Performing the principal: school leadership, masculinity and emotion

Abstract

In western democracies, the critiques of managerialism in school leadership are increasingly common. Feminist researchers have suggested that this recent orientation fits more easily with traditional male leadership than with that of their female counterparts. However, not all men principals are happy with the managerialist turn either. This study investigated how male primary school principals describe their work and respond to the recent changes. While we acknowledge that female principals are also required to deal with emotional issues, this paper points to the stresses experienced by male principals as a consequence of their being men. From this standpoint, our analysis suggests that gender relations form a particular feature of current leadership issues for male principals and we identify the demands placed on them as a consequence. Using data drawn from a series of recursive interviews with 17 experienced male elementary school principals, we propose that emotional issues are centrally involved in the busyness of running a school. While the acknowledgement of emotional responses challenges the stereotypical view of the male manager as impersonal masculine authority, we show that emotional encounters serve to usher in traditional gendered responses in these male school leaders in ways that are experienced as challenging.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Judith Gill

Judith Gill PhD is currently an Adjunct A/Professor in the School of Education at the University of South Australia, Mawson Lakes Blvd, Mawson Lakes, South Australia 5095, Australia. She has a long-standing interest in gender, work and education, particularly in terms of gender contexts of learning, which involved comparing the experience of students in single-sex school compared with education, leading to her book Beyond the great divide: Single sex schooling or coeducation? (2004). Another line of enquiry has been citizenship education, as in her 2009 book Knowing our place: Children talking about identity, power and citizenship. More recently, she has investigated engineering education, as seen in Gender inclusive engineering education (2009) and Challenging knowledge, sex and power: Gender, work and engineering (2014).

Peter Arnold

Dr Peter Arnold, PhD, is a research associate at the School of Education at the University of South Australia, Mawson Lakes Blvd, Mawson Lakes, SA 5095, Australia. He has recently completed a doctoral thesis on the experience of male primary school principals. He undertook this work after having spent many years working first as a teacher and then as a principal in a series of Australian primary schools, ranging from rural locations to urban settlements. He is currently involved in two government-funded studies, one of youth sexuality education and the other of teacher resilience and retention.