ABSTRACT
The unit of study is headship and many voices and many tones of voice are used to construct an understanding of headship in an English secondary school taking events and the commentaries that surround them as the ‘critical case’ or unit of analysis. Links were made between the data that were collected through observation and interview and a form of anthropological analysis based on the use of ‘critical incidents’ or ‘event analysis’ that would assist in studying processes associated with headship. Studies of crises have been produced by the anthropologist Victor Turner who argues that a suitable unit of analysis in ethnographic study may be a situation, event or crisis that he terms a social drama. The critical incident not only highlighted some of the processes associated with the different groups and individuals with whom the head worked but also illustrated the stresses, ambiguities and dilemmas of headship in the mid-1980s.
