Power, risk and utility – interpreting the landscape of culture in educational
leadership
The end of the world
As the academic field of educational management, leadership and administration has
evolved over the last half century, a small number of key concepts have emerged to
frame both the academic understanding of the field and the professional development
of practitioners. These concepts include, for example, models of leadership (see, for
example, Bush, 2003) and of school effectiveness (e.g. Harris, Reynolds & Bennett,
2001). While recognised as lying at the heart of the discipline, such key concepts are
nevertheless open to periodic critique and refinement as their implications for practice
and educational outcomes are both interrogated intellectually and observed in
practice. This paper focuses on one of these key constructs – the nature of culture as a
concept, and its construction and value in supporting both our understanding of the
leadership of educational organisations and the requirement for preparing more
effective leaders in the future.
The article explores the relationship of culture with the exercise of power. The
latter, of course, is variously defined (Dahl, 1957), but for the purposes of this article
we take it to mean the capacity of an individual or group to influence positively or
negatively the psychological and material resource of others. Engagement with
culture, we argue, implies the exercise of power, but this carries risks in embedding
further unjustifiable inequities in circumstances, particularly where the assumptions
that are found in conceptualisations of culture are not well understood by those
exercising such power. However, it may also have utility to move schools and
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colleges in positive, intentional directions, as leaders can use culture to move towards
a more equitable distribution of the positive outcomes of education. Superintendents,
principals, teachers, students and their families can all lead. However, as the article
presents a critical perspective linking culture to power, it is the practice of
superintendents and principals that is the primary focus. They arguably hold greater
power than other school community members. Their understanding of culture is
therefore particularly vital.
The disciplinary base of studies of culture is very wide. Our concern is with
the concept of culture as it is understood and used in the social sciences, and
particularly anthropologically derived approaches. We acknowledge the intellectual
richness and social utility of other approaches which have their provenance elsewhere,
for example in the humanities or cultural studies, but focus more narrowly with the
intention of informing and stimulating those whose arena in education is largely
shaped by social sciences theory.
Recent interest in culture as a facet of leadership remains buoyant (e.g. Lumby
& Foskett, 2008), in part because of the growing assertion that education faces a
scenario akin to what Carroll (1992), drawing on Mead (1969), depicts as ‘the end of
the world… where people feel “the order of the world as they know it is collapsing”’
(p. 349). The magnitude of the impact of technological, economic and social change
has been repeatedly emphasised from the late twentieth century (Bottery, 1999;
Brown & Lauder, 1997; Burbules & Torres, 2000; Waters, 1995). The sense of
change metamorphosed into fears of systemic collapse with the global financial
catastrophe in the first decade of this century. Mead in 1969 and Carroll in 1992
remind us that such a scale of change demands revisiting cultural values, as practice
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and power relations are disturbed both by change itself and by an inability to
assimilate it. The impetus to engage with culture therefore may have strengthened.
Despite the high profile of culture in our intellectual and professional debate,
we are concerned that the concept provides at least as many questions and challenges
as answers and solutions. Hence this paper addresses questions posed by Marshall as
long ago as 1988, at the time when, as she ironically comments, educators ‘discovered
culture’ (p. 262): should educational leaders engage with culture and if so, how and
what are the moral issues which arise? Already by 1988, awareness of culture as an
aspect of the work of schools had been evident for some time. Waller (1932), for
example, provided some early reflections linking the concept of culture to schools.
The more recent past is revealed by a search of the Education Resources Information
Center (ERIC), the largest educational library, in which the earliest article with
‘culture’ in its title dates from 1953. A steady climb in the number of articles, from
less than 10 for the whole of the 1950s to well over a hundred per year in the 1980s,
suggests a rising interest. In total, from 1953 to 2008 there are over 7,000 articles on
education with culture as a central focus indicated in the title. More specifically,
linking culture to management or leadership has also become an increasingly common
theme. The earliest such article in ERIC was published in 1978 and a further 92
articles follow in the period to 2009, indicating the persistence of culture as a theme in
the discourse of management and leadership.
This paper sets out to chart the engagement of the field over time and to adopt
‘an alienated perspective’ (Erickson, 1987, p. 15) on culture and educational
leadership; that is, we stand aside from the accumulated history of engagement with
culture in education and attempt to view how it is conceived and to what end with a
more distant and sceptical view. The persistence of recourse to culture as an important
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concept within leadership and management studies suggests that there is a belief that
it must hold inherent value, even if it is not yet clear exactly what that value is. While
we might argue that, for the individual pupil or student, education is simply a project
in cultural exploration, for the teacher or educational leader it is important to consider
the benefits and risks of seeking to understand culture and to attempt to manipulate or
influence it. The paper therefore explores the potential, but also the risks of culture as
a tool of educational leadership.
The sections which follow chart the history of the concept within education,
consider the current position of persisting interest, and map in some detail theoretical
models and their scope. The article finally explores the possible uses of culture and
related risks.
Conceptualising culture
Concepts of culture and the uses to which they are put are situated within the
ontological, epistemological and axiological traditions of different disciplines.
Anthropology, concerned with analysing the similarities and differences between
groups, includes many debates about not only how culture can be conceived, but also
the determinants of culture. Biological, psychological and material factors are
variously weighted in a range of theories. The struggle for a Science of Culture, the
part title of Harris’ (1979) influential volume, reflects an intention to establish reliable
frameworks for identifying and portraying culture. By contrast, from their inception in
the 1960s, cultural studies emphasise agency and a political agenda, seeking to
decipher the evolution of societies and the in/equalities that result reflected in the
everyday and sometimes ephemeral products of culture. Such brief descriptions risk
miniaturising the richness and variety of these and other disciplines concerned with
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culture. The purpose of this partial summary is to situate education’s engagement with
culture. Education has no equivalent rich range of cultural theory, but has eclectically
borrowed from other disciplines. The article explores and critiques educators’ use of
the borrowings. The titles of articles and books suggest that culture in education is
viewed primarily as a tool related narrowly to student inclusion/exclusion and to
raising attainment within educational organisations. The aim of leadership is to
positively influence culture and to use conceptualisations of the nature of culture to
achieve these ends. The anthropological quest to discover reliable patterns, their
determinants and effects has influenced education as leaders search for formulae
relating culture to improvement. However, the resulting descriptions and prescriptions
lack the rigour of the detailed empirical study of anthropology. As such, our thesis is
that the use of the concept of culture is somewhat impoverished in the field of
education and particularly in educational leadership.
A useful way of unravelling the field’s engagement with culture is to chart the
history of it as a concept. Such an approach is challenging, because of the multiple
disciplinary sources, for example, anthropology, philosophy, sociology, cultural
studies and business studies, amongst others (Schoen & Teddlie, 2008). Psychology
has a particular perspective through linking neurological patterns to acculturation
(Lakomski, 2001). The approach of each discipline varies interrelatedly with the
purpose of investigation, with the scope of whom and what are studied, with the
methodology and with the power relationship between the researcher and the
researched. One factor, however, links the disciplinary analyses: dissatisfaction with
the theoretical terrain. Critique echoes down the decades. In the 1970s ‘culture’ is
suggested to be a ‘catch all’ for whatever is needed (Keesing, 1974), in the 1980s it is
a term deliberately used with imprecision (Nias, 1989), in the 1990s it is the most
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vague concept of all (Van den Bouwhuijsen, 1995), and in the 2000s it continues a
long history of ambiguity (Schoen & Teddlie, 2008). Overlain on this dissatisfaction
with the clarity of theory is a twenty-first century post-modern insistence on the
improbability of being able to locate individuals and groups within a discernible
culture. Bhabha (1994), for example, insists belief in homogeneous cultures of nations
or ethnic groups is subject to profound challenge, and Said (1989) charts the
dissolution of faith in language and identity, the tools by which one might describe
any group or its culture. Recent critique has suggested that it may be time to abandon
the concept as useful and adopt alternative theory to examine the differences between
individuals and organisations and the impact of difference on peoples’ lives (Van
Oord, 2008). However, though the concept has been repeatedly deprecated, it has
retained a tenacious hold on the interest of researchers and practitioners alike. Why
leaders persist in valuing the concept of culture is a key question.
The value and risks of culture as a construct for praxis
The challenge for all who observe the human world, whether from an
objective analytical perspective (for example, academics) or from the perspective of
those who need to operate in ‘people environments’ (for example, teachers, leaders
and managers) is to make sense of a bewilderingly complex problem. It is a truism
that every human is individual and unique, yet there is a clear need to make sense,
order and pattern from what we observe, as a basis for action and interaction in that
human world. The concept of culture may be seen as a tool to assist with that process
of making sense of people by providing a mechanism for simplifying, categorising
and describing the human state. We would argue that the concept of culture is
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essentially an intellectual or heuristic device about summary and simplification of the
world of people.
Jenks (1993) developed a typology of culture which has been widely recognised
as distinguishing a number of key elements of how that summary and simplification
works. The key categories are:
1. Culture as a cerebral cognitive category. This sees culture in terms of the
individual and their personal characteristics.
2. Culture as an embodied collective category. This sees culture in terms of the
intellectual development of a group.
3. Culture as a descriptive and concrete category. This sees culture in terms of
artistic and intellectual artefacts and ideas.
4. Culture as a social category. This sees culture as the whole way of life of a
larger group of people.
The key point from Jenks’ typology is that we may consider culture at a range of
scales of analysis, from the individual, to groups, to whole communities (Types 1, 2
and 4), and may also see culture in terms of narrow concepts such as the artefacts or
ideas a group generates (Type 3). But at whatever level we undertake the analysis, the
purpose is to summarise or simplify from the specific to the general.
Such a process of generalisation has a number of important features of which
the user must be aware. Firstly, it will prioritise certain characteristics over others in
reaching the generalisation – it will not be comprehensive. Secondly, the group that is
produced will not be uniform, but will represent a range of individuals distributed
around a typical ‘average’ characteristic. Thirdly, it is most unlikely that any
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individual will match all of the characteristics of the group. What this means is that
such a summary and simplification will be helpful in providing a broad brush picture
or a conceptual framework within which to organise ideas, plans or intentions, but
will inevitably be of limited value when working with individuals, or groups smaller
than the overall scale of analysis. Understanding culture is about understanding the
commonalities that are a satisfactory basis for generalisation.
For the educational leader this means that concepts of culture and the skills of
cultural literacy are both essential sets of attributes and dangerous analytical tools.
Reflecting on culture may provide a helpful way of getting at the broad picture and
understanding the overall characteristics, categories and groups of those we work with
– it is part of the helicopter view required for good leadership and is also part of the
skills of scanning key to a leader’s ability to understand the environment. But the
individuals within the school – or even some of the groups within the school – are the
pixels in the picture, not the picture itself, and understanding the range of pixels that
make up the picture is also an essential skill for leaders and managers.
There is another danger within the concept of culture. Culture is essentially
about comparison; it is a comparative concept. It is a way of saying ‘this person/this
group’ is similar to or different from ‘that person/group’. It is a fundamental, human,
interpersonal process to try to understand people or groups by a process of
comparison with what we already know. Indeed, constant comparison of new
information with what we already know and understand is the very essence of
learning. But comparison isn’t simply a mapping and categorising activity, for it is
fundamentally imbued with values and beliefs. Comparison is not just about ‘different
from’; it is almost always about ‘better or worse than’. As Bates (1987, p. 108)
asserts, all study of culture is ‘saturated with ideology’.
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For the educational leader this means that understanding culture brings with it
some serious risks. By seeking to understand the cultures engaged with the school,
college or university (whether that be of the communities served, the students or their
parents), the educational leader is undertaking a comparative process in which
explicit, but more dangerously, implicit values will be part of the interpretation of the
cultures that are observed (Stephens, 2007). It is fundamentally difficult for any
individual born, educated and working in a dominant cultural context not to see other
cultures in terms of deficit models (i.e. in terms of how the other group is ‘not like
me’). Equally, it is difficult for a leader not to operate in a way in which the power
relationship of organisational structures and processes are not replicated in the power
relationships between cultures and sub-cultures, with associated risks of reinforcing
social difference and existing hegemonies.
Mapping the terrain
An important question, therefore, is how far the elements of power, risk and
utility are reflected in both the conceptualisations of culture within the field of
educational leadership and in the practice of leadership preparation. To understand the
benefits and dangers of engaging with culture, it may be helpful to further map the
terrain of alternative perspectives by examining a range of theoretical models related
to practice, and considering the scope embedded within existing studies.
Culture as Metaphor
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There are myriad definitions of culture, many of them metaphoric in approach.
Cornelissen (2004, p. 706) argues that ‘generally a metaphor’s heuristic value comes
from the two terms or entities (and their respective domains) that it conjoins and the
new light that it casts on a specific target subject’. Metaphors which compare culture
to social DNA or to computer bits (Erickson, 1987) or our metaphor (a picture made
up of pixels) attempt to conceptualise the means by which culture is created and
transmitted. By comparing two things which are different phenomena but bear some
similarity, a metaphor incites careful consideration of points of similarity and
dissimilarity. The nature of the target concept, in this case culture, thereby becomes
clearer. There is, however, a counter-argument that ‘metaphors are deemed as initially
inevitable but eventually detrimental to theoretical development due mainly to their
imprecision and low conceptual content’ (Tsoukas, 1991, p. 566). Metaphors may
both distort perception and encourage imprecision.
The fact that culture is predominantly discussed by means of metaphor may be
therefore significant. Are metaphors used to sharpen an imprecise concept, or is the
imprecision driven by the use of metaphoric language? It seems likely that the
intention may be the former and the effect the latter. Imprecision appears an
unavoidable facet of culture. Erickson (1987) refers to Kroeber and Kluckhohn
(1952), who devote a book to exploring hundreds of variations in the use of the
concept. Much literature adopts a default position of defining culture in general and
rather vague metaphoric terms discernible in relation to a particular group, for
example in Jenks’ (1993) categories 2 and 3.
Scope
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Whose culture is studied is of at least as much interest as how we define the
concept. The focus of the lens has passed from the school or college as a whole, on to
subgroups. While there are many organisational studies of whole-school culture, the
focus on groups is generally on out-groups, those which are explicitly or implicitly
‘disadvantaged’. Bhabha (1994, p. 1) suggests that ‘It is the trope of our time to locate
the question of culture in the realm of the beyond’. The culture of advantaged
subgroups, for example a white leadership team, is much less frequently studied, and
at the same time the recognition of disadvantaged cultural groups typically neglects to
consider that, by definition, there will therefore be advantaged groups in that same
setting. The focus is also generally kept within the bounds of the organisation, and
does not take account of the culture and its impact in the wider community. Tapia
(2002) argues that studying culture within the school misses the essential element of
the culture of home and society, and that without understanding the impact of being
poor, for example, it is not possible to understand the culture of learners and learning
in the more circumscribed domain of the school itself. Bell and Kent (2010) concur,
making ‘external culture’ one of their five-piece jigsaw model for describing culture.
The nuances of how culture is explored may reflect the cultural stance of the
interrogator. The understanding of culture is coloured by culturally defined sensemaking and particularly preconceptions of power relations. Thus, early definitions of
culture refer to the concept as evidence of the acquisition of valued knowledge and
skills which are owned by a small and privileged section of society: high culture
(Bates, 1987). Later definitions reverse the focus, seeing culture as primarily
adaptations in behaviour evident in sections of society which are considered in deficit
intellectually or economically. Marshall (1988) pinpoints criticism of anthropologists’
practice of ‘studying down’ (p. 263) the daily habitual world of primitive cultures,
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focusing on the less powerful. The educational equivalent is to focus on the culture of
those groups of learners or staff who are seen as being in deficit, or problematic in
some way compared to the explicit or implicit norms of those of more privileged
socio-economic status or skin colour or gender. The culture of Asian families or white
working-class boys is seen by some as both discernible as a phenomenon and
influential in shaping the education and life course of constituent members. Culture
has also to some degree become inextricably tied to the idea of ‘multi’ cultural and
the effort needed to celebrate diverse cultures, implying a default position which,
without a conscious project to the contrary, sees them as not worthy of celebration.
This implies, in Said’s phrase, ‘the dreadful secondariness of people’ (1989, p. 207).
The notion of celebrating the culture of white middle-class families does not appear to
justify much critical attention. Culture, so viewed, is a deficit mechanism of survival
in the face of threats such as poverty (Lee, 2008).
Bates (1987) provides a useful distinction between schools’ vertical and
horizontal engagement with culture. Vertical perspectives consider the culture of outgroups, whether characterised by ethnicity, socio-economic background, gender,
behaviour or other characteristic. Horizontal perspectives engage with the dominant
culture of the school. While many of those who research and practice leadership
would argue that their view of minority cultures is entirely positive, the vertical view,
by definition, places subgroup cultures as deviant from the norm. Both the dominant
and subgroup cultures may therefore be perceived as requiring adjustment or
remediation to neutralise potentially harmful effects. Parents, for example, may enrol
children in ‘culturally affirmative schools’ (Dove, 1996, p. 357) with ‘multi-cultural
and bilingual-bicultural education’ (op. cit. p. 365). In the face of evidence of the socalled under-achievement, for example, of African heritage children in schools with
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‘European centered knowledge’ (op. cit. p. 359), schools may place responsibility for
low attainment levels on the cultural orientation of families and communities, and
parents may place it on the cultural defects of the school. In the UK, national policy
attempts to erase the effects of perceived working-class culture by ‘raising
aspirations’. The vertical view of education cultures may argue for assimilation, for
example by inducting all into classic Western knowledge, or for differentiation, for
example by celebrating different religious practices. Leading school culture(s) is
consequently about leading contestation of dis/empowerment, hinging on assimilation
or diversity.
The horizontal view of culture is essentially concerned with effectiveness in
relation to attainment and achievement. The value base of the dominant culture is not
questioned. Rather, the culture of the school is assessed as to how far it produces the
outcomes which are valued by the dominant group. Consider, for example, Stoll and
Fink’s (1996) metaphoric typology of five types of school culture: moving (dynamic
and successful determination to keep developing), cruising (rather complacent, often
with privileged learners who achieve despite little school dynamism), strolling
(neither particularly effective or ineffective, but long term not keeping pace with
change), struggling (ineffective but trying to address issues), and sinking (ineffective
and not improving). This implicitly accepts attainment as the chief goal. Similarly,
Hargreaves’ (1999) formal, welfarist, hothouse and survivalist metaphoric model is
focussed on the degree to which the school supports attainment.
Culture and hegemony
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The analysis above suggests that the issues of power and risk can be identified
within the existing range of theoretical perspectives on culture, but that they have not
been appropriately exposed in critical reflections because of the perceived immediacy
of the utility of culture as an intellectual tool. The notion that ‘there is nothing as
practical as a good theory’ (Lewin, 1935) may have overridden the need for careful
reflection on the issues surrounding the utility of culture as a framework for
leadership action.
There is another dimension of this issue which operates at the macro scale of
the interface between national government policy and political ideology, and which
returns us to the question with which this article began – what are the moral issues
that arise in using culture as a tool for educational leadership? Galbraith (1983, p. 5)
characterised ‘conditioned power’ as a process of persuading or enrolling people in
submission to a new way, but without their conscious awareness of the process of
submission. This implies rather sinister motivations, yet it can be argued that
government policies in many parts of the world have adopted such an approach. They
are seeking to embed a new culture which utilises revised ways of thinking about
students as customers, communities as markets, and leaders as enacting nationally
designated standards. As a result, without necessarily making a conscious choice to do
so, we continue to use the same language to describe schools and colleges, learners
and educators, even though the leadership in question may actually be based on quite
different values to previous eras. School leaders have been implicated in this cultural
change, yet may have been engaged in it without seeing the larger scale ideological
cultural project they have been instrumental in delivering. As long ago as 1987 Bates
challenged the intention of leaders’ engagement with culture, critiquing its use as a
manipulative corporate tool to shape the thinking, aims and practice of students, staff
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and the wider community. A counter-narrative depicts leaders as attempting to
manipulate culture to achieve a more socially just and inclusive education than was
the case in the first half of the twentieth century (Shields & Seltzer, 1997). Others
argue that culture has become largely irrelevant as a theoretical framework (Van
Oord, 2008). Concepts such as identity or political science are suggested to have more
to offer in explaining and accepting, or resisting, the means by which individuals’
education and life trajectories are influenced by organisations and society.
Specifically, alternative concepts may have more explicatory power in relation both to
how educational leaders select or are socialised into behaviours during their
development and to how schools stratify or homogenise their community.
Some are more sanguine, depicting culture as offering a menu of behaviour
choices over which the individual has control (Sparkes, 1991). For example, the
prevalent policy in the UK of ‘raising aspirations’ amongst those who are perceived to
be aiming lower or more narrowly than their abilities might justify, is often linked
with notions of changing the culture within the school and the community (Francis et
al., 2003; Healey & Connolly; 2004; Siann, 1998). The school leader therefore has
power to make changes in structures, processes and artefacts which can impact
positively on how students think about themselves and their future.
Using culture in education
Our critique of the lack of suitable reflection on the nature and applications of
concepts of culture within educational leadership suggests that there are implicit
issues of power relationships and social risks which threaten its utility to leaders.
However, we believe it still provides a perspective that may contribute real ‘value
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added’ to the approaches of both policy developers at supra-institutional levels and
leaders within educational institutions, providing that it is used with full awareness of
its risks and challenges. All of the conceptualisations of culture are simply models, or
abstractions of reality, and do not constitute reality itself, whereas the operational
environment of educational leaders is clearly about real people in real circumstances.
Therefore, there are two themes that we wish to consider in the conclusions to this
paper. The first relates to the implications for the training and development of
educational leaders. The second is about the implications for those seeking to
influence, manipulate or change culture in educational settings.
The training and development of future leaders has emerged as a priority in
many national settings with schemes and training programmes emphasising the role of
leaders in raising educational achievement (Lumby, Crow, & Pashiardis, 2008).
Such training has, in essence, three components: the development of knowledge and
understanding of the environments of leadership; knowledge of the skills and methods
of management and administration; and the development of analytical and strategic
skills. The development of elements of all three components is interrelated in complex
ways, but we would observe that the emphasis in many training contexts has been on
a ‘toolbox’ approach rather than an intellectual development approach. Our analysis
of the nature of culture, and of the balance of risk and utility in using it as a
conceptual framework, emphasises that a toolbox approach to leadership development
is itself risky. There is a danger that the appealing nature of the cultural approach’s
tools will risk their application in the absence of any true understanding of their nature
and risks.
The superficial acknowledgement in many programs that culture is a defining
factor in how students experience education and the outcomes they achieve is
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insufficient. The ‘tick lists’ to measure culture or the brief familiarisation with the
various cultures of minority groups which some provide are dangerous in encouraging
complacency in the face of insufficient critical awareness. Rather, if culture is
acknowledged to be a foundational tool, materials and activities are needed to
encourage students to make their own culture as strange to them as that of others
within their community. Activities which ask participants to describe and critique
their own culture in detail might derail their blindness to the distinctive nature and
implications of the culture of the white middle class, for example. Some
understanding of how other disciplines approach culture and the value base of the
various epistemologies would be useful. Participants may prefer to cut to the chase of
pragmatic tools that appear to offer quick fixes in changing school culture. Such
apparent pragmatism may be counter-productive, embedding existing assumptions
and practice. A key aim of preparation programs might be to ensure knowledge of the
ways in which culture has been conceived and to what ends over time, and to
stimulate deep reflection on how culture might be influenced in the school community
and to encourage active choices about whose purposes are thereby served.
Our second theme in conclusion reflects the discussion pursued in this paper
about implications for educators who attempt to influence or manipulate culture. A
primary challenge is to decide if culture is the right theoretical tool (Van Oord, 2008).
If it is determined that culture is the correct tool, then a more sophisticated
understanding of the culture(s) in question may be needed. Both leaders and policy
makers may need to think more carefully about the relationship of vertical and
horizontal views of culture. Two decades ago, Carroll (1990, p. 350) agued that:
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A learning culture is an organization of diversity in which consensus about
what needs to be known is negotiated through the day-to-day exchanges of its
participants. Common knowledge is not the possession of one generation to be
transmitted to another; it is created through joint transactions among members
of the culture that occur throughout the individual’s lifetime.
What are the implications of such a view of an ongoing co-created epistemology for
those operating within the bounds of a National Curriculum, standards and
standardisation? UK governments repeatedly aver an intention to create more
autonomy and less prescription for educators (Weaver, 2010). This is usually
followed by legislation imposing further prescription. In such circumscribed settings
the creation of knowledge in parallel with the creation of culture is a symbiotic and
testing project, which demands working with both vertical and horizontal perspectives
on culture.
Manipulating the vertical perspective carries particular risks. It may be that the
dominant culture, as transmitted by the majority of white middle-class leaders, is a
barrier to learning. A school context which is experienced as an alien culture may be
an inhibitor of individual learning, thereby blocking the construction of a learning
society. As is so often the case with leadership, an implication of this paper is that
education leaders need to exercise deep reflection and moral acuity both in relation to
the organisation they lead and to their own identity, acculturation and practice. This
must precede consideration of whether and how influencing or manipulating culture
might be relevant to achievement or under-achievement, however judged, within their
school, college or university. Neither competence-based development programmes
nor ‘tick box’ assessments of school culture and the prescriptions for change which
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follow are likely to engage with the underlying value and power bases of culture. The
prevalence of the superficial approach suggests the tenacious hold of culture may be
due in part to its efficacy as a tool of maintaining hegemony and the dominance of
those who traditionally hold power. This article suggests the potential benefits of
education leaders’ engagement with culture, but also exposes multiple and serious
risks.
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