To cite this chapter please use:

Niesche, R. & Gowlett, C. (2019). Why use social, critical and political theories in
educational leadership? In Niesche, R. & Gowlett, C. (2019). Social, Critical and
Political Theories for Educational Leadership, 1-16. Singapore: Springer.

Chapter 1: Why use social, critical and political theories in

educational leadership?

Richard Niesche and Christina Gowlett

What is important in a text is not what it means, but what it does and
incites to do. What it does: the charge of affect it contains and trans-
mits. What it incites to do: the metamorphoses of this potential energy
into other things… (Lyotard, 1984, pp. 9-10).

Introduction
The field of educational leadership has, in recent years, been largely obsessed with
fads, models and approaches that seek to capture the essence of ‘good leadership’,
as well as relying on what are too often reductionist and de-contextualised pre-
scriptions of ‘what works’. In many respects, these lines of inquiry are understand-
able given the hegemony of neoliberal discourse into education more broadly. A
‘what works’ discourse is seductive to many educational leaders because their
workplaces have become more complex, stressful and driven by both increased
and competing demands. However, these desires to improve this situation have
been captured by a ‘culture industry’ (Adorno, 1991), a ‘leadership industry’
(Kellerman, 2012) predicated on consumerism and hyper-industrial capitalism
(Stiegler, 2011), and neoliberal governmental rationalities (Brown, 2015; Dardot
& Laval, 2013) rather than genuine participative reforms aimed at both working
with educational leaders and trusting their professionalism and expertise in design-
ing solutions that are appropriate for their schools, students and communities.
Such discourses that obsess with forms of efficiency and effectiveness,
high stakes accountabilities and the privatisation of education have resulted in a
complex environment in which policy makers and educational leaders seek cer-
tainty in what needs to be done according to these ideals, and in both responding
to and constituting these rationalities of government. Given the challenges facing
leaders, one can understand the popularity of ‘feel-good’ literatures that promote
an overly positive account and stories of heroic leaders and messianic faith in the
notion of ‘leadership’ (Alvesson & Spicer, 2012; Lakomski, 2005). However, the
pursuit of ‘what works’ agendas, particularly in educational leadership, can too
easily neglect the specificities of context when attempting to transfer ideas and ap-
proaches across contexts and schools. Furthermore, ‘what works’ can have serious
‘side effects in terms of harmful effects on education (see Zhao, 2018). Addition-
ally, while more critical studies of leadership have played an important role in de-
bunking some of the myths of leadership and taking a more nuanced approach to
its discourse both over the last 30 years or so, and also much more recently (see
Lakomski, Eacott & Evers, 2017; Niesche, 2017), there is still much to be done to
develop alternate perspectives and ways of understanding this phenomenon. This
is not to say that socially critical perspectives have not been prevalent or ongoing
(as we discuss in more detail in Chapter 2), but rather highlight the importance of
these lines of inquiry as both being historically important and relevant but also
moving them into the contemporary moment where the contexts of education have
been undergoing such profound changes, that these approaches (and a critical re-
reading and engagement with the theories and concepts) are needed now more
than ever.
In response to the complexities facing leaders in education, ‘leadership’,
and particularly the notion of ‘good leadership’, is often presented as a solution to
a variety of problems. It is not uncommon to hear calls for strong and good leader-
ship as being required in contemporary times and in the face of intractable prob -
lems, as if these notions are just common sense and someone has to just get on and
‘do it’. While such characterisations, and the largely instrumental approaches to
leadership developed in response no doubt have their place and, have done some
important work in understanding the work of educational leaders, there is also at
the same time, a plethora of this kind of scholarship as well as an all too narrow
set of approaches to studying leadership. This narrowness of inquiry and the insu-
lar nature of the field has been highlighted before as problematic (see Gunter,
2010; Eacott, 2015). Careful and comprehensive mapping of the field by others
such as Gunter (2001, 2016), Gunter & Ribbins (2002) and Thrupp (2003), high-
lights the significant attention given to particular approaches of the more instru-
mental, school effectiveness and improvement variety, and also the marginalisa-
tion of critical and socially critical approaches due to their perceived lack of prac-
ticality and the (mistaken) view that many of these approaches are being critical
for critical sake and offer little in the way of perceived solutions. Thrupp (2003)
refers to these socially critical approaches as the textual dissenters, as opposed to
the more problem-solving approaches and also what he refers to as another group
called the textual apologists. Alvesson & Spicer (2012) categorise similarly using
the notions of functionalist, interpretivist and critical approaches in their develop-
ment of what they term ‘critical performativity’ as a way to build on the critical to
have a more affirmative role towards theorising and understanding leadership.
Most recently, Helen Gunter has devoted a significant chapter in her 2016 book
covering these more critical approaches. Such important work, as documented in
that chapter, has developed a substantive response to the more traditional ways of
understanding educational leadership, and yet at the same time has been marginal-
 3

ised in favour of neoliberal and consumerist influenced reforms and their requisite
models of leadership that are constructed as required to implement said reforms.
In this book, we seek to build on these critical traditions but draw on a
quite different set of theoretical resources to generate new and different ways of
understanding educational leadership, and more importantly, the context in which
such a phenomenon is analysed. We agree that the more traditional approaches
tend to overstate the importance and role of individual leaders (see Evers &
Lakomski, 2013; Gronn, 2003), and also fail to see the need for more diverse per-
spectives (especially from outside the field) that challenge the status quo and that
also seek to understand more than simply the agentic possibility of the individual
leader. In other words, there is more to the study of educational leadership, partic-
ularly through analysis of broader societal, cultural, religious, political, philosoph-
ical factors and approaches and perspectives. It is this ‘more’ that we seek to high-
light in this book, to analyse educational leadership as both a context and also a
phenomenon situated within broader contexts. We believe that one cannot simply
study individuals, schools, education systems and educational reforms without
broader analyses of the contexts in which these take place. Of course, many stud-
ies claim to acknowledge context but then proceed to prescribe sets of practices,
skills and characteristics that transcend across schools, systems and countries. It is
often through stories of turnaround schools, successful schools, school effective-
ness and improvement, and the development of models and standards that this
work takes its seductive hold. In the interest of characterising context differently,
we draw upon theories and philosophical ideas from outside the field of educa-
tional leadership and even education. We make no apologies for this while at the
same time acknowledging the challenges of doing so both in terms of the diffi-
culty of the texts but also in their reception (or not!) by educational leadership
scholars and researchers. Obviously, the challenge for us in doing so lies in mak-
ing the case for the relevance and usefulness of these ideas, not necessarily with
the narrow aim of improving ‘practice’, but for the purposes of facilitating a better
understanding of what constitutes broader contexts and issues and how they im-
pact upon education and the work of educational leaders.

Theory and context

The role of theory is vital for the progression of the field. Being able to think, see
and analyse in a multitude of ways is how new meanings and understandings are
generated. Being able to ‘think with theory’ (Jackson and Mazzei, 2012) pushes us
to look at on-going problems and issues in new ways. It challenges us to move
outside our comfort zone of understanding, and bend our minds to new and excit-
ing ways of seeing the world and how it operates. The genesis of this book came
from a strong belief that we both have in the importance of theory. Every time we
make a decision, it is located (knowingly or not) from a premise of belief about
the world and how it operates. Everyday, in a multitude of ways, we are making
decisions that are based from a particular prism of thought. What we do is not
neutral. How we act always comes from a theoretical standpoint. Working with
4

theory and all its intricacies involves having a conversation about the premises
from which we make our decisions. Theory consequently plays a vital role in big-
ger picture discussions about ethics and change.
What sort of theory gets to be heard and included in educational leader-
ship conversations is of utmost importance to us both. Educational leadership has
a propensity to include some theorists into the fray, and leave others on the side-
lines. The tethering of some kinds of theory to particular empirical spaces is prob-
lematic and there is a vital need to expand the borders and boundaries around the
location and perceived purchase of theory (see Gowlett & Rasmussen, 2014; Gow-
lett & Rasmussen, 2016). Who gets to count as an educational leadership re-
searcher is part of this conversation since using the ‘right’ theory is often a ticket
of entry into the field. Do you get to count as an educational leadership researcher
if you use theory that emanates from a different empirical space? The importation
of ideas from one space into another certainly comes with its own set of chal-
lenges, but we would argue that the educational leadership field needs to be open
to inviting new ways of ‘doing’ research into the field.
In educational leadership, theory tends to refer to models of leadership
practice that often de-contextualise leadership from broader issues, ideas and de-
bates. The field generally remains not only impervious to a broader theoretical en-
gagement but is relentless in its drive for generic articulations of best practice and
school effectiveness. This is undoubtedly due to the particular neoliberal flavour
to the education reform agendas that are happening in many countries around the
world, and the conscription of ‘leadership’ as the panacea to many educational
problems. By way of background to this book, we propose that these conceptual-
isations of leadership are part of the problem, not the solution. While this point is
not a new one, the field of educational leadership has previously engaged with a
finite set of tools and concepts with which to make this case. This is where more
critical approaches can continue to be of significant value. They help us to under-
stand the problems with, and limitations of, current educational leadership dis-
course while simultaneously enabling different prisms of thinking about leader-
ship to flourish and thrive, thus nourishing rich conversations more generally
about leadership. Our aim here is to provoke further debate in theorising educa-
tional leadership and to also strengthen the field through knowledge construction,
and not simply critique (although we feel this must also occur simultaneously).
One of the most problematic aspects of much educational leadership dis-
course is the use of ‘context’ as a caution and corollary to the development of
leadership models and standards with little in the way of significant analysis of
this ‘context’ beyond the school, or worse, simply mentioning context as import-
ant and then ignoring it. Context, like the term leadership, has become so ubiquit-
ous that it has lost any real clarity of meaning and particularity. The construction
of ‘context’ through a series of inputs and outputs via systems theories a la Hoy &
Miskel (2013) is a case in point. We believe ‘context’ designates a range of
broader political, philosophical, economic, cultural, historical and societal dis-
courses, and that these manifest in various ways. Our task then is to draw on a
 5

wide variety of resources with which to examine this notion of ‘context’, and how
it impacts, sustains, constrains and enables certain leadership discourses to func-
tion, gain traction and also (importantly) displace and marginalise other voices and
concerns.
In response to these issues, our aim in this book is:

1. To make the case for a continued and expanded use of social, critical and
political theories in the field of educational leadership
2. To provide readers with a useful introduction to a wide variety of theoret-
ical/philosophical approaches/positions.

We acknowledge that the approaches we use in this book are eclectic and include
the work of thinkers that have been increasingly drawn upon in educational leader-
ship more recently (Michel Foucault), some that remain largely ignored with the
odd exception (Judith Butler) and other contemporaries that have yet to be ex-
plored (Karen Barad, and Bernard Stiegler). There is a distinct continental
European philosophy flavour to the selection of thinkers. While Judith Butler and
Karen Barad are American, their philosophy is influenced by and has strong links
to continental philosophy both in style, scope and content. We make no apologies
for this as we feel that even amongst the cries of the ‘death of postmodernism’ in
recent times (although also largely in popular media), there is still much to be
learned and drawn upon from these bodies of work. It is also important to note that
apart from Michel Foucault, who died in 1984, all of these thinkers are writing
today and as such have much to contribute to our understanding of contemporary
conditions.
By way of introduction, Michel Foucault was a well-known French philo-
sopher and historian who famously described an alternative approach to the study
of power in specific fields of sexuality, prisons, insane asylums and hospitals, as
well as developing other concepts and inquiries into ethics, technologies of the
self, governmentality, neoliberalism and bio-power. The influence of Foucault’s
thinking has been so profound that his work has been used in a huge variety of
fields and disciplines, including education. Judith Butler is an American philo-
sopher best known for her work on gender theory, performativity (different from
Lyotard’s use of the term and subsequent use in education by writers such as
Stephen Ball), ethics and political theory. Butler’s work and radical departure
from traditional understandings of sex and gender, along with her political activ-
ism, have been incredibly important for gender studies and has been taken up in a
range of areas including psychoanalysis, film and literary studies. Bernard Stiegler
is a French philosopher who studied and wrote with Jacques Derrida and as such is
a contemporary of that earlier French post-structuralist movement as demonstrated
by Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Ro-
land Barthes, Michel Foucault and so on. As such, Bernard Stiegler takes a critical
reading to these previous bodies of work in his critique and characterisation of
contemporary life and what it means to be human in this technological and con-
6

sumerist age. Stiegler’s works have been translated into English over the last 10-
15 years and the influence of his ideas is still growing across many fields and dis-
ciplines. It would also be fair to say that he is strongly influenced by the works
and philosophy of Hegel, Heidegger, Simondon in addition to the Frankfurt
School. Karen Barad is an American feminist theorist who also writes across and
engages with continental philosophy, cultural studies and the philosophy of sci-
ence and physics. The influence of Barad’s work has been keenly felt in recent
years with much attention being given to her development of agential realism.
It should be obvious, even to the casual observer, that none of these
thinkers write in/on education let alone educational leadership 1. Part of the reason
for this is due to the purpose of the book and yet also due to our own personal in-
terest in the work and writings of these authors. It is a valid question to ask why
these thinkers’ ideas are relevant or useful for the study of education and educa-
tional leadership. However, we feel there is much to be learned and gained from
thinking with these ideas for a field that is still far from receptive to ideas and ap-
proaches from ‘outside’. It is also worth noting here the important contribution the
Routledge book series edited by Helen Gunter, Pat Thomson and Jill Blackmore
has made, for this series has systematically introduced the ideas of Hannah Arendt
(Gunter, 2013), Michel Foucault (Gillies, 2013), Jacques Derrida and Jean Fran-
cois Lyotard (Niesche, 2013), Nancy Fraser (Blackmore, 2017) and Pierre Bour-
dieu (Thomson, 2017) to educational leadership scholars and readers. Our book
seeks to do similar work to these texts, albeit covering a broader range within the
one volume. The use of multiple thinkers’ ideas also allows us space and oppor-
tunity to think across these bodies of work, to highlight the linkages, similarities
and differences between them. From this it may then be possible to develop lines
of inquiry that are provoked by simultaneous usage or a bringing together of con-
cepts for new and innovative ways of looking at old issues and problems. It is this
kind of generative work that we hope this book develops in the writings of others,
including new and also more experienced scholars in the field.
The perspectives we use in this book also do not constitute a movement
or a coherent body of thought, hence the title of the book. They are, for the most
part, considered philosophers and yet the word philosophy does not appear in the
title of the book. While this may seem odd, there is some method to this odd de-
cision. This largely revolves around the function or usage of the philosophers’
ideas into educational leadership. We draw upon their philosophical ideas to un-
dertake socially critical and political work. However, we also do feel that these
ideas are social, critical and political, particular in their often cross-disciplinary
fertilisation of ideas. For example, the importance of Michel Foucault’s work for
society and social issues is without question. At the same time his work is also
highly critical in approach as well as being of significant importance for politics.

1 Although we acknowledge the work of Bernard Stiegler in certain texts has engaged

with educational issues (see Stiegler, 2010, 2015).

 7

The same could be said for the other thinkers as well. We specifically outline the
reason for the choice in the book overview section of this chapter.

A word about post-structuralism

While we do not want to engage in a lengthy discussion about the characterisation
and labelling of the authors we draw upon in this book, we think it is necessary to
make a few comments regarding the term post-structuralism. Questions such as
‘why don’t we use it throughout this book?’, even though in previous publications
we have used the term to describe a particular approach (see Niesche & Gowlett,
2015; Niesche, 2013). We still believe those works were appropriately character-
ised as putting forward post-structuralist ideas at the time, and we continue to ar-
gue for the importance of those ideas in education and educational leadership.
However, to label this work, this text, as such becomes problematic when bringing
together quite different authors albeit with some similarities in conceptual ap-
proaches and development. While, arguably, post-structuralism is a useful um-
brella term for the approaches we take in this book, the use of such an umbrella
term is not in line with many post-structuralist approaches, via its own criteria and
critique, nor do the authors fit comfortably within such a frame and in fact many
of them refuse to be characterised as such. We discuss some of these issues in
more depth in the final chapter along with a response to critiques and criticism of
post structuralism and post-modernism. For the moment though, a few words
about this term ‘post-structuralism’ that helps to clarify our thoughts.
Post-structuralism emerged in the second half of the twentieth century
and has been understood as a movement of thought (Peters & Burbules, 2004), or
continuum of critique of both phenomenology and structuralism (Parkes, Gore &
Elsworth, 2010). It would be a mistake to claim that post-structuralism represents
a unified approach or discourse as its main purveyors, those such as Derrida, Ly-
otard, Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault and Butler, have often dis-
agreed on numerous points and orientations. Nevertheless, these differences have
not prevented these ideas from extensive use and application across a very diverse
range of disciplines and fields, including education (for example, Ball, 1994;
Cherryholmes, 1988; Davies, 1993; Peters, 1998; Peters & Burbules, 2004; Usher
& Edwards, 1994; Youdell, 2011). Given that education is the modernist project
par excellence, post-structuralist forms of critique have played an important role
in unsettling and challenging particular claims to truth in education and educa-
tional discourse. However, post-structuralist thought has had a much more limited
use in the field of educational leadership, management and administration (some
exceptions include Blackmore, 1999; English, 2002, 2003; Gillies, 2013; Maxcy,
1991, 1994; Niesche, 2011; Niesche & Keddie, 2016). Perhaps the reasons for this
are more to do with the leadership field being a conservative field that is heavily
focused on capturing the essence of leadership through best practice models;
strongly influenced by the school effectiveness movement; and, an international
leadership industry geared towards selling its latest problem-solving list of how to
bullet points (Gunter, 2001, 2012). For those of us seeking for alternatives to tradi-
8

tional or mainstream approaches, or who are looking for more critically informed
approaches, then post-structuralist ideas can prove very helpful.
The field of educational leadership has long been associated with main-
taining its own logic, and presuppositions have not only remained impervious to
much of the theoretical and analytic practices of the social sciences but these pre-
suppositions have also tended to sideline and marginalise discourses relating to
feminism, ethnicity and race (Blackmore, 1999; Fitzgerald, 2003a, 2003b). More
recently, issues of social justice and equity have emerged as foci of study, yet to
date there has been a limited critical engagement with the troubling of these con-
cepts in themselves (see Gowlett, 2013). However, at the same time there has been
a shift to the ‘othering’ of disadvantaged groups through discourses such as the
‘management of diversity’ and other problematic understandings of these complex
issues (Wilkinson, 2008). As Fenwick English (2002) also argues, like the dis-
course of modernism itself, the field of educational administration assumes that it
is the totality of all that is worth knowing and thus simply casts an unproblematic
larger net of inclusion to new concepts and discourses. Rather than widening the
net, post-structuralism is useful for both critiquing from within and also opening
up new lines of analysis beyond traditional frameworks and approaches.
However, we don’t feel that as a general term of description, it accurately
portrays all the ideas in this book or where it should sit in terms of approach. Yes,
Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, in particular have often been described as post-
structuralists, and as stated above we have also described them as such (see Nies-
che & Gowlett, 2015), but overall, we feel Foucault was not strictly speaking, a
post-structuralist and in fact, to describe his work as such would be against the
sentiments of post-structuralism itself. Post-structuralism is far from a coherent
approach or body of work and when combined with the other authors we use in
this book, the term post-structuralism simply becomes misleading, inaccurate and
unhelpful, although we certainly acknowledge that some of the ideas discussed in
this book could be described as poststructuralist, particularly the work of Judith
Butler and some of Foucault’s ideas. This labelling and characterisation of these
thinkers is often problematic, as Foucault famously remarked when asked about
his work and political leanings:

I think I have in fact been situated in most of the squares on the polit-
ical checkerboard, one after another and sometimes simultaneously: as
anarchist, leftist, ostentatious or disguised Marxist, nihilist, explicit or
secret anti-Marxist, technocrat in the service of Gaullism, new liberal
and so on. An American professor complained that a crypto-Marxist
like me was invited to the USA, and I was denounced by the press in
Eastern European countries for being an accomplice of dissidents.
None of these descriptions is important by itself; taken together, on
the other hand, they mean something. And I must admit that I rather
like what they mean…It’s true that I prefer not to identify myself, and
 9

that I’m amused by the diversity of the ways I’ve been judged and
classified (Foucault, 2000, p. 115).

The choice of approaches in this book is largely drawn from those thinkers whose
work we argue can be usefully cross-fertilised into the space of educational leader-
ship. When proposing such a book as this, one is faced with the choice of breadth
versus depth, and we have decided to go with a little of both. We do not propose
that each chapter will fully cover each thinker’s oeuvre, nor provide the definitive
account of each body of work. However, each chapter will provide a brief look
into the various thinkers’ ideas while helping to illuminate or understand a particu-
lar element of educational leadership discourse. Each chapter will also provide
some supplementary readings for those interested in pursuing these ideas in fur-
ther depth. One of the reasons for such an approach to this text is that usually a
book exploring such a wide variety of approaches is most often an edited collec-
tion that results in a large variance in the quality and approach of contributions,
often with only a sketchy introductory chapter attempting to piece it all together.
Our aim here is to both incorporate a wide array of ideas and concepts and, at the
same time, develop a coherence of voice across chapters, not for the purpose of
trying to bring the disparate elements to a coherent ‘position’, but to enable a flow
of ideas and highlight linkages and key differences between these approaches. We
propose to work productively with the uneasy tension between many of these
ideas to allow for cross-referencing and some coherence in style and voice.

The use of voice and positionality

The question of voice in such a co-authored text as this then becomes an interest-
ing one. Although there are multiple ways of working with other co-authors, we
have decided to allocate specific thinkers to each of us and then another one of us
takes the lead on the other chapters, that is, this chapter, the next and then the con-
clusion chapter. For any reader familiar with our previous works then this will
make sense in terms of previous knowledge and also interest in particular sets of
ideas. Feminist scholars and gender theorists will no doubt be interested to know
(and perhaps not surprised!) that Christina has written the Butler and Barad
chapters and Richard has written the Foucault and Stiegler chapters. When we say
written, this means fully drafted with then additional comments and edits made by
the other for these particular chapters. In these chapters (3, 4, 5 and 6) we substi-
tute ‘I’ for we to reflect the dominant voice of either Richard or Christina as ‘au -
thor’ of these chapters and retain ‘we’ for the rest. Hopefully, at the same time we
have also been able to retain a sense of collaborative voice and coherence through-
out the whole text. Additionally, it is important to note that we have collaborated
before on a previous journal article, worked together in edited projects such as a
special issue for Educational Philosophy and Theory, an edited book (Lakomski,
Eacott & Evers, 2017), and also presented together and in symposia sessions at a
range of conferences. This previous work facilitates the approach we have taken
throughout this book.
10

Further to these collaborations we also have particular individual bio-

graphical histories and positionalities that may be relevant and of interest to read-
ers of books such as this one, especially in our respective relationships to the field
of educational leadership and areas of interest and research. In undertaking a brief
bio of each of us as authors and academics we are also conscious of the difficulties
of allocating a ‘name’ to particular texts. Derrida, Lyotard and Foucault all con-
sidered the relationship of a name or author to a text and sought to disrupt to obvi -
ous use of a name as a condensation symbol for a particular work, series of texts
or concepts. However, they did this in slightly different ways. For example, Lyo-
tard questions the sense that can be made from a proper name. The proper name
designates a person in a rigid and consistent way but the meaning attached to the
name is multifarious and dependent on the phrase attached to the name rather than
the name itself. Reality then becomes the many senses attached to the name via
different phrases, statements and language. As he describes in The Differend:

Reality entails the differend. That’s Stalin, here he is. We acknow-

ledge it. But as for what Stalin means? Phrases come to be attached to
his name, which not only describes different senses for it (this can still
be debated in dialogue), and not only place the name on different in-
stances, but which also obey heterogeneous regimens and/or genres.
This heterogeneity, for lack of a common idiom, makes consensus im-
possible. The assignment of a definition to Stalin necessarily does
wrong to the nondefinitional phrases relating to Stalin, which this
definition, for a while at least, disregards or betrays. In and around
names, vengeance is on the prowl. Forever? (Lyotard, 1988, p.56).

Lyotard uses the name ‘Stalin’ as an example to argue that such a name cannot
identify as a single sense or referent, that is, there cannot be a common meaning
and association to the name. Stalin will indicate different meanings depending on
context of usage and its linking with particular phrasing and language, time and
space.
The name ‘Richard Niesche’ designates, husband, son, brother, academic
at UNSW, author, educational leader, senior lecturer, deputy head of school re-
search and so on. There is no fixed referent. The allocation of meaning and sense
to the name is dependent on the contexts and usage. In a formal academic and au-
thor sense, Richard’s bio and author description usually goes like this (and may
well be very similar to the one used for this book):

Richard Niesche is currently Deputy Head of School (Research) and

Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of New
South Wales, Sydney, Australia. His research interests include educa-
tional leadership, the principalship and social justice. His particular re-
search focus is to use critical perspectives in educational leadership to
examine the work of school principals in disadvantaged schools and
 11

how they can work towards achieving more socially just outcomes. He

has published his research in a range of peer-reviewed journals and is
the author of a number of books including Foucault and Educational
leadership: Disciplining the Principal (Routledge, 2011), Decon-
structing Educational Leadership: Derrida and Lyotard (Routledge,
2013), and Leadership, Ethics and Schooling for Social Justice (co-
authored with Professor Amanda Keddie, Routledge, 2016). He is the
founding co-editor of the ‘Leadership Theory’ book series with
Springer. Forthcoming is Social, Critical and Political Theories for
Educational Leadership (2019, Springer).

However, much more informally, characterising oneself and one’s work is prob-
lematic especially when considering the complex relationship with a field like
educational leadership when taking more critical perspectives. When asked about
his research area Richard usually describes himself as a researcher in educational
leadership more for the sake of simplicity than anything else. To a lay audience
this then often requires some explanation of describing Richard’s work with
schools, principals and other leaders around examining the problems and issues
they face, and how they try to resolve these issues. However, if speaking to an-
other researcher in education or academic from outside the specific field, will
come the: “BUT, I draw upon a range of mostly post-structural ideas with which
to critique mainstream ideas”. The reason for this is partly the poor profile and
perceived quality of educational leadership research and thus as a marker of dis-
tinction from this sometimes, maligned work by invoking the name of ‘difficult’
continental philosophy. This also serves to distinguish himself from this perceived
poor quality or traditional and conservative scholarship. Furthermore, there is a
staking out of one’s theoretical and/or philosophical position in relation to educa-
tional leadership. The point we wish to illustrate here goes back to Lyotard’s claim
about the name and also Derrida’s work in deconstructing proper names in that it
becomes impossible to identify a fixed notion of understanding to the name and its
alleged referent in academic discourse and discipline. Another answer could be
that who one is depends on who one is talking to, who the particular audience is.
As Foucault in his essay ‘what is an author?’ states, “an author’s name is not
simply an element of speech…its presence is functional in that it serves as a
means of classification” (Foucault, 1977, p. 123).
There is also an inherent tension in being paid for and recognised as a re-
searcher, teacher and scholar in educational leadership, and then at the same time
being critical of much of the field in which one works and associates. This can and
has led to some elements of marginalisation (as typical of more critical perspect-
ives generally) and also missed opportunities and recognition. This is not meant to
be seen as a form of sour grapes, as Richard has certainly benefitted from a num-
ber of opportunities, support and other factors, but rather the tensions and risks
with doing critical work and scholarship. It is also interesting that Richard has also
largely published outside of the mainstream educational leadership journals as
12

well as having sought out the more critical venues such as International Journal
of Leadership in Education and Journal of Educational Administration and His-
tory, and other more generalist and educational politics and policy journals (due to
their reception of such critical styles of work). Thus, it is a curious space to work
in when deciding where to publish one’s ideas.
Christina’s positionality is also interesting given she may not even be
considered ‘within’ the field of educational leadership research, although as we
have already mentioned she has contributed to and co-authored works that are loc-
ated within this empirical space. To this end, we should ask: what constitutes a
scholar as belonging to a particular field of research? How to define oneself as a
scholar is said to be of utmost importance, but the thought of being boxed so nar-
rowly instils fear and trepidation into Christina as a key tenet of her work is the
disruption of borders and boundaries around the formation of knowledge. Much of
Christina’s work to-date has been concerned with unsettling sedimented know-
ledge by transporting Butlerian queer theory into seemingly conservative and tra-
ditional research spaces. Queer theory is often tethered very heavily to research
concerned with gender and sexualities, but why? Why is Butler anchored to such a
narrow perimeter of usage, when other scholars (such as Foucault, who could also
be categorised as a queer theorist. He did, after all, write about the history of sexu-
ality!) are allowed to take flight into a multitude of empirical spaces? Christina’s
work is concerned with asking these probing questions about the perceived place
and purchase of certain theories and, importantly, illustrating the utility of blurring
the boundaries. This makes it hard to ‘fit’ Christina into any one space, but dis-
rupting the perceived place and purchase of what a researcher is and can do, is the
point.
If we were to use Butler’s notion of performative constitution, then
Christina would be made sense of by her publications, which are mostly about
policy, school change and educational leadership. Simultaneously though, we
would also have to acknowledge that they have been about the utility of queer the-
ory in these empirical spaces. Thus, Christina would like to think of herself as an
example of performatively resignifying what an educational leadership scholar can
‘look like’ as she conforms, but not fully. She’s recognisable as a leadership
scholar, but in a somewhat quirky way, thus interrogating the borders and bound-
aries of belonging to the educational leadership space.
Coming back to this issue of names and authors, Foucault (1977), writes:

The author’s name characterises a particular manner of existence of

discourse. Discourse that possesses an author’s name is not to be im-
mediately consumed and forgotten; neither is it accorded the moment-
ary attention given to ordinary, fleeting words. Rather its status and its
manner of reception are regulated by the culture in which it circulates
(Foucault, 1977, p. 123).
 13

Our function then, as authors of this text and the discourses within ‘it’, becomes
one of discussing, circulating and explaining how certain discourses operate
through education and educational leadership. We draw on the various thinkers’
ideas in order to describe the various ways in which these relevant concepts and
theories can be put to use across disciplines and both within and across educa-
tional discourses. The ‘book’ in which this discourse resides also presents a num-
ber of problems in terms of its coherence and possible reception. In acknowledg-
ment of the problems of the language of the introduction and its particular relation
to the rest of the book, this introduction has both prepared the reader for what is to
come and yet at the same time also functions as an exterior function to those later
chapters, such is the difficulty of an introduction - it is both necessary and re-
dundant: in the words of Derrida, “this will not have been an introduction”.2

Overview of the rest of book

In the next chapter, we argue that we are witnessing a new phase or ‘theory turn’
in the field of educational leadership. These more critical perspectives in the field
of educational leadership have typically been marginalised by the larger body of
orthodox approaches due to a perceived lack of focus on best practice and ‘what
works’ discourses, and especially in recent years with the rise of the school effect-
iveness and improvement movement. However, critical perspectives in educa-
tional leadership constitute an essential and vibrant part of educational leadership
scholarship and discourse. Drawing very briefly (and not to trump what comes in
Chapter 3!) on Michel Foucault’s notion of discourse, through this chapter, we ex-
amine how critical perspectives have been constituted historically, with some of
the main themes of research. This foregrounding also highlights a number of limit-
ations with more orthodox and hegemonic leadership discourses. We identify a
number of key writers in the field and situate them in the current theory turn, that
is, an emphasis of theoretically informed research that have been prolific over the
last 5-10 years.
Chapter 3 is the first of the chapters in the book that examines the key
ideas of a particular thinker. In this case it is the work of Michel Foucault. We use
Foucault’s work to highlight a number of prescient issues in education and educa-
tional leadership, namely how discourse works in the creation of particular norms
and truths that function in the field of educational leadership. We begin by situat-
ing this work in relation to previous work drawing on Foucault’s ideas and then
discuss some of the main ideas associated with Foucault: discourse, power, gov-
ernmentality, ethics and the subject. Within each of these sections we link to edu-
cational leadership discourse that is both useful for further examination and how

2 Derrida famously uttered “This (therefore) will not have been a book” (Der-

rida, 1981, p. 3) at the start of the book Dissemination. Derrida then proceeds to
deconstruct the functioning and purpose of the preface and its role in a book. Der-
rida also included introductions in this section so we have reworded this quote to
reflect this instance.
14

such approaches may still serve some important use giveth the age of Foucault’s
work and also the previous use of his ideas. We argue that there is still much that
can be done and in fact, need to be done in the contemporary moment more than
ever. Finally, we provide a brief annotated bibliography of some key works to ex-
plore for future readers and research.
Chapter 4 looks at the work of Judith Butler. In this chapter we attempt to
unpack the key ideas in Butler’s work. Butler’s work is dense, so the aim of this
chapter is to make her ideas as accessible as possible. We explore Butler’s con-
cepts of intelligibility, performativity, causal reversal and performative resignific-
ation. All of these concepts speak back to long held notions about ‘truth’, ‘iden-
tity’ formation and agency. Throughout the chapter, prompting questions are
asked and potential links with educational leadership are made. This culminates in
an extended example at the end of the chapter showing how Butler may be used
within the educational leadership space.
Chapter 5 introduces the ideas of Bernard Stiegler. We introduce both a
number of Stiegler’s concepts as well as some of his key books and book series.
As we explain throughout the chapter, Stiegler has written little on education per
se (albeit one book and another more related to the role of universities), so we take
some time arguing for how Stiegler’s ideas can be useful in understanding broader
societal, cultural and digital trends that are affecting individuals and societies
around the world. We one thinks of context in the field of educational leadership,
ne immediately thinks of the school. While obviously the school is a central unit
of analysis of education and is vitally important for understanding the contexts in
which school leadership happens, there is also much broader discourses that have
a profound effect on education and educational leadership. Stiegler’s analyses of
technics, digitisation, hyper industrial economies and consumer capitalisation are
all affecting education in new and important ways. We take Stiegler’s work to ar-
gue we cannot ignore these aspects of societal change on a mass scale and how
they influence our thinking and actions in education and the work of educational
leaders. We take time to examine Stiegler’s work on the Technics and Time series,
the Symbolic Misery series, Disbelief and Discredit series in addition to books
such as Taking Care of Youth, States of Shock and some shorter pieces. Other spe-
cific concepts we highlight include psycho-power and the pharmakon. At the end
of the chapter we again provide an annotated bibliography and a short key terms
list.
Chapter 6 introduces the work of Karen Barad. Karen Barad can be cat-
egorised as belonging to the new materialist and post-humanist paradigms, al-
though we explain at the front of the chapter why she is perhaps better understood
within post-anthropocentric thinking. Like Butler, Barad draws from an eclectic
range of scholars and reworks their ideas. Barad’s work is focused on giving mat-
ter its due recognition in the meaning-making process. This chapter outlines how
Barad has extended Butler’s notion of performativity and infused it with posthu-
manist thinking. Throughout the chapter, possible links with educational leader-
 15

ship are made, and an extended example of what a Baradian framework could ‘do’
is given.
In the final chapter (Chapter 7), we bring together a number of themes
from each chapter and provide some comments and thoughts regarding the rela-
tionship of these ideas to each other. We also take some space to explore the role
of theory in education and educational leadership research along with some cri-
tiques and criticisms of the ideas presented throughout the book. In particular, we
respond to some critiques levelled at postmodernism and some of the problems we
see with these characterisations. That is not to say some critiques have not made
important points and contributions, but rather to identify sometimes broad and
general dismissal of these ideas under the umbrella term of postmodernism. We
respond to these and highlight both the importance of our position and some ways
forward for future research.

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