiatives promulgated by central government coupled with the expectation that they will be efficiently implemented through strengthened leadership and management at the school level. Third is to suggest that the rhetoric currently dominating the discourse of policy and of leadership and management, encapsulated in the term 'transformation', is largely a myth. Fourth concern is to suggest that most headteachers and teachers have not wholly rejected recent educational reforms nor offered overt resistance, but have mediated government policies to render them congruent with the needs of students in individual schools in particular contexts; and fifth is to suggest that perhaps a majority of headteachers and teachers are bringing to their work a skepticism towards government policies, a pragmatic approach towards their implementation, a sense of contingency in their relevance, and a constructivist approach to learning and teaching collaboratively pursued. This book begins with a List of tables, Preface, and Acknowledgements. The chapters are divided into four parts: Part One, The Nature of Irony, contains the first three chapters; (1) Introducing the Ironic Perspective; (2) Endemic Ambiguities: the Preconditions of Irony; and (3) The Ambiguities of Policy Implementation. Part Two, Irony and Managerialism, contains the next two chapters: (4) From Management to Managerialism; and (5) A solution in Search of a Problem. Part Three, The Rhetoric of Managerialism and Leadership, presents the next 2 chapters: (6) The Myth of Transformation; and (7) Transmissional Leadership for Political Transformation. Part Four, The Ironic Response and the Future of Managerialism, contains the final 3 chapters: (8) Patterns of Ironic Response; (9) The Ironic Orientation and Professional Practice; and (10) Temperate Leadership and Management: Living with Irony. The book also contains a section of References, and an Index.