ABSTRACT
In my professional life, I am the principal and chief executive of one of the largest post-16 educational institutions in the UK. My college is a fully incorporated entity and operates very much at the forefront of the change process that has faced all such institutions that now make up the modernized UK public sector. I have worked in senior management positions in post-16 education for eighteen years. For the past eight of these I have been a college principal working in the inner city of London with some of the most challenging social and educational agendas that have been present in education throughout this period. On reflection, I realize that my personal experience of much of this part of my career has been paradoxical in that I have found myself acting, with apparent confidence, the part of a radical modernizer while struggling more personally to make sense of the wider political, social and organizational context in which I have been active. The source of my motivation to engage at depth with a doctoral research program is, I believe, located in my inability to resolve this paradox of my lived experience.
