Is educational leadership (still) worth studying? An epistemic worthiness-informed analysis

Abstract

This article is exploratory and experimental. It starts from the premise that leadership scholarship is a site of disagreement, where mainstream claims are challenged by critical scholars. Some criticism focuses on conceptual clarity, and incorporates consideration of who should be categorised as a leader, and on what basis, and whether it is helpful to refer to ‘leaders’ and ‘followers’. The ‘new wave’ of critical leadership studies generates controversial questions relating to whether leadership exists or is in fact a myth that we have reified. The bulk of criticism directed at educational leadership challenges three mainstream knowledge claims – underpinned by what I call the causality belief, the leadership dependency belief, and the conceptual belief – and which are the focus of this article's analysis. While criticism of these knowledge claims is well-rehearsed, the article breaks new ground by analysing them through an epistemic justification lens to address the question: is educational leadership (still) worth studying? Represented by these three component beliefs, the mainstream educational leadership scholarship belief system is analysed within a frame derived from the philosophy of science, and draws on BonJour's coherentist theory of epistemic justification to apply a more structured assessment than has hitherto been achieved by critical scholarship.