ABSTRACT
About the nature and role of values in solving school-leader problems, there is considerably more heat than light. Values, somehow, ought to be important. Social psychology, for example, has long offered impressive empirical support for their role in peoples’ thinking and problem-solving (e.g., Rokeach, 1975). Furthermore, students of educational leadership and administration acknowledge such importance in their theoretical reflections. ‘Values are central to educational administration’, notes Willower (1987, p. 17) in the sense that administrators make choices among competing values and consider the desirability of alternative courses of action on a daily basis. But as Greenfield has persistently pointed out, the empirical study of administration has traditionally ‘ignore[d] value and sentiment as springs of human action’ (1986, p. 59).
