ABSTRACT
Educational leadership, management and administration as a field of study has a rich history of epistemological debate. From the work of Andrew Halpin and Daniel Griffiths in the 1950s and 1960s in what is known as the Theory Movement, through to Thomas Barr Greenfield’s critique of logical empiricism in the 1970s, the emergence of Richard Bates’ and William Fosters’ Critical Theory of educational administration in the 1980s and Colin Evers and Gabriele Lakomski’s naturalistic coherentism from1990 to the present time, debates about ways of knowing, doing and being in the social world have been central to advancing scholarship. However, in the most recent decade, at least since the publication of Evers and Lakomski’s work, and despite the emergence of a more sociologically informed stream of scholarship (Gunter, 2010), questions of the epistemological and ontological preliminaries of research have become somewhat marginalised. This is not to suggest that such discussions are not taking place, but rather that they have been sporadic and piecemeal. This is further embodied in the context of the various traditions of educational administration (e.g. scientific, instrumental, humanistic, critical, etc.) rarely, if ever, engaging with one another.
