It is assumed that individuals' cognitions of who they are in a particular social structure influence their behaviour in that space. Likewise, school principals' cognition of who they are in schools as social structures influences how they behave as leaders. In this article, we use the role identity theory as a framework to analyse novice…

Drawing on the quintile system of categorising schools, South African public schools are bifurcated into no-fee and fee-paying schools. Emerging research has shown that school principals in both categories of schools encounter several challenges with regard to school funding. In this article, we employ contingency leadership theory to examine how…

Research studies on financial management in South African public schools expands recurrent literature, most of which have largely pathologised school leadership and management, and rural schools in particular. This article instead draws from a qualitative case study of success, which examined how five novice principals in a rural setting went…

This paper explores what, from school principals' perspectives, constitutes leadership for coping with and adapting to policy change within deprived school contexts. Using qualitative interpretive research, we drew from the practices of five principals that were purposively selected from a broader study, which focused on school principals'…