Leaders in Context: Postpositivist Approaches to Understanding Educational Leadership

Leadership is one social scientific field that has escaped the ubiquitous "paradigm wars." Leadership theorists have always attached great, perhaps exaggerated, significance to the agency of leaders. Traditional research methodologies (e.g., questionnaire surveys) normally associated with positivist approaches remain theorists' predominant modes of inquiry. Such methods, however, pay insufficient attention to the role played by institutional contexts in the definition and structuring of human agency. Two alternative methodologies that acknowledge the importance of context in the social construction of leaders and leadership systems are ethnography and biography. Each provides a better way for dealing with followers' implicit theories than mainstream conceptions of leadership. This article outlines the purposes of both modes of inquiry, discusses the problems and possibilities inherent in each, and provides illustrative examples of their advantages for theory building.