Lejf Moos

Schools and Leadership in Transition: the case of Scandinavia

This article will set the context of democratic leadership in Scandinavian countries. This concept will be discussed in a dual perspective. On the one hand there are pressures to transform the governing of the schools towards a more ‘rigorous’ form of New Public Management (NPM) with models of leadership/management from the world of business and industry. This trend is affected by a new wave of economical and cultural globalisation, while the discourse of NPM is exerting a strong influence on how municipalities organize and govern the schools in Scandinavia (Moos, 2000; Peters et al., 2000). On the other hand there is a growing consciousness of the need for sustaining trust and loyalty in the school as an organisation. This may be seen as an effect of European/Scandinavian societies becoming increasingly complex. These societies are often called hyper complex societies with no one single centre from which government can be exercised. The governing of the public sectors therefore has largely to rest on trust and communication (Kirkeby, 1998; Giddens, 1991; Thyssen, 2001). This article will discuss how Scandinavian school leaders try to cope with this dual pressure while maintaining distinctive aspects of Scandinavian educational culture. This is one of many dilemmas being faced by school leaders coming to terms with notions of accountability. As an illustration we will refer to some findings from an international research project in which Danish and Norwegian school leaders participated (Biott et al., 2001; Sugrue, 2003, forthcoming).

Successful School Principalship in Danish Schools.

Purpose – Aims at conceptualizing and investigating the meaning of good school principalship within the space for manoeuvring that is available within the context of Danish comprehensive schools. The paper aims to present findings from case studies of two Danish schools within the frame of reference.Design/methodology/approach – Outlines the educational context for the Danish schools and gives a short account of the point of departure for the analysis. The perspective in this study is that leadership is about communication, decision making and community building at several levels in schools. In the beginning of the project a series of interviews with stakeholders in those schools was conducted. That formed the basis for the accounts of the first two schools. Later on a number of key stakeholders in the schools were observed and interviewed and that is the basis for the account of the third Danish school.Findings – The findings show that whilst there is a high degree of consensus amongst the schools and th...

Educational leadership: leadership for/as Bildung?

With inspiration from the educational paradox: how can actors, as external influences, enable human beings to act independently of external leadership? This article will discuss an organizational paradox: how can staff be lead in ways that enable them to become autonomous followers? The educational paradox was originally phrased in the beginning of the Enlightenment epoch and it therefore links education with democracy: ‘Bildung’ was seen as a way to facilitate people in being emancipated, action competent citizens of democratic societies. The organizational paradox is also phrased as a vision of a democratic education in a democratic setting. The article discusses this leadership vision in the light of contemporary trends in society, politics, governance and culture: globalization, decentralization, contingency, neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism, new public management and the efforts to promote and stress the managerial aspects of school leadership.

Evidence and Policy Research

The EERJ roundtable took as its point of departure the experience of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Developments (OECD) Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) in carrying out policy research. CERI has conducted four reviews of national educational research and development (in New Zealand, England, Mexico and Denmark), and has run a number of meetings specifically on the use of evidence-based policy research (in the USA, Sweden and the Netherlands). Tom Schuller, Head of CERI, presented some conclusions from these and other CERI activities. Responses were made by Wim Jochems, Open University of the Netherlands, Lejf Moos, Danish University of Education, and Agnes van Zanten, Observatoire Sociologique du Changement, CNRS, Paris. The EERJ Roundtable was an opportunity to return to the issues raised in the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) 2003 Hamburg Roundtable on the ‘OECD Examiners Report on Educational Research and Development in England’ (European Educational Research Journal, 3(2), 2004, pp. 510–526) in a wider context and as part of a trend to evaluate the quality and organisation of educational research, and its contribution to educational policy.

What Kinds of Democracy in Education are Facilitated by Supra- and Transnational Agencies?

In recent years, political rhetoric in many parts of the world has tended to take a reductionist view of education and educational research. It often seems that the pivotal challenge in education is how to help pupils acquire basic skills such as literacy and numeracy in order to become competitive in the job market, in business and industry. Thus, the key purpose of educational research is to produce evidence for the ‘best practice’, ‘that works’. Issues like social justice, democracy and critique seem to have lost importance on the political agenda. However, education and educational research can not and should not be reduced to simplistic paradigms. Therefore a number of colleagues were invited to take a broader view of the issue – taking, as our point of departure, the view that educational systems in European countries are influenced in complex ways by supraand transnational agencies through regulation (for example from the European Union [EU]) or, for example, via discursive forces (from agencies like the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD]). We felt that it would be interesting to call attention to, and discuss, what those influences mean to the development of democracy within the fields of education and educational research. In this editorial I shall frame this discussion and, at the same time, introduce the articles by discussing these issues. First, I discuss the influence of supraand transnational organisations and agencies. Second, I consider the social technologies that are employed by these and other organisations. Third, I reflect on the influence these two phenomena have on democracy in and around education and educational research. The articles report on discussions in England, Ireland, Germany, Sweden and Denmark and their view is different in terms of sectors of the education field: university, basic education, lifelong learning.

Globalisation and its Effects on Educational Leadership, Higher Education and Educational Policy

Almost twenty years ago, as the first author of this chapter was driving from Guadalajara, Mexico to Mexico City, he stopped outside a small Mexican town to stretch his legs at a scenic overlook on some backcountry highway that ran through the forested hills of Michoacan state. There he saw a man, a vendor, who happened to be wearing a playera, a t-shirt, bearing the logo of the author’s alma mater, The University of Michigan. Amazed and a bit homesick, he asked the man how he had come by the shirt, explaining in Spanish that he had gone to school there, hoping to make some small human connection. But the man was ignorant of the significance of what he was wearing, especially for our author. To him, it was simply a shirt. Much has changed in the past twenty years, though much remains the same. As through history, people still engage in commerce, among themselves and their kind, and between different peoples. However, the rapidity of transactions (e.g., ‘ecommerce’); the depth of penetration of non-indigenous goods, cultural artefacts, and life ways into far flung locales; and, indeed, the rate of change itself stand in stark contrast to the ways these goods and ideas were exchanged previously, and the contexts, conditions and meanings of those exchanges. In this chapter, we examine the effects of globalisation on higher education and educational leadership, and policy changes associated with these domains. By necessity, portions of our discussion will be more general, more global in nature – especially those portions having to do with large-scale trends and theoretical applications. Other portions of our discussion will be much more focused – when considering particular phenomena or institutions – and, hence, more local and specialised.

Denmark: Bildung in a Competitive State?

Danish values are deeply influenced by the agrarian cooperative movement, which emphasized the need to establish democratically organized local self-help organizations. In education, this foundation was reflected in the emergence of a free school movement and the embrace of the ideas of an influential mid-nineteenth-century thinker who advocated freedom of choice for parents in educating their children.1 In 1903, the comprehensive school model—the Folkeskole—was introduced as the locally controlled but nationally based model, with the freestanding school at its center.

Examining the Myth of Nordic Uniformity: The Production of Educational Policy in Denmark and Sweden

Danes and Swedes have a sibling relationship, made increasingly close by the recently completed bridge connecting Copenhagen and Malmo. Like siblings, the countries often joke that their close relative is too lazy or too serious to do a needed task well. In this chapter we avoid such pleasantries, and focus exclusively on differences and similarities in the ways educational policies are produced, enacted, and accounted for.

From still photo to animated images

In the ‘Leadership for Learning’ project1 we have collaborated with participating schools in writing an initial portrait of each school. Based on official descriptions and interviews with stakeholders in the developmental process we have constructed a narrative or a portrait of the schools and stakeholders’ conceptions of learning and leadership and the relations between those phenomena. The portrait is being kept up to date through researchers’ field notes and reflections and supplementary interviews with stakeholders. In this way the initial portrait is being transformed into ‘animated images’ and is thus becoming a very important link between the schools and the researchers/critical friends. It provides an important narrative of the learning processes going on. At the same time, it acts as an ‘irritation’ in schools’ and researchers’ learning processes. While the initial portraits tended to be largely descriptive, some schools, with support from their critical friends, opted for a more analytical view of their school, for example a critique of their current practice with regard to leadership for learning. These more analytical and self-critical portraits are helping to model the form of reporting that we might expect to see from schools as they progress in their thinking.2