ABSTRACT
Institutional and interactional power are of course closely and importantly related; for it is precisely by virtue of their institutional power that heads and deputies have access to (and time to participate in) a large range of non‐classroom contexts where they acquire the necessary cultural resources (knowledge of theories and other institutions and also, of course, the strategic skills of decision‐making) which they can then employ to good effect in the educationist context. The maintenance of the boundaries of permissible practice is therefore achieved as a result of an intersection between head and deputy headteacher strategy, the cultural resources which teachers of all kinds bring to the interaction (these consist of professional experiences and shared interpretative schemes), and the influences of the dominant hegemony and the institutional distribution of power on the content of those resources.
