ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how the policies of leadership represent a key dispositif for neo-liberal school reforms. As for the specific field of educational leadership, the authors should ask how a dispositif involves knowledges, practices and technologies that situate head teachers as subjects either for the enactment of educational policies or for leading schools as organisations. Nevertheless, studies that are inspired by a democratic-critical discourse show a much more complex and articulated knowledge of educational reality, where the work distribution, or division of labour between professionals causes greedy work for educational leaders and their staff. Leadership as policy dispositif, of which transformational and distributed are probably the most relevant ones, produces a regime of truth and technologies of governmentality to put in practice a neo-liberal education model pursuing educational goals congruent with those of competitiveness, selection, performativity and so on.
