Thinking Management and Leadership within Colleges and Schools Somewhat Differently: A Practice-based, Actor-Network Theory Perspective

摘要

This article examines the significance of materiality for management and leadership in education using resources provided by actor-network theory (ANT). Espousing the idea that human interactions are mediated by material objects and that these objects participate in the production of practices, ANT affords thinking management and leadership in a somewhat different way. Drawing on empirical data collected over the course of examining management and leadership in vocational education institutions in Australia and innovation and change in Australian schools, it is argued that educational management is primarily to be seen not in terms of the intrinsic capabilities or potentialities of managers and leaders but rather enactments of management. It can, with profit, be conceptualized as a field of practices constituted and enacted contingently by people and objects in complex networks. Moving educational management from individual attribute to contingent enactment makes it possible to study its specific workings including how it operates to produce, and also challenge, the generalizing logics of market and economism that characterize contemporary education (Ball, 2007). It makes visible mundane and material forms of power that frequently go unrecognized yet can serve crucially to make this challenge.