Educational Leadership for Results or for Learning? Contrasting Directions in Times of Transition

Educational leadership, like educational systems and schooling, is steered by the national political, professional and social contexts in which it occurs. In recent years, managerialist values have informed the policies of many governments and “new public management” challenges the ideals of “progressive humanistic leadership” in schools in many countries. The former approach is driven by results and demands for accountability whereas the latter favours an holistic, child-centred approach to leadership in which educational leaders at both system and school levels adopt a proactive, empowering and participative approach based on humane values of personal and organisational learning. Newly professionalised educational managers in the transforming systems of central and east Europe face the difficult task of reconciling these two differing directions. Scholars, researchers and developers of educational leadership have a key role to play in helping to deepen understanding of the dilemmas created by these contradictory trends.

Feminine context of prehistoric notation systems

A radical school of modern feminism exists which believes in the existence of a time in prehistory, before the male take-over, when society was universally matriarchal, and women enjoyed a more central role in society than men. The idea of an ancient matriarchy first gained ground in the 19th century amongst evolutionary theorists, such as Engels. He linked the oppression of women to the rise of the state, which he said had resulted in the separation of private and public domains, the activities of women being relegated to the private service of their husbands (Leacock, 1978, p. 255; Siverblatt, 1991, pp. 141, 144-146). Another theory is that matriarchal society was swept aside during the Neolithic by patriarchal, hierarchical invaders from northern Europe (Stone, 1976, p. 20; Tringham, 1991, pp. 96-97; Grindell, 1993, pp. 124-125). Supporters of the matriarchal thesis maintain that mathematics, counting and calculation were originally female preserves that were linked to fertility through the menstrual cycle and the motions of the moon. They argue that math is derived from the Sanskrit matra or the Greek meter, both of which mean mother and measurement. Therefore, mathematics literally means mother wisdom, and ancient peoples regarded it as one of the particular gifts of the mother-goddess to her daughters (Walker, 1983, pp. 684-5). The paper seeks to explore this claim, that in the beginning counting and calculation were the preserves of women

John Johnson\u27s letters: The accounting role of Tudor merchants\u27 correspondence

This article examines the role that correspondence played in the accounting systems of Tudor merchants. Merchants relied heavily on letters as a means of controlling their businesses at a distance by making agents accountable. Written accountability, as well as information for business decisions, was encouraged by agency relationships in mercantile enterprises. The system could be undermined by the breakdown of communication through the negligence of a factor or the lack of involvement by the principal. The time delays between the sending and the receipt of letters, on the one hand, and the procurement and conveyance of goods, on the other, were additional problems

Historiography, causality, and positioning: An unsystematic view of accounting history

The article reviews recent developments in accounting historiography in relation to the underlying positioning of the participants. It finds that accounting history has located itself within the tradition of social science, which subsumes events into generalizations and generalizations into theory. It reviews the efficacy of causal theories of human behavior and proposes an alternative non-theoretical approach

Role of accounting in public expenditure and monetary policy in the first century AD Roman Empire

Previous authors have argued that Roman coinage was used as an instrument of financial control rather than simply as a means for the state to make payments, without assessing the accounting implications. The article reviews the literary and epigraphic evidence of the public expenditure accounts surrounding the Roman monetary system in the first century AD. This area has been neglected by accounting historians. Although the scope of the accounts supports the proposition that they were used for financial control, the impetus for keeping those accounts originally came from the emperor\u27s public expenditure commitments. This suggests that financial control may have been encouraged by the financial planning that arose out of the exigencies of funding public expenditure. In this way these two aspects of monetary policy can be reconciled