A new biographical studies for educational leadership : challenges from a postcolonial and globalizing world

This paper examines the nature, role and development of biographical studies in educational administration and leadership, how it has changed under neo-liberalism and the challenges posed by postcolonial studies. It first examines the nature and value of conventional Western biographical studies for educational administration, including a number of problems and limitations that also affect biographical studies in other parts of the world. The second section examines a number of issues in the postcolonial literature that raise questions about Western research, including biographical practices that lead to ‘orientalism’ (Said), inequities and communicative domination (Habermas), the construction of the subaltern (Guha, Spivak), a critique of colonial social forms and cultural processes (Bourdieu), and research practices that disadvantage the non- Western research subject (Smith). The final section examines research implications of a more decolonized and inclusive biographical studies for educational administration

Educational Administration and Leadership Curricula for Modern Nation-Building in Muslim Countries: Modernisation, National Identity and the Preservation of Values and Culture

Despite the dominance of neoliberal ideology aimed at economic advancement, two of the main purposes of educational systems still is the cultivation of national identity and the preservation and continued development of social, cultural and political traditions that shape and sustain national identity and the distinctiveness of a society. While some argue that Islam and modernisation are incompatible and to modernise Islamic countries, Islam as a religion, doctrine and political ideology should be eliminated, it is argued here that there are no inherent conflicts or contradictions between Islam and modernisation and that the Anglo-American approach is not the only path for modern societies. Muslim countries can find their own path to modernisation using Islamic principles and Shura as a political ideology. Through the application of multiple modernities, we suggest that teaching educational leadership can be effectively internationalised and modified to serve cultural and social heritage and goals of Muslim countries. Finally, we discuss the characteristics of educational leaders required for nation-building in Muslim countries, arguing that nation-building efforts should involve an extensive use of historical events, traditional narratives and literature that aim to explain and convey cultural values and national ideologies to the new generations. One approach is through hybrid curricula where international literature can be combined with material reflecting the nature and character of Muslim countries, particularly if presenting the field in an interpretive and critical manner and taking into account the collective nature of Muslim societies

Education in a troubled era of disenchantment : the emergence of a new Zeitgeist

This essay examines the emergence of a new Zeitgeist that has profound implications for education, particularly in the US. Following the dominance of neoliberalism, changes in society are reviewed that have been identified by many authors from a number of disciplines that are becoming more influential including globalisation, digitalisation, the surveillance and security state, populist politics, and post-truth claims and practices. Using a Zeitgeist analysis based primarily in Weberian disenchantment and the iron cage, a more central Zeitgeist of pervasive and institutionalised narcissism that encompasses the emerging eras is examined and identifies a number of issues and problems that arise for education and its administration

Mentoring and role modelling in educational administration and leadership : neoliberal/globalisation, cross-cultural and transcultural issues

Many, if not most, of my writing comes from experience, as it does for many scholars – either observing situations and events, being among those involved in these, and the many discussions with students and colleagues about the experiences they have gone through in many countries I have visited or worked in. This topic of mentoring and the related role of role modelling initially came to me shortly after doing my doctorate in a mentoring mode with Christopher Hodgkinson in Canada, and my ideas about this were reinforced when I was mentored in informal postdoctoral work with Wolfgang Mommsen in Germany in the 1990s

Mapping the field of educational leadership and management in the Arabian Gulf region : a systematic review of Arabic research literature

The purpose of this systematic review was to identify trends in educational leadership and management (EDLM) knowledge production in the Arabian Gulf region, drawing on a database of 272 studies published in local (Arabic) journals over a 10-year period (2009–2018). The review focused on the geographic distribution of the literature, authorship trends, types of studies, research topics, research methods and data collection techniques. The study employed quantitative methods aimed at highlighting patterns of EDLM knowledge production rather than synthesising research findings. The study used the Arabic databases hosted by Dar Almandumah (EduSearch, EcoLink, IslamicInfo, AraBase, and Humanindex), in addition to the Shamaa database to identify relevant sources. The study found that the literature under investigation reflected many of the features characterising EDLM literatures from other developing countries, especially in terms of the types of studies, topical coverage and research methods. The most notable features included uneven geographic distribution, predominance of single-authored papers, absence of certain important topics, prevalence of empirical articles, and heavy reliance on quantitative research methods and data collection techniques. Recommendations were provided to improve future EDLM research in the region. The study supports findings from previous reviews of EDLM literature in the Arab region and highlights the need for more concerted efforts to enhance the quality and relevance of this literature to increase its ability to inform policy and practice

Toward a postcolonial securities critique of higher education leadership : globalization as a recolonization in developing countries like the UAE

This article examines the intersection of three concepts in education–cultural security, globalization and the postcolonial critique–are related in order to advance the application of cultural security studies in educational administration and leadership. The first section discusses constructivist security studies as they apply to socio-cultural and political aspects of educational values, identity formation and cultural norms in non-Western contexts can be viewed as securitized. The second section presents connections between security studies and globalized education by demonstrating how the latter can be defined as a cultural security problem. The next section shows similarities between cultural security and postcolonial critiques as they relate to foreign curriculum and pedagogy for educational leadership as a form of re-colonization that can undermine the integrity of other cultures, using the United Arab Emirates as an example. The final section discusses this critique in relation to an illustrative country, the United Arab Emirates. The conclusion discusses the implications for educational administration as a field of study, research and practice

The politics of educational change in the Middle East and North Africa : nation-building, postcolonial reconstruction, destabilized states, societal disintegration, and the dispossessed

This chapter examines the system level changes and developments in education in the Middle East, focussing primarily on the relationship of education to its regional and international contexts where there is adequate information available (in some cases significant events have been happening so rapidly that scholarly information is not yet available). The argument made here is that given the political and economic instability throughout much of the Middle East (Aman & Aman, 2016; Korany, 2010) the social institution of education is a function of local and foreign contextual factors undergoing other forms of development than ‘reform’ (as it is generally understood in the West), unlike the 19th century during which many Middle East states experienced periods of educational reform (Hourani, 1991). The Middle East is is still affected by ongoing influence of World wars, colonisation, the Cold War, the Gulf Wars and disruptively high levels of modernisation and globalisation influences, perhaps more so in this region than many others globally. Barakat (1993) approaches this combination of internal and external factors as those that fall into a set of diversity and integration polarities that create the tension Middle Eastern states are coping with: unity vs fragmentation, tradition vs modernity, sacred vs secular, East vs West, and local vs national, all of which have a profound impact on educational systems and their curriculum, teaching and administration as well as the ends it is conceived to serve (e.g., Kaplan, 2006). The politics of education in the Middle East for many countries is not a matter of reform, but of other kinds of political processes in combination with international and regional forces that affect these political processes and the legacy of history that shaped their political structures, social norms and social institutions. There are five major country patterns, each of which has a corresponding structure and condition of educational system: 1) those countries undergoing rapid modernisation and multiculturation that are relatively stable states in which nation-building is well underway, characteristic of the Arabian Gulf states like Qatar (Tok, Al Khater & Pal, 2016) and the United Arab Emirates (Davidson, 2005); 2) postcolonial, revolutionary and/or post-war reconstruction characteristic of Iran, Morocco, Algeria, Lebanon (Najem, 2011; Shuayb, 2012) and Jordan (Alon, 2007); 3) destabilised states that are experiencing varying degrees of transformation and tension such as Turkey (Axiarlis, 2014) and many of those referred to as ‘Arab Spring’ states (Danahar, 2013; Lynch, 2014) like Egypt (Lacroix & Rougier, 2016) which has experienced a long history of student activism in national politics (Abdalla, 2008; 4) states that are in disintegration and human devastation like Syria, Iraq (Al-Ali, 2014; Isakhan, Mako & Dawood, 2015), and Yemen (Brehony, 2013; Heinze, 2016); and 5) the dispossessed like the Palestinians (Knudsen & Hanafi, 2011), Kurds (Allsopp, 2015; Aziz, 2011) and Syrians (Fisk, Cockburn & Sengupta, 2015; Yassin-Kassab & Al-Shami, 2016). The corresponding patterns of educational system, therefore, are the following: 1) those countries undergoing rapid modernisation and multiculturation that are stable states in which nation-building is well underway, characteristic of the Arabian Gulf states like Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey (Abdel-Moneim, 2015; Abi-Mershed, 2011; Davidson & Smith, 2008); 2) postcolonial or post-war reconstruction characteristic of Iran, Morocco, Algeria, Lebanon and Jordan (Abi-Mershed, 2011; Fontana, 2016; Rohde, Dhouib & Alayan, 2012); 3) destabilised states that are experiencing varying degrees of transformation and tension including Turkey (Kaplan, 2006; Nohl, Akkoyunlu-Wigley & Wigley, 2008; Ozgur, 2012) and many of those referred to as ‘Arab Spring’ states like Egypt (Abdel-Moneim, 2015; Mohamed, Gerber & Aboulkacem, 2016); 4) education in disintegrating and devastating conditions like the identity politics of the Iraqi disputed territories (Shanks, 2015), destruction as in Syria (Glass, 2016), and Yemen (Mohamed, Gerber & Aboulkacem, 2016); and 5) the education of the dispossessed include schooling in refugee populations, as with many Syrian children in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan (Abi-Mershed, 2011; Culbertson & Constant, 2015; Demirdjian, 2011; Rhohde, Dhouib & Alayan, 2012). Understanding the developments and changes in educational systems also requires an historical perspective that extends in its most immediate effects to colonialism (Owen, 2004), the effects of late 19th century European imperialism and post-Ottoman Empire influences primarily from France and Britain (Fieldhouse, 2006) and Cold War activities (Halliday, 2005) that positively and negatively affected state and nation building. Current globalisation influences, therefore, can be seen as a continuity of foreign influences, currently mostly from the US, the UK and Russia, in combination with regional and local dynamics that create a complex regional and international assembly of factors that Jreisat (1997) refers to as ‘converging obstacles’ due to the inextricable interplay of internal and external factors. If one defines colonisation as not only the imposition of political and military power, but also the cultural shaping of ideas and imagination, as Said (1993) does, or Thiong’o’s (1986) through his notion of colonising the mind and Spavik’s (2010) ‘subaltern’ identity, then globalisation through education carries with it a recolonising effect. According to Sayigh (1991), education’s role in colonising Middle East territories provided the intellectual framing of colonised and postcolonial states as dependent and underdeveloped, which colonised the mind by dispossessing people of their own (intellectual) history, providing a foreign ideology of development that was disadvantageous to them, and has continued to conflate a positivistic approach to growth with national development that effectively alienated Middle East people’s from a societal development that preserved the integrity of indigenous social institutions. One example of this is the assumption that developing one’s educational systems requires a knowledge transfer that only travels from ‘West’ to ‘East’. Equally significant are security concerns that directly and indirectly have an impact on education, originating during the First World War, and continuing up to the present time related in part on an international level to parts of the Middle East like the Arabian Gulf which is an economic strategic location with vast oil reserves. Halliday (2005) identifies three main influences on Middle East societies that frame or shape an investigation into any aspect of society: 1) security issues internal and inter-nation; 2) overall economic decline with a rising population creating greater labour demands; and 3) an increasingly disruptive ideological atmosphere affecting internal and external relations. Complicating the development of education are also many waves of migration from Western ex-patriates moving into the Arabian Gulf for employment opportunities, Eastern European migration due to perceived life improvements, and Arab expatriates who have either moved for employment opportunities or as refugees. This produces a great cross-cultural complexity that can lead to conflicts and tensions over ideas and practices about how organisations should be structured and function. Another dimension of foreign influence relating particularly to education are schools and colleges operating on a foreign curriculum, usually American, British or Australian and many branches of Western universities throughout the region over the last several decades (Buzan & Gonzalez-Pelaez, 2009; Willoughby, 2008), affecting the development of many social institutions as well as the strong influence of Egyptian, Iranian and Iraqi teachers, faculty and administrators on many smaller countries (e.g., UAE, Bahrain). Despite the level of destabilization, etc., some educational developments in the region are quite literally astounding: in stable countries, especially in the Arabian Gulf, a rapid and extensive attendance and investment in schooling and higher education that began in the 1950s and has carried through to the present day, which however carries limitations in contributing to nation-building if modelled on an external source (Badry & Willoughby, 2016; Brown, 2000), and the heavy involvement of women, particularly in higher education in a number of countries (Kirdar, 2007). However, there are other problems such as those that are relatively minor like the ‘borrowing’ of what Donn and Al Manthri (2010) refer to as the ‘off-loading’ of failed educational experiments (or reforms) from the West to full-scale destruction and devastation in states where education has all but disintegrated

Educational administration's paradises lost : a flâneur/se stroll through the futures past

Educational administration and leadership tends towards optimism such as achieving social justice, shared leadership, and global wellbeing, even though this has been unrealistic in many countries that are conflict zones with war, invasion, famine, and disease. The futures that many saw were globalisation of Western education, even though this has been belied by many postcolonial authors for pursuing a new form of colonisation. Increasingly there are negative impacts discovered about digital technologies such as surveillance, privacy issues and negative psychological effects. There are also populist and rightwing political changes in many countries affecting laws, policies and programmes that have an impact on teaching and research. This chapter, following the method of flâneuring derived from Walter Benjamin and Georg Simmel used in sociology, history, and cultural studies, takes a stroll internationally through the actual world of events and developments that threaten to derail many advances that seemed well underway or expose fantasies of how the world will develop globally, myths of a post-racial society, and illusions of postcolonialism. The chapter explores the method of flâneurie, consisting of observation, reading and producing text that 'reads' a social setting of the people, architectural configuration and events as an interpreter or 'detective' of social experience, in this case the implications of socio-cultural and political dynamics of society that affect educational administration and leadership in the emerging Zeitgeist

The total toxic institution : when organisations fail psychologically, socially and morally

Toxic leadership and toxic organisations appear to be common now, especially in the US where many of the statistics are available. Williams (2017 ) cites a number of studies and surveys that show a 50 per cent estimate in leaders and managers in the US who are ineffective, incompetent, or toxic, with increasing turnover and failure rates in chief executive officers as high as 75 per cent and up to 40 per cent of Fortune 500 executives engaging in misconduct. But the problem is also found in other countries— Veld sm a n’s (2012 ) research has found a 30 per cent toxic leadership rate internationally in a survey of the literature showing that the most common causes are hubris, ego, and a lack of emotional intelligence. A number of authors have identified the ways in which organisations are toxic and the role of leadership in producing toxicity: the use of punitive and bullying management practices, lack of compassion and empathy, ‘creeping’ bureaucracy, overemphasis on the ‘bottom line’, performance assessment oriented towards individual rather than team performance, and little evidence of concern for and contributions to the community (e.g. Lipman-Blumen 2005; Padilla, Hogan and Kaiser 2007 )