Mapping the terrain of educational leadership and management in East Asia
| Date | 09 August 2013 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JEA-05-2012-0066 |
| Published date | 09 August 2013 |
| Pages | 618-637 |
| Author | Philip Hallinger,Darren Bryant |
| Subject Matter | Education |
Mapping the terrain of
educational leadership and
management in East Asia
Philip Hallinger
Asia Pacific Centre for Leadership and Change,
The Hong Kong Institute of Education, Hong Kong SAR, China, and
Darren Bryant
Department of Education Policy and Leadership,
The Hong Kong Institute of Education, Hong Kong SAR, China
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to gain perspective on the extent to which the vision fo r
knowledge production in East Asia set forth by Bajunid, Cheng, Hallinger, Walker, Dimmock and
others almost 20 years ago has been fulfilled. The authors undertook an effort to map the terrain of
knowledge production in educational leadership and management in East Asia since the year 2000.
Their method of mapping this terrain involves the analysis of trends in publication of articles about
and/or from East Asia in eight core educational leadership and management journals.
Design/methodology/approach – The authors’ methodology employed a descriptive, quantitative
form of literature review. They identified a clearly delimited bodyof literature, comprised of all ar ticles
published about or from East Asia between 2000 and 2011 in eight core educational leadership and
management journals. Then they employed a systematic search for information within that literature
and analyzed trends across the studies. This allowed them to map the terrain of recent research on
educational leadership and management within East Asia.
Findings – The volume of knowledge production from East Asia between 2000 and 2011 consisted of
less than 6 per cent of total output in the relevant journals. Although there was a discernible increase
in the annual rate of publication over the course of the 12-year period, the authors treat the increase as
relatively unimportant given the small volume. A substantial majority of the publications not only
came from a few societies, but from a small number of universities. Citation analyses were highly
consistent with all of the above trends, and reinforced a picture of limited impact.
Research limitations/implications – The authors’ study focused on a clearly delimited region,
East Asia. Although they believe that the study may have implications for other regions of the
developing world, they do not speculate on the extent of relevance. The authors intentionally limited
their definition of the corpus of knowledge to a specific set of international refereed journals that are
published in English. This ignores the potential contributions of conference papers, books, book
chapters, research handbooks, domestic journals, and even other international journals in which
educational leadership scholars publish.
Originality/value – Tothe authors’ knowledge , there havebe en no efforts undertaken to understand
the nature of knowledge production in educational leadership and management in East Asia. When
approaching this review in 2012, the authors were not under the illusion that the regional knowledge
base would be either overly dense in terms of the concentration of studies within particular areas or
broad in scope. However, future scholarship may be aided by this systematic assessment of the current
knowledge base on educational leadership in the region.
Keywords Research and development, Educational management, Educational leadership, Asia,
Knowledge base, Asian studies, Educational administration, Knowledge management
Paper type Research paper
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/0957-8234.htm
Received 25 May 2012
Revised 27 July 2012
Accepted 27 July 2012
Journal of Educational
Administration
Vol. 51 No. 5, 2013
pp. 618-637
rEmeraldGroup Publishing Limited
0957-8234
DOI 10.1108/JEA-05-2012-0066
The authors wish to acknowledge the funding support of the Research Grant Council (RGC) of
Hong Kong for its support through the General Research Fund (GRF 841512).
618
JEA
51,5
The rising economic and political fortunes of Asia-Pacific countries are, however, fostering
greater interest and confidence among scholars in their own intellectual traditions. Notably, the
current moodis not one of reaction.Instead, these scholars are searchingfor the best of past and
presentpractice, from East andWest, as their societies work to reformthemselves economically
while maintaining cohesion socially, culturally and politically (Bajunid, 1994). The resulting
effort has the potential to enrich the occidental knowledge base in educational administration as
well as their own. It will cause us both to question key assumptions about education and
administration, and to consider alternative theoretical perspectives towards administrative
practice (Bajunid, 1994; Habana, 1994; Hallinger et al., 1994; Ribbons, 1994)(Hallinger, 1995, p. 4).
Almost 20 years have passed since scholars first began to explore limitations of the
knowledge base underlying the practice of school leadership and management in
East Asia (Bajunid, 1996; Cheng, 1995; Habana, 1994; Hallinger, 1995; Hallinger and
Leithwood, 1998; Hallinger et al., 2005; Ribbons, 1994; Walker and Dimmock, 2002).
As suggested above, the region’s scholars of that period approached the dearth of
empirical research and theorizing on school leadership and management practice
outside of a relatively narrow set of “western” cultural contexts (e.g. USA, Canada, UK,
Australia) with a sense of opportunity. Their optimism was further fuelled by the
emergence of global research findings supporting the importance of leadership to
successful education reform and school quality (e.g. Bell et al., 2003; Hallinger, 2011c;
Hallinger and Heck, 1996; Leithwood et al., 2006; Robinson, 2008).
The ensuing years have witnessed dramatic growth in East Asia’s higher education
sector, whether measured by growth in the number of institutions, graduate degree
programs, faculty members, or students (Bajunid, 2011; Cheng, 2010; Gopinathan and
Lee, 2011; Mok and Cheung, 2011). More specific to the focus of this pap er, we note the
large increase in the number of graduate programs in educational leadership and
management (i.e. MEd, MA, MPhil, EdD, PhD) offered by universities in East Asia.
This has had the concomitant effect of increasing the volume of empirical research
conducted in the region by a growing array of graduate students and faculty members.
These convergent trends suggested new possibiliti es for contributing to the
development of regionally grounded scholarship in our field[1].
The purpose of this paper is to gain persp ective on the extent to which the vision for
knowledge production in East Asia set forth by scholars such as Bajunid, Cheng,
Hallinger, Walker, and Dimmock in the mid-1990s has been fulfilled. In addressing this
challenge, we launched a research project designed to map the terrain of knowle dge
production in educational leadership and management in East Asia[2]. The project
analyzes trends in the publication of articles about and/or from East Asia in eight core
educational leadership and management journals from 2000 to the present. The study
is organized to answer the following research questions:
(1) What was the volume of articles from and about the East Asia region
published in core educational leadership and management journals between
2000 and 2011?
(2) To what extent has the annual rate of regional publication changed over the
course of this period?
(3) How does the contribution of scholarly publications to the regional knowledge
base vary across the 17 East Asian societies covered in this study?
(4) How does the contribution of scholarly publications to the regional knowledge
base vary with respect to the authors’ universities?
619
Terrain of
educational
leadership
To continue reading
Request your trial