Knowing Educational Administration: Contemporary Methodological Controversies in Educational Administration Research

Educational administration is a field currently undergoing great intellectual change. The dominant scientific tradition now competes with a range of alternative, systematically different, accounts of such major concerns in the field as: the nature of administrative and organizational theory, explaining and improving educational leadership and practice, the place of values and human subjectivity in our accounts of educational organizations, the nature of educational policy and the conduct of research. "Knowing Educational Administration" surveys and analyzes all of the most important theories in the field. However, as differences among these theories reflect ultimately different philosophical positions, the book offers a new philosophical perspective on educational administration. For administrative theories to count as sound knowledge they must meet the demands of our best theories of knowledge. The book outlines and defends a particular coherentist view of knowledge and then uses that view both to criticize existing administrative theories and to develop a distinctive alternative. The alternative is a new postpositivist science of administration which is able to include ethics and subjectivity within the scope of sound administrative knowledge.

Table of Contents:
Preface. Acknowledgements. Educational administration and the theory of knowledge. Knowledge and justification. The theory of movement: past and present. The Greenfield Revolution. Hodgkinson on humanism in administration. The cultural perspective. Administration for emancipation. Ethical theory and educational administration. Policy analysis: values and complexity. Research in educational administration: against paradigms. Author index. Subject index.

Review :
...cuts through much of the nonsense that can be found in the field today...technically competent, beautifully argued piece of work, perhaps the best book to date specifically devoted to philosophy and educational administration...a landmark contribution...sophisticated work...provides a solid philosophical grounding for scholarship and for practice in educational administration Journal of Educational Administration John Sayer, University of Oxford ...This is a thoroughly professional, firmly grounded book. Oxford Review of Education Martin Barlosky ...provocative stimulus to rethink the importance of epistemology and its relationship to theory and practice at a pivotal moment in the field's history Curriculum Inquiry