Facing “reality”: including theemotional in school leadership

programmesJanice Wallace

Undergraduate Teacher Education, Undergraduate Student Services,Faculty of Education, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to argue that emotions characterise organisations and,therefore, emotional labour and performance is central to the work of school administration. Thus,the study of emotions needs careful attention in educational administration programmes. The authoralso considers whether school leadership preparation programmes in Canada and elsewhere providetheoretical knowledge to support this. Finally, the author posits three theoretical perspectives onemotion in administrative work and organisational settings, including education, that might beincluded in school leadership courses to better support principals in the emotional work that is core totheir effectiveness.

Design/methodology/approach – The author draws on two research studies to inform theanalysis offered: one on the effects of restructuring on the work of school administrators and the othera consideration of principal preparation programmes in Canada. Both employ qualitative methods,including document searches. A broad literature review in relation to the research focus is also offered.

Findings – The paper finds that principals talk a great deal about the emotional aspects of their workyet there is no explicit exploration of theories of emotion in principal preparation programmes.The author provides brief examples of the efficacy of psychoanalytic, socio-cultural, and feministpost-structural analysis of emotional labour as useful for emotional praxis in administrative work.

Originality/value – The analysis offered will be useful in reviewing principal preparationprogrammes with regard to their effectiveness in addressing central concerns of emotional praxis inthe work of school administrators.

Keywords Educational administration, Emotional intelligence, Principals, Canada

Paper type Research paper

The reality is that organizations are places of emotion, ranging from anger to joy to sorrow,from love to hate, with characteristic emotional climates and cultures (Hearn and Parkin,1995, p. 136).

Recently I was at a meeting where a senior administrator in a large educational institutionwas asked what kept her up at night. The response was refreshingly honest: “What keepsme up at night are the people conflicts, the people issues, those who are hurting and havebeen hurt by others” (paraphrase of personal communication, February, 2010). Too often,leaders in educational organisations experience a tension between the perceived need topresent a public face untroubled by emotion and the emotional labour (Fineman, 1993)that is an inevitable part of the work of administration, yet the emotional domain occupiesan inordinate amount of an administrator’s time and energy. As Hearn and Parkin (1995)remind us, “The reality is that organisations are places of emotion, ranging from anger tojoy to sorrow, from love to hate, with characteristic emotional climates and cultures”(p. 136). It is curious, then, that preparation programmes for educational leaders persist in

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Journal of EducationalAdministration

Vol. 48 No. 5, 2010pp. 595-610

q Emerald Group Publishing Limited0957-8234

DOI 10.1108/09578231011067758

ignoring the centrality of emotion to the work of school administrators, thus perpetuatingthe toxic notions that administration is either a rational exercise that can and should bedivorced from the emotional aspects of human interaction or that emotions canbe commodified and placed at the service of “greedy organisations” (Blackmore, 1996).

While curious, it is not surprising that university-based educational administrationprogrammes ignore theories of emotion (see Samier, 2009 for an overview) or the role ofemotions in the work of administrators. After all, organisation theory, premised onmasculinist norms (Blackmore, 1989), has a long tradition of shunning affect as subjectiveand non-rational while privileging the rational, instrumental, and measurable. Doing so,however, obfuscates the stubborn persistence of idiographic influences in organisationswhile rationalising the technologies of control within bureaucratic organisations, suchas hierarchy. Weber (1993/1905, p. 216, italics added) observed that “the more[bureaucracy] is dehumanized, the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from officialbusiness, love, hatred, and all personal, irrational and emotional elements which escapecalculation”. Weber’s statement suggests that the efficacy of containing the emotional inorganisational settings is congruent with the degree to which the rational technologies ofbureaucracies dehumanise organisational processes. At its core, however, education andthe organisations that support its processes are necessarily permeated with interactionsbetween humans – teachers, students, parents, bureaucrats, voters, community members,service agents – who feel deeply about education and often differ with one another aboutcore practices and values, thus dehumanising organisational processes is not onlyimpossible but highly antithetical to its core task – educating the young.

What we are educating them for is, of course, highly contested (Labaree, 1997) butTouraine offers a vision of educational goals that includes the emotional vigour ofthe young:

[. . .] to enable them to become free individuals who can discover and preserve the unity oftheir experience throughout the upheavals of life and despite the pressures that are brought tobear on them (Touraine, 2000, cited in Bates, 2009, p. 171).

Bates (2009) argues further that such a vision of educational purpose at the heart ofadministrative practice might create the conditions for reducing “the collateral damagethat is currently one outcome of our administrative production of emotion in education,as well as the invisibility of the administrative processes involved” (p. 171). Forexample, a growing body of research suggests that school leaders who understand theimportance of the emotional context in which they work will provide a more satisfyingand effective work context for teachers, students, the community, and themselves (e.g.Hargreaves, 2001; Leithwood and Beatty, 2008). There are also cautionary studies ofhealthy and unhealthy emotions that drive people toward and away from positions ofleadership and the emotional implications of leadership that uses coercion and bullyingto manipulate others to achieve organisational goals (Samier and Atkins, 2009;Schmidt, 2009).

The literature in educational administration would suggest, then, that it is arguablyessential that graduate programmes of study designed to prepare principals for theirwork need to include the study of emotions as an explicit body of knowledge. Yet, this wasnot my experience as a student and professor of educational administration in variouscontexts in Canada. Beatty and Brew (2004), drawing on anecdotal evidence, confirm thatemotions in administration and organisations are not generally taken up in any kind of

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explicit way in the UK, Australia, or the USA. In this paper I will first argue that it is timeto face “reality” (Hearn and Parkin, 1995): emotions characterise organisations and,therefore, emotional work is central to the work of school administration. Thus, the studyof emotions needs careful attention in educational administration programmes. Second, Iwill briefly explore whether there is any evidence that school leadership preparationprogrammes in Canada and elsewhere recognise this reality in their course work. Third,an exploration of some theoretical perspectives on emotion in administrative work andorganisational settings, including education, that might be included in school leadershipcourses will be offered for consideration.

My discussion will draw on research that explored the impact of system restructuringon the work of school administrators in three provinces in Canada – Ontario, Alberta,and British Columbia (Wallace, 2005, 2008). Open-ended interviews exploring the effectsof restructuring on their work were conducted with a distribution by position, gender,and geographic location as follows (Table I).

Not surprisingly, much of the language gathered in open-ended interviews referencedthe emotional nature of the changes principals were experiencing, therefore, while myoriginal intent for the research did not include exploring the emotional terrain ofchanging administrative contexts, the transcripts provide a rich text for doing so.In addition to a review of the interviews from this study, I am also drawing on anecdotalevidence from 12 years of teaching graduate courses in educational administration inthese same three provinces[1] as well as a joint project that looked at the dominanttheoretical approaches to administration in principal preparation programmes andcertification across Canada (Wallace et al., 2007).

Facing “reality”: the emotional labour and performance of emotion byschool administratorsAs Samier (2009) notes, the definitional task “in considering theories (and value anduses) of emotion [. . .] is not straightforward: it is highly complex and contentious” (p. 2).

Male Female

British ColumbiaPrincipal (K-6) 1 3Principal (9-12) 2 1V-P (K-6) 1 1V-P (7-10) 1OntarioPrincipal (K-8) 1 2Principal (9-OAC) 1 1V-P (K-8) 1V-P (9-OAC) 2 1AlbertaPrincipal (K-6) 1 1Principal (K-8) 1Principal (K-12) 1V-P (K-8) 1V-P (10-12) 1Principal (7-9) 1Principal (9-12) 2 1

Table I.Participant distribution

by position, gender,and location

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In this paper, I will be drawing primarily on psycho-social theories of emotion that lookat how emotions are taken up by administrators in organisational settings. Particularlyuseful as a beginning point for my analysis is Fineman’s differentiation betweenemotional work and emotional labour. Drawing on the work of Hochschild (1983),Fineman (1993, p. 3) states:

Emotion work is the effort we put into ensuring that our private feelings are suppressed orrepresented to be in touch with socially accepted norms [. . .] Emotional labour is thecommercial exploitation of this principle: when an employee is in effect paid to smile, laugh,be polite, or “be caring”. An essential feature of the job is to maintain an organizationallyprescribed demeanor or mask. This can be fun: an exquisite drama. It can also be stressfuland alienating.

In a recently updated version of his book, Fineman (2003) goes on to distinguishbetween feelings and emotions:

There is the subjective element of emotions, what we feel. And there is the displayed feature ofemotion, what we show [. . .] what we show of our feelings, our emotional performance,is heavily influenced by social conventions and the impressions we wish to convey to others.It is socially constructed (p. 8, bold added).

The anxiety prompted by the emotional labour described by Fineman (2003) as well ashis differentiation between the private experience of emotion and the publicperformance of feelings are illustrated in the following affective descriptions that aretypical of the experience of emotions described by the principals in my research:

. The tension between getting the paper work done required by centralmanagement and the need to address “people” issues that affect teachers andstudents.

. The surprise at being viewed and treated differently by colleagues when movingfrom teaching to administration.

. The conflicted feelings in supporting board initiatives that are at odds withpersonal beliefs about effective pedagogy.

. The uncertainty of knowing how to support a staff member experiencing apersonal trauma.

. The realisation of how varied beliefs are in relation to effective discipline amongstaff, the community, and board policy.

. The need to cope privately and publicly with the heartbreak of the sudden deathof a student.

. The joy of accomplishing a shared school goal.

. The puzzlement and frustration of dealing with resistance of particular membersof the school staff to initiatives that the principal sees as essential to the successof minority students.

In these scenarios, and so many more like them, principals described experiencing joy,sorrow, confusion, frustration, fear, anger, uncertainty, hope, and heartache privatelyand then making decisions about what emotional performance is appropriate withinthe circumstances in their public role as school leader. For example, some of theparticipants in the study and several graduate students have expressed their anxiety,

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anger, and fear at a joint meeting with the superintendent of schools and otherprincipals when he or she was presented with an initiative that went against personalbeliefs about schooling and student support. The question then becomes, how mightthe principal respond? Will the response jeopardise his or her career? Will expressinga different idea enhance or hinder opportunities for students? Depending on thedemeanor of the superintendent, is there room for discussion or will introducingother programme options be met with anger, surprise, or encouragement? What willothers think if he or she speaks up? Is speaking up an expectation, or will an interjectionbe met with embarrassed silence, bemusement, or affirmation from principalcolleagues?

This moment lays bare the power relations and wider political forces shapingemotions in response to schooling practices: who gets to speak, and who must be silent;what is possible to be said; and how what is said is embedded in broader economic,political, and social forces shaping education as a socio-political activity. As theprincipal mulls over his or her emotional performance options in the face of anger, fear,frustration, and concern, his or her ultimate decision is not only personal but alsopolitical in that it has immediate and cumulative implications for career aspirations,the shape of organisational and pedagogical practices and opportunities for students,as well as community engagement. If the board adopts the initiative, the principal’semotional work will include hiding antipathy to the initiative, the emotional labour willinclude being seen to be publicly supportive, and the emotional performance mayinclude expressed enthusiasm at staff meetings, with parents, and at board meetings.As Putnam and Mumby (1993, p. 38) observe “Emotional labour is experienced moststrongly when employees are asked to express emotions that contradict their innerfeelings”. The necessary emotional performance under these circumstances, Fineman(1993) suggests, can be stressful and alienating. However, participants in theprincipals’ study also talked about the “exquisite drama” in which they were engaged.They talked about “taking on a new role” and the possibilities to create change withinthat role. For some, the pleasure of introducing practices that were improvingpedagogical support and student opportunities was what enabled them to remainhopeful and committed to a difficult role. Blackmore describes this dissonance as beingbetween their:

[. . .] passion for their work and desire to ‘make a difference’ (doing good) (Nias, 1996), and thedemands of performativity which is about compliance (being good), thus producingcompeting mindscapes (Blackmore, 2009, p. 112, citing Blackmore and Sachs, 2007;Sergiovanni, 1999).

Facing “reality”: theorising emotion in the work of educational leadersThere are many such moments in a principal’s career, and an understanding of theoriesof emotion would be helpful in understanding the centrality and role of emotions to lifeand work in organisational settings. Samier (2009), citing Nussbaum’s (2001) opus,Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions , points out that “the study ofemotion has an ancient and relatively continuous history, carried up through intellectualtraditions that include political and other social institutional consideration” (p. 1).However, the early study of educational administration drew heavily on the theorymovement, whose theorists, such as Simon (1947) relegated emotion to the irrational.As previously noted, this bifurcation of reason and emotion continued well into the

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1980s in organisation studies more broadly and well into the 1990s in scholarship relatedto educational administration.

While Thom Greenfield’s phenomenological challenge to dominant theories ofeducational administration in the early 1970s was given broader attention in the late1980s, it was not until the late 1990s that the study of emotions in educationalorganisations and the practices of educational administrators began to appear inscholarly journals. Over the past ten years, there has been an emergent attention to thecentrality of emotions to the work of school principals in research and scholarshipabout educational administration. It is not coincidental that much of the researchemerged with the wave of neo-liberal restructuring in educational organisations duringthe late 1980s. Blackmore (2009), citing Bauman (1996), describes the emotions that are“a condition of new times” marked by the stripping away of “familial and state safetynets”, and a state of generalised anxiety in the face of the effects of “the fast capitaliststage of globalization” (p. 114). The effects were (and are) pervasive and inescapablein public institutions, including education. Thus, although organisational andadministration theory had privileged reason and suppressed affect, “the climate ofambient fear” (Bauman, cited in Blackmore, 2009, p. 114) prompted attention to feministanalysis that had long questioned the bifurcation between reason and emotion, theindividual and community. In addition, critical theorists pointed to the intersection ofcapitalist ideology and the marketization of public institutions, such as education, andpost-structural analysis focused on the ways in which the circulation of neo-liberaldiscourses were capturing labour within performative discourses of measureable resultsand competitive practices.

Ferguson (1984), for example, drawing on critical, post-structural, and feministanalysis, pointed to the ways in which the discursive positioning of women and visibleminorities in society was emblematic of the power of bureaucratic discourses tocapture our public and private labour and affect, while hiding the discursive traces ofour capture in the language of reason. Blackmore’s (1996) feminist analysis pointed toevidence that, due to stereotypical perceptions of women’s socialisation as nurturers,women administrators were often placed as emotional labourers in educationalsystems dealing with the effects of restructuring and downsizing. These analysesmade clear the ways in which organisations were using emotional and physical labourto service the needs of hyper-capitalism in a globalised economy.

Other educational theorists have explored the affective domain of schooling andeducational organisations as well. For example, Beatty (2000) and Hargreaves (2001)explore the intersection of emotion and reason in conceptualising a more robust notionof rationality and the centrality of emotions to administrative work. Others havelooked at the dark side of emotional performance in schools and the danger of ignoringthe emotional damage caused by ineffective and abusive leaders (Blase and Blase,2003; Samier, 2009) in educational organisations.

While this body of literature contributes much to our understanding of emotions ineducational settings, and there are pockets of inquiry that continue to develop ourunderstanding of emotions as enacted in educational organisations (e.g. Leithwood andBeatty, 2008; Samier and Schmidt, 2009), there has not been an expansive andsustained body of work in educational administration literature over the past fiveyears. A recent literature review of current peer-reviewed journals (i.e. 2005-2010)reveals little attention paid to affect and a great deal of attention to instrumental

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approaches to understanding the work of educational administrators. Using a Booleansearch of academic journals between 2005 and 2010 on a library database and the keywords “emotions” and “educational leadership”, I found only 20 titles, most of whichwere about teachers’ leadership in classrooms, but a similar search for “educationalleadership” and “accountability” resulted in 222 titles.

Emotions and preparing for the principalshipThis lack of attention to emotions in educational organisations and leadership ismirrored by a similar lack of attention in educational administration graduateprogrammes in Canada. The requirements for a teacher to become a school principaldiffer across the country as each province in Canada has jurisdictional responsibility forits education system, but in most cases, principals prepare for their responsibilities witha combination of courses provided by their local board, provincial non-credit courses,and a masters degree – usually in educational administration.[2] The non-credit coursesprovided by local boards generally focus on explicit practices and expectations withinthe local jurisdiction and preferred leadership styles, e.g. leadership in learningcommunities, while the educational administration programmes provide a broaderunderstanding of leadership and organisational theory.

A survey of masters courses provided at universities across Canada (Foster et al.,2010) reveals that they do differ slightly in emphases and programme delivery modelsbut generally cover similar bodies of knowledge as core. For example, a programme ofstudy at a particular university in Ontario is comprised of a working knowledge of thehistory of education policy formation in Ontario and the ability to identify and critiquethe assumptions of major research methodologies in addressing questions in educationalcontexts. Theories of educational administration and organisational theory areconsidered core knowledge, which is reinforced with an opportunity to focus specificallyon theories of leadership in a graduate seminar. While emotions are often at the heart ofthe issues being examined as well as theories of leadership, they are not explicitlyexamined using the growing theoretical knowledge base about emotions in educationalorganisational forms and practices that is now available.

My experience teaching at universities in three provinces of Canada, research withcolleagues at my current university and a university on the east coast of Canada, aswell as a web search and anecdotal evidence verify that educational administrationprogramme content focuses on an historical review of theories of organisation,administration, and policy. Some include education law, “alternative” theoreticalperspectives, such as critical and feminist theory, finance, leadership in “alternative”educational settings such as Aboriginal communities, higher education, and so on, asoptions. None explicitly take up theories of emotions in organisations although manycurrent theories of leadership are deeply enmeshed in inter-personal emotionalconnections. Crawford (2009) points to “invitational leadership” as an example of atheory that has “explicit connections to emotion through its emphasis on affirmation,respect, trust, and support” (p. 187). In fact, with reference to the historical trajectory ofleadership theory, she argues that “affect is a thread that runs through them all” (p. 18).However, it is an invisible thread as it is not often named or theorised in graduate-levelcourses in educational administration. As a result, beginning principals are notprovided with the theoretical tools to deconstruct the emotion-saturated environmentthat shapes their work and which they in turn shape with each emotional performance.

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Emotional praxis: exposing the invisible thread of emotions in the work ofadministratorsHow might graduate programmes in educational administration in Canada, the focus ofthis study, be enriched by the inclusion of theories of emotions in organisational settings?I have briefly discussed the kind of educational research that is being done in the area ofeducational administration earlier in this paper. I will turn now to some promisingdirections in organisation theory that might enable a more richly theorised understandingof the effects of emotion on the work of school administrators: psychoanalytical,socio-cultural, a feminist post-structural analysis of emotions. The following explorationwill not be exhaustive but is offered in order to prompt greater attention to thepossibilities for informed emotional praxis in educational administration.

Psychoanalytic analysis of emotionsWhile psychoanalytic theory is becoming more common in curriculum studies(e.g. Britzman, 2009; Jagodinski, 2005; Pitt, 2005), there have been very fewpsychoanalytic studies in educational administration. As Samier (2009) demonstrates,however, psychological approaches were common in the 1960s and 1970s in studies oforganisational behaviour, human relations theory was influenced by behaviourism andtrait theory – products of Herzberg’s industrial psychology. Assor and Oplatka (2003)offer a more contemporary example of the application of psychological theory to thepersonal-professional growth of principals using four psychological perspectives:humanistic fulfilment/actualisation, psycho-dynamic, moral/identity development, andadaptive cognitive development. Their model is interesting in that it provides areflective tool for principals who are considering their personal and professional lives:

[. . .] in four distinct, yet related, domains: fulfilling basic needs and actualising potentialities,learning to cope with and moderate extreme, anxiety-based strivings, forming reflection-basedindividualised moral and educational vision, and constructing adaptation-promotingknowledge and skills (p. 471).

The model is very useful in thinking through, for example, the desire to be liked intension with the need to make judgments in the face of competing interests.Unfortunately, the authors also suggest that their model would be useful for supervisionand assessment processes (p. 493), thus devolving the power of psychoanalytic analysisas a tool for reflection to forms of surveillance and control. Depending on how it is used,however, the model could be highly useful for principals in considering their motivationfor certain actions, sources of anxiety, and possible strategies for dealing with stressmore knowledgeably.

Although less common than traditional forms of psychological analysis, interpretiveforms of psychoanalysis have been applied to organisation studies, looking at,for example, “the personal changes on a conscious and unconscious level required fororganisational change to take place” (Samier, 2009, p. 5). The resurgence of interpretivepsychoanalytic analysis in organisation studies emerged in the work of Fineman(1993, 2003), Ashkanasy et al. (2000, 2002), and Hartel et al. (2005), who looked at:

The nature of emotion and its place in organization studies, the ways that emotions structureorganizational life, how a study of emotions can help in the interpretation of organizationaldynamics, the effects of emotions, and emerging research approaches (Samier, 2009, pp. 5-6).

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Fineman’s (1993, 2003) notion of emotional work, emotional labour, and the conceptof performing emotion are highly useful in analysing the emotional tensions betweenpersonal and organisational desires and values. As I have illustrated earlier in thispaper, these concepts have been particularly instructive in understanding the tensionsexperienced by school administrators during neo-liberal reforms. Interpretivepsychoanalytic theory can also be useful in helping school principals understand thefear engendered by, for example, performative measures of accountability (Schmidt,2009), or the psychological effects of narcissistic (Samier and Atkins, 2009) andbullying (Blase and Blase, 2003) forms of interaction that poison relations withinschools – particularly when such behaviour is exhibited by school leaders.

Socio-cultural analysis of emotionsFineman (2003, p. 15) observes that “To say emotion is social is to spotlight the culturalsettings in which emotions are learned and expressed”. That is, school administratorsbring norms of emotional expression with them to their work and those norms are thenunder scrutiny and are constantly called into question when those norms are incongruentwith other cultural settings within the organisation, the community, and other socialcontexts in which they do their work. Fineman’s observation is extended by Denzin (1984)who writes:

In every day life the emotions that people experience and establish can be as basic to theirjoint actions as are the claims to power, influence and status [. . .] individuals are connected tosociety through the emotions they experience (p. 24, cited in Blackmore, 2009, p. 109).

Not surprisingly, then, principals, whose work takes place at the nexus of competingsocial, political, economic, and cultural interests experience heightened emotionaldemands in their work.

The headline of a Toronto Star feature story (Brown, 2000) on education at theheight of neo-liberal reforms in Ontario asked the provocative question: Why wouldanyone want to be a school principal? The question was accompanied with thefollowing warning “The hours are long, job security is weak and you’ll bear the bruntof public reaction to every change to hit the school system.” Given that the rate ofchange in school systems has not abated in the decade since that headline was written,it is fair to assume that the socio-cultural context in which principals do their work isprompting a complex array of emotions both personally and contextually. In fact,personal and collective interests have accelerated in organisations characterised by anincreasingly individualist and performative environment marked by high stakesaccountability.

The difficulty for many principals is that they often experience the inevitabletensions of the complex emotional location of their work as a personal failure, maydeflect the tensions they are experiencing to personal failures of their teaching staff, ormay simply resign themselves to extending their working day to meet the growing listof accountability demands while attempting to stay true to their beliefs about what isimportant in providing leadership in schools. One female principal in a rural school inAlberta shared the following:

I think my coping strategy, probably, is that I just work until the job gets done. So if I take thetime to deal with those things that just come up during the day, then I take the time at night todo all the other stuff that I was planning to get done. So I just extend my day and that’s what

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works for me. I made some decisions really early on in my career that if I was going to be anadministrator and work in schools, for me to be effective, then, I needed to have priorities.So I’ve made a conscious decision not to have children [. . .] Because I knew that I couldn’t dothat and still be effective in my work.

One can only imagine the price of the emotional investment that this principal has madeto be “effective” in her work. Others talked about the anguish of prioritising budgets,their disappointment in colleagues who did not complete requisite paper work to meetaccountability targets or were unwilling to take on extra responsibilities in the face offiscal challenges. In each example, the needs of a “greedy organisation” were leftunchallenged and the emotional price exacted by those needs was paid by the individualand was expected by the organisation with little recognition of the socio-political sourceof that price.

Increasing electronic surveillance has further exacerbated the tensions aroundperformance that are shaping principals’ practices in ways that are potentially unhealthy –emotionally and physically. Many of the principals in the study talked about increasingdemands for reporting on performative measures to senior administration and ways theyhad found to respond to the intrusion of such demands on both their personal time andeducational goals. For example, one principal, from a northern board that largelydepended on electronic surveillance to monitor principals in schools characterised bylarge geographic distances between them, shared how he responded to these tensions byshaping his work in ways that met the requirements of senior administration and still lefttime for his educational and personal priorities:

I am grounded in my own beliefs and I always work from what is in the best interests of the ofthe students regardless of what the Ministry or central office says and, you know, to extendthat, what is in the best interests of the students as far as staff relations is having a staff thathas the obstacles taken away so they can do their job. So if you know more responsibilitiesare heaped on me in this new site-based management model that we’re in, I will tend to spendmore time on the important things – the teaching and helping teachers and connecting withstudents – than I will worried about deadlines for paperwork and all of the unnecessarythings that are thrown at you from people who have lost vision.

Question. So the superintendent calls you and says I don’t have that report on my desk onsuch and such a date; what’s your reply?

Response. My response is that “these are the things that I’ve been doing Mr Superintendentand I will get to them when I can” . . . but I don’t miss deadlines. What I do is spend a lot lesstime meeting those deadlines so where one person might have a nine page power pointpresentation on what was expected, I’ll get right to the point and give the superintendentwhat he needs without losing sight of the important things. I still meet deadlines but Idon’t try and impress anybody by doing it. I do it as okay this is part of my job and this ismore important – and it hasn’t seemed to hurt me so far.

This principal went on to describe his commitment to be home at a reasonable time inthe evening to enjoy his family life, but doing so meant being at the school at 6 a.m.most mornings.

While his response to my questions reveals awareness of the socio-cultural demandsshaping his work and an attempt to respond in ways that do not ignore core beliefs aboutpersonal and professional commitments, the tensions are evident in his final words – “ithasn’t seemed to hurt me so far”. Clearly, he recognises that his choices have been

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tolerated but he runs the risk of not meeting increasing administrative expectations.At the end of our discussion, he joked, “Well, if I do get in trouble with administration,I could always sub[stitute teach] in [a small British Columbia community].”

This principal had been immersed in graduate courses all summer whenI interviewed him and had identified the socio-cultural forces at play in his work.He had become aware of his core commitments in relation to those forces, the kind ofemotional labour required to meet those commitments, current and potential responsesin his life and practice that respond to those tensions, and the potential personal andprofessional price of those choices. Unlike this principal’s experience, however,educational administration programmes in which principals are not given a theoreticallens to examine the ways in which socio-cultural factors shape their practices andinteractions are inadequately preparing principals for dealing effectively with theemotional exigencies of their work.

Post-structural (feminist) analysisPost-structuralism is a complex and often contradictory lens through which to examinehuman activity in organisational settings. It provides a theoretical lens that opens uppossibilities and reconceptualises power and human interaction in ways that are notfixed but instead reside in the circulation of discourses and the struggle for meaning.Although there is much that could be said about the possibilities that post-structuralism offers to analysing emotions, I will use Kenway et al.’s (1994) succinctdiscussion of some of post-structuralism’s analytical potential. They suggest thatpost-structuralism offers a view of:

[. . .] the way in which meaning is struggled over and produced, the way it circulates amongstus, the impact it has on human subjects, and finally the connections between meaning andpower. For poststructuralists, meaning is not fixed in language, in other cultural symbols orin consistent power relationships. It shifts as different linguistic, institutional, cultural andsocial factors come together in various ways. Meaning is influenced by and influencesshifting patterns of power. And finally it constitutes human subjectivity which is againregarded as shifting, many-faceted and contradictory (p. 189).

Weedon (1987 cited by Strahan, 2002, p. 114) defines subjectivity as “the conscious andunconscious thoughts and emotions of the individual, her sense of herself, and herways of understanding her relation to the world”.

An incident occurred during an interview with a principal in British Columbia thatsuggests the indeterminacy and shifting emotions that occur in struggles for meaningand the impact of those struggles as power and meaning come together in variousways around ideological investments. I asked Carla[3] to think of a metaphor thatmight characterise her view of herself as a leader. She responded with the followingunforgettable image:

I think it’s very, very evident after working with people for a period of time that I really docare and have great hope for what we do, and that requires an optimistic side that is justslammed down. I consider myself to be (pause to control tears that unexpectedly emergedduring this response) [. . .] it’s rather emotional [. . .] I really do consider myself as a custodian,probably a fierce angel.

It was obvious to both of us that my question had prompted a strong emotionalresponse that came from months of workplace uncertainty and the eventual end

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of a programme that was entirely congruent with her ideological commitments tolearners and for which she had provided leadership. For her, there was an exquisitedrama in the deeply engaging work of providing specialised support for studentswhose learning needs were not well served by the traditional educational system.Her leadership in the project was highly collegial and non-hierarchical. In this moment,she was struggling with her shifting subjectivity as she returned as principal in a largehigh school that was hierarchically organized and represented the same system whichhad not served those students well. In answering the question, she was attempting tomake sense of her ideological commitments. Boler (1999), citing Pratt (1984), suggeststhat “ideologies reflect emotional investments” that are “lived at the edge of our skin”(pp. 181, 182) and living that struggle at the edge of her skin was evidenced by Carla’sunbidden tears. It was, to use her words, “rather emotional”.

Feminist post-structural analysis enables a further reading of this incident as deeplyembedded in historically inscribed gendered discourses that distinguish the rational,individual, and public (usually identified with the masculine) and the emotional,collective, and private (usually identified with the feminine). Post-structuralism breaksdown these binaries, however, and offers more complex readings of the discourses andemotions that circulate with/in power relations. Carla’s emotional ambivalence isrevealed in the image of the fierce angel – in some ways offering antithetical images ofboth a strong warrior and gentle protector. Further, Carla’s struggle to contain heremotions reveal the “the discursive practices [that] establish what can be felt”(Zembylas, 2009, p. 103).

Zembylas (2009) argues that a post-structural analysis offers an opportunity tointerrupt instrumental approaches to emotions in leadership, such as checklists basedon Goleman’s (2001) emotional intelligence being used to predict leadership efficacy.Instead, emotions can be examined as the discursive traces of competing discoursesin educational organisations, thus offering a more complex look at the ways inwhich discourses circulate between and among various relations of power and meaningmaking.

ConclusionIn this paper, I have attempted to map out the dominant signposts on the landscape ofscholarly inquiry about emotions and educational administration. I have posited thatscholarly literature demonstrates that emotions are central to the work of schooladministrators in that the organisations within which they work are deeply emotionalterrain. However, while there is significant work in the area of emotions andorganisations as well as emotions and educational administration, the literature has beenmarginalised in recent years in favour of more instrumental explorations of leadershippractices – in particular, issues of accountability. Crawford (2009) refers to the emotionalaspects of so many current theories of school leadership as “the invisible thread”, and Iargue in this paper that it is the invisible thread in current scholarly literature that mustbe made visible in the graduate programmes that form the theoretical grounds uponwhich beginning principals consider their practice.

To illustrate the possibilities of theories of emotion for enriching understandings ofschool administrators’ work and deepening a sense of its possibilities, I offer a briefglimpse of three promising theoretical perspectives on emotions in organisations. First,I explore psychoanalytic theory, and in particular interpretive psychoanalytic theory,

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as a way to deeply engage with individual feelings of fear, anger, and contentment inrelation to the social and political environment of schools. Further, psychoanalytictheory offers a way to examine the darker side of leadership as demonstrated bynarcissism, fear, and bullying. Second, I turn to socio-cultural explorations of emotionsin organisational behaviour as a way to understand the intersection of the social and thecultural in the work of school principals who must negotiate contested claims to “power,interests, and status” (Denzin, 1984, p. 24) in the everyday interactions of multipleplayers in school settings. Finally, I offer post-structural (feminist) analysis as a way toexplore the shifting and contested discourses that shape meanings and emotions in theideological commitments of schooling.

By providing opportunities for students of educational administration – manyof whom already are or will be school administrators – to explore emotions inorganisations and administrative practices using the wide array of theoretical approachesavailable to them, many will be enabled to move beyond “competency approaches toemotion” (Crawford, 2009, p. 195) or the capture of emotions at the service of “greedyorganisations. Instead, more complex analyses will offer opportunities for administrators“to create the conditions and provide emotional support for a more creative andmeaningful identity construction” (Samier, 2009, p. 9) in the pursuit of transformativepossibilities for those who work and learn in schools.

Notes

1. I taught educational administration courses at a university in Ontario for four years and at auniversity in Alberta for eight years. I have also taught similar courses as a summer visitingscholar at two universities in British Columbia for ten years.

2. At present, only two provinces and two territories require principals to be certified as acondition of employment: Ontario, New Brunswick, the northwest territories, and Nunavut.Both of the provinces also require five years, as a minimum, of successful teaching experiencebefore a teacher is eligible for qualification as a principal. Certification requirements aresimilar in terms of requiring various combinations of practical short courses and universitycoursework to achieve the certificate. At the present time, the remaining eight provinces andthe Yukon do not require school principals to be certificated for the administrative role.Manitoba provides school administrators with the opportunity to achieve certification,however, the province does not mandate this as a condition of employment. Quebec iscurrently the only province that does not require school administrators to be certificatedteachers, leaving the criteria for appointment of school principals up to individual schoolboards who must consult with their respective and appropriate governing boards. Alberta andBritish Columbia are provinces that are actively working towards the development ofprincipal certification processes, although they do not presently have any requirements in thisarea. Although eight provinces and one territory do not require principal certification as acondition of employment, consistently, school boards across the country give preference tocandidates with graduate degrees and often seek promises of those not possessing advanceddegrees that they will work towards earning them (Wallace et al., 2007).

3. Carla is a pseudonym.

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About the authorJanice Wallace is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies andAssociate Dean, Undergraduate Teacher Education at the Faculty of Education, University ofAlberta. Janice Wallace can be contacted at: wallacej@ualberta.ca

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