Review of research publications on educational leadership and management in Asia: a comparative analysis of three regions

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which calls over the past 15 years for increased empirical research on educational leadership and management in Asia have yielded increased knowledge production. The study analyses trends in research about and/or from Asia published in eight core educational leadership journals between 2000 and 2011. We provide an overall picture of the volume and impact of knowledge production in the region, as well as insights into change in the rate of knowledge production from the region over time. The study employs a comparative lens, specifically analysing differences in knowledge production capacity and impact across West, South and East Asia. These comparative analyses extend further to understanding variations in the contributions of different societies and universities across Asia. Although the research identified a disappointing level of overall publication in the region, interesting patterns were revealed with respect to the distribution of publications both across and within the three regions of Asia. Taken together the results suggest that progress in developing an ‘Asian knowledge base’ in this field remains stunted, and that regional capacity to produce empirical knowledge continues to be limited to selected societies and universities.

Keywords:

• Asia
• research and development
• knowledge base
• leadership
• management
• administration

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge the funding support of the Research Grant Council (RGC) of Hong Kong for its support through the General Research Fund (GRF 841512).

Notes

1. Note that we characterised these as ‘eight core international research journals’ rather than ‘the eight core international research journals …’ Although any selection of ‘the core journals’ is disputable, we assert that this set is a reasonably comprehensive yet focused list of educational leadership journals.

2. It should be noted that Leithwood and Jantzi’s (2005) review of research on transformational school leadership employed essentially the same set of journals as the basis for their data collection (i.e., seven of the same journals out of eight).

3. The h-index was proposed by J.E. Hirsch in his paper ‘An index to quantify an individual’s scientific research output’, arXiv:physics/0508025 v5 29 Sep 2005. It is defined as follows: A scientist has index h if h of his/her Np papers have at least h citations each, and the other (Np-h) papers have no more than h citations each.

4. This is based on analysis using the Publish or Perish tool on 19 May 2012.

5. We considered two other well known journals: Leading and Managing and Journal of School Leadership. However, the former had a much lower h-index (15), and the latter failed to meet our criterion of having a mission of including international research.

6. It should be noted that unlike in the USA where most doctoral dissertations are stored in digital format by UMI and made available through Proquest, in Asia such systems are not yet in place. Thus, doctoral dissertations are generally stored in print format at single universities. This makes them largely inaccessible for the purposes of international research.

7. It should be noted that, given the diverse foci of our research questions, we decided to include all studies that either investigated about educational leadership and management in these societies or were written about educational issues more generally but produced by scholars operating within the region.

8. In fact, IJEM is also currently published in the USA. However, its mission is more explicitly international than EAQ or LPS. It is interesting to note that IJLE, which is also published in the USA and espouses an explicitly international mission, has published such a low percentage of articles from Asia.

9. It should be emphasised that this ‘average number of articles per society’ does not even include all societies within Asia. Societies such as Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar etc. that did not produce any publications were not even included in the calculation. Thus, ‘real average’ is even lower.