Distributed Leadership for Social Justice: Exploring how Influence and Equity are Stretched over an Urban High School

Abstract

Although leadership for social justice and distributed leadership have separately garnered a great deal of interest among educational administration scholars, no studies have explored the possible conceptual and empirical links between these important and promising areas of inquiry. This study draws from extant literature to suggest an exploratory conceptual framework designed to investigate distributed leadership practice for social justice; it then explores the efficacy of the framework using data from an ethnographic study of leadership practice conducted in an urban high school in the southeastern United States. Findings suggest that the framework has potential for explaining social justice leadership practice as the context-specific and situation-bound work of formal and informal leaders throughout an organization.