The purpose of this integrative literature review was to draw together recognised streams of knowledge to inform contemporary leadership of school systems in democratic societies. The article integrates scholarship in ethical leadership (EL) and social justice leadership (SJL). The resultant conceptualised model is an expanded version of a…

Rapidly changing educational contexts demand deft leadership responses. In this fluid environment, it is imperative that leadership learning models sound educational praxis. Such praxis necessitates the inclusion of participant voices within relational and dialogic processes that enable authentic, creative and collaborative thinking. This paper…

The doctrine of leader centrism, supported by the concept of methodological individualism, dominates contemporary accounts of leadership in education and is generally applied as the default option that explains how organizations such as schools function. We argue that methodological individualism is not defensible and that as a result, the…

Given present criticisms of contemporary education and leadership practices, this article investigates the ways in which the basic concepts of state freedom and bureaucracy stifle ethics and social justice in educational leadership practices through the philosophical framework of Emmanuel Levinas. By investigating Levinas' 'an-archy', the…

This article takes a contemporary look at distributed leadership in practice by drawing upon empirical evidence from a large-scale project in the USA. Initially, it considers the existing knowledge base on distributed leadership and questions some of the assertions and assumptions in recent accounts of the literature. The article also addresses…

This article critically explores how educational leadership is becoming increasingly affective in order to cultivate pupil potential and thereby meet the challenge of creating the best schools in the world. It critically analyses policy and handbook approaches to affective educational leadership technologies by showing the difficulty in keeping…

This article outlines the findings from a contemporary study of principals' leadership practices in Malaysia as part of the 7 System Leadership Study. Recent policy developments within Malaysia have increased principals' accountability and have underlined the importance of the role of the principals in transforming school performance and student…

On an international scale, public administration is undergoing considerable restructuring as principles of private enterprise are becoming the orthodoxy. At the same time, economic instability (or crisis) is gripping both national and global financial markets, suggesting a flaw in the system or even that capitalism has reached it limits. Crises in…

Over the past two decades, there have been calls by scholars for a more concerted effort to develop empirically grounded research studies on educational leadership management and administration in an indigenous context rather than hegemonic western contexts. This paper presents a review of contemporary literature on educational leadership from…

Contemporary discourses in educational administration have exponentially grown the number of adjectival leaderships, challenged traditional organisational structures, and offered autonomy as a solution to performance issues. In this theoretical paper, I ask "what does the principalship look like after autonomy?" Despite the range of…

Emotional intelligence is a crucial and key ingredient of great leadership and can be seen as a transformational part of leadership that can bring unparalleled leader, member, and organizational success. While a plethora of research and data exists on emotional intelligence, deficiencies in evidence exist to understand the relevance in school…

Educational leadership discourse has for sometime been the major intellectual pillar of what was once known as the field of educational administration. An examination of the postgraduate coursework programmes available to aspiring principal leaders at every Australian university supports such a contention. While this discourse does shed light on…

ACECQA [Australian Children's Education and Care Quality Authority] has published its fifth occasional paper analysing Quality Area 7 -- Leadership and service management. This completes the suite of occasional papers that cover the four quality areas of the National Quality Standard that are comparatively challenging. Quality Area 7 recognises…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to argue that historical research methods offer an innovative and powerful way to examine, frame, explain, and disrupt the study of contemporary issues in educational leadership. More specifically, the authors examine how historical methodology might recast some of the questions educational leadership…

This research poses two interrelated questions. How important is it for the formation of democratic ideas about educational leadership that the group or individual promoting those ideas is operating within a democratic political environment or, to the contrary, in the absence of one? And second, in the case of the latter, what are the available…