ABSTRACT
This chapter reports on a fragment of a longitudinal study of a principal’s transformational leadership and his school’s organisational change. The chapter examines the conversion of the principal’s personal capital into the school’s organizational capital. Three underlying, inter-nested mechanisms of capital conversion emerged from the interview data: Time, a significant person, and a critical moment are required to achieve school development. The specialised skills for intra-capital-conversion and cross-capital-conversion are internalised in the principal’s transformational leadership required for decoding and reshaping school doxa and promoting school change. To encourage Chinese schools to perceive their culture, gain organisational capital, and respond to change, a high amount of cultural capital should be brought into the criteria of selection and training of new principals.
