ABSTRACT
The mainstream educational leadership expertise and its literature need disrupting. Despite the more recent entry into the field of critical voices and perspectives (Bates, 2010; Lakomski, 2005), the field tends to be sociologically realist; it assumes that changing social and political realities are self-evident and unproblematic. It is not uncommon for leadership gurus like Fullan (2011), Hargreaves (2011) and Leithwood et al. (2006) to take neo-liberal reform and its effects on education systems in liberal democratic countries as inevitable and largely beyond interrogation. With the exception of feminist, critical and poststructuralist analyses, how political and governmental discourses constitute or shape the notions, practices and expertise of educational leadership has avoided critical inquiry. The mainstream leadership literature has instead attempted to be responsive to these changes by offering models, technical skills, personal attributes and best practice solutions to the supposedly immutable circumstances of political, social and educational reform. This has made the expertise of educational leadership a resource for government authorities who have sought to ‘script the performance’ of politically responsive educational leadership through government policy and programmes (Fitzgerald and Savage, 2013). The purpose of this chapter is to move beyond accepting the norms and practices of school reform and educational leadership by examining the contemporary conditions through which it has become possible to think of and act upon principals as ‘leaders’ of schools.
