Review of international research on school leadership for social justice, equity and diversity

The issue of social justice (SJ) leadership has become one of the central topics in educational leadership and management research in recent years. Despite increasing attention to the topic among policymakers and researchers during the last two decades, no comprehensive review of SJ leadership research has been conducted. By using bibliographic data from the Scopus database and employing various bibliometric analysis tools, this paper presents a systematic review of SJ leadership research, tracing its development and characteristics within a broad perspective. Results identify the key scholars, sources, and documents in the field of SJ leadership, as well as the most used concepts and their interconnections. A serious imbalance in the SJ leadership literature is also identified, with few studies from non-Western societies. Possible avenues for future research and review studies are suggested.