ABSTRACT
Current conversations about educational leadership have increasingly included questions about its sources. Distributed leadership is much in vogue with researchers, policy makers, educational reformers, and leadership practitioners alike (Hammersley-Fletcher & Brundrett, 2005; Storey, 2004). Not surprisingly, however, there are competing and sometimes conflicting interpretations of what distributed leadership actually means. As Harris (2004) has noted, the definition and understanding of distributed leadership varies from the normative to the descriptive. Some, for example, are attracted to increasing, or otherwise manipulating, the distribution of leadership as a possible strategy for school improvement. This perspective, reflected in most of the chapters in this text, encompasses “shared” (Pearce & Conger, 2003), “democratic” and “dispersed” (e.g. Ray et al., 2004) conceptions of leadership, as well. Others (e.g. Spillane et al., Chapter 5 in this volume) employ the concept as a means of “simply” better understanding the meaning and nature of leadership in schools. Not surprisingly, then, the literature about distributed leadership remains diverse and broad based (Bennett et al., 2003).
