Abstract
In early childhood education, the concept of distributed leadership has emerged as a key analytical tool for understanding leadership as well as a normative guide for what leadership should be. The concept originates in Peter Gronn’s work, where it is positioned as overcoming the structure-agency debate, which is a foundational question in the study of social reality. While distributed leadership itself has been extensively studied, the problem motivating Gronn’s work—the structure-agency problematique—has rarely been investigated. In an effort to create a deeper understanding of the role of structure and agency in constituting early childhood education leadership, this study examines how these two key dimensions of social reality structure early childhood education center leaders’ understanding of leadership. The data for the study consist of focus group interviews where early childhood education center leaders discuss various aspects of leadership. The data are analyzed in the broad framework of post-structural discourse analysis, using the analytic concept of frame, which reveals the interplay of structure and agency in early childhood education leaders’ understandings of their work. The findings show that early childhood education center leaders’ understanding of leadership is mainly focused on the side of structure and offers few chances for the kind of collective effort hoped for by Gronn.
Highlights
And policy discussions in early childhood education (ECE) have recently begun to reflect a broader trend in educational leadership theory by highlighting distributed leadership (DL) as a key analytical tool for understanding leadership as well as a normative guide for what leadership should be
Varpanen: Early childhood education leadership in Finland through the lens of structure and agency 519 (2000), where he proposes an interpretation of DL as a solution to a more fundamental disagreement about the nature of leadership
Lurking behind this polarization is an even more fundamental problem of social theory: the structureagency debate, that is, do the actions of agents constitute social structure or does the social structure constitute the agents and their actions? In the context of this study, this translates to: do the actions of leaders constitute institutional structures or do the institutional structures constitute the leaders’ actions? This debate has a long history (Archer, 2000; Giddens, 1984; Howarth, 2000) as a foundational question of social ontology, but Gronn (2000: 317–318) argues that if we are to move beyond the simplistic polarization in leadership theory, we need to find a way to accommodate both structure and agency as forces that shape the social world
Summary
And policy discussions in early childhood education (ECE) have recently begun to reflect a broader trend in educational leadership theory by highlighting distributed leadership (DL) as a key analytical tool for understanding leadership as well as a normative guide for what leadership should be (see e.g. Heikka et al, 2012; Heikka and Hujala, 2013). (2000), where he proposes an interpretation of DL as a solution to a more fundamental disagreement about the nature of leadership He describes leadership theory as polarized around an idea of a superlative individual transforming institutional practices, on the one hand, and an idea of institutional practices and structures swamping the individual on the other (Gronn, 2000: 317). Lurking behind this polarization is an even more fundamental problem of social theory: the structureagency debate, that is, do the actions of agents constitute social structure or does the social structure constitute the agents and their actions? It seems that Gronn’s initial assumption about the polarization of leadership around the structure–agency debate merits more explicit attention
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