Culture-based leadership

Abstract

The field of educational leadership is beset with a barrage of different ‘leadership theories’. There are so many differently named theories and models of leadership that the student and practitioner have difficulty understanding them as anything other than an automat of alternatives. To confuse matters even more, nearly all of these alternatives claim to work in the interest of transformation and social justice and against the status quo. Unfortunately, the dominant textbooks available in educational administration and leadership favour certain traditional approaches to leadership while all but ignoring the most cogent of the contemporary critical alternatives. This essay argues that one reason for the absence of critical voices in the dominant textbooks and practices in the field results from the failure to recognize a commonality among certain critical stances on educational leadership that distinguish them from more traditional approaches. It suggests the field would benefit from recognizing that educational leadership theories may actually be approached as either organization-based theories or as culture-based theories and then advocates more consideration be given to culture-based theories.