This paper is a response to Richard Niesche's recent JEAH paper claiming a 'theory turn' in educational leadership. Bringing Niesche's argument into conversation with recent work on social epistemology in the field, I argue that any claim for a theory turn is premature and arguably requires further nuancing of enduring issues. Framed around the…

Purpose: School consolidation reforms are underway in regional New South Wales (NSW), Australia. The purpose of this paper is to establish an evidence base of research literature on school consolidation in regional, rural and remote locations. Design/methodology/approach: A scoping study of empirical literature on school consolidation, with a…

Journal rankings are increasingly being used as proxies for assessing the quality and worth of individual faculty and their contribution to institutional performance. Problematic within this agenda is the historical mapping and projection of current journal rankings. Individual papers are being assessed against criteria far…

As a field of knowledge production, educational administration and leadership scholars do a substantial amount of talking past one another. These parallel monologues are a major issue for the advancement of knowledge. Original contributions can only be made in relation to others. That is, the innovation or significance of scholarship is an act of…

As one of the central institutions of society, schooling is subject to significant public interest and scrutiny. Fads and fashion successfully developed elsewhere are often rebadged and relaunched in education for the purpose of improvement. Such interventions are often quickly identified as intruders and frequently fade into obscurity, but what…

Whereas epistemological debates raged in educational administration during the Theory Movement, or inspired by intervention from Thom Greenfield, Richard Bates or Colin Evers and Gabriele Lakomski, epistemology and the quest for the scientific study of educational administration has somewhat diminished in the era of managerialism and the pursuit…

Over the past two decades, there have been calls by scholars for a more concerted effort to develop empirically grounded research studies on educational leadership management and administration in an indigenous context rather than hegemonic western contexts. This paper presents a review of contemporary literature on educational leadership from…

On an international scale, public administration is undergoing considerable restructuring as principles of private enterprise are becoming the orthodoxy. At the same time, economic instability (or crisis) is gripping both national and global financial markets, suggesting a flaw in the system or even that capitalism has reached it limits. Crises in…

Purpose: "Leadership" is arguably the central concept of interest in contemporary scholarship on educational administration. Within this scholarly discourse, there is an explicit assumption that leadership is a "real" phenomenon that is not only important, but also necessary for educational institutions. However, few scholars…

Contemporary discourses in educational administration have exponentially grown the number of adjectival leaderships, challenged traditional organisational structures, and offered autonomy as a solution to performance issues. In this theoretical paper, I ask "what does the principalship look like after autonomy?" Despite the range of…

Despite the "practice" turn in the broader management literature, very little work in educational administration has engaged in a theoretical discussion about what constitutes leadership practice. Theoretically informed by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, this paper contributes to the long-established critical tradition in the educational…

When it comes to organizational performance, leaders matter. Without significant attention to the preparation and development of school leaders, government initiatives aimed at building world class education systems are unlikely to succeed. Across the Anglophone world leadership preparation and development has become a key leverage point in…

What we have come to understand as education has a temporal dimension: the school year, progression based on time, timetables, and so on. Similarly, our understanding of teaching is framed by temporality, primarily through salary structures and an implicit coupling of performance with time in the field. We argue that this underlying generative…

In this paper, we weave the auto-ethnographic narratives of the two authors with Bourdieu's key concepts of "habitus," "field" and "capital," as we seek to bring to a level of explicitness the reflexive lens which has shaped our scholarly work. In particular, we examine the process of becoming educational…

The quality of scholarship in educational leadership has frequently been questioned both within and beyond the field. Much of the work in the field is limited to the analysis of either individual or structural influences on practice. The resulting lists of traits, behaviours and organizational structures provide little in furthering our…