Is educational leadership (still) worth studying? An epistemic worthiness-informed analysis

Abstract

This article is exploratory and experimental. It starts from the premise that leadership scholarship is a site of disagreement, where mainstream claims are challenged by critical scholars. Some criticism focuses on conceptual clarity, and incorporates consideration of who should be categorised as a leader, and on what basis, and whether it is helpful to refer to ‘leaders’ and ‘followers’. The ‘new wave’ of critical leadership studies generates controversial questions relating to whether leadership exists or is in fact a myth that we have reified. The bulk of criticism directed at educational leadership challenges three mainstream knowledge claims – underpinned by what I call the causality belief, the leadership dependency belief, and the conceptual belief – and which are the focus of this article's analysis. While criticism of these knowledge claims is well-rehearsed, the article breaks new ground by analysing them through an epistemic justification lens to address the question: is educational leadership (still) worth studying? Represented by these three component beliefs, the mainstream educational leadership scholarship belief system is analysed within a frame derived from the philosophy of science, and draws on BonJour's coherentist theory of epistemic justification to apply a more structured assessment than has hitherto been achieved by critical scholarship.

Is leadership a myth? A ‘new wave’ critical leadership-focused research agenda for recontouring the landscape of educational leadership

“…the non-education-specific) leadership scholarship fields, as I discuss in a section below, the consensus practice identifies leadership as a form of influence; this is probably the only belief that is more or less shared across these fields' expanse of mainstream and critical scholars. What I identify elsewhere (Evans, 2022) as the field's mainstream belief system also reflects evident broad consensus amongst a sizeable majority of educational leadership scholars, denoting what is generally termed 'mainstream' educational leadership scholarship. Dissension from this mainstream is represented by critical discourses and communitiessome of whose members, to varying degrees, retain an affiliation with the mainstream despite holding deviant beliefs, while some break away from it, taking their belief systems with them.…”

“…In diverting its researchers' gaze from the wealth of knowledge that the wider leadership (or organisational studies) field's critical scholarship has accumulated, educational leadership scholarship's epistemic parochialism seems to have stifled its own field's epistemic development. This (educational leadership) is a field, as I indicate elsewhere (Evans, 2022), whose knowledge claims have been under fire for several decades, whose mainstream belief system has been exposed as unreliable, and whose epistemic worthiness has been shown to be shaky. It is surely time, then, for educational leadership scholars to remove their blinkers and, in colloquial terms, wake up and smell the coffee.…”

“…Taking up the ‘story’ of educational leadership scholarship's epistemic development from where that paper (Evans, 2022) leaves off, in what remains of this article, I delineate the features of such a new research agenda.…”

“…Taking up the 'story' of educational leadership scholarship's epistemic development from where that paper (Evans, 2022) with what consequences, leader(ship)-exerted influence occursa tradition that keeps leaders and leadership always in the frame, as the presumed influencing agents. Yet, from the decades-long, seemingly indefatigable, search for the elusive 'how' or 'why' missing link in the leadership→student achievement causality chain, educational leadership researchers, as many scholars have noted (e.g.…”

“…With this observation in mindand having argued that seeking the holy grail, not only of leadership, but also of professional development (Evans, 2022), has met with little, if any, success -I have no wish to set up a holy grail of collegial influence for researchers to shift their focus onto. Rather, I envisage a research agenda that, cumulatively and in due course, may generate evidence that indicates trends, tendencies and patterns of influential agency, and the broad direction towards which paths of influence may be considered to lead.…”