ABSTRACT
The sense of increasing complexity and uncertainty which marked the twentieth century was captured by the poet Yeats when he used the phrase ‘Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’. It can refer to the human destruction inflicted on peoples and the environment as well as the multiplying communications media. In the developed world the century saw the creation of lifestyles and living conditions unimaginable and impossible at any earlier period of history. Old certainties were challenged so that the only certainty remaining was that the pace and complexity of this change would continue. This postmodern condition ‘of ephemerality, fragmentation, discontinuity and the chaotic’ (Harvey 1990:44) has implications and potential for integrity in schools as organisations, and is the subject matter of this chapter.
