Luxury Leadership: privatism and school leadership in a global world

Neoliberal transformation strategies in western-style democracies continue to construct the school as a corporate business, and the school principal as entrepreneur. This is a globalized phenomenon that speaks to the BELMAS... [ view full abstract ]

Neoliberal transformation strategies in western-style democracies continue to construct the school as a corporate business, and the school principal as entrepreneur. This is a globalized phenomenon that speaks to the BELMAS members and the 2018 conference theme regarding the relationship between policy and strategies for sustainability in the supply and demand of school places. Importantly competition and markets challenge strategies for sustainability as the emphasis is on risk, success or failure, with schools opening and closing. We examine this by using data from four ESRC funded projects (fieldwork is complete, data sets are produced and analysed) to think about and develop a new understanding of school leadership that we call: Luxury Leadership. Drawing on empirical interview and observation evidence from working with professionals in schools concerning education policy, knowledge production and educational leadership we site our analysis in England as a ‘laboratory’ for radical changes. We challenge the field to think differently about privatization by focusing on privatism, or how the individual professional is required to think and practice in private, promote the private self as a luxury good in public, and produce the school as a product that appeals to the private consumer. Notably we take this challenge for the view forward by exploring how new forms of corporatised leadership have been presented to education professionals as an inspiring approach to school principalship, with claims about improving pupil outcomes through fetishising ‘modernisation with moral purpose’. We provide significant insights through the new lens of ‘luxury leadership’ to examine the construction of school principals as change agents, identifying their temptation to mimic and enact identities and practices associated with corporate elites. Luxury leadership is a novel way of thinking about what it means to be and do ‘leader’, ‘leading’ and ‘leadership’ in public-service education. We intend examining key features: first, as an elite project segregating the leader from the led; second, as an elite practice requiring recognition and consent from the led; third, as dynamic and contextual; while the “on-the-pedestal” location of elite leadership remains intact, it is open to reimagining and rebranding. Elite leaders pose serious new dangers to cultural inclusivity, and so we examine the meaning of this analysis for professionals and for research.