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Because administration is the process of making decisions and because values are an important part of administrative culture, values are important in administrative work. The value orientations of American public school superintendents are described. Interviews with 15 Midwestern superintendents provided the data for the study. Responses to explicit questions about values are reported regarding the qualities valued in subordinates, the factors that have limited professional success, and criteria used to determine successful problem resolution. Superintendents were also asked to describe the most serious problems they had faced in their careers and their greatest achievements. Analysis of the data indicated that superintendents as a group valued human skills over either technical or conceptual skills. Though superintendents said that they value individual discretion among subordinates, they see it as a limited and qualified opportunity. Those interviewed demonstrated a selective management memory, finding it easier to describe their past accomplishments than serious problems they had encountered during their careers. In general, they did not focus on limitations, problems or failures. Most of those interviewed showed little inclination to retrospective analysis of administrative actions, contrary to contemporary calls for more reflective practitioners.

Describes the everyday micropolitical facilitative strategies and personal characteristics of exemplary school principals who have influenced and enhanced teachers’ sense of empowerment. The data discussed here were drawn from a qualitative study of teachers in 11 schools affiliated with Glickman’s League of Professional Schools in Georgia. An open‐ended questionnaire designed by the researchers, according to general guidelines for grounded theory inquiry, provided teachers with the opportunity to identify and describe in detail characteristics of principals that enhanced their sense of empowerment. Inductive analyses of the data generated a description of facilitative leadership that includes seven major “facilitative” strategies and one set of facilitative personal characteristics that enhanced teacher empowerment. Focuses on the strategies and characteristics teachers identified as facilitative principal leadership. Discusses findings in terms of the relevant empirical and theoretical literature.

Research shows that the rates of return to citation are substantial in the context of the academic reward system. Since quantitative performance measures, notably publication and citation counts, are associated strongly with life‐cycle remuneration and career mobility, both should be utilised in research assessment exercises. This paper brings together empirical findings from the non‐interacting research literatures of economics and information science to make the case for using citation rates as a valid and cost‐effective proxy for quality in certain disciplines.

The genesis of the moral leadership concept in educational administration and examples of studies exploring this idea during the 1979‐2003 period are discussed. The author recommends more contextually sensitive descriptive studies with a focus on the social relations among school leaders and others, giving particular attention, in a phenomenological sense, to the meanings, perspectives, and espoused purposes of school leaders’ actions, social relationships, and interpersonal orientations.

As part of a major study, an attempt was made to examine the organizational values of secondary schools in Hong Kong with a self‐constructed, standardised instrument, the School Values Inventory. Values are chosen, because organizations are not only theory‐laden, but are also value‐laden and the sharing of organizational values are the binding forces that hold an organization together. Using LISREL confirmatory factor analytic modelling techniques and based on a sample of 554 teachers from 44 secondary schools in Hong Kong, a four‐factor model of organizational values was developed. The model which, precisely and concisely, concludes binding forces in Hong Kong schools as bureaucratic linkage, cultural linkage, tight coupling, and loose coupling provides an insight to understand school administration and organizational cultures.

This research seeks to explore the inevitable internal struggle experienced by school leaders when making ethically‐informed judgments. The study acquired principals' intimate reflections about professional decision making in response to personal versus organizational and/or professional value discrepancy as identified in the ethic of the profession and its model for promoting students' best interests.

A modified phenomenological research method, appropriate for an educational research context, was used to capture administrators' perspectives about moral practice and decision‐making experiences. The primary data collection strategy was participant interviews by means of purposeful sampling.

A clash between personal beliefs and values and organizational/professional expectations was very real for participants. The experience was generally frequent, but varied among principals. The struggle can be characterized as a phenomenon of intrapersonal moral discord experienced as part of the process of deciding ethically when faced with difficult moral choices.

The study contributes to the understanding of moral conflict in school leadership as an intrapersonal moral phenomenon, and how the conflict is resolved in practice, while providing insights into a more recently defined and theorized professional ethic for educational leadership. The study offers empirically derived knowledge for theory building and offers conceptual clarification of the moral leadership construct.

Moral judgment was complicated and contextually defined for participants. Administrators reported various ways of dealing with the nuances of personal and organizational value incongruity in order to engage in ethical decision making, including relying on, in some instances, a fundamental professional injunction.

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.

There has been a great deal of research published on the lower success rates of women and underrepresented (UR) students in Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics-related (STEM) occupations. For biomedical scientists in particular, many of the obstacles to success occur during graduate training and may be related, at least in part, to certain demographic characteristics (i.e. gender or ethnicity). In particular, women and UR students may be positioned disproportionately into labs with fewer resources and less productive faculty advisors. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The present study examines the distribution of biomedical science graduate students into research laboratories, based on the gender and ethnicity of both students and faculty advisors. This is archival data that were collected via publicly available information on the internet.

Results indicate that female (vs male) students and UR (vs white and Asian) students are paired with advisors who are less successful (i.e. fewer publications, lower h-indices). Additionally, the data show patterns of homophily in that female (vs male) and white and Asian (vs UR) students are more likely to be paired with female and white and Asian advisors, respectively.

This research uses real-world, archival data to demonstrate that phenomena suggested in previous literature (e.g. less favorable pairings for female and UR students, homophilic pairings) occurs with this specific population.

The purpose of this paper is to identify what job‐related, individual, and profession‐related variables cause the intention to quit teaching among the early career teachers, especially teachers of Ethiopia.

Quit intentions were measured adapting the scale developed by Mueller and Lawler, and 11 profession‐related and person‐related job variables were measured by author‐developed and literature‐derived scale items on a five‐point Likert scale, along with five status variables. Data were analyzed from a sample of 308 early career teachers belonging to secondary and preparatory schools of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

An alarming 53 per cent sample expressed high quit intention whereas only 13 per cent teachers showed low quit intentions. Choice satisfaction (accounting 44 per cent variance), availability of other job opportunities (23 per cent variance), perceived status (15 per cent variance), and self‐accountability (13 per cent variance) emerged as predictor variables. None of the five status variables emerged as significant predictors. Commitment to teaching profession was not a significant predictor, suggesting the two concepts independent of each other.

Providing freedom of choice at entry level to teaching profession coupled with enhancing rigour in pre‐service education was suggested as major steps required for decreasing high‐level quit intentions.

Education policy needs to be such that for preparation of teachers of secondary and preparatory level, pre‐service teacher education students should have attained maturity of adulthood with a minimum academic attainment of a post‐undergraduate level or a post‐graduate level. This is to enable early career teachers to handle adolescence‐level school students by being equipped with better skills learned during pre‐service teacher education.

The results are pertinent not only to Ethiopia but also to any less developed or a developing country, where “catch them early” policy is followed for pre‐service education and where less rigorous pre‐service education exists.

The purpose of this paper is to engage in a thought experiment, exploring the use of Wikipedia or similar content‐malleable systems for the review and dissemination of academic knowledge.

By looking at other sources, the paper considers the current state of the academic peer‐review process, discusses Wikipedia and reflects on dynamic content creation and management applications currently in use in academia.

The traditional peer review process must be updated to match the rapid creation and diffusion of knowledge that characterises the 21st century. The Wikipedia concept is a potential model for more rapid and reliable dissemination of scholarly knowledge. The implications of such a concept would have a dramatic effect on the academic community.

This paper promotes a radical idea for changing the methods by which academic knowledge is both constructed and disseminated.