Theorising Context in Educational Leadership from a Relational Critical Realist Perspective

Abstract

Educational leadership scholars are unanimous in their appreciation of the importance of context. As a concept, however, context is not unproblematic and, while being scarcely theorised, the recent growing interest around the topic has shown fundamental differences in the way that it is approached with repercussions on how the field progresses. The analysis of published literature on context undertaken in this article, therefore, attempts to look beyond current framing of context as antecedent and moderator, in order to propose a relational critical realist perspective to framing context and, hopefully, shape as well as decolonise future policy, practice and theorising in educational leadership.