Like all of our colleagues in CEL we are interested in
understanding the nature of leadership within the learning and skills sector.
Typically such an inquiry begins with basic questions such as how should we
define leadership? What is the difference between leadership and management?
What counts as effective leadership? Can effective leadership be learned, or are
some people just born with qualities that make them better at leading and
inspiring others?
In order to address such questions we have decided to begin
our own research from a slightly different perspective. Instead of thinking
about leadership as a set of mysterious personal qualities that some individuals
just seem to possess, we ask whether it is perhaps more interesting to think of
leadership as a set of skills and
practices. In other words we are interested in understanding leadership as a
form of everyday work. Work that is done, not just by college principals and
senior managers, but by people, systems and
technologies working together across organizations and institutions.
By seeking to 'explicate' leadership we are trying to
understand, document and unpack all of the ordinary and often taken-for-granted
work that goes into accomplishing sets of tasks that are framed as 'effective'
leadership. To explicate, therefore, means to describe in detail what we observe
when we as researchers spend a prolonged period of time shadowing principals,
senior and middle managers, administrative and teaching staff as they go about
their everyday work.
Observation-based, or ethnographic,
studies of this kind have a long tradition in the social sciences and
particularly anthropology, but as yet the ethnographic method has yet to be
rigorously applied to the study of educational leadership (although see the work
of Harry Wolcott as a fascinating exception). In doing research of this kind we seek
to provide familiar and accessible accounts of leadership-in-action. Accounts
that focus on the taken-for-granted and the ordinary aspects of doing leadership
as well as the highly visible and often esoteric qualities that so often feature in
popular leadership textbooks and theories.
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