Discourses of School Leadership Traveling Across North European School Systems

Abstract

This chapter analyzes dominant discourses of European school leadership over the timespan of the last three decades and across the school systems participating in this research project. A large body of literature has portrayed a transition of ideas about school principalship toward the image of the school principal as a relatively autonomous and clearly result-accountable manager. In a similar vein, inherent and longstanding interdependencies between municipalities and schools, on the one hand, and political parties, teacher unions, and interest groups in the local civic society, on the other, have been downplayed in the reform rhetoric and governing principles central to the New Public Management (NPM) doctrines. As a result, an image of the school organization as a local and autonomous service-providing “firm” led by a relatively “sovereign” school principal has evolved in recent decades. These partial changes in the cultural–cognitive and normative basis of the larger school institution, in Scott’s terminology, have played out differently in the five systems analyzed in this book, and this chapter will analyze similarities and dissimilarities across the system cases. More specifically, this chapter will inspect how ideas of contemporary school leadership have manifested in school leadership education and training programs across the countries.