Understanding the Field of Educational Leadership

Bringing Bourdieu to the study of Education Management, Leadership and Administration assumes a normative opposition to a meritocratic view of education. Through a lifetime’s explication of the ways in which schooling both produces and reproduces the status quo, Bourdieu offers a powerful critique and method of analysis of the history of schooling and of contemporary educational polices and trends.

This volume will explain each of the key terms in Boudieu’s thinking tool kit, showing how the tripartite concepts of field, habitus and capitals offer a way through which to understand the interaction of structure and agency and the limits on the freedom of an individual – in this case educational leaders – to act. It will provide a range of exemplars of the application of these tools to questions of concern to the scholars in the field of educational leadership, and of interest to those whose primary focus is the utility of Bourdieu’s social theory.