THE MANAGEMENT AND LEADERSHIP IN EDUCATION SERIES
The Making of Educational Leaders

THE MANAGEMENT AND LEADERSHIP IN EDUCATION SERIES
The Making of Educational Leaders

THE MANAGEMENT AND LEADERSHIP IN EDUCATION SERIES
The Making of Educational Leaders

Leadership has been, and continues to be, a source of endless curiosity to academic commentators, journalists, practitioners and the general public. This fascination with the comings and goings of individuals as diverse as celebrities, politicians, sportsmen and women, entrepreneurs, school princi- pals and others, persists despite the typical kind of ho-hum reception now accorded manynewworks on the topic. 'Not anotherbook on leadership!' has become almost the standard refrain. Moreover, the leadership literature increases at a truly staggering rate. In his preface to the third (and most recent) edition of Bass & Stogdill's Handbook of Leadership - a publication of genuinely encyclopaedic proportions which comes closest to being the Bible of the field - Bernard Bass (1990, p. xv) notes that the 3,000 original entries in 1974 had more than doubled to 7,500 by 1990. A new student of leadership might well be tempted to ask how much of this vast corpus provides useful, as opposed to merely decorative or ornamental, knowledge. This is a question the eminent scholar Chris Argyris - founder and propo- nent of organizational learning - asked himself in the late 1970s. The overwhelming bulk of the findings of leadership research, including hisown, Argyris (1979, p. 61) claimed, lacked utility and application in specific action contexts. Why? Because 'the theories-in-use that subordinates held were never mapped . . . I never studied the learning system that they created'.

PETER RIBBINS AND JOHN SAYER