A systematic review of research on educational leadership and management in South Africa: mapping knowledge production in a developing society

Abstract

For much of the past 60 years, the ‘visible’ knowledge base consisted almost entirely of studies that described EDLM policies and practices from a relatively small number of Anglo-American societies. Over the past five years, reviews of research have revealed abundant evidence of rapidly increasing publication output from developing societies in Asia, Africa and Latin America. A recent review of Africa’s EDLM literature identified South Africa as a ‘positive outlier’ in knowledge production. The current review examined South Africa’s published EDLM scholarship in terms of its volume, growth over time, distribution across scholarly journals and authors, citation impact, as well as types of studies, research methods, conceptual models and topics. The database of sources for the review consisted of 292 EDLM articles published in English language journals up to the end of 2016. The review employed quantitative ‘topographical analysis’ aimed at describing key features of the African knowledge base in EDLM. Patterns in the topography of the South African literature identified in this review were also benchmarked against findings reported in reviews of research conducted in other societies and regions of the world.