Toward a Reconsideration of Biography as an Instrument for Studying Leadership in Educational Administration

Abstract

The thesis of this paper is that "biography" does offer something valuable to educational administration that it currently lacks, and that biography ought to be reconsidered as a legitimate instrument for the study of educational leadership. Traditional research methodologies (questionnaire surveys, for example) normally associated with positivist approaches to the study of educational leadership remain theorists' predominant mode of inquiry. Such methods, however, do not pay sufficient attention to the role played by institutional contexts in the social construction of leaders and leadership systems. The difference between biography and social science also relates to the level of generality – a sort of micro/macro distinction. Educational leadership theorists, by training and inclination, look to the general, while biography deals with the particular. Biography can be moved beyond narration and storytelling to the construction of case studies to test or evaluate theories. And it can be argued that to understand a system, we need to look at leadership both "close up" and from a "long view." Previous approaches to the study of educational leadership decontextualized not only the decisions but also the "process" involved in developing them. Biography can restore the "wholeness" of the entire act of leadership.