The impact of neoliberal reforms of education systems on the work of teachers and school leaders, particularly in relation to high-stakes accountability frameworks, has been extensively studied in recent decades. One significant aspect of neoliberal schooling is the emergence of quasi-autonomous public schools (such as Academies in England, Charter Schools in the USA and Independent Public Schools in Australia), characterised by heterarchical governance models, the promotion of entrepreneurial leadership cultures, and the promotion of a discourse of pursuing educational equity by (...) means of ‘achievement for all’. This paper explores the emergence of a mode of teacher professionalism characteristic of these quasi-autonomous schools, and conceptualises this as being ‘neo-performative’. The neo-performative profession is shaped by the shift in the focus of the regulation and management of schools from ‘governing to governance’, and the consequential rise of the ‘responsibilised profession’, and marked by the emergence of an entrepreneurial model of school leadership. The paper argues that this new conceptualisation of teacher professionalism requires further, more focused, empirical study in order to explore how neoperformative teachers and school leaders articulate their vision of educational equity and social justice, and how they enact this vision in an increasingly intensified high-stakes accountability culture. (shrink)

Critical realism is an established post-positivist philosophy applied by researchers in a number of fields and yet it is little used in educational leadership and management research. This ar...

ABSTRACTCritical realism is an established post-positivist philosophy applied by researchers in a number of fields and yet it is little used in educational leadership and management research. This article responds to calls from the field for a more critical approach to educational leadership and management research by offering critical realism as a way to address these concerns and it explores why critical realism has not featured more in the field, particularly as it could provide that more critical approach. The use (...) of critical realism as an analytical approach as well as a content enables the linkage of the calls from ELM to critical realist features and then to some constraints upon its use in the field. The theory around the application of critical realism is advanced providing insights for researchers in its use, though no claim is made that critical realism is the only way to do so. (shrink)

This article explores how leadership is done in a ‘leaderless’ team. Drawing on a corpus of more than 120 hours of audio-recorded meetings of different interdisciplinary research groups and using a discourse analytic framework and tools, we examine how leadership is enacted in a team that does not have an assigned leader or chair. Our specific focus is the discursive processes through which team members conjointly solve disagreements and negotiate consensus – which are two activities associated with leadership. More specifically, (...) we analyse how meaning is collaboratively constructed and how team members arrive at a solution in those instances where there is some kind of disagreement, or even conflict, among team members. This discourse analytic study thus contributes to leadership research in two ways: i) by exploring some of the discursive processes through which leadership is actually performed in a ‘leaderless team’; and ii) by looking at a largely under-researched leadership constellation, namely distributed leadership. We thereby illustrate some of the benefits that discourse analytical approaches offer to an understanding of the specific processes that are involved in the complexities of leadership performance. (shrink)