The ethic of community
| Published date | 01 April 2004 |
| Pages | 215-235 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/09578230410525612 |
| Date | 01 April 2004 |
| Author | Gail C. Furman |
| Subject Matter | Education |
The ethic of community
Gail C. Furman
Washington State University, Pullman, Washington, USA
Keywords Ethics, Community, Leadership, Social justice
Abstract This article proposes the concept of an ethic of community to complement and extend
other ethical frames used in education (e.g. the ethics of justice, critique, and care). Proceeding
from the traditional definition of ethics as the study of moral duty and obligation, ethic of
community is defined as the moral responsibility to engage in communal processes as educators
pursue the moral purposes of their work and address the ongoing challenges of daily life and work
in schools. The ethic of community thus centers the communal over the individual as the primary
locus of moral agency in schools. The usefulness of the ethic of community in regard to achieving
the moral purposes of schooling is illustrated with the example of social justice. The author
concludes that the ethic of community is a vehicle that can synthesize much of the current work on
leadership practices related to social justice and other moral purposes of educational leadership.
In this article, I propose the idea of an ethic of community to complement and
extend other ethical frames used in education (e.g. the ethics of justice, critique,
and care). Proceeding from the traditional definition of ethics as the study of
moral duty and obligation, I define ethic of community as the moral
responsibility to engage in communal processes as educators pursue the moral
purposes of their work and address the ongoing challenges of daily life and
work in schools. Thus, an ethic of community centers the communal over the
individual as the primary locus of moral agency in schools. In what follows, I
first present some background on moral leadership and ethics in education; I
then argue that the ethic of community is a needed complement to the other
ethical frames typically used in education and show how it is related to
achieving the moral purposes of schooling. In other words, I will argue that
ethic of community is a vehicle that can synthesize much of the current work on
leadership practices related to social justice and other moral purposes of
educational leadership.
Background
The argument that educational leadership is fundamentally a moral endeavor
has been developed by many scholars in recent years. Goldring and Greenfield
(2002, pp. 2-3), for example, in their recent work on the “roles, expectations, and
dilemmas” of leadership, state that the “moral dimensions of educational
leadership and administration” constitute one of the special conditions that
make administering schools “different from such work in other contexts”.
Similarly, Sergiovanni (1996, p. 57) argues that schools are “moral
communities” requiring the development of a distinct leadership based in
“moral authority”. Using more playful language, Hodgkinson (1995, p. 7) states
that educators are “secular priests working in an arena of ethical excitement”.
The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
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The ethic of
community
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Journal of Educational
Administration
Vol. 42 No. 2, 2004
pp. 215-235
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
0957-8234
DOI 10.1108/09578230410525612
While the focus on the moral in education is not new – Dewey (1922), for
example, wrote about education as a fundamentally moral practice – what is
new is the increasing interest and rapid expansion of this literature in recent
years. There are probably many reasons for this, including the emergence of
the critical humanist perspective in the 1980s (e.g. Foster, 1986), challenges to
the dominant functionalist research traditions in the field (Greenfield, 1979,
1999), as well as the widely-recognized “new realities” of the social context of
schooling (Cunningham and Mitchell, 1990).
In my view, this emerging literature on the moral in educational leadership
falls into at least three distinct but overlapping strands – moral leadership
theory, the moral purposes of leadership, and ethical leadership practice. First,
scholars have developed a body of work aimed at the explicit development of
moral leadership theory. As Leithwood and Duke (1998, p. 36) note, moral
leadership “has been one of the fastest growing areas of leadership study”.
Scholars who write in this area argue that values are a central part of all
leadership practice and that the proper foci of leadership studies should be the
values and ethics held by school leaders themselves. Sergiovanni’s (1992, p. 16)
argument for a “new kind of leadership” based in “moral authority” is illustrative:
By giving more credence to sense experience and intuition, and by accepting sacred authority
and emotion as fully legitimate ways of knowing – , the value systems undergirding
management theory and leadership practice will grow large enough to account for a new kind
of leadership – one based on moral authority. This kind of leadership can transform schools
into communities and inspire the kind of commitment, devotion, and service that will make
our schools unequaled among society’s institutions.
In addition to advocacy and theoretical work, some research studies have
explored moral leadership in action in the practice of school administrators (e.g.
Dillard, 1995; Enomoto, 1997; Greenfield, 1991; Kasten and Ashbaugh, 1991;
Kelly and Bredeson, 1991; Keyes et al., 1999; Marshall et al., 1996; Reitzug and
Reeves, 1992). Across these studies, common findings are that administrators
are very much aware of the moral aspects of their work and that they do
practice moral leadership in relying on their core values and their commitments
to particular “ends-in-view” in their work in schools.
The second strand in the literature is the increasing attention to these
“ends-in-view” or moral purposes of leadership, that is, the valued outcomes
that should be the goal of leadership endeavors in twenty-first century schools,
such as social justice, racial equity, and learning for all children (Beck and
Murphy, 1994; Furman, 2003; Hodgkinson, 1991). In this strand, the focus is not
so much on the values held by leaders themselves, although this is certainly
relevant, but on the goals of their work, in other words, what leadership is for.
Where traditional leadership studies have tended to take a relatively
value-neutral approach to studying “what leadership is, how it is done, and by
whom” (Furman, 2003), much contemporary scholarship is focusing on the why
of leadership – its moral purposes and how they can be achieved in schools.
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