ABSTRACT
In the field of educational administration, we live in an age of leadership, both in the material sense of leaders as persons and in a formal sense that concerns the concept, or rather concepts, of leadership. It has not always been so. Although leaders and leadership have been studied since antiquity – Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s The Politics offer fine examples – in the field of educational administration, which began a quest in the 1950s to be more rigorous and scientific, the dominant paradigm has been that of systems theory. This view brought with it an account of how organisations functioned, and when they failed to function adequately, it proffered both diagnostics and remedial action. When a system is characterised by a specification of inputs, the processing of those inputs and a set of desired outputs, the resulting diagnosis that the theory most likely suggests is a failure of adequate integration between the system’s components. Perhaps there may be inadequate feedback, causing the system to drift outside its operating parameters, and to fail to return to equilibrium. Perhaps there is a problem with inputs. The point is that a systems-theoretic portrayal of an organisation is not isomorphic to that quintessential representation of an organisation’s pattern of leadership – the organisational chart.
