ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes that hegemonic educational administration and leadership theories cannot adequately explain examples of maladministration. It argues that the inability of orthodox approaches to educational administration and leadership research to deal with maladministration is based on under-developed accounts of the ontological, epistemological, and normative assumptions guiding inquiry. The chapter discusses that relations are a crucial lens for the theorisation of maladministration in education, including the ongoing recasting and potentialities of organising activity. To advance our understanding of maladministration the underlying generative principles of arguments need to be illuminated and the relational approach provides the intellectual resources to do so. Analysis of our ontological complicity is made possible through not only a critical engagement with the limits of thought but also the spatio-temporal conditions in which that thought is exercised. To think relationally about maladministration is to go beyond the simplicity of right and wrong/quality and non-quality, and trouble the very use of analytical dualisms.
