This article examines how "Educational Management, Administration and Leadership" has embodied the values, concepts and practice of the field of educational leadership over 50 years and so played a part in challenging or sustaining inequality in education. The article explores selected key concepts, equal opportunities, diversity, and…

This article considers distributed leadership in the context of the extensive literature on post-bureaucratic organisations. It suggests that both distributed leadership and bureaucracy are ideal types. It outlines the development of bureaucracy as an organisational form, challenges the often-stereotypical criticisms that have damned the theory…

William Taylor's 1969 chapter provides a springboard to reflect on how what he termed administrator training has developed since the 1960s. Responding also to Baron's insistence in the same volume that education be viewed as political, the article adopts a critical perspective, focusing on leader preparation programmes and exploring how they…

Responding to Thrupp's [2003. "The School Leadership Literature in Managerialist Times: Exploring the Problem of Textual Apologism." "School Leadership & Management: Formerly School Organisation" 23 (2): 169] call for writers on school leadership to offer "analyses which provide more critical messages about social…

In about a decade the theory of distributed leadership has moved from a tool to better understand the ecology of leadership to a widely prescribed practice. This article considers how to account for its spread and dominance and what purpose it serves. The concept offers an enticing suggestion of including more in leadership, and even sometimes…

A number of researchers have provided an overview of the progress of research focusing on gender and educational leadership/management in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Some cast studies of representation as an early phase overtaken by later concern with phenomenological and radical perspectives. More recently, a focus on women and…

This article explores the insights literature can bring to administrative and bureaucratic critique, focusing on the work of Nikolai Gogol. Gogol's satire of bureaucracy presages many subsequent social science analyses. These encompass the fundamental ruptures in society caused by a surfeit of bureaucracy in "The Nose" and, on a more psychological…

Currently, ethnographic interest in leadership is relatively sparse. This paper's focus derives from research about integrating diversity in leadership, and how some leaders are included and excluded from organisational influence in Further Education. Specific interest is in methodological opportunities to research leadership as observed…

This article explores a paradox, namely the rhetoric of engagement with diversity and social justice among education leaders, yet the paucity in forward-looking critical theory and practice to develop that engagement. It draws upon relatively new as well as established concepts, including the Capabilities Approach, to suggest how and why diversity…

Consideration of the quality, relevance and utility of research in educational leadership and management has been a growing concern of researchers, policy-makers and practitioners, but there is little agreement about its current state or priorities for development. The article reflects on the key criticisms that have been made of research in…

This article uses the theoretical framework of broad and narrow ways of conceptualizing diversity, the latter focusing primarily on those characteristics that are likely to lead to disadvantage, ethnicity, gender and disability, and the broader encompassing many more characteristics of "difference", such as educational background,…

Education is a global enterprise. It is increasingly assumed that an "international perspective" is required to comprehend and relate this world scale enterprise to national, regional and local practice. The phrase is used frequently and generally without an exact definition of meaning. This article explores how the concept of an "international…

This document is a chapter in "The Principles and Practice of Educational Management," which aims to provide a systematic and analytical introduction to the study of educational management. The structure of the book reflects the main substantive areas of educational leadership and management, and most of the major themes are covered in the…

Reports on the results from case studies performed at three vocational institutions in the Shaanxi province in China on the management of marketing, resources, and the curriculum and reflects on the relationship to the United Kingdom experience. Concludes by presenting some areas for consideration in developing the management of vocational…

Based on a national survey of college managers, this book discusses how incorporation of colleges in England has changed working lives of middle and senior managers. Chapter 1 describes the context in which colleges have worked since 1993 and the research rationale and methodology. Chapter 2 analyzes how far senior and middle managers' leadership…