Introduction: Challenging the orthodoxy of school leadership: Towards alternative theoretical perspectives

School leadership is now at the top of the research and policy agendas of many countries. Leadership is currently back in fashion and its new found popularity is spawning a range of development, training and research activities all proudly bearing the label ‘leadership’. But what exactly does this label mean and most importantly what leadership models or theories are shaping this development and research work?

Lakomski (1999) has claimed that there is no natural entity or essence that can be labelled ‘leadership. It is Lakomski’s (1999) view that leadership research has yielded a mass of largely inconclusive results and has demonstrated that leadership means different things to different people in different contexts. In response to this position, Gronn (2000) has argued that the fact that researchers have provided inconclusive results is not a sufficient argument for jettisoning the concept of ‘leadership’ altogether. He argues that leadership is still needed but that a fundamental re-conceptualisation of the nature of leadership within organisations is overdue.