ABSTRACT
Postmodernism brings both challenges and opportunities to educational administration. This chapter presents both the opportunities and challenges of postmodernism both broadly, as a theoretical stance, and specifically, as it applies to educational administration research and practice. It provides an overview of postmodernism, and explores how researchers in educational administration have used postmodern thought in their work. The chapter examines where the postmodern-inspired educational administration researcher fits into the overall educational administration literature and suggest future directions for its use. It describes five themes of postmodern research, namely, the centrality of discourse, fragmented identities, the critique of the idea of representation, the critique of metanarratives, and the power/knowledge connection. Postmodernism is associated with the so-called linguistic turn in which philosophers paid ever-closer attention to the role language, and other systems of symbols, play in the experiences of the world.
