ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we consider how current practices in educational administration as both a professional practice and a scholarly fi eld would have to be approached differently if the claims of philosophical hermeneuticsnamely, a hermeneutics of trust-were taken seriously. Put simply, a hermeneutic, meaning-centred approach would conceive of educational administration more as a task of making meaning than as a technical enterprise, and it would conceive of scholarship as having a stronger interpretive dimension than current practices would admit to. Adopting such an approach would displace positivism’s epistemological privilege in the fi eld and, further, it would displace the hermeneutics of suspicion as the predominant alternative to positivist methods. Before we describe a hermeneutics of trust and its implications for educational administration, however, we fi rst briefl y outline recent critiques of the current conceptualization of administration.
