The inseparable connection between leadership, agency, power and collaboration in a primary educational setting

Deborah M Humphreys,Clare Rigg

doi:10.1177/1742715020931285

Deborah M Humphreys, Clare Rigg

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/1742715020931285

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Abstract

This paper critiques the empirically supported normative argument that distributed leadership allows for shared accountability and responsibility. Through the means of cognitive mapping and semi-structured interviews, we engaged in understanding how practices and structural conditions of distributed leadership within two English state primary school settings were established and accepted and where the inseparable connections between leadership, agency, power and collaboration positioned some members less well to participate and exercise influence than others. Our study utilises Foucault’s critical concepts of power as an interaction of social relations and his concept of ‘technologies of self’ whereby individuals undertake practices in order to shape themselves in particular ways to be accepted. Furthermore, drawing upon Bourdieu’s concepts of capital, habitus and field, findings indicate how within a distributed model of leadership individuals can be disconnected from the collective but enabled to feel good about this. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for distributed leadership and the necessity to problematise power more generally within a distributed model of leadership.

Highlights

This paper explores aspects of the inseparable connection between leadership, agency, power, and collaboration in a primary educational context
The focus for our study is on the D/discourse of individuals as they talk about their ‘figured worlds’ of inseparable connections between leadership, agency, power and collaboration
A question that drove our study, was what are the connections between agency, collaboration and power within a distributed model of leadership? Rather than viewing distributed leadership (DL) as an effective means of distributing responsibility and accountability where schools as Harris (2003: 321) posits, ‘build a climate of collaboration premised upon communication, sharing and opportunities for teachers to work together’ and seeing leadership under this guise as ‘effective’, we set out to problematise and critique DL as a Discourse and practice

Summary

Introduction

This paper explores aspects of the inseparable connection between leadership, agency, power, and collaboration in a primary educational context. Official rhetoric presents DL as a means of leading with impact and is the preferred model of leadership within statefunded primary schools placing the headteacher as pivotal in influencing others (Department for Education, 2017) It is a model which multiple studies have professed distributes responsibility and accountability throughout a setting to improve performance with the leader at the centre (Day et al, 2010; Harris, 2014). They could be acts of compliance or resistance of the self in order to be discursively included what Foucault refers to as ‘technologies of the self’ (Gillies, 2013). We sought to explore the dynamics of power and influence within the settings and drew on Foucault’s explanation of power as something which is carried out within different aspects of human activity, between different individuals or groups

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