Introduction

Politics is ubiquitous in administration and leadership, on all levels from the macroglobal to individual units of an organisation and interpersonal relations. As the distribution of power, and therefore decision-making, it necessarily involves administration and leadership. Pollitt and Bouckaert’s recent Public Management Reform takes a political approach to administrative studies that is equally relevant to educational administration, examining several levels of political infl uence: socioeconomic forces within which jurisdictions are embedded (including international politics); the political system, consisting of party political ideas, pressure from citizens, and new management ideas; chance events, like scandals and disasters, that require political action; and to some extent the ‘elite decision-makers’ who determine what is desirable and feasible, which would include cabinet ministers and mandarins who occupy a quasipolitical and quasiadministrative role (2004: 25). To these can be added micropolitics and the correlatives of authority, consent and obedience. The importance of politics to administration and leadership is emphasised in their characterisation of regimes as ‘politicoadministrative’ (2004: 39). Not only is politics endemic to administration, and intensifi ed when leadership is added, but it comprises a necessary foundational dimension to the political character of nations, upon which their administrative systems, political roles, and patterns of political behaviour and conceptions are built. One of the most infl uential systems, neoliberalism and the New Public Management ideology (referred to sometimes in education as the corporatisation and commercialisation of education), has had a signifi cant effect on the public sector internationally since the early 1980s. This collection explores how politics relates to education in as many aspects as one volume can hope to cover.