The inseparable connection between leadership, agency, power and collaboration in a primary educational setting

Abstract

This paper critiques the empirically supported normative argument that distributed leadership allows for shared accountability and responsibility. Through the means of cognitive mapping and semi-structured interviews, we engaged in understanding how practices and structural conditions of distributed leadership within two English state primary school settings were established and accepted and where the inseparable connections between leadership, agency, power and collaboration positioned some members less well to participate and exercise influence than others. Our study utilises Foucault’s critical concepts of power as an interaction of social relations and his concept of ‘technologies of self’ whereby individuals undertake practices in order to shape themselves in particular ways to be accepted. Furthermore, drawing upon Bourdieu’s concepts of capital, habitus and field, findings indicate how within a distributed model of leadership individuals can be disconnected from the collective but enabled to feel good about this. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for distributed leadership and the necessity to problematise power more generally within a distributed model of leadership.