This presentation was a guest lecture for Richard Niesche's "Critical perspectives in Educational Leadership" course. It draws on my forthcoming book and seeks to recast leadership through relations.

1. Dr Scott Eacott
From “leading” to “organizing”

2. SOME BACKGROUND
• MLMEd no discussion of
“leadership” as anything but
THE desirable.
• Hambrick & Finkelstein (1996)
asking questions of the self?
• Lieberson & O’Connor (1972)
• A long history of asking
questions of the “realness” of
leadership.
• Does leadership hold up to
theoretical critique?

4. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
What I offer today comes from:
Eacott, S. (forthcoming). Beyond leadership: a relational
approach to organization theory in education. Dordrecht, the
Netherlands: Springer.

5. (PEDAGOGICAL) OVERVIEW
Objective
• To analyze “leadership” for its theoretical and methodological
rigor and robustness.
Quality Criteria
• You can identify some of the underlying generative features of
argument for “leadership”.
Tasks
• Presentation (45 mins)
• Dialogue and debate (45 mins)
• But the above is flexible
4

6. LEADERSHIP PRELIMINARIES
Something about what is a social group (e.g., an organization)?
1. A group (i.e., n=≥2) requires some form of organizing.
2. If there is leadership there is group change.
3. “Leadership” involves “administration” and/or “management”
but offers something “more”.
4. “Leadership”, “management”, and “administration” are three
distinct, even if related, analytical categories.

7. FROM RATIONAL TO RELATIONAL
Built on a Bourdieusian craft of scholarship, I propose the
following relational approach:
• The centrality of “organizing” in the social world generates an
ontological complicity in researchers (and others) that makes it
difficult to epistemologically break from ordinary language;
• Rigorous (social) scientific inquiry calls into question the
foundations of popular labels such as “leadership”;
• The contemporary condition is constantly shaped by, and
shaping of, the image of organizing;
• Foregrounding relations enables the overcoming of
contemporary, and arguably enduring, analytical dualisms
(structure/agency, individualism/holism, universal/particular)
• In doing so, there is a productive – rather than merely critical –
space to theorize organizing activity.

8. ONTOLOGICAL COMPLICITY
Some matters:
• Embedded and embodied auctors
• Greenfield on the “realness” of organizations
• Complicity with orthodoxy
• The social world is contested
• Positionality and non-positionality
• Enduring productively

9. PROBLEMATIZING LANGUAGE
Some matters:
• “Leadership” is the contemporary flavour
Previous labels have been demonized
• But leadership is … ?
• The rise of leadership in spatio-temporal conditions
• Epistemic imperialism
• Beyond critique
• Theorize it has the Pretty Woman effect
Anything you want it to be

10. SPATIO-TEMPORAL CONDITIONS
Some matters:
• Context as causal
(1) Context (social structures) → practice
[determinism]
(2) Practice (agency) → context (social structures)
[agentic]
(3) Practice (agency) ↔ context (social structures)
[conflationism]
(4) Context (social structures) → (+/-) practice (agency) →
transformed or reproduced
[moderation]
• Organizing as context

11. ANALYTICAL DUALISMS
Some matters:
• Structure and agency
• Universal and particular
• Individualism and holism

12. PRODUCTIVE THEORIZING
Some matters:
• Theoretical insecurity
• Pre-existing normative orientation
• Easy to dismiss / ignore based on alternate positions
• But this involves “othering” and separate entities
• To think relationally is to problematize AND contribute
• To look at problems AND possibilities
• Knowledge claims in relation to one another
• There are explicit practical applications of the relational
approach

13. RECASTING ED LEADERSHIP
Thinking of educational leadership with new terms
• The shift from “leadership of organizations / people” to
organizing activity
• The generation of knowledge / conditions
• Not agents or actors but auctors (s/he who generates)
• Not contexts / environments but spatio-temporal conditions
Not just novel language, but a re-casting through the
centrality of relations

15. DIALOGUE AND DEBATE
Guest lecture presented to:
EDST5143 Critical Perspectives on Educational
Leadership
University of New South Wales
Sydney NSW AUSTRALIA
11 July 2017

16. Contact Details
Dr Scott Eacott
PhD MLMEd GradCertPTT BTeach/BSocSci FACEL
Director, Higher Research Degree Programs
School of Education
University of New South Wales
Sydney NSW AUSTRALIA 2052
P: +61 2 9385 0704
T: @ScottEacott
E: s.eacott@unsw.edu.au
W: http://scotteacott.com