Questioning Leadership. The Greenfield Legacy

Citation

Clarke, S. (2005), "Questioning Leadership. The Greenfield Legacy", Journal of Educational Administration, Vol. 43 No. 2, pp. 235-238. https://doi.org/10.1108/09578230510586632

The title of this book is rather misleading for its concern is not with leadership per se but with the broad field of educational administration. As such, the book comprises a selection of essays written by eminent scholars who are familiar with Greenfield's ideas and the discourse surrounding research in the field. Indeed, many of the contributors were colleagues of the man who has been credited with causing a revolution in the theory of educational administration. The aims of the book are claimed to be threefold. First, to provide a critical examination of Greenfield's ideas. Second, to formulate a research agenda based on Greenfield's ideas and third, to continue the conversation about the foundations and practice of administration.

For this purpose, the essays are organised into five sections: “Greenfield's Approach” that examines the background to his work as chronicled by people who had a close personal and professional relationship with Greenfield; “Interpretative Approaches” focussing on developing the orientation upon which Greenfield's approach to educational administration was based; “Reconstituted Approaches” that considers Greenfield's views on research and looks at ways in which these ideas can be accommodated within more conventional approaches to educational administration; “Critical Approaches” consisting of critical analyses of Greenfield's work; and “Inquiry and the Practitioner” that examines Greenfield's ideas as they might be used to develop an agenda for inquiry in educational administration.

Although these sections to the book enable the reader to view Greenfield's contribution to the field through different lenses, there is, inevitably a good deal of overlap between one section and another. In particular, a constant theme throughout the book is the conceptual journey that was undertaken by Greenfield during his academic career. Lauretta Baker describes this journey as “tortuous and metamorphic” (p. 112) and it began, paradoxically perhaps, with a positivist and essentially quantitative orientation towards his thinking, research, and writing.

It seems to have been a relatively mundane encounter with what Greenfield described as the “Realpolitik of organizations” (p. 35) while he was Head of Department at OISE (University of Toronto) that provided the catalyst for him to doubt the capacity of the positivist quest to develop a theory of organisational behaviour with predictive power. An unexpected incident involving a close colleague determined that Greenfield would embrace the premise that the people who comprise organizations are not like the inanimate objects of physical science. On the contrary, they are complex, wilful and volitional, disorderly and unpredictable.

The most celebrated expression of this new direction in Greenfield's thinking was contained in his paper Theory About Organisation: A New Perspective and Its Implications for Schools, presented at the Third International Intervisitation Programme in Bristol in 1974. In this now infamous address he exposed the frailties of the framework for inquiry considered by the majority of the scholars in the field to have most potential for developing a theory of organisational behaviour. He was especially critical of the notion, integral to the hegemonic “theory movement” of the time, that organizations are capable of existing separately from the people who make them up and that it was possible to formulate inviolable principles for guiding effective organisational action. At a more pragmatic level, he was concerned that this approach to administration may imbue administrators with the simplistic idea that a “golden rule book” was available that could be applied to the administration of organizations regardless of context.

Hence, Greenfield suggested that human organizations, rather than displaying a natural underlying order, are in effect, existential realities characterised by complexity, uncertainty and willfulness. In setting out a new subjectivist agenda for future enquiry into organizations, Greenfield argued that an increased emphasis should be placed on understanding power relations, conflicts, values and moral dilemmas in educational leadership. From this perspective, organizations cannot be studied in the way positivistic social scientists believed that they could.

This, then, became Greenfield's alternative position on theory and inquiry into educational administration that Derek Allison describes graphically as “letting the Genie of social constructivism out of the epistemological bag” (p. 189). As one would expect, it is also this position that is the subject of considerable deliberation throughout the pages of the book. Perhaps a particularly revealing comment made by Daniel Griffiths, one of Greenfield's intellectual sparring partners in the aftermath of the Bristol address, provides us with some insight into why the long‐term impact of Greenfield's ideas has generated so much debate. In his contribution to the book, Griffiths confides that he has “never understood why he (Greenfield) spent a third of his life critiquing a movement that was over in 1965” (p. 146). This comment, in itself, invites speculation as to the legacy of Greenfield's approach to the study of educational administration.

The nature of Greenfield's legacy for the field is well argued by James Ryan in one of the latter chapters which serves to synthesise many of the arguments raised elsewhere in the book. Ryan contends that the most obvious service Greenfield did for scholars and practitioners was to expose the deficiencies of a positivistic approach to the study of educational administration. He concedes that Greenfield was not the first to question this approach but, for whatever reason, he had the greatest impact in the field. The debate continues, however, as to whether a reconstituted approach to inquiry in the area can occur without abandoning the traditional paradigm completely or whether, as Colin Evers reiterates in the book, it is possible to accommodate Greenfield's subjectivist position on human organizations within administrative theory that also coheres with natural science and all its explanatory resources.

As Ryan points out, regardless of the direction that the field of educational administration eventually takes, one thing that Greenfield has left us with is the realisation that social inquiry is likely to be sharpened if it is based on an acknowledgement that organizations are disorderly, complex, chaotic and above all, unpredictable places. It is this realisation that provides a realistic understanding of organisational life that may help those within their settings to lead and manage effectively.

In fact, Carol Harris argues in her chapter that Greenfield's post‐positivist work is more relevant today than when it first appeared in the mid‐1970s. In support of her observation, she goes on to restate one of Greenfield's hopes that he has “helped us goldfish see the water in which we swim if only to assure that the water is indeed murky” (p. 118). Peter Ribbins also employs the tool of figurative language in making his judgement that because of Greenfield's contribution we have been able “to stand on a giant's shoulders as we peer into the future and in doing so strive to redefine educational administration in order to meet the challenge of the new millennium” (p. 54).

It is, perhaps, indicative of the theoretical turbulence that continues to characterise inquiry into educational administration that the book does not quite define the shape of the phoenix that Greenfield hoped would eventually emerge from the ashes that he had strewn across the old field. It is, however, a scholarly and beautifully written examination of Thomas Barr Greenfield's work and a measured assessment of its application to current research in educational administration. In addition, it contains a good deal of biographical background that engages the reader and helps explain the personal and professional influences that were brought to bear on the evolution of Greenfield's thinking – in this regard, Peter Gronn's chapter is especially poignant. Another intriguing aspect of the book is the fascinating insight that it provides into the dynamics of intellectual debate as it wrestles with the introduction of an unorthodox idea.

The book should be compulsory reading for academics who wish to follow the changing discourse of educational administration and its implications for practice. Nevertheless, after reading the book one is left with lingering doubts about whether hard‐pressed school leaders and administrators would be able to engage fully with the all the polemics of theory development. Ironically, they tend to be preoccupied in dealing with disorderly, complex, chaotic and unpredictable organizations on a day‐to‐day basis. As far as these people are concerned, Greenfield might have hit the mark with his observation that, “In the end we must be content simply with knowledge that gets us through the day, preferably happily”! (p. 128).