Purpose: Principals' leadership has become a subversive activity that is carried out strategically to challenge and disrupt the status quo and resist policies and practices that are counterproductive to their work. The purpose of this paper is to reveal subversive tactics principals use in pursuit of justice and equity in schools and identify…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe the variations in the ways that principals conceptualize their basis of power in schools. Design/methodology/approach: Phenomenography was used as the research method of this study. The interviewees consisted of 16 principals, eight from public schools and eight from private schools. Findings: The…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present and discuss the findings from research on the relationship between leadership theory and policy reform in Malaysia. Distributed leadership is normatively preferred in the Malaysia Education Blueprint (MEB), the country's major policy reform document. The research was conducted in two dissimilar…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe a study that explores the discreet activist strategies of educational leaders who promote social justice. Design/methodology/approach: Part of a larger project, this study employed qualitative methods. In particular, researchers interviewed 26 leaders--principals, vice principals, department heads,…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between educational leadership and teacher's motivation. The research described here was anchored in the convergence of two fundamental theories of leadership and motivation: the full range model of leadership and self-determination theory. The central hypotheses were that…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore two dimensions of leadership practices (i.e. teaching and learning and sources of power) used by two exemplary principals in mainland China against a background of education reform and to identify how broader contextual factors have shaped these two dimensions of their leadership.…

Explores four women elementary principals' experiences with power in their working lives. Themes emerging through in-depth interviews included empowerment and positive, negative, and traditional power. These are discussed through three lenses: dominance, facilitation ("power through"), and "power with." All interviewees…

The Galbraith article gives us the opportunity to think out loud about the purposes and practices of field activity, and in responding, this article argues that Galbraith is more concerned with the technical application of a method rather than investigating knowledge production. Using Bourdieu's theory of practice enables critical evaluation to be…