A critical exploration of collaborative and distributed leadership in higher education: developing an alternative ontology through leadership-as-practice

Since the turn of the millennium, interest in collaborative and distributed conceptualisations of leadership has gathered momentum, particularly in education. During the same period, higher education institutions have been embedded in practices shaped by New Public Management. The resultant reconfiguration of structural arrangements within institutions has led to the existence of two staff groups, professional and academic. The former is often aligned to the rise in managerial practices over claimed academic collegial practices, thus creating conditions for a possible dualistic positioning with the two groups. Distributed leadership and collaboration are claimed to be approaches that overcome this dualism, yet they may also be susceptible to maintaining this dual state and subtly reaffirm embedded interests and structures. As an alternative, a leadership-as-practice approach ontologically shifts the way in which sense is made of organisations. The practice-based model for understanding organisations presented in this paper offers a theoretical and applied framework that incorporates and also goes beyond collaborative and distributed leadership due to its association with practice theory.