Editorial

International Journal of Educational Management

ISSN: 0951-354X

Article publication date: 28 March 2008

329

Citation

Roberts, B. (2008), "Editorial", International Journal of Educational Management, Vol. 22 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijem.2008.06022caa.001

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2008, Emerald Group Publishing Limited


Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Educational Management, Volume 22, Issue 3.

Welcome colleagues again to the third issue for 2008. Recently I have attended the UCEA conference in Washington and it was indeed a great pleasure to meet so many of you connected with the journal and with whom I have corresponded for many years without ever having met some of you! Of course there were many useful presentations and I had the pleasure of being a co-presenter with Ray Calabrese and other colleagues in a unique world wide link using the latest technology (it worked in most instances!). At some future stage there may be a paper on the issues raised in the presentation. However to concentrate on this journal issue there are six papers with Australia, New Zealand, USA, UK and Malaysia being the main contributors.

The first paper belongs to Dr Don Adams and Associate Professor David Gamage of the University of Newcastle, Australia write on the leadership effectiveness in a large vocational education and training establishment in New South Wales. The paper focuses on the effectiveness of head teacher leadership with the technical and vocational area. The results suggest that the effectiveness of the head teacher leadership need to be improved substantially. More specifically, there was a significant difference between the self perceived leadership effectiveness of the head teachers and the leadership effectiveness perceived by teachers. The study also showed that the effects of gender, length of service as a head teacher or time in other educational specifics did not affect substantially the head teacher leadership effectiveness.

In the next paper, Professor Tim Mazzarol and Professor Geoff Soutar of the University of Western Australia combine to produce work on the Australian institutions’ international markets. The paper recognizes the global market for students and the highly competitive nature of it where institutions rely on income from international students. The study examines the countries from which Australian education institutions draw their students and use the information to better understand the patterns. Three groups were clear local players, global players, and minor players in which the latter only periodically recruited international students. The paper suggests that managers in educational institutions seeking to engage in overseas markets must make a strategic choice as to the level of their commitment to internationalisation and that this will impact on the choices they make about the way they recruit international students.

Again from the Southern hemisphere, Professor Graham Elkin, Dr John Farnsworth and Dr Andrew Templer make a contribution on Strategy and the Internationalisation of Universities, in which the relationship between having a complete strategic focus and the extent of internationalisation on university business schools, and the level of desire for future internationalisation is explored. Data was collected for business schools and business facilities using the Elkin, Devjee model of internationalisation concerning the current and desired levels of internationalisation of the business schools. In addition, schools were asked six key questions about strategic focus. It was observed that the schools with complete strategic focus had higher levels of current internationalisation and greater aspirations for even higher levels of internationalisation than schools without a complete strategic focus. It was also found that there may be a connection between research intensivity and internationalisation.

John Garger, Metronome Computer Services, and Dr Paul Jacques of Western Carolina University, USA contribute on student perceptions of leadership. Students in a mid-sized public university completed surveys to assess perceptions of instructors’ intellectual stimulation and individualised consideration leadership behaviours. Within and Between Analysis was used to determine how leadership operates within this education environment. The results suggest that a Leader-Member Exchange relationship exists between student and instructor. Implications and future research possibilities are discussed.

From the Faculty of Educational Studies at the University Putra Malaysia, Dr Jamaliah Abdul Hamid writes on knowledge strategies of school administrators and teachers. Her contention is that the knowledge strategies of individuals vary depending upon their intended purpose. In a common work environment, such as a school, the knowledge strategies of the staff reflect certain similarities. This research highlights the knowledge strategies of school administrators and teachers in schools to acquire, share, and use information. Analysis was also done on differences of strategies which are attributed to factors such as work experience, areas of specialisation and ICT competence. The study was carried out through a survey questionnaire to more than 700 respondents in 40 schools in Malaysia. Results showed that school administrators had a higher repertoire of knowledge strategies than teachers, and that for both groups, the strategies to acquire knowledge were the highest in comparison to knowledge sharing and utilisation. ICT competence was a significant contributory factor to differences in knowledge strategies.

In issue four of 2008 a number of international papers are included in a special issue edited jointly by Professor Petros Pashiardis of the Open University of Cyprus and Dr Paul Gibbs of Middlesex University. The paper in this current issue by Paul Gibbs is by way of a prelude to the special issue as it was not possible to include it in the special because of space. However, it is appropriate to present it here on the topic of marketers and educationalists. In this paper the author suggests that marketing as a technology of the market has contributed to the foreshortening of educational horizons within which we act or observe but which we are only able to hold for a short period. To satisfy this demand for more time, marketing has contributed to the “commoditisation” of consumption patterns in time and foreshortened the acceptable range in which consumption can be achieved. Marketing has contributed to change in the essence of educational provision. Moreover, the clash of “temporalities” of marketing and liberal education creates a tension that directly affects the provision of education. This can be seen in lifelong education which it is suggested is functionally a series of short bite-sized exposures to learning, readily consumable one after the other.

Brian Roberts

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