ABSTRACT
It is a frequent enough situation in conducting research to answer one set of questions and then researchers fi nd something else entirely unanticipated. In his classic work The Art of Scientifi c Investigation, Beveridge explained, ‘New knowledge very often has its origin in some quite unexpected observation or chance occurrence arising during an investigation’ (1950: 55). This chapter represents such an occurrence. In conducting an exploration of the nature of administrative heuristics in the management of educational organizations in the UK and the US over a fi ve-month period (English and Bolton 2008), we came upon the presence of trust as a variable in explaining the nature of heuristics and also found a connection to Bandura’s (2001) concept of personal agency.
