Bourdieu’s strategies and the challenge for educational leadership

Abstract

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 understanding of leadership. Theoretically informed by the work of Pierre Bourdieu and building on a previous special issue edited by Lingard and Christie, in this paper I contend that insufficient attention has been devoted to the temporal features of leadership actions. Analogies provided by practising principals are used to highlight the directly unobservable features of school leadership. The central argument of this paper is that heightened attention to temporal elements of leadership as a social action has the prospect of elucidating that which is not directly observable and consequently move scholarship beyond the superficial measurement of what is directly observable to a thick description of educational leadership.

Notes

1. As an Australian educational leadership scholar, I cannot help but be particularly interested in the field within my own national boundaries while at the same time focusing on it internationally.

2. This is a government‐funded title which tells the story, through a biographical narrative, of 12 ‘effective’ Australian principals and the contexts of their work.

3. A deliberate stylistic choice has been made to indicate Bourdieu’s concepts of capital, field, habitus and strategies in italics to prevent confusion with other uses of the terms.

4. Checks for validity were undertaken by cross referencing responses with other questions relating to their role and how they enact that role.

5. I am grateful to Jenny Gore who so articulately made this point at a recent post‐graduate conference at the School of Education, University of Newcastle.