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Today, multilevel analytics on educational governance, management, and leadership are common in educational leadership research, drawing on a variety of approaches and academic disciplines. This article develops a threefold critique of the state of the art. First, this article argues that research on higher education leadership often represents an unreflected position regarding the societal role of higher education—decontextualising leadership from external practices and disregarding its internal object. Second, the approaches applied in leadership as a multilevel phenomenon can be problematic. On one end of the spectrum, we find particularist approaches focusing on individual levels representing disparate and often incompatible theoretical perspectives. As these positions rarely communicate, they have difficulties producing a coherent representation of higher education leadership. Universalist approaches, in turn, study leadership on several levels but offer identical conceptual tools for any societal practice, thereby losing the sensibility of the societal, cultural, and economic tasks of higher-education institutions, and for their specific character as institutions for research and teaching. Thirdly, research on educational leadership mostly fail to provide adequate theory of pedagogical interaction and influence. This is a twofold challenge. On the one hand, research lacks a theory of the object of educational leadership, namely teaching and studying. On the other, although research often defines leadership as a process of influence aimed at supporting learning, it lacks a theory able to explain what constitutes this influence. This article elaborates the possibilities for non-affirmative theory of education to provide a theory and language to overcome these challenges.

Recent research has indicated global trends of decreasing teacher autonomy and increasing teacher accountability. Standardised national tests have been identified as one of many factors constraining teacher autonomy. Another trend influencing teachers’ scope of action is the profiling and branding of schools that compete for students. This qualitative case study concerns the general upper secondary level in Finland, the only level of education in the country with a high-stakes final examination—the matriculation exam. The upper secondary level is generally regarded as Finland’s most subject-focused level of education. In contrast to this subject-focused tradition, the case school for this research has developed a cross-curricular profile emphasising creativity, boundary crossing and an outward orientated approach. The study explores the teachers’ perceptions of how their autonomy is constrained in this context characterised by tensions between the cross-curricular school profile on one hand, and the subject-focused tradition and student evaluations on the other. Although one might expect these tensions to constrain teacher autonomy, the results show that the teachers, in fact, experience the cross-curricular school profile as increasing their individual autonomy. The study demonstrates that upper secondary teachers can experience extensive autonomy despite global trends of increasing teacher accountability and diminishing teacher autonomy.

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