Educational Leadership as Mundane Work

Simon Kelly. Lancaster University, UK. Educational Leadership as Mundane Work. CCEAM 2004

Educational Leadership as Mundane Work

Simon Kelly, Marian Iszatt White, Dave Randall and Mark Rouncefield Centre for Excellence in Leadership∗ Lancaster University, U.K.

Paper presented at the CCEAM 2004 Conference on Educational Leadership in Pluralistic Societies, 20th -27 October 2004. Hong Kong and Shanghai

Abstract This paper presents some early findings from a research project on 'leadership' in the post-compulsory education sector that uses an eclectic mix of broadly 'ethnographic' methods in order to obtain some insight into the real time, real world, everyday, mundane business of 'doing' (Garfinkel 1967) 'leadership' in an educational setting. While leadership theories based on different social, political and psychological approaches (Yukl, 2002; Grint, 2002) proliferate, the emphasis in this paper is not on ‘theorising’ leadership work but on seeking to understand leadership through the provision of ‘thick descriptions’ of the practical, everyday, accomplishment of the work. The data and experience comes from ‘shadowing’ education sector leaders in various institutions as they went about their everyday work. We present data on the circumstances, practices and activities that constitute the ‘real world', situated character of leadership work and comment on the significance of our approach for both research and leadership development and training.

Keywords Ethnography, ethnomethodology, mundane work, leadership

∗

This project has been funded by, but does not necessarily reflect the views of the Centre for Excellence in Leadership. The Copyright of all publications on work commissioned by CEL is owned by Inspire Learning Ltd, from whom permission should be sought before any materials are reproduced.

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Educational Leadership as Mundane Work Simon Kelly (Lancaster University), Marian Iszatt White (Lancaster University), Dave Randall (Manchester Metropolitan University) and Mark Rouncefield (Lancaster University)

"Virtually all the studies in the social and administrative sciences literature 'miss' the interactional 'what' of the occupation studied". Lynch (1993:271) Introduction: Leadership Theory and Leadership Practice. This paper presents some very early findings from a long-term research project on 'leadership' in the post-compulsory education sector in the UK. It deploys an eclectic and opportunistic mix of broadly 'ethnographic' approaches in order to obtain some insight into the real time, real world, everyday, mundane business of 'doing' (Garfinkel 1967) 'leadership' in an educational setting. In so doing it aims to provide a more sophisticated, empirically based understanding of everyday leadership work, addressing the complex conditions, processes and outcomes of leadership practices. While leadership theories based on different social, political and psychological approaches (Yukl, 2002; Grint, 2002) proliferate, the emphasis in this paper is not on ‘theorising’ leadership work but on seeking to understand leadership through the provision of ‘thick descriptions’ of the practical, everyday, accomplishment of the work. Unlike other accounts of leadership our interest lies not in ‘theorising’ such work but in seeking to understand leadership through the provision of ‘thick descriptions’ of the practical, everyday, accomplishment of the work.

Given current concerns about a 'crisis of leadership', leadership theories continue to proliferate and draw upon different social, political and psychological theories, as overviews of the field make clear (Yukl, 2002; Grint, 2002). Some of these theories retain the idea of the ‘heroic’ leader, a plucky individual pitted against forces of organisational and social inertia.

Others elaborate upon the idea of ‘post-heroic

leadership’ (Grint, 2002), sometimes called ‘distributed leadership’, addressing the concerns of some who are critical of ‘managerialism’ in further and higher education. Whilst these relatively fresh theoretical premises have done much to challenge the rugged

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individualism characteristic of swathes of the popular management literature there remains an emphasis upon individual meanings and interpretations, albeit with due credit given to the individual’s social position in networks and communities of practice.

Our main concern with these studies is that the phenomena of interest in leadership work have mysteriously disappeared. In these accounts of leaders and leadership work, instead of examining the activities and interactions that makes leadership and FE colleges the recognisably distinct phenomena they are understood to be by those who work in them, a theoretical analysis of the forces which allegedly shape that work and those institutions instead takes precedence. In the process the setting becomes just another incidental area in which to observe such forces and processes at work. A number of dilemmas arise out of this methodological choice to attempt to give explanatory accounts of social life. For researchers often appear to be more involved in questions concerned with the form of explanation, addressing primarily sociological issues. In an unfortunate likeness to playground disputes this often amounts to little more than who has the best theory, the deficiencies of other theories, and so on. Many of the problems of understanding leadership work appear to be a product of this desire to construct theoretical, 'explanatory' accounts of social life. The problem is that in constructing such accounts researchers 'lose their' phenomena' - the real world, real life experiences of leaders as they go about their everyday, mundane work. As Atkinson (1978) commented some time ago: "For at least a century, sociologists have dreamed of producing descriptions and explanations of social phenomena that would exhibit some of the rigour and general applicability achieved by natural scientists The suggestion that this has been a dream is not intended to ironicise or ridicule the discipline for its failures, nor to propose that the aim of accumulating a corpus of systematic knowledge about social order is somehow mistaken or not worthwhile. Rather it is to draw attention to the fact that sociologists still have a great deal of trouble in convincing a more general public that their 'expert' claims about how the social world works should be taken any more seriously than those of anyone else".(Atkinson 1978: 168)

Sociology in general knows of these problems but presumes that the problems are theoretical in the sense that their 'problems' in getting a fit between theory and 'the world'

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lies in the sophistication (or lack of it) of their theories. It is as if, as Watson (1994) comments; “The seen but unnoticed backgrounds of everyday activities are made visible and are described from a perspective in which persons live out the lives they do, have the children they do, feel the feelings, think the thoughts, enter the relationships they do, all in order to permit the sociologist to solve his theoretical problems.” (Watson 1994)

The real problem of social scientific attempts at understanding leadership lies in the fact that they have made the phenomenon disappear – a product of searching for explanations of the realities underlying commonsensically available appearances of social order in preference to an examination of how such appearances are interactionally produced, managed, recognised and used as if they were 'the facts of the matter'. What are ignored are the lay methods and interests that make up the 'what' of situated practices themselves. There is absolutely no serious mention or description of what leadership work such as running a meeting, presenting a College's financial position, talking to new students, interviewing and appraising staff etc actually consists of as a practical endeavour. As such it misses the ‘interactional ‘what’’ of the occupation studied (Lynch (1993: 271) the actual and see-able business of doing leadership work. The everyday activities of leadership work become just another tool for illuminating a favoured social scientific theory. The result is that real worldly activity becomes what Lynch calls "a docile matrix for exercising a theoretical will" whereby the theoretical will provides the framework into which any 'real world' phenomenon will 'fit'

For us understanding a setting is a matter of describing the practices whereby the members of that setting make it understandable to one another rejects the practices of coding and classifying the ethnographic record through the application of pre-defined and ‘externally-’ or ‘theoretically-derived’ analytic frameworks. Furthermore it rejects the claim that ‘an understanding’ of social organisation is achieved through the construction of the kinds of sociological narratives explaining the real-world, as Crabtree et al (1999) make plain:

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“Ethnomethodology is not in the business of explanation as that notion is understood in the social sciences. The business of explanation - of abstracting from witnessed appearances and constructing master narratives or models according to the rules and procedures governing the production of factual knowledge of a calculable status - trades on, offers accounts of and about, rather than makes visible, the social practices in and through which members produce and manage the daily affairs of a setting. Thus ethnomethodology eschews explanation and urges the researcher to treat practice as a topic of inquiry through and through rather than a resource for building explanatory constructs”(Crabtree et al., 1999: 670)

Studying Mundane Leadership: Ethnomethodologically Informed Ethnography Consequently, our investigation examines leadership practices ethnographically, following leaders 'in action'. This entails detailed observations of the everyday work of leadership - how and in what ways leadership 'gets done', what resources and techniques are deployed in the course of the working day and so on. This is of particular interest since it is clear that managing innovation in educational settings is a complex and difficult business because it involves concurrent changes which can result in a number of tensions: reconciling what can turn out to be incompatible strategic goals; understanding and developing the necessary support and skills for implementing and managing changes (Yates (1989)); and the practical prioritisation and reconciliation of long-term policy and short-term contingencies.

These, among others, are generic problems across

organisations intent on relatively rapid innovations in culture and practices. In this specific case our investigations attempt to unpack the myriad of skill related problems involved in managing multiple organisational changes within post-compulsory education and thereby provide more sophisticated, empirically-based understandings of everyday leadership work that address the complex conditions, processes and outcomes of leadership practices.

The data and experience comes from ‘shadowing’ education sector leaders in various institutions as they went about their everyday work Such ethnographic methods, with their emphasis on workplace studies and the ‘real world, real time’, everyday character of work, have risen to some prominence in recent years. The central characteristic of ethnomethodologically informed ethnographic enquiry is the researcher’s detailed

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observation of how the work actually ‘gets done’. Its focus is upon the circumstances, practices and activities that constitute the ‘real world', situated character of work. The defining feature of this kind of study is the immersion of the researcher in the work environment where a non-presumptive record is made of all aspects of the day-to-day work over an extended period of time. In this way a 'thick description' (Geertz (1973)) is built up of the situated working practices. In ethnomethodologically informed ethnographic research the understanding of any work setting is derived from the study of that setting itself, rather than from any highly structured model or theory of work organisation or work processes; that is it ties itself closely to the observed data, it is 'datadriven'. A central precept of ethnomethodological ethnography is to aim to find the orderliness of ordinary activities, an orderliness accomplished by social actors, unreflectively taken-for-granted by them and constructed with their common-sense knowledge of social order.

In studying members’ methods - the 'machinery’ that constitutes members’ cultural competence enabling them to do what they do - ethnomethodology displays an indifference to mainstream sociology’s fundamental concern to explain why it is that things happen as they do. Instead it replaces it with an emphasis on the description of how people accomplish activities. Ethnomethodology's analytic frame is not based around an explanation or theory of why things are happening the way they are, but how it is that ordinary members of society are organising matters such their courses of action constitute orderly social phenomena. Ethnomethodology attempts: “… to describe the operational theories, or theories-in-use, that members deploy in attending to the appearances of their surroundings, in constructing their situated courses of action" (Sharrock and Watson, 1988: 127)

This involves documenting how and in what ways members produce and account for social phenomena, rather than the procedures of sociology in this regard. As Wittgenstein argues:

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"The difficulty - I might say - is not that of finding a solution but rather of recognizing as the solution something that looks as if it were only a preliminary to it .. This is connected, I believe, with our wrongly expecting an explanation, whereas the solution of the difficulty is a description, if we give it the right place in our considerations. If we dwell upon it, and do not try to get beyond it." (Wittgenstein, Zettel quoted in Heritage 1984:103).

Leadership as Mundane Work: Some Brief Empirical Details In this section we briefly present some data, culled from a mass of transcripts, documents and interviews, on the everyday circumstances, practices and activities that constitute the ‘real world', situated character of leadership work.

Mundane Leadership- giving a clear message: The notion of leadership as 'giving a clear message' - ensuring that staff, students and parents had a clear idea of what was expected of them and what they in turn might reasonably demand was a recurrent theme in our observations and interviews. As far as staff were concerned, reference to the '3Rs', quality and 'excellence was commonplace: “[We had] a great inspection report. … we went up in everything, mainly by focusing in on quality. I mean, I started talking about the three Rs – recruitment, retention and results – as soon as I came … I think most people out there would say I’ve always given them a clear message.” (College Principal)

And, in these matters at least, leadership is about teamwork, stimulating a team, getting them to act in concert and adhere to particular sets of ideas and values: “…We talk in terms of the ‘excellent person’ – which some people interpret negatively as a kind of clone, but its not what we mean. We defend that and explain what we mean by ‘an excellent person’ and why its important that we do get [these kinds of] persons, because we can’t do what we want to do for the students without somebody who’s got these kind of qualities, for example a team person and so forth…” (College Principal)

And such a philosphy extends to the management and motivation of students: “Our Quality Team met in December and produced an action plan to build upon our existing high standards. By any benchmark, our college has state of the art facilities and excellent accommodation. Its support for students is outstanding. Nevertheless, we realise we need to work hard to maintain the high

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standards and to respond to emerging problems and ‘hotspots’: In the meantime, for immediate attention, could we all:

Strictly enforce the ban on eating and drinking in class; Communicate our expectation that students should not even bring empty can or food containers into classrooms; Report immediately to line managers any cause for concern about classrooms, e.g. litter, graffiti; Put chairs on desks at the end of the last lesson of daytime classes; Challenge inappropriate student behaviour in public areas or report it.” (Staff Bulletin)

This 'clear message' further extends to issues of the college image or ‘brand’, its appearance to the outside world etc.

“During 2003 SMT recognised that, with increased individual use of IT, there was a need for more consistency of style in College documentation. Examples of the range of diversity in practice were evident in papers that went to Governors’ meeting, in letters from different parts of the College to the same external orgnanization (e.g. the Learning and Skills Council) and in memos from different departments. Font sizes varied from 8 to 14 point size and a variety of typefaces were used… this inconsistency potentially ‘dilutes’ the ‘brand value’ of the College ..A group of ‘professionals’ was formed to develop documentation standards or ‘house style’ guidelines for use by all College staff. These guidelines should now be followed: Develop and maintain a consistent identity for the College so that all readers will quickly recognise a document as being from the College. Ensure documents portray a consistent high quality, attractive, modern image that accords with the College’s vision, mission and values etc. etc.” (Staff Bulletin)

Mundane Leadership- audit culture and calculation work One particular emerging managerial philosophy that seems especially relevant to issues of educational leadership is the need to demonstrate competence, compliance and effectiveness to a variety of audiences. As Strathern (2000) suggests, the philosophy of 'audit' or 'audit culture' is becoming increasingly common in public institutions as well as having longstanding roots in private enterprise. This builds on a developing requirement to practice and perform a new kind of accountability based around notions of economic efficiency and good practice (Strathern, 2000: 1). Within Further Education audit takes a variety of forms - in its most obvious in Ofsted inspections and annual reports. Further 8


education is no different from other organizations in that for those in the sector it is a commonplace that everyday organizational life often consists of various kinds of ‘checking up on each other’. However, the formalisation of this checking and monitoring through auditing represents a break with traditional forms of organizational control in education with its longstanding emphasis on 'professionalism'. While arguments about professionalism remain increasingly forms of audit are deployed to ensure quality control - that mechanisms and procedures are in place - rather than the quality of ‘first order’ operations (Power, 1994: 19) such as teaching - though this too is increasingly the case with an emphasis on results and 'value added'. In this way the audit serves as a means of indirect control over work practices through the monitoring and regulation of other systems control. This idea, that leadership involves the recognition of a move towards a service culture - where students and parents become 'customers' and education a 'product' - subject to frequent, public audit and accountability also features heavily in our observations of everyday leadership work with College Principals: “..You might say that the problem with all of FE, arguably all of education now is that it’s target driven. So that is not the fault of the college. If we are going to be – our funding is dependent upon it – our esteem in society is dependent upon on us doing what? – Delivering retention, achievement, success. That’s it! That’s it! Y’know, it’s the same for hospitals, you can see, so you might say, OK, can a teacher – at the end of the day a teacher can do what the bloody hell he or she wants in a class, provided that when they’re observed they can get a grade 1 or 2, because that’s life, and that isn’t us that’s what OFSTED says. And the students are really happy, they stay, they get the results so their mums and dads are happy, or their employers are happy, or the students as adults and so on, that they’re happy, and they are going away from here with what they came in to get. Now, the teachers got to do that and if the teacher isn’t doing that then I don’t want to hear about professionalism and so on because it’s a big excuse. It’s a smoke screen.” (College Principal)

And its not just colleges and their Principals that need to face up to the reality of the audit culture. The ability to be able to 'account' for their activities, to be able to present a plausible, reasoned justification, a 'good story' also extends to the staff (and ultimately the students). Here is a College Principal quite frankly acknowledging this new facet of organisational life: “… so one of the things that we’ve done is do a lot of information giving about benchmarks and it’s often good news, particularly about achievement, you know, “your achievement is 20% above the

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national average” and they all say “that’s really good”. But when you then ask the question, “I’m an inspector – so how have you achieved that?” And when they say “we don’t know” you say “we don’t know – that’s not going to impress an inspector, is it?” because they’re going to say, “well it’s probably the students then” or “you’ve just got good students”. And they – we’ve managed to soften them up into that, almost that you’ve got to tell a story, so make something up then. There must be a reason, you might not be able to prove it but if you can’t prove, an inspector can’t prove it either. So we’ve tried very hard to tell stories at a college level, like that’s our achievement, you know, if you look at our success rate’s gone up and our achievement has gone up even faster, our retention rate’s down – that could be really bad news, you know, it could be that people are getting really fed up with the teaching course, but that’s not our story. Our story is that two years ago we took this view that we were going to be harder on academic neglect, we’ve got – you know, we can demonstrate that we have actually kicked out more students than in previous years, so that affects the retention, but the students you’ve got left achieve overall, and our success rate’s gone up even faster. So there’s a very positive story, you know, “do you understand that story?” and we try and give them those types of things.” (College Principal)

And here is an email from a Head of Department to his staff along similar lines:

"Attached is a Post Inspection teaching observation timetable. Do not panic, do not even think about it. It's my way of assuring the inspectors that we have a plan. When we go away lets think again, as in, lets negotiate." (HOD email)

This is decidedly not cynicism, just a practical response to he demands of the job and the contingencies that are thrown up by everyday work - and at its heart everyday work has a predominantly egological and practical orientation. What do I do next? Who do I need to see? What is the appropriate procedure? What is the plan? How do I react to it? - and so on. And, of course, while such leaders are often only too well aware of plans and procedures they are also cognizant of the fact that getting a plan to work is often an effortful accomplishment. The relevance of plans to human action has been famously outlined by Suchman (1987) - "plans are resources for situated action but do not in any strong sense determine its course". Her central argument is that plans do not thoroughly determine in

advance and causally direct in every detail courses of action. A plan is an abstract construction that needs to be to be applied in specific circumstances. Plans do not simply ‘execute themselves’ nor is the relationship between the plan and the action it directs a mechanical one. Plans are accomplished activities and the successful accomplishment of

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a ‘plan’ is consequently dependent on the practical understandings about what the plan specifies in these circumstances, using these resources, these people, and so on. Although plans may be presented as abstractions, as manuals, as statements of procedures, and so forth, the ‘just what’ it takes to realise them is a practical matter of ‘making the plan work’ through all the various and inevitable contingencies that can arise. It is such activities which maintain the plan by dealing with ‘those things which arise’, ‘the things not planned for’, the ‘things which suddenly come up’ so that even ‘deviations’ from the plan can be accommodated to sustain its ‘spirit’. Suchman's work presents plans as elements which enable workers to make sense of both their own and others work and to come to a practical decision about future courses of action. What this emphasises is the importance of seeing how and in what ways plans and procedures are interwoven into a highly variegated set of phenomena that make up the social organisation of work.

This is especially relevant when considering, for example, the various forms of 'calculation work' that College Principals necessarily engage in as part of responding to the demands of an audit culture.The emphasis here is on documenting the work that Principals must do to make activities fit with the various ‘organisational terms’ associated with calculation and calculability. This involves grappling with the practical difficulties of determining which figures are required for which purpose and knowing how to manipulate and represent them. It is not simply a question of seeing what is 'in the figures' and then working out what should be done since 'what is in the figures' has to be worked out: "This work involves grappling with the sheer practical difficulties of determining which figures are wanted, pulling them out, and then knowing how to manipulate them and assess their product." (Anderson et al 1989: 105-6) " .. success depends upon managing the interplay between precision and interpretation in calculation.".( Anderson et al 1989:121).

The following extracts come from observing the activities of a College Principal surrounding an audit committee meeting

Report from external auditors on funding. College retained all its funding, as everything was in order.. Principal X (humorously) thanked the auditor for giving him ammunition for his forthcoming meeting with LSC..

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Tidies papers ahead of 10:45 meeting - final run through of scripts for LSC meeting to make sure they are all clear and all telling the same story Vice Principals arrive - X leads the meeting by identifying an error in the student numbers which have been sent to the LSC - leading to an error in the financial calculations which have been mde subsequently X: "..and we need to get the numbers right, dont we? ' - gives the right figures to insert .. and works through the numbers on a calculator - rehearses argument in terms of funding implications .. now concerned about whether college will get premium funding due to a change of emphasis in the criteria. " We need to present the numbers in a way that makes it easy for them to tick the criteria.".

Later..X is finalising update paper for LSC (re progress against strategic targets) .... 'thinking on screen and playing around with content'... Has found a way of using the numbers re: student recruitment and retention selectively to strengthen their case for premium funding. Needs to disguise the fact that they are 31 down overall. .... The biggest shortfall was in 19+ which is counted in a different category. Can use this to fudge their failure to meet targets.

Mundane Leadership - Meetings, meetings, meetings It is no great sociological discovery to suggest that much of everyday, mundane leadership work is dominated by meetings, attending them, planning them, following them up and so on. In The Business of Talk: Organisations in Action Boden, (1994) highlights meetings as the ‘very stuff of management’ and proceeds to document both the accomplishment of meetings themselves and the role of meetings in the accomplishment of the organisation. While we might cavil with the hyperbolic claim that meetings are the ‘very stuff of management’, that ‘meetings are where organisations come together’ (1994: 81) there can be little doubt from our ethnographic observations that meetings are a frequent, and often complained about, feature of organisational life. For Principals decisions have to be made about which meetings to attend: “…and the relationship thing about who matters in the county – not who invites you, but who matters. That’s a different thing, particularly in B------- because there is a sort of, quite a sort of flattering network of the private schools and H------- Trust and – well, all that sort of certain type of bits of the County Council and other things, and that’s all very flattering to get invitations, but actually that won’t take the college anywhere. What I’m much more concerned about is school heads, and the university.” (College Principal)

Other everyday work consists of preparing for meetings:

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“A useful pre-meeting. For a set-piece meeting like this (with the LSC), it’s important to be prepared. I feel I know where we are now and we all know what to say. We did this with Ofsted (and got grade 1 for leadership and management).” (College Principal)

While whether meetings are occasions for making, as opposed to simply approving decisions is debatable and the subject for various forms of work by the College Principal: “… the way we operate …is that if – you know, I want to retain the right to take decisions on some things, some matters. Therefore in terms of the agenda of our Executive we have the sort of classic decision consideration information, and I try to flag up whether I’ve already got, made the decision by saying – if I say something’s for consideration, then that probably means I might reserve the right to not go with the consensus. If it’s for decision, that generally means I’ll – you know, I will abide by whatever the consensus is and we try very hard for that sort of consensus.” (College Principal)

Mundane Leadership - using everyday technologies Finally, in this brief outline of some of our empirical findings - it is undoubtedly the case that while 'leadership' may continue to be mythologised in terms of various personal characteristics the actual business of doing leadership is relatively mundane - and involves mundane technologies. It has become a commonplace observation that modern organisations, including the education sector, are experiencing enormous growth in the deployment of information and communications technologies. This is often accompanied by arguments suggesting that extensive use of IT serves to ‘reconfigure the organisation’ through its application in data analysis and processing, communication and decision support (Zuboff (1988); Scott Morton (1991)). The successful implementation of information systems involves their integration into the everyday work of complex organisational settings and consequently depends upon a range of social and organizational factors rather than mere technical concerns - people need to be cajoled and persuaded into using the technology, shown its benefit. Despite this it is evident that much 'leadership work' is accomplished 'through the technology'. ICTs are crucial in the provision of management information, the production and utilisation of that information in everyday leadership work; and the use of technology in support of decision-making, managing and motivating. This is not about particularly complex or challenging technologies but the everyday use of mundane information systems such as email, spreadsheets, presentation packages, desk-top publishing and diary systems and so on. Simple observation, for example, reveals that much of what we might characterise as 13


leadership work, presenting and enforcing decisions, ensuring compliance, managing disputes etc is carried on through email - and that in increasingly distributed educational organisations management by 'walking about' has been supplemented by management by 'sitting down and emailing'. In the first two extracts an attempt is being made to develop a coherent and universal policy on student discipline: "Attached is a copy of our current thinking on how we should respond to students who are identified as being 'at risk' as regards their academic progress. Clearly we need to address this problem as it has a considerable impact on both our retention and achievement. (Quality Unit) suggested I send you a copy. We would like to have something along these lines in place for Sept 04. Any thoughts? " (email extract)

"(To Quality Unit) .. (the management team) are currently trying to bash out a coherent student discipline policy. We have had a lot of grief over the last year from staff who feel we are not dealing appropriately with student misconduct, i.e. we are not immediately excluding them from college. The Quality Unit got any take on this problem? We know we have to do something to improve the learning culture but are not quite sure what. Stun me with your penetrating insight. "(email extract)

As this Head of Department notes in his reflective diary: "My particular management brief is to try and do something about improving teaching and learning within the faculty, however my ability to even get started on this task has been limited by a number of continuous distractions that I suspect are the everyday fare of middle managers. So insistent are some of these issues that whatever ability I might have to think about and understand the underlying problems, my chances to do anything about them are constrained by the everyday business of muddling through". Whilst this is reflected in the following email to staff it is also perhaps indicative of just how much of the everyday work is carried out via the email system: "Most of you have not responded to my request for you to fill in an annual leave form, nor to a request for you to let me know if you would object to having a PGCE student during the next academic year. Please exercise your communication skills and get this sorted out." (email extract)

Conclusion: Leadership as Mundane Work “The purpose of ethnographic analysis is to produce sensitising concepts and models that allow people to see events in new ways. The value of these models is to be judged by others in terms of how useful they find them..” (Hammersley 1992: 15)

The overall objective of our current research is to explicate leadership through an ethnographic study of leaders 'doing' leadership work - wherever and however it is done.

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Of course, none of the above examples are dramatic instances of the exercise of leadership or a phenomena often associated with leadership, 'power'. Our observations suggest that leadership is an everyday phenomenon, appearing in various mundane disguises. In consequence our examples are themselves mundane and very ordinary (and far more prolific than is reported here) in their invocation of a hierarchical relationship which exists, and is known to exist by the parties to the occasion, between them. It is a relationship that is unproblematically accepted as ‘this is the way things are’ - ‘extended in time and space’ (Boden, 1994: 215). Leadership is something that is locally accomplished in action and whose coherence and very recognisability as ‘leadership' is only understandable in the situated ‘grammar’ of its achievement. So phrases uttered by 'leaders such as: - ” get this sorted out"' "we need to get the numbers right”etc - taken from the extracts, do not in themselves indicate 'leadership' or ‘power at work’. Leadership (and perhaps power) acts as an appropriate description for is ‘going on’ because the words, the tone with which they are said and, most importantly the setting, the courses of action, the relationships, within which they occur act as documentary evidences of the mundane exercise of ‘leadership'. Our approach emphasises understanding such leadership work as 'everyday practice', as a practical and ongoing accomplishment as opposed to more theoretically, sociologically, informed idealisations of such work. Leadership in education consists of complex, but ultimately mundane and ordinary practices. Such work involves formally recognised leaders such as college principals, but also senior and middle managers, teaching staff and administrators working throughout the college. It is about arriving at shared understandings - and various mundane interactional competences are routinely observed to play an important part in the activity - such as knowing how to preface, repair, produce formulations, tell stories, develop scenarios and so on. Knowing how to build a recognisable and coherent scenario draws upon assumed sets of common-sense understandings about 'how we do this kind of work'; and 'how we get into this position'. Appeals to such common-sense recognisability are at the heart of this interactional work. But there is no special or arcane skill here. Our observations of leaders involved in ‘real world, real time’ work has simply documented what Garfinkel termed 'vulgar competences' (Garfinkel (1967) - competences or resources available to just about anyone.

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The main concern of this paper has been with briefly explicating some of the mundane interactional competences displayed leaders in their everyday work. The aim of this ethnomethodologically-informed ethnography has been to observe and describe the phenomena of ‘everyday life’ independently of any preconceptions of received sociological theories and methods. The concern has been to be 'data driven, to be ‘led by the phenomena’, rather than by the concerns and requirements of any particular social scientific standpoint. The phenomena which we have investigated are consequently studied and depicted in their character as ‘phenomena of everyday life’, as ‘everyday’ occurrences for those who are involved in the activities in question - being a College Principal or member of a Senior Management Team in an FE College. The phenomena is thereby displayed in all its raw detail since it is not for the investigator to decide what things are, what matters, what is important, or trivial, but to ascertain how things might be judged in that way by those who are doing them. But our work is not simply about research - much though we enjoy it. Our interest is rather less concerned with academic and theoretical issues such as 'power' or 'diversity' or 'patriarchy' or 'emotional intelligence' (though it does bear on all of these) whatever the current fashion might be. We are seeking instead (or as well as) to understand everyday leadership work in order to impact both research and leadership development and training. While issues of everyday leadership practice have been the focus for a number of researchers (Bryman, 1992; Yukl, 2002), few have taken this seriously as a viable programme of research or leadership development. We do. The relevance of this perspective to leadership and leadership development lies in the fact that it draws attention to the detailed examination of work - leadership work - as lived experience, and clues as to how such work is accomplished in the way it is. Our observations resonate with some of the everyday lived realities of being a College Principal or member of a Management Team. As such the method has the potential to impact on leadership education, training and research by providing a link between training and practise and a model for the facilitation and relevance of research

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Acknowledgements Our thanks go to the CCEAM 2004 organizing committee, CEL members and authors for their contributions to the conference. Thanks also to our friends and colleagues at The Centre for Excellence in Leadership in the UK, and particularly to the Principals and members of staff of the FE colleges that participated in our study. Their continued cooperation and patience is greatly appreciated.

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Heritage, J. (1984) Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology, Cambridge. Polity Press Lynch, M. (1993) Scientific practice and ordinary action: Ethnomethodology and social studies of science. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Pollner, M. (1987) Mundane Reasoning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Power, M. (1994) The Audit Explosion. Demos. London. Power, M. (1997) The Audit Society: rituals of verification. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Scott Morton, M. (ed.) (1991) The Corporation of the 1990s: Information Technology and Organizational Transformation. Oxford University Press, New York. Sharrock, W. and Button, G. (1990) ‘The social actor: social action in real time’. In G. Button (ed.) Ethnomethodology and the Human Sciences, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 137-176 Sharrock W. & Watson R. (1988) ‘Autonomy Among Social Theories; the incarnation of social structures’ in Fielding (1988) Strathern, M. (ed.) (2000) Audit Cultures: anthropological studies in accountability, ethics and the academy. Routledge, London. Suchman, L., (1987) Plans and Situated Action: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge.Watson 1994 Watson, R. (1994) 'Harvey Sack's Sociology of Mind in Action' Theory’. Culture & Society, 11: 169-186. Yates, J. (1989) Control through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management. Baltimore. John Hopkins University Press. Yukl, G. (2002) Leadership in Organizations, 5th Edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall Zuboff, S. (1988). In the Age of the Smart Machine: the future of work and power. New York, Heinemann Professional.

Address for Correspondence: Dr Simon Kelly Department of Computing, Lancaster University,

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Lancaster, UK LA1 4WA [email protected]

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