Search results

The purpose of this paper is to address issues of medical leadership within health systems and to clarify the associated conceptual issues, for example, leadership versus management and medical versus clinical leadership. However, its principle contribution is to raise the issue of the purpose or outcome of medical leadership, and, in this respect, it argues that it is to promote medical engagement.

The approach is to provide evidence, both from the literature and empirically, to suggest that enhanced medical engagement leads to improved organisational performance and, in doing so, to review the associated concepts.

Building on current evidence from the UK and Australia, the authors strengthen previous findings that effective medical leadership underpins the effective organisational performance.

There is a current imbalance between the size of the databases on medical engagement between the UK (very large) and Australia (small but developing).

The authors aim to equip medical leaders with the appropriate skill set to promote and enhance greater medical engagement. The focus of leaders in organisations should be in creating a culture that fosters and supports medical engagement.

This paper provides empowerment of medical professionals to have greater influence in the running of the organisation in which they deliver care.

The paper contains, for the first time, linked performance data from the Care Quality Commission in the UK and from Australia with the new set of medical engagement findings.

This paper investigates the effect of income inequality on health status. A model of health status was specified in which the main variables were income level, income inequality, the level of savings and the level of education. The model was estimated using a panel data set for 44 countries covering six time periods. The results indicate that income inequality (measured by the Gini coefficient) has a significant effect on health status when we control for the levels of income, savings and education. The relationship is consistent regardless of the specification of health status and income. Thus, the study results provide some empirical support for the income inequality hypothesis.

Since the late 1990s, teacher professional development models have shifted from a focus on individual improvement to collaboration as a means to foster support, information, and resource exchange between teachers. Following this shift, researchers began to use social network research methodology in the early 2000s to reveal the ways in which informal relationships affect teachers’ practices. This chapter reviews current literature on teachers’ social networks and teacher quality to describe the ways in which social networks mediate teachers’ practices. It provides detailed examples from two studies on teachers’ social networks and suggests ways that scholars can incorporate the constructs of social capital and social networks into large-scale research on teacher quality.

The role of relationships in the process of leadership and change is central, yet the social aspect of the work of reform is often background in favor of more technical approaches to improvement. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to argue that social network theory and analysis provides a useful theory and set of tools to unpack the complex social work of leadership.

In this paper the authors begin by reviewing social network theory in education to date. The authors identify strengths and gap areas and use findings and data from existing social network studies of educational leadership to highlight major concepts.

Along with empirical examples, the paper proposes four important strands of social network analysis for future research in educational leadership: multiplex networks; multi-mode networks; longitudinal networks; and real time networks.

This paper builds on recent scholarship using social network analysis in educational leadership and suggests that social network theory and methods provides unique and important analytic purchase in the study of educational leadership.

Reflecting on professional learning networks (PLN) in rural and equity-seeking spaces, the authors foreground the importance of “relational space” in studying PLNs in this commentary. The authors argue that while the complexity of taking a relational approach is challenging, it offers an important and necessary perspective, one which is often implicit in the studies featured in this book but not explicitly considered. The chapter is organized around three broad concepts from social network theory – boundedness, connectedness, and mutuality – which serve as starting points for shifting our gaze from formal system structures to more deeply interrogating the informal relational spaces within PLNs. The authors conclude with a call to make use of network theory and methods on their own, and in complement to other literatures, to do so.

While in everyday practice, school leaders are often involved in social relationships with a variety of stakeholders both within and outside their own schools, studies on school leaders’ networks often focus either on networks within or outside schools. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which principals occupy similar positions in their school’s network and the larger district network. In addition, the authors examined whether principals’ centrality in both networks can be attributed to demographic characteristics and transformational leadership (TL).

Using social network analysis, correlational and regression analysis, and an advanced social network technique, namely p2 modeling, the authors analyzed data collected among 708 educators in 46 Dutch elementary schools. The authors also offer a visualization of the district social network to explore principals’ relationships with other principals in the district.

Results suggest that principals who occupy a central position in their school’s advice network are also more likely to occupy a central position in their district’s collaborative leadership network. Moreover, TL was found to affect the extent to which principals are central in both networks.

The study is unique as it simultaneously explores principals’ social relationships in schools and the larger district. Moreover, the authors advance the knowledge of TL as a possible mechanism that may shape the pattern of these relationships, thereby connecting two streams of literature that were until now largely disconnected. Limitations to the study warrant further qualitative and longitudinal research on principals’ social relationships in schools, districts, and the larger community.

There is a widely accepted myth in New Zealand that the Elam School of Fine Arts in the University of Auckland is an organised anarchy, internally divided and cantankerously unbiddable, and further, that this is largely inevitable given the nature of artists and designers. Its unique culture, however, is shown in this paper to have been generated and reinforced over decades by the exigencies of environment, partitioned and media‐based curricular structures, intense and volatile relationships, and, occasionally, inappropriate leadership services. Despite this history, Elam has sustained a major role in shaping New Zealand’s cultural identity, and continues to produce some of the country’s most outstanding visual artists and designers. The paradox involved is partially explained by persistent evidence of self‐managing teams, creative problem‐solving, and independent excellence, that suggest deep and plural commitments to a virtue ethic.