Leadership, Hermeneutics and Empiricism
| Date | 01 September 1994 |
| Published date | 01 September 1994 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/09578239410063085 |
| Pages | 46-53 |
| Author | Peter Davson‐Galle |
| Subject Matter | Education |
Journal of
Educational
Administration
32,3
46
Leadership, Hermeneutics and
Empiricism
Peter Davson-Galle
University of Tasmania, Launceston, Australia
In a recent article in this journal[1] John Smith and Joseph Blase discuss the
vexed issue of educational leadership. They advocate a set of qualities as those
of the good leader and claim to derive them from hermeneutics. They claim also
that another construal of good leadership, which they link with empiricism and
consider dominant, is to be rejected. In what follows, I concur with most of their
conception of good leadership but wish to point out that it is not to be thought
of as part of a “package deal” which commits one to hermeneutics. Indeed, on
my analysis, Smith and Blase’s conception of the qualities of a good leader is
quite compatible with philosophical views which count as variants of
empiricism. I judge it fortunate that this is so, for the hermeneutical views in
which Smith and Blase ground their ideas about leaders seem fraught with
difficulty and it is cause for relief that a worthy picture of leadership does not
have to carry the burden of such objections.
The conception of leadership that Smith and Blase attack is one that views
the leader’s task as the efficient and effective achievement of the organization’s
goals. On this view, the selection of the most appropriate means for those ends’
achievement is considered a matter of expertise in the management of human
and material resources. In the case of educational leadership, much of this
expertise taps into the educational research literature. This research objectively
studies educational organizations and generates law-like generalizations
concerning its features. Armed with such intellectual mastery of their
professional circumstances, educational leaders can deploy technical expertise
to calculate apt means to the given ends. The ends themselves, however, are
matters for value-judgement rather than matters of fact. And values are seen as
having the status of subjective preference and thus to not be the sort of thing
anyone can be expert about, educational leaders included. Setting the goals of an
educational organization is thus not seen as a proper thing for the educational
leader to concern him/herself with. His/her domain of expertise lies with me ans,
not ends; the latter are, from his/her professional perspective, “givens”, things
set by the school’s political-societal context. As noted, such a view of
educational leadership is considered by Smith and Blase to be currently
dominant and they consider it to be “strongly influenced by the empiricist
theory of knowledge”[1, p. 6]. Like most other “isms” within philosophy, what
The author is grateful to this journal’s editor and one of its referees for their helpful criticism and
encouragement of the article’s development.
Journal of Educational
Administration, Vol. 32 No. 3, 1994,
pp. 46-53. © MCBUniversity Press,
0957-8234
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