Democratic Leadership in Education by Woods Philip Arthur;

Author:Woods, Philip Arthur;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 334361
Publisher: SAGE Publications, Limited
Published: 2005-09-18T00:00:00+00:00

Hierarchical organizations are simply too inflexible and rigid to compete effectively in today’s business environment. They fail to attract the right human capital and to produce the right core competencies and organizational capabilities. As a result, they need to be replaced by lateral forms of organization that rely heavily on teams, information technology, networks, shared leadership, and involved employees … [These new organizational forms] will have flat, agile structures, open information, power that moves to expertise, and systems that create knowledgeable employees throughout the organization. (Lawler 2001: 16–17)

Democratic leadership, in this view, is a means of engendering compliance with dominant goals and values and harnessing staff commitment, ideas, expertise and experience to realising these. Democracy is instrumental and de-politicised, and has more in common with distributed leadership.

It is possible to see in the concern with student engagement an extension of subtle instrumentalism. Jeffrey (2003: 494) notes amongst teachers a lessening of emphasis on responding to pupils’ emotions and on developing pupils’ own educational evaluations, and instead ‘a more pragmatic use of emotions to engage interest’.1 A concentration on team identity amongst pupils and teacher encourages learner collaboration and a shared identification with school objectives. In the following example these children, quoted by Jeffrey, are talking about a forthcoming inspection of their school by the national inspection agency in England, Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education), illustrating how subtle instrumentalism can become pervasive:

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