ABSTRACT
The previous chapter explored the different ways that the two school principals were inserted and positioned within discourses of school management and used the examples of the writing of submissions and grants, and schoolcommunity relations, as forms of governmentality. However, governmentality is concerned with not only practices of governing others but also practices of the self (Dean, 1999). In this chapter I examine these practices of the self and how the two school principals exercise such practices to become ethical subjects. Specifically I use Foucault’s notions of ethics and technologies of the self to understand how it is possible for the two school principals to contest and respond to the proliferation of practices that can serve to discipline and normalise them under notions of governmentality. In addition, I examine how issues of gender are relevant in technologies of the self and how these inform their leadership practices. This is done with the view to disrupting the traditional notions of leadership put forward by much of the leadership literature examined in Chapter 3, and to illustrate how the leadership and management work displayed by the principals of the case study schools is complex and constantly shifting in ways that are not captured by the constraining views of principals’ work represented through traditional leadership and managerialist discourses. A principal’s work is highly ethical and an understanding of how principals act with regard to their own actions as well as in relation to those of others, such as teachers, parents, children, colleagues and community groups, is important. It is necessary to remember that Foucault’s genealogy of ethics was undertaken using discourses of Greek antiquity, and while I would not go so far as to say that these discourses directly translate to today’s society, they do provide ways of critically analysing thoughts and actions in relation to the self and others that can open up possibilities for change (Hoy, 1986).
