The Search for Science and Scientific Standing

Abstract

The search for science and scientific understanding in educational administration and leadership has been shaped to varying degrees by differing views of science. Three such views have had some influence in the field. Positivism, as a form of strict foundationalism, has been perhaps the least influential. It purports to justify a theory of educational administration by deriving it from a secure set of alleged knowledge foundations. The weaknesses in this view are well known, with its influence nowadays confined mainly to accounting for operational definitions and a quest for empirical foundations. Logical empiricism, a modest form of foundationalism, has been of most influence. Expressed most clearly in the Theory Movement of the 1950s, and later through its application in social systems theory, it sought to justify theories of administration by empirical testability. Observation statements are derived from the theory and are then tested against actual observations. Justification is a matter of securing many confirmations and no disconfirmations.Both positivism, in this sense, and logical empiricism were primarily employed in a project to build scientific theories of educational administration. Because they placed a premium on law-like generalizations, a form of systems theory such as could be applied to organizations, came to dominate the field, at least until the 1980s, despite known weaknesses in logical empiricism as an account of science.It was systems theory itself that emerged as problematic. As key features of systems emphasized stability and return to equilibrium, the model proved to be unsatisfactory in accounting for change, especially large-scale systems change as occurred with neoliberal reforms of schooling in the direction of school-based management.Theories of change, especially those for systemic change within whole jurisdictions, favored leadership as the primary explanatory source in accounting for school reform, and furthermore, for implementing it. As a result, by the 2000s, the role of science had narrowed from providing constraints on theories of organizations, to providing the conditions for evidence-based research into leadership. Logical empiricism as a theory of science had become the epistemological basis for a scientific research methodology in leadership studies.Known weaknesses in logical empiricism have led to so-called post-positivist accounts of science. An important one of these uses science itself to account for the nature, acquisition, and justification of knowledge. This scientific naturalism favors a coherentist view of justification that can then be used to shape both the content and structure of theories of educational administration, leadership, and how they are related.KeywordsPositivismLogical empiricismNaturalistic coherentismSubjectivismCritical theoryHumanismPostmodernismCausationStatistical regularityPatternRandomnessEffect sizeCorrelationBest fitEmpirical adequacySystems theoryTestabilityConfirmation biasDistributed cognitive systemContext