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Examines leadership and school restructuring. Drawing upon postmodern/poststructural theory, argues that a new conception of educational leadership is required as reformers contemplate educational reconfiguration. Argues that the metaphorical notion of leadership as design is appropriate and valuable as reformers seek to consider plans to restructure schools. Traces the likely practical bearings of leadership as design upon the roles, rules, relationships, and results attached to present‐day school restructuring efforts.

Since the late 1980s we’ve been inspired by feminist theorizing to interrogate our field of organization studies, looking critically at the questions it asks, at the underlying premises of the theories allowing for such questions, and by articulating alternative premises as a way of suggesting other theories and thus other questions the field may need to ask. In so doing, our collaborative work has applied insights from feminist theorizing and cultural studies to topics such as leadership, entrepreneurship, globalization, business ethics, issues of work and family, and more recently to sustainability. This text is a retrospective on our attempts at intervening in our field, where we sought to make it more fundamentally responsive to problems in the world we live in and, from this reflective position, considering how and why our field’s conventional theories and practices – despite good intentions – may be unable to do so.

This chapter explicates the theoretical basis and contribution of poststructuralism to the study of strategy and strategic management. More specifically, it focuses upon Foucauldian analysis which is contrasted to rationalist and interpretivist studies. Foucauldian analysis is not regarded as a corrective but as an addition to these established approaches to studying strategy. Notably, Foucault's work draws attention to how discourse constitutes, disciplines and legitimizes particular forms of executive identity (‘strategists’) and management practice (‘strategizing’). We highlight how Foucault's poststructuralist thinking points to unexplored performative effects of rationalist and interpretivist studies of strategy. Foucault is insistent upon the indivisibility of knowledge and power, where relations of power within organizations, and in academia, are understood to rely upon, but also operate to maintain and transform, particular ‘discourses of truth’ such as the discourses of ‘shareholder value’ and ‘objectivity’. Discourse, in Foucauldian analysis, is not a more or less imperfect, or ineffective, means of representing objects such as strategy. Rather, it is performative in, for example, producing the widely taken-or-granted truth that ‘organization’ is separate from ‘environment’. In turn, the production of this distinction is seen to enable and sanction particular and, arguably, predatory forms of knowledge, in which the formulation and application of strategy is represented as neutral, mirror-like and/or functional.

Care-fully attending to the ontologies embedded within educational research, this chapter provokes readers to consider the epistemic worlding of qualitative research. Drawing on the intersections of feminist poststructuralism, post-humanism, and new material feminisms, educational research can be seen as happening to worlds while also making worlds. As such, educational researchers are invited to care for the ethical entanglement among the research, researcher, researched, and reader. Bringing diverse mo(ve)ments into conversation, a minor sequence for decentering the educational researcher is presented. One example is the destabilization of conventional data triangulation through “Talking Triads.” Thinking with/in a multimodal triad gestures toward the possibility of engaging all scholarship as an intimate endeavor. More specifically, this chapter begins to illuminate how textual re/presentations of becoming-minor inherently raise tensions between nonhuman structures (e.g., time, tradition, concepts, mirrors, literature) and the human experience of being-educational researcher. From mirrors to monsters, the manifestation of “I” becomes-with/in that which is more than human.

This chapter addresses growing concerns that, despite being a radically intentioned community, Critical Management Studies (CMS) lacks an orientation to achieve pragmatic change. In response I argue that the failure to address the continuing marginalisation of the subaltern is key to CMS being negatively represented as an elitist self-preoccupied endeavour. This state of affairs is linked to a legacy of the ‘postmodern’ turn, which emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, as evidenced by the nature of contemporary debates continuing to reflect the stylistic fetishes of that time. I contend that the ghost of postmodernism is evident in the continuing predilection to produce signification discourses marked by symbolic absences, which politically confine such texts to the level of epistemology. The lack of integration of ontological concerns means that corporeal aspects of daily life are neglected, resulting in an abstracted ‘subjectless’ mode of representation. To address these limitations, a feminist activist version of post-structuralism (PSF) of the time is revisited, which through its distinctive attention to community concerns, enabled the linking of epistemological and ontological representations; thereby facilitating the creation of a framework for pragmatic change. As the chapter demonstrates, by drawing attention to the integral relationship between the modes of representation, power relations and subsequent social effects, poststructuralist feminists were able to achieve praxis outcomes. Accordingly, I argue this treasure house of ideas needs to be reclaimed and provides illustrations of the design principles proffered to support my contentions.

This chapter draws on a study on Adivasi identities in a context of protracted violence and conflict in India. The chapter examines the ethical issues that emerged during the research with young people, through a critical exploration of researcher positionality and power. The chapter is informed by a naturalistic inquiry into community interactions and youth voice in an area of civil unrest in India, and specifically, with young people from the historically marginalised Adivasi community. I reflect on my theoretical transition to poststructuralism in the doing of this research, enriched by postcolonial and feminist perspectives, which emphasises the centrality of context and the inextricability of the researcher from the researched. By critically reflecting on my power and positionality as an adult researcher, I question how the particular context of the young participants, my presence and participation within it produced particular responses, understandings and identities of young people. These understandings are entangled with ethical challenges in relation to the navigation of the research context, gendering and hierarchisation within local community relations. In encountering these complexities, my ethical positioning raises questions about ‘representation’ in the capturing of youth voices in the Indian context. The chapter suggests an articulation and linking of the ethical tensions to a substantiation of the theoretical and methodological framings of research, informed through the research context and the researcher’s positionality.