Culture-based leadership

Abstract

The field of educational leadership is beset with a barrage of different ‘leadership theories’. There are so many differently named theories and models of leadership that the student and practitioner have difficulty understanding them as anything other than an automat of alternatives. To confuse matters even more, nearly all of these alternatives claim to work in the interest of transformation and social justice and against the status quo. Unfortunately, the dominant textbooks available in educational administration and leadership favour certain traditional approaches to leadership while all but ignoring the most cogent of the contemporary critical alternatives. This essay argues that one reason for the absence of critical voices in the dominant textbooks and practices in the field results from the failure to recognize a commonality among certain critical stances on educational leadership that distinguish them from more traditional approaches. It suggests the field would benefit from recognizing that educational leadership theories may actually be approached as either organization-based theories or as culture-based theories and then advocates more consideration be given to culture-based theories.

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Trevor Ngorosha with his valuable editing in the preparation of this manuscript and Andrew Saultz for an important suggestion at a critical moment.

Notes

1. While standard practice calls for the term ‘commonsense’ to be written as a single word only when used as an adjective, we purposively write the term as a single word even in other usage to make clear that ‘commonsense’ is often neither ‘sense’ nor ‘common’, but a myth created through hegemonic narratives.