Challenging leadership: The issues

Abstract

In the field of educational administration, we live in an age of leadership, both in the material sense of leaders as persons and in a formal sense that concerns the concept, or rather concepts, of leadership. It has not always been so. Although leaders and leadership have been studied since antiquity – Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s The Politics offer fine examples – in the field of educational administration, which began a quest in the 1950s to be more rigorous and scientific, the dominant paradigm has been that of systems theory. This view brought with it an account of how organisations functioned, and when they failed to function adequately, it proffered both diagnostics and remedial a..