Understanding Leadership in Education - How Context Matters

This book argues for the importance of context in understanding educational leadership. It discusses the value of leadership in explaining the performance of educational organizations and considers a more balanced approach that emphasizes both structural factors and agency factors in understanding what these organizations can achieve. It also observes the interplay between leaders' actions and context with regard to decision-making, and in turn contends that large-scale theories are far too coarse to accurately account for the enactment of leadership in shifting and dynamic contexts. Drawing on recent and evolving branches of the neurosciences, the book maps out future and promising avenues, theoretically and empirically, that will help readers to understand what actually goes on in the day-to-day activities of leading and learning in context, and to improve it. 

List of contents

Part I From systems theory to the rise of leadership.- 1 Introduction.- 2 The rise of leader-centrism.- Part II Limits to leadership.- 3 Methodological limits to leadership.- 4 Training leaders: Limits to the knowledge base.- 5 General limits to social science knowledge.- Part III Building leadership knowledge in the presence of uncertainty.- 6 Learning to lead in organizational contexts: Towards a social epistemology.- 7 Learning through problem solving: The semantic fragmentation of "leadership".- Part IV Naturalizing individual and organizational cognition.- 8 Naturalizing cognition and the place of emotion.- 9 A naturalistic view of organizations.- 10 Enculturated minds, critical learning and leadership.

About the author

Colin W. Evers is Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of New South Wales. He studied mathematics, philosophy, and education before taking his PhD in philosophy of education at the University of Sydney. His teaching and research interests are in educational administration and leadership, philosophy of education, and research methodology. He is Section Editor of the Springer Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory (Educational Administration) and has been an Associate Editor of Educational Philosophy and Theory and a Co-Editor of International Studies in Educational Administration. His current research concerns the application of scientific realism and coherentist inference to theories of individual and distributed cognition in leadership. He has co-edited and co-authored fourteen books, mostly on aspects of educational administration and leadership, and over 120 scholarly papers in his areas of research interest.

Gabriele Lakomski is Professor Emeritus at the University of Melbourne. Her research interests are in the areas of leadership, organisational learning and culture, cognition and emotion in cognitive science. Her current research focuses on neuroscience and the emotions, the relation between cognition and emotion, and what this means for rational decision-making and leadership in organisational contexts. Gabriele was Editor of the Australian Journal of Education; Section Editor of the Second International Encyclopedia of Education; Senior Editor of Organization Studies, and Section Editor of the Springer Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory (Educational Leadership). She is a member of a number of editorial boards, such as the Journal of Educational Administration, Educational Management and Leadership, Management Learning and Academy of Management Perspectives. She is author, co-author and co-editor of six books and over 80 scholarly papers.

Product details

• Authors: Colin Willia Evers, Colin William Evers, Gabriele Lakomski
• Publisher: Springer, Berlin
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 29.04.2021, delayed
• EAN: 9789813362154
• ISBN: 978-981-3362-15-4
• Illustrations: 1 SW-Abb.
• Series: Educational Leadership Theory
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Education > Education system