CHAPTER 7 THE PRINCIPALSHIP, AUTONOMY AND AFTER

 The office of the principal – the principal-ship – is a key component in our conceptualization of
the social order of schooling. Large-scale projects such as the ISSPP reinforce the centrality of
the principal-ship.
 The adoption ofpractices from private enterprise into the public services, and in
particulareducation, and the social Darwinism of the market have become key policy leversin
the recasting of educational administrative labour.
 The research object – in this case the principalship – can only be understood in relation to other
objects. This is a challenge for the traditional entity based ontology of educational
administration.
 Again, it forces an epistemological break with the spontaneous understanding of the social
world.
 Furthermore, it empirically grounds the scholarly narrative. If the research object can only be
understood in relation to other objects, then the description needs to be based in a particular
time and space.
 The trajectory, both temporally and sociospatially, of the particular is of heightened
importance.

CHAPTER 8 FOR A RELATIONAL PROGRAMME

 Mainstream rhetoric in educational administration promotes rationality, consciousness,

structural arrangements, linear concepts of temporality and the unique context of each location
while also seeking to construct universal lists, frameworks, capabilities or standards for
leadership.
 There is, and not surprisingly, substantial alignment between the managerialist orthodoxy of the
contemporary condition and scholarship in educational administration
 As an intellectual space, educational administration has a tendency – as to many disciplines – to
provide only minority status or even othering of approaches which do not conform to the
hegemonic position .
 With its status as an applied field, educational administration has for the most part, ignored
scholarship that asks questions. The relational research program I have built and defended in
this book is a viable alternative for educational administration.
 It balances the rigour and robustness sought for legitimacy within the academy with a
systematic focus on the organizing of education. It stresses the process over the product giving it
a dynamic relationship with temporality and socio-spatiality.
CHAPTER 9 SOME CONCLUSIONS

 The recognition, but not separation, of the theoretical and empirical problem is a key move.
Rather than privileging the empirical problem and overlaying that with theoretical resources,
the relational research program explicitly integrates the two, seeing them not as separate
entities but as two sides of the one enterprise. In doing so, particular attention is paid to the
Construction of the research object and the relations between the researcher and the
researched. This is why early chapters were devoted to problematizing the intellectual gaze of
the educational administration.

 Disciplines with greater internal heterodoxy (e.g. sociology) are more open thanthose with
stronger identity defining research traditions. The desire to be scientific– in the traditional sense
– and of value to practice is a limitation of educational administration.

SYNTHESIS

The increasing growth of the Educational Leadership, Management and Administration Theory
Workshop that I host annually is evidence that there remains a core group of internationally
connected scholars centrally concerned with theoretical and methodological matters. This is despite
the apparent apathy of many journals in the field to seriously engage with theory due to a
preference for parallel monologues from logical empiricist projects. The path to full professor – in
the British rather than US sense of the title – is no longer based on building and sustaining a
research program but whether one can attract large competitive funding and publishing in a small –
and somewhat narrowly focused – set of journals identified as high impact or high quality. Giving the
impression of being meritorious, such systems overlook the legitimation process and the discursive
nature of scholarly work. This is where the relational approach is of worth.

The relational research program is about rigorous and robust scholarship. It is concerned with
the theoretical problem of the legitimation of the social world. This is a theoretical problem that
plays out in many, if not all, empirical situations. It provides a set of theoretical resources for
thinking through the construction and maintenance of the research object, asks questions of
contemporarily popular labels, grounds those in time and space and rejects binaries such as
individualism /collectivism and structure/agency. Most of all, the relational research program
is a productive space to theorise educational administration. It is less concerned with evaluation
than it is describing the conditions in which contemporary action plays out. It does not require large
scale funding nor does it have an implicit desire to ‘scale up’. Most significantly, this is not the final
word on the relational research program. It is an ongoing intellectual exercise, one that if you will
not join me on, I trust that you will at least support or follow from the sideline.
REFLECTION

The Principalship is about the key improvements or the concepts of managing the
school, institute or organization and a being a good leadership for the principalship. Many
administrative phenomena are really historical topics rather than strictly managerial
problems. Those involving forces external to organizations that influence decisions and
actions, which are regarded simplistically as ‘environmental factors’ in systems theory,
would be more fruitfully pursued as the study of administration under different historical
conditions, such as colonization and decolonization, social unrest, revolt, revolution and the
introduction of new political and social values like equality and equity, all of which have had
a significant influence on educational systems.

The relational approach I argued for in this book pays explicit attention to the
construction of the research object. Working with the notion of the epistemological break
to break with the language of the everyday, bringing to the fore the ontological complicity
with organizing, the relational approach negates the need for adjectives. In doing so, the
relational approach refocuses scholarship on the construction and ongoing maintenance of
the research object more so than an adjective serving as a marker of scope. To support the
work around the research object the relational approach also calls for empirically grounding
the scholarly narrative as opposed to universal appeals.