Professional development of school leadership as boundary work: patterns of initiatives and interactions based on a Norwegian case

ABSTRACT

Research on the professional development of school leadership often highlights the value of partnerships across institutions. Increasingly, partnership has been labeled boundary work. However, few empirical studies have been conducted on school leaders’ professional development as boundary work. The aim is to contribute empirical insight into the phenomenon based on a specific case and present findings from a qualitative study. The study is grounded on audio and video data collected over a 2-year period in a team of participants from schools, a local educational authority, and a university in Norway. This enables attention to the minute details of participant discursive initiatives and interactions. The third generation of the cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) is the chosen theoretical framework. Through extensive coding of discursive individual initiatives during 10 meetings, the analysis revealed 13 types of initiatives and their patterns of distribution across the three institutions. The interaction analysis shows how the different initiatives contributed to an expansion of the problem-spaces being worked on and how the issues of leadership, power, and authority emerged in the interactions. Attention to the initiatives and the interactions is essential to ensure that boundary work aids school leadership development in the future.

Introduction

The focus in this article is on professional development as school leadership. It draws on the literature on ‘the education of leaders’¹ and on ‘school leadership development.’^2,3 The term ‘professional development of school leadership’ is used as a collective term in this article.

Although the United States was virtually alone in providing university-based leadership programs in the 1950s, a few other countries began to introduce such programs at the end of the 1950s and in the 1960s; these countries include Canada, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand (Miklos, 1983). In the 1980s, countries around the world began to offer professional development of school leadership. Various researchers have contributed to this area via reviews of research, often from different national contexts (for the United States, see Murphy & Hallinger, 1992; for England, see Bush & Jackson, 2002; for Australia, see Dempster, Lovett, & Fluckiger, 2011; Norway: Møller, 2016).

Until the early 1970s, school leadership research was dominated by the ‘theory movement,’ where the goal was to develop general laws for successful school leadership with a purpose of using the knowledge as a basis in the education of school leaders to develop school leadership as a profession separate from teaching (Griffiths, 1988). Many researchers have criticized this approach to leadership for focusing too much on technical issues and administrative skills and for the lack of attention to values (e.g. see Greenfield, 1979; Greenfield & Ribbins, 1993). Other researchers (e.g. Eacott & Asuga, 2014; Ylimaki & Jacobson, 2011) have underpinned the importance of context in the professional development of school leadership. Despite the critics of generic ways of approaching the education of school leaders, scholars (e.g. in the United States) have developed standards for effective school leadership, and in turn, standards for effective education of school leaders.

The literature in the last two decades has revealed a variety of ways to foster the professional development of school leadership around the world (Author, 2016; Huber, 2010; Lumby, Crow, & Pashiardis, 2008; Townsend & MacBeath, 2011; Young & Crow, 2017; Young, Crow, Murphy, & Ogawa, 2009). Professional development of school leadership may imply collaboration across institutions. The literature reveals that institutions such as universities, schools and district offices are engaged (Crow, Arnold, Reed, & Shoho, 2012; Huber, 2010; Young & Grogan, 2008). Boundary work and boundary crossing have been frequently discussed in other fields of inquiry, for example, in the research on vocational training, social work, teacher education and workplace learning (e.g. Edwards, 2010; Engeström & Sannino, 2010; Ludvigsen, Lund, Rasmussen, & Saljö, 2011; Tuomi-Gröhn & Engeström, 2003). However, sparse empirical and theoretical attention has been paid to the professional development of school leadership as ‘boundary work’ across institutions, which is the phenomenon under study here. These studies include analyzes of the professional work ‘at the boundaries’ (Edwards, 2010), ‘learning across sites’ (Ludvigsen et al., 2011), and ‘expansive learning’ through boundary crossing (Engeström & Sannino, 2010).

Boundary crossing is the result of two simultaneously occurring processes within a knowledge society (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011); that is, the processes of specializing and collaborating across boundaries. As professionals increasingly become more specialized, they need to collaborate to solve complex problems and share expertise. Akkerman and Bakker (2011) argued that ‘boundaries are becoming more explicit because of increasing specialization; people, therefore, search for ways to connect and mobilize themselves across social and cultural practices to avoid fragmentation’ (p. 132).

The distribution of labor within institutions has some degree of predictability. For instance, the responsibilities of a school principal or a researcher are formally prescribed in part by job descriptions and mandates. When professionals from different institutions collaborate across institutional boundaries, the distribution of labor is less obvious since the participants lack a common history, rules, and conventions. Therefore, it is important to examine questions of leadership, power, and authority. An assumption in the reported project is that the distribution of labor in boundary work becomes visible and manifested through the participants´ individual initiatives and social interactions when working on different issues. Attention to the initiatives and the interactions is essential to develop knowledge about school leadership development as boundary work and to ensure that it aids school leadership development in the future.

The empirical example is from a Norwegian context. The professional development of school leadership as boundary work was studied over a 2-year period in a team of principals from primary and secondary schools, municipality leaders from a local educational authority, and researchers from a university (Author, 2014). The team was formed to support principals in leading a local school improvement project. This arrangement was part of a national school improvement program.

The cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) constitutes the theoretical framework of the study. Multiple variations of this theoretical approach are used in different national contexts, for example, in Germany, the United States, Australia, and Finland (Sannino & Engeström, 2018). The study is inspired by the approach developed and used at the University of Helsinki. CHAT consists of first, second, and third generations (Engeström, 1987). While the first generation of CHAT has its origin in Vygotsky’s (1886–1934) work and his methods of theorizing individual development, the second generation of CHAT has its origins in Leontiev’s (1903–1979) work, which expanded the unit of analysis from individuals to collective settings. The present study is positioned within the third generation of CHAT, which was developed by Engeström (1987) because of the expansion of the unit of analysis to include at least two institutions (i.e. two activity systems). The third generation of CHAT builds on the studies of researchers such as Bateson (1904–1980) and Bakthin (1885–1975).

The following sections include relevant research followed by a presentation of the analytic framework. The case, the context, and the methodology of the study are then described before the presentation of the analyses and the findings. Finally, in the last sections, the findings, offering implications for future leadership development, are discussed and concluded.

Relevant research

The section presents the relevant research and the research approaches related to school leadership, power and authority, the distribution of labor, the professional development of school leadership, and boundary crossing.

There are many approaches to leadership. Eacott (2019) explained, ‘There is nothing in the empirical world that directly corresponds with the label leadership. Instead, it is an epistemic construct, only coming to being through analysis’ (p.20). The present study may be sorted within a relation approach, which is concerned with ‘the constitution and the emergences of organizing activity through relations’ (Eacott, 2017, p.198). In line with Smylie, Conley, and Marks (2002), I perceive that leadership does not reside in a formal role. Rather, leadership is an outcome of relational work in organizations.

Gronn (2003) argued that leadership is part of a family of terms of related usage, for example, authority, power, influence, and coercion. Authority has been thought of since Weber (1972) as the legitimate cousin of power; where power coerces, authority persuades. In the literature, a distinction is made between an instrumental and relational perspective (Burbules, 1986). The instrumental perspective linking power to a personal level has been criticized by Burbules (1986) and Watkins (1989). Instead, they asserted that power is a relational concept where participants have the opportunity to, more or less, delimit each other’s actions. School principals cannot rely on a formal position. It is the outcome of the interactions that determines the trajectory of the activity, even if the principal makes the final decision (Vennebo & Ottesen, 2012, p. 268). As such, authority is not an a priori attribute; instead, it is collectively negotiated.

In this study, ‘soft power’ is used. It refers to the dynamics of influence and affiliation through collaborative work in contrast to the exercise of coercion or force through ‘hard power’ to achieve institutional aims (Spicer, 2013). Power and authority are also linked to the use of cultural tools. As Wertsch (1998) opined, ‘The use of a particular mediational means is often based on factors having to do with historical precedent and with cultural power and authority’ (p. 42). In other words, the use of cultural tools may have historical and cultural explanations.

The division of labor comes into being when two or more people are required to perform some work together (Gronn, 2003), which is the situation in the empirical example in this article. A distinction is made between the division of labor and the division of rights, although the two are interrelated (Strauss, 1985). Gronn (2003, p. 28) espoused that ‘the division of labor is concerned with the completion of tasks, while the division of rights concerns the authority and accountability for the allocation of work and resources. In practice, the division of labor of the different stakeholders involved in boundary work is not always obvious. Lopez-Real, Law, and Tang (2009) reported findings from a study of four tripartite conferences in which student teachers, mentor teachers, and university tutors participated in the development of student teachers in China. The university tutors dominated the conversation in the beginning, while the situation changed to a more equal distribution of discursive initiatives during the collaboration.

It is reasonable that knowledge exchange is an aim of interprofessional work. Based on data from interviews, observation, and questionnaires, Singh, Märtsin, and Glasswell (2013), in an Australian context, suggested that as the partnership progressed, the researchers and teachers became more willing to engage in common knowledge exchanges. In a national study of interagency work in England, Daniels (2011) focused on communication practices across professional boundaries. The findings suggested the teams with the weakest boundaries were the most likely to be crossed by other stakeholders.

Although little attention has been paid to the professional development of school leadership as boundary work, the research on partnerships indirectly reveals that such work is common (Author, 2016). For example, during the 1990s in the United States, different versions of participatory research were designed for school leaders to be able to explain the problems they faced in their everyday practice, and since 2000, school partnerships have increased (McCarthy, Hackmann, & Malin, 2017). Huber (2010), analyzed school leadership programs in 15 different countries in Europe, Northern America, and Asia and identified how the combination of course-based learning at universities with experience-based learning at local schools had become a trend in many countries. In Norway, several national improvement programs have been launched during the last decade. In these programs, teachers and school leaders are supposed to develop their professional expertise through boundary work across institutions, such as schools, municipalities, and universities. However, self-reports from surveys and interviews dominate the methodologies used in the research (Author, 2016). As Byrne-Jiménez, Gooden & Tucker (2017), the actual pedagogy in leadership programs remains a relevant question.

The attention to boundary crossing and boundary work is not new. Suchman (1994, p. 25) introduced the term ‘boundary -crossing’ to denote how professionals at work need to ‘enter onto territory in which we are unfamiliar and, to some significant extent therefore unqualified.’ It is an argument in both CHAT and in situated theory on expansive learning (Wenger, 1998) that boundary crossing and boundary objects⁴ carry the potential for learning. When reviewing 181 studies to identify how boundary crossing and boundary objects work, Akkerman and Bakker (2011) revealed four typical mechanisms (also called types of learning): identification, coordination, reflection, and transformation.

In a similar way, Edwards (2010) explained how boundary work has the potential of mediating learning because it may become a springboard to new relationships and may mediate knowledge exchanges and reflective processes in which the practitioners question the aspects of their own practices. However, based on her research in the UK, she also pointed out challenges. The participants may lack the expertise to reflect beyond the bounders of their practices and to understand what is at stake for other participants. Edwards argued that boundary work requires a specific relational and professional expertise to engage with professionals from other practices.

Recently, some scholars (Engeström, 2009; Sannino & Engeström, 2018; Spinuzzi & Guile, 2019) have pointed to a fourth generation of CHAT because of new global challenges. Unlike cases, which traditionally have been examined with CHAT (e.g. education, health, law and other long-term and stabilized activities), the analyses of new cases from post-bureaucratic work tend to include activities that are unstable and interconnected with many other activities, including interactions with open-source software, co-work, and client-focused projects (Spinuzzi & Guile, 2019).

The review of the relevant research has highlighted several points: First, professional development of school leadership often indicates partnerships between schools and universities and includes a combination of experience-based learning at the workplace and university-based courses. Although a few studies have applied CHAT as a methodological approach, the methodology is dominated by self-reports from surveys and interviews. A careful analysis of the ongoing interactions and negotiations that go on within partnerships is often missing. Second, the division of labor within partnerships has been explored, but we know less about how the ongoing interactions and negotiations emerge. Third, the studies on boundary crossing have revealed the potential of mediating learning when practitioners are challenged to question their own practices. However, less empirical and theoretical attention has been given to professional development among school leaders. The study reported in this article aims to fill that gap and adds an empirical analysis to the current understanding of professional development across schools, local educational authorities, and universities. The next section elaborates on CHAT as the chosen theoretical approach in the study.

The analytic framework for examining boundary work

The way in which a situated activity is linked to objects is called the ‘cornerstone of CHAT’ (Kaptelinin & Miettinen, 2005, p.1). The notion of an object helps distinguish activity systems from each other (Engeström, 1987) and shows what directs and energizes an activity (Foot, 2002). The object of a hospital is historically to make people healthy and to contribute to research, which is different than that of a school. In this study, schools, educational authorities, and universities are treated as different activity systems because the activities are motivated and directed by different historical objects developed over decades (Engeström, 1987). Historical objects usually develop slowly over time and are not easy to research.

Rather than examining the historical objects of the three interacting activity systems, the present study examines the boundary work of a team. The team is conceptualized as a ‘boundary zone.’ The concept was first introduced by Konkola (Tuomi-Gröhn & Engeström, 2003) and described as a ‘no man’s land’ free from routine and rigid patterns of interactions. When object-oriented collaboration takes the form of teamwork and is too loose and temporary to be categorized as an activity system, Engestroö;m (2008) suggests using intermediate concepts in such approaches. In this article, the term ‘boundary work’ is used as an intermediate empirical concept. However, in this case, the boundary work takes place in a boundary zone where participants are partly committed to the historical objects of the activity systems they represent and partly struggle to construct a new boundary object for a shorter period of time. They do so by negotiating several situationally constructed objects along the way. A ‘situationally constructed object’ refers to what is being worked on in the here and now in terms of different problem-spaces and issues (Engeström, 1999).

An object defines ‘a horizon of possible actions’ (Engeström, 1999). Leadership can be theorized within the processes, or ‘search actions’, through which subjects interact to construct, develop or maintain objects locally (Vennebo & Ottesen, 2012, p. 258). A principal may make decisions and set the agenda, but despite the formal roles that are regulated, they are situated and achieved through interactions. In CHAT, the relationship between individual actions and interactions are considered dialectic (Lektorsky, 2009). Individual actions and interactions are thought to presuppose each other. Consequently, the analytic focus of this study is on discursive actions and social interactions.

The rules, the community, and the division of labor in activity systems may differ in each activity system. This research specifically focuses on the division of labor. Engeström (2001) stated that ‘the division of labor in an activity creates different positions for the participants, the participants carry their own various histories, and the activity system itself carries multiple layers and strands of history engraved in its artifacts, rules and conventions’ (p. 136). The distribution of labor in CHAT refers to the horizontal division of tasks and the vertical distribution of authority (Engeström & Sannino, 2010). Furthermore, it is assumed that the division of labor partly manifests through discursive action (and other types of action) in relation to the different situational constructed objects that arise during collaboration.

The case and the context

The team studied worked on a local school improvement project in a mid-sized Norwegian municipality, which consisted of seven schools. The project was one of 100 projects supported by a program called The Knowledge Promotion – From Word to Deed, which was part of a national curriculum reform initiative. Because the national educational authority considered the implementation of the curriculum reform challenging on an organizational level, the local educational authority and the schools had to select external partners, such as researchers from colleges and universities, as a prerequisite for getting funding for the local projects. Two researchers (including the author) were invited to contribute to the professional development of the school leaders. Three principals from the piloting schools in the project, three municipality leaders, and the two researchers formed the team.

No guidelines were established for collaboration; consequently, the participants had to negotiate the agenda and identify the preliminary distribution of labor; for example, who was going to make the time schedule, create the agendas, and lead the meetings and the team (Author, 2014). After some time, the principals from the piloting schools, the leaders from the local educational authority (hereafter called municipality leaders), and the two university researchers decided to form a school improvement team, which serves as the case in the present study. The municipality leaders were accountable for making a project plan together with the school leaders and for submitting reports to the national program committee.

Methodology

A qualitative research strategy was chosen for the larger research project, which the present sub-study is part of. The larger study examined the different aspects of school leadership development as boundary work. It also followed the activities of the team in their natural setting (Bryman, 2012) during the 10 meetings. The work was a longitudinal panel (Bryman, 2012) study, and it was conducted during a 2-year period with the team consisting of the same individuals. Furthermore, this study was deemed to have an ethnographic approach (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2010) since it draws upon audio and video recordings from the 10 team meetings collected over the 2-year time frame.

The study also employed an intervention approach, as the researchers participated in the teamwork and introduced several tools for mediating the learning processes. The researchers’ involvement in the group might challenge the analytic perspectives of the research. Therefore, several strategies were used to produce valid data analysis (Author, 2013), including explicitly shifting from an interventionist approach to an analyst approach, thus enabling a time lag between the data collection and the data analysis. Other strategies included recording the interactions using video and audio equipment, transcribing the team negotiations of the team, coding participant actions, and applying a comprehensive conceptual framework (CHAT).

The analysis was a multi-step process. First, in the larger study, the transcribed audio data (25 hours) from the 10 team meetings was organized into 34 episodes (Author, 2013). Each episode indicated what was being worked on here and known in terms of the issues presently in situ. To capture the motivational force behind the team’s work in situ, the term ‘situation-specific object’ (Author, 2013; Engeström, 1999) was used to refer to the different issues being addressed. A new episode was signified with a thematic start or a shift related to the topic being worked on. The 34 episodes were sequentially numbered from 1 to 34, covering nearly all the discursive initiatives and interactions of the working team besides the negotiation of meeting dates.

To answer the first research question regarding the type and distribution of initiatives, discursive actions were electronically analyzed across all episodes and workshops based on the transcripts of audio and video data from all the workshops. This was accomplished through an extensive coding process using the scientific software HyperResearch. Some of the discursive initiative types were generated from the data, while some were inspired by Middleton (2010) codebook for interinstitutional work. Some of the codes had to be renamed to ensure precision. Finally, 13 types of initiatives were identified (Table A1). Although the individual discursive initiatives (what the actors said) were coded, they were grouped according to the three activity systems (i.e. schools, education authorities, and universities). In the presentation, an inconsistent number of participants was controlled for in regard to each activity system and meeting.

When answering the second research question related to how the initiatives were realized through the group’s teamwork, an interaction analysis was conducted (Jordan & Henderson, 1995, p. 39). In analyzing how the initiatives were realized through teamwork, attention was devoted to what was collectively ‘produced’ when the team focused on situation-specific objects. Although the different types of discursive initiatives in the boundary work were accounted for across all the activity systems, the study was still defined as qualitative since the reports regarding the distribution of discursive actions were used as a foundation of qualitative analyses in regard to how the discourse initiatives played out through the collective work. Excerpts that exemplify the patterns of interactions were selected based on the following criteria: the interaction (1) includes several of the initiatives, (2) shows how the individual initiatives collectively play out through the boundary work, (3) involves participants from all three activity systems, and (4) indicates how the team worked on shared situational objects. Episodes 1–4 were left out because the boundary object and the situational objects were ill-defined in the beginning of the collaboration (cf. Author, 2014).

Findings and analyses

In this section the types of initiatives and their distributions across the three activity systems are examined before a presentation of how the initiatives play out in the interactions in the boundary work.

The types of initiatives and their distribution

Table 1 shows the 13 kinds of initiatives identified in the analysis. The distribution of the discursive actions across the three activity systems (i.e. schools, municipalities, and universities) demonstrates the similarities and the differences regarding the contributions from each activity system.

Table 1. The type and the distribution of kinds of discursive initiatives.

Type of initiative	Distribution of discursive initiatives*: School Municipality University			Total number
Nominating main issues for discussion	0	4	17	21
Acknowledging and/or qualifying what is said	46	72	77	195
Aiming (referring to aims, i.e. of the team/the local project/the national program)	13	32	11	56
Arguing (without further nuances)	56	42	23	121
Exemplifying	50	38	2	90
Mirroring what is said	2	18	20	40
Nuancing what is said	93	75	60	228
Talking from the perspective of another’s activity system	12	28	5	45
Problematizing the subject matter	16	17	7	40
Questioning subject matter	30	50	243	323
Testing ideas, arguments, or assumptions	8	8	19	35
Theorizing by referring to theory, models, and/or research	4	15	19	38
Summarizing subject matter	0	6	6	12
Total number	330	405	509	1244

* Performed by participants from the school, education authority, and university, respectively.

The distribution of initiatives across the three activity systems may not be surprising, specifically in terms of the principals most often being the actors who exemplified what was said, since the team was designed to specifically support the principals and enhance their expertise in leading organizational learning in their schools. Similarly, as the municipality leaders were responsible for reporting on the local project to the national program committee, it is also unsurprising that they were the most likely to refer to aims during the 2 years of collaboration. In addition, this also applies to the fact that the researchers were most likely to refer to theory and research since theorizing has been a prominent practice of universities for decades. It is important to note that the researchers also asked most of the questions during reflection.

However, some surprising differences were also noted. For example, Table 1 indicates that the researchers were most likely to nominate issues for future work, test out what was said, and summarize the conversation thus far. These actions might be considered surprising because the researchers were the only actors who were not leaders in contrast to the principals and the municipality leaders from the educational authority. It might also be surprising that the principals, to a lower degree, theorized the problem space discussed, since two of the three principals had been enrolled in a master program in educational leadership.

The next section exemplifies how the initiatives played out through the social interactions of the team. The team consisted of the following municipality leaders⁵: Eileen, Leo, and Patricia (however, Eileen attended the meetings most frequently); principals: Tony, Annie, and Billy, and researchers: Casper and Rachel.

Ways in which the initiatives are played out through interaction

In excerpt 1, we meet the team in Episode 22 in the beginning of meeting 8 when they are preparing the work for an evaluation report for the national program board. The team first negotiated the different aspects of the evaluation before focusing on the types of evaluation within the schools.⁶ The topic was on the team’s agenda because the municipality was asked to submit a midpoint evaluation report to the board of the national program. Rachel, the researcher, presented the agenda, which had been previously discussed with the team.

Excerpt 1

Table

Who		Discursive initiatives and interactions	Type
1.^7	Rachel (R)	So, if you look at the program, [we are going to]^8 discuss what evaluation the pilot schools have in relation to the project targets and the key challenges in the work on evaluation [the report to the national authority]. We are also going to share experiences, and we will have an action learning session (…).^9 Does this sound OK?	Nominating Questioning
2.	Tony (P)	Um	Acknowledge
3.	Rachel (R)	There is much talk about evaluation (…). There is [in Norway] a focus on the end product [of education]. They [the national authority] request to be informed to the results. This [phenomenon] can be traced back to the 1980s, when a committee from the OECD [Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development] visited Norway. They [the committee] asked certain timely questions about what the government really knew regarding the quality of schooling in Norway. They [the national educational authority] argued Norway did not have a proper quality assessment system. Since then, there have been a number of measures (…). There is now, for example, more focus placed on the PISA [Programme for International Student Assessment] tests. Some – for example, Gustav Karlsen [a professor and author] – call it [the phenomenon] ‘decentralized centralism.’ That is, the evaluation is centralized, but the responsibility of evaluating is decentralized in favor of the municipalities. The national authority – they have focused on the goals and results. So, what do you think, Tony?	Theorizing

Rachel (1) nominated the situation-specific object to be worked on here, known (Engeström, 1999) as a horizon of possible actions, since she also tested out whether the agenda was okay. Tony simply acknowledged that the suggested program was ‘okay’ without adding any other suggestions. Thus, as can be seen in Excerpt 1, the researcher explained why the national authority had implemented stricter evaluation practices by referring to both past and present events. Specifically, she introduced the concept of ‘decentralized centralism,’ which could be regarded as what Vygotsky (1986) defined as a scientific concept rather than an everyday concept. Her initiative was categorized as ‘theorizing.’ Rachel did not define the concept, which might be a reasonable thing to do in a lecture at the university. Instead, she used the term to conceptualize the present situation. In Excerpt 1, the researcher was the most engaged participant in terms of defining the evaluation as a situation-specific object. Initiatives directed toward the situational objects consisted only of the discursive initiatives of two individuals. Excerpt 2 illustrates how the conversation continued in Episode 22 as they still discussed the evaluation as a situational object.

Excerpt 2

Table

Who	Discursive initiatives and interactions	Type
4. Tony (P)	I think there is a duality in all evaluations. There is the government’s need for measuring and controlling [schools] as well as the government’s need to evaluate and improve internal processes related to evaluation (…).I understand the need for learning about situations in schools through external types of evaluation, but this is a type of external demand that is not as important to us.	Arguing Exemplifying Perspective taking
5. Rachel (R)	And then the question is what to use it [external types of evaluation] for? Some call it various forms of accountability. One can be administrative, but it can also be professional (…) Elstad [a Norwegian researcher] has investigated what happens in schools that score poorly, how it might affect the teachers’ feelings, and what it’s like for a teacher if they know there are very low scores in their classes.	Problematizing Theorizing
6. Eileen (A)	When you look at decentralized centralism through goals and results, there is a complexity in it regarding the goals and the results sought. It is reflected in areas that are prioritized by the local municipality authority (…)	Exemplifying Aiming
7. Rachel (R)	That is what Dahler-Larsen [a Danish researcher] is questioning. When we spend a lot of time on it [evaluation], how [can we] utilize it?	Exemplifying Theorizing Questioning
8. Billy (P)	I am thinking, you are saying that there are so many things we are going to evaluate. There certainly are, but maybe we must determine what is most important in relation to motivating [students] (…). We must not think that ‘they’ [the central authority] just want to control ‘us’; [we] have to think that it’s to ensure that we do something good!	Mirroring Exemplifying
9. Rachel (R)	Yes, it’s an important point of view. It is because of student learning.	Acknowledging
10. Billy (P)	Rather than thinking that evaluation comes from above, we can think that evaluation ensures the quality [of the schooling]. How can we, either we as teachers, principals, or students, do something where we are? That is important. To juggle several balls in the air at once, we need to sort out what is important.	Arguing
11. Rachel (R)	Do you think that you [as school leaders] are responsible for that?	Testing
12. Billy (P)	I think we all are responsible [of the situation] at the level where we are.	Arguing

In contrast to Excerpt 1, Excerpt 2 shows how the participants representing the three activity systems define the evaluation as a situation-specific object (cf. Engeström, 1999) through discursive interactions. The principals exemplify, argue, and problematize the evaluation, while the municipality leader (6) refers to the aims in the governance document (aiming). The researcher refers to other researchers (5, 7), but also asks questions (questioning). Excerpt 2 also reflects the typical distribution of initiatives among team members (Table 1). An exception of this is how Billy (8) mirrors (mirroring) what is said, an action frequently performed by the researchers (cf. Table 1). In contrast to the situation in Excerpt 1 in which the researcher used theoretical concepts, in this excerpt, Eileen (6) utilizes the concept of ‘decentralized centralism,’ which was introduced by the researcher to conceptualize the present situation (theorizing). Eileen (6) uses everyday concepts to define the situation within her context.

The participants contributed with their different initiatives, which may be conceptualized ‘search actions’ (Engeström, 1999) to expand the definition of the evaluation as a situation-specific object. For example, Tony (4) stated ‘I think there is a duality in all evaluations.’ Meanwhile, Eileen (6) asserted that what is prioritized locally reflects what is prioritized nationally, while Billy (8) introduced the concept that the national authority has a productive agenda (perspective taking). The participants picked up what was said by others in the team and expanded it. Billy exemplified (exemplifying) this by referring to both the internal and external forms of evaluation. Rachel (5) extended his argument by conceptualizing the phenomenon and referring to theory (theorizing): ‘And then the question is what to use it [external types of evaluation] for? Some call it the various forms of accountability.’ Here, Rachel theorized the situation by using scientific concepts (cf. Vygotsky, 1986) sans further explanation.

Excerpt 2 illustrates how the participants from the three activity systems used different resources, or what Vygotsky (1978) would call ‘meditational means,’ when arguing about evaluation. Specifically, the principals relied on their experiences with external evaluation in schools, the administrators relied on policy documents, and the researchers relied on theory and research in their arguments, which reflect the history of the activity systems being engraved in the resources (cf. Engeström, 2001).

When Excerpt 1 and Excerpt 2 are compared, the lengths of the participant contributions vary. In Excerpt 1, the responses from the researchers at the university are much longer than those from the principals in the school. Also, the response lengths were more equal in Excerpt 1 than in Excerpt 2.

From initiative 4 to initiative 11 the participants were engaged in illuminating evaluation as a situational object. However, by initiative 11, Rachel the researcher took on another position, which might reflect her self-positioning to gain the authority to ask for the principals’ responses (cf. Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998).

Discussion

The overall purpose of the national program was to strengthen the ability of schools to improve their work and create a better learning environment for the pupils. The national program committee introduced tripartite collaborations (boundary-crossing) as a policy instrument to mediate the school improvement work. It is timely to expect that a new instrument should come with guidelines for implementation, which was not the case. Instead, the actors in the 100 projects had to test out the instrument by exploring different ways of collaborating about what and how (Author, 2014). The literature reveals that boundary crossing may mediate learning but may also imply several challenges related to questions of leadership, authority, and the distribution of labor (cf. Akkerman & Bakker, 2011; Edwards, 2010).

In the reported project, it was not decided in advance who was going to lead the team. Thus, the boundary zone was ‘an open space for authoring’ (Holland et al., 1998). The coding of the initiatives across activity systems revealed that the researchers from the university were those who most often nominated the agenda, asked several questions, and summarized the discussions. Without having roles as leaders at the university, this finding is partly surprising. The researchers were ascribed as supervisors or helpers, not as leaders in the project, so this was to some degree unexpected. However, it might reflect the difference in status between schools and universities.

When approaching leadership from a relational perspective (cf. Eacott, 2017), the attention is moved from individual discursive actions to the unfolding activity in the team, in this case to the boundary work. Smylie et al. (2002) declared that leadership does not reside in formal roles; rather, it is the outcome of relation work. The analysis of the distribution of initiatives shows that the typical leadership initiatives were evident in the boundary work. Attention has been paid to the initiatives and to the development of the direction of the boundary. The team succeeded in unveiling evaluation as a situational object with the help of several initiatives. The initiatives included setting the agenda, posing several questions, and summarizing and were not resisted. In a moment, in the collaborative work, the researcher positioned herself as a leader of the team, posing a question about accountability (cf. Holland et al., 1998).

The national program initiative implied both a distribution of tasks and a distribution of rights, which Gronn (2003) argued are different but interrelated. The division of labor comes into being when two or more people are required to work together. The pattern that became visible when analyzing the discursive actions reflected the historical objects (Engeström, 1999) of the interacting activity systems, where the principals frequently came up with examples (exemplifying), the researchers theorized (theorizing) the issues being worked on, and the actors from the municipality referred to the aims (aiming) that they were accountable for. Moreover, the distribution of labor also reflected a typical aspect of professional development – attempts to explain problems that students face in everyday practice in the context of theory (McCarthy et al., 2017). The distribution of rights was ascribed to decide the external intuitions and account for the result to the municipality leaders in collaboration with the schools, while the distribution of labor concerning the completion of the local project was distributed to the three institutions involved. In this work, the national educational authority expected the actors from the three institutions to cross boundaries to collaborate about school improvement. One may assume that the institutions were unfamiliar with this type of boundary crossing (cf. Suchman, 1994).

When analyzing how the initiatives played out in the boundary work, it became evident that the researcher ‘lectured’ about why the national authority became stricter with evaluations by referring to past events, and by using theoretical concepts, which is common at universities. If this term was not used by any of the other participants, this finding could indicate, in line with Singh et al. (2013), there was major boundary insulation regarding the contributions of the three activity systems. However, it became visible in the interaction analysis that the municipality leader picked up the term. Furthermore, the analysis showed that the participants extended each other’s arguments, which could indicate what Singh et al. (2013) and Edwards (2010) called ‘knowledge exchanges.’ Knowledge exchanges are among the many benefits of boundary work.

The participants reflected together on evaluation as an issue through making perspectives explicit and taking the perspective to the other, which is one of the four mechanisms in boundary zones and which creates a potential for learning through boundary crossing (cf. Akkerman & Bakker, 2011). The different types of initiatives contributed to illuminating evaluation as a situational constructed object (Engeström, 1999). To credit an individual for grasping the teaching practice would be insufficient since all the participants contributed in the shared boundary work by asking questions, bringing in different perspectives as the analyses of social interactions demonstrates.

Actions such as setting the agenda, sequencing the work, and summarizing the workshop could be considered instances of strong framing (cf. Spicer, 2013), which could have limited the interactions. It could further be argued that the researchers were positioned as being responsible for the team’s negotiations, direction, and outcomes. Still, it is an open question whether the aforementioned actions limited the interactions. It might be reasonable, instead, to conceptualize that these initiatives reflect what Spicer (2013) called ‘soft power.’ According to Spicer (2013), ‘soft power lies in the discursive actions’ (p. 151). However, this finding might also demonstrate that unintended asymmetrical relationships in educational settings might emerge, which may benefit from having a leader (cf. Edwards, 2010).

Similar to the study by Lopez-Real et al. (2009), the present analyses showed that the conversation became more equal as the collaboration processed. Whether the duration of the participant initiatives indicated equality, or a lack of equality remains to be examined. As Helstad and Møller (2013) found, leadership positions and power relations are constituted, challenged, and can be changed in interactions amongst the participants over time.

The participants used various resources (meditational means) in their argumentation, which reflects the historical objects of the three activity systems. A finding by Lopez-Real et al. (2009) suggested that university teachers are more capable of relating their responses to theory and course modules than others. As shown in Table 1, the researchers referred to theory and research more frequently than the other participants. For example, Rachel (the researcher) did not define what was meant by the term ‘decentralized centralism,’ which may be interpreted to reflect the power and authority of universities (cf. Wertsch, 1998). The researcher appeared to use the theory as her own resource to conceptualize the situation rather than introducing the concept as a tool for reflection to the team. Nevertheless, one of the municipality leaders from the educational authority used the concept in her argumentation, which indicates her comprehension. The development of common knowledge is a challenge of boundary work (Edwards, 2010).

Conclusion

For years, empirical and longitudinal studies have been considered necessary in terms of research on the education and development of school leaders. Despite the recurring reminders, studies based on surveys and interview data still dominate the field. Since the professional development of school leadership as boundary work has become increasingly common, the primary purpose of the present study was to contribute empirical insight into the patterns of discursive initiatives and interactions in which principals, municipality leaders, and researchers participated during a 2-year period in a Norwegian context.

Based on the extensive coding of initiatives, the findings from exploring the first research question suggest the existence of 13 kinds of discursive initiatives. The way in which the participant initiatives played out during the boundary work partly reflected the different institutional practices involved and partly reflected the development of interaction patterns. The interaction analysis showed how the different initiatives contributed to an illumination of how to evaluate the school improvement project as a situational object. Instead of being predetermined, the boundary zones were open for leadership and authority, and the distribution of labor may have emerged from the interactions. ‘Soft power’ lies in the discursive actions (cf. Spicer, 2013). Knowledge emerges from these exchanges (Edwards, 2010). It is the initiatives taken together that expand the problem-spaces being worked on.

The findings suggest that more attention should be paid to interaction patterns when designing new opportunities for school leaders to learn across activity systems, especially with the issues of leadership, authority, and the distribution of labor, because boundary work is challenging, and there is no guarantee that the work will be productive for all the involved institutions.

The research on the education of school leaders and school leadership development is criticized for being atheoretical. CHAT has made it possible to theorize school leadership development as boundary work in situ, something not possible with only surveys and interview data.

It is a limitation that this study was relatively small, in that it examined leadership development in only one interdisciplinary team in one municipality in Norway. However, the study contributes with an in-depth analysis of the professional development of school leadership, which is demonstrated to be common in Norway and in many other countries. Consequently, the study has relevance beyond the specific team. Scaling up is needed to include more cases within and across countries. So far, the fourth generation of CHAT is still rather underdeveloped but might be a relevant conceptual framework for examining the professional development of school leadership that takes place in teams over short periods of time.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks colleagues in the research group, Curriculum Studies, Leadership, and Educational Governance (CLEG), for helpful comments on drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Supplementary materials

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ruth Jensen

Ruth Jensen (PhD) is an Associate Professor at the Department of Teacher Education and School Research, Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Oslo in Norway. Her research interests are within educational leadership, school improvement, the education and the development of school leaders, as well as institutional work. At the moment she is involved in evaluating a Norwegian reform, and she is involved in a project titled Professional Actors’ Work to Retain Students in Secondary Education (ProAct).

Notes

1. Settings in which aspiring and practicing school leaders are enrolled in programs that confer formal and individual qualifications.

2. Settings in which established and experienced school leaders are offered further professional development, which do not bestow formal qualifications.

3. The term ‘School leaders’ captures individuals in principal or assistant principal positions.

4. Wenger (1998) refers to artifacts when using the term, while Engeström refers to what directs activity.

5. All the participants have been given false names for privacy.

6. The agenda for the team’s meeting was negotiated in advance via e-mails among the participants.

7. The turns in the excerpts were sequentially numbered to show the order of the discursive initatives.

8. [] Added by the author for clarity.

9. (..) Due to the length of the discursive initiations, irrelevant sections are excluded.

Table A1.

An overview of codes.

Table

Code	Description (in short)
Nominating	Nominating the main issue (situational object) to be discussed
Acknowledging	Acknowledging and/or qualifying what was said (without detailed explanations)
Aiming	Referring to aims (of the local project) in some sense
Arguing	Arguing for a statement without referring to examples
Exemplifying	Concretization the issues being discusses
Mirroring	Mirroring what was said or how to perceive the situation
Nuancing	Adding more details related to the issue at hand
Perspective- taking	Taking another’s point-of-view
Problematizing	Focusing on problematic aspects
Questioning	Introducing questions for reflection
Testing	Presenting and/or testing ideas
Theorizing	Referring explicitly to theoretical framework, models, analytical concepts, theorists, or research
Summarizing	Reviewing the subject matter