School Leadership and Administration: The Cultural Context

Globalization has enabled educational theory, policy, and practice to cross national boundaries with unprecedented ease, thus encouraging administrators around the world to share strategies and methods. Yet scholarly accounts of globalization often fail to recognize the importance of the indigenous cultures that interact with and mediate globalizing forces. Allan Walker and Clive Dimmock argue that a consideration of local culture is vital to any understanding of educational leadership, administration, and organization. In keeping with this demand, the essays collected inSchool Leadership and Administrationhighlight sociocultural influences upon schooling in East and Southeast Asia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and beyond. Taken together, these studies develop a cross-cultural approach to school administration, and provide a needed comparative dimension to the field. While much scholarship within international education has worked to establish paradigms for school structureand organization, this collection pays overdue attention to the contexts within which these models are interpreted and used. In this way,School Leadership and Administrationconstitutes the first foray into the uncharted terrain of comparative educational administration and leadership.