Taking a Distributed Perspective in Studying School Leadership and Management: The Challenge of Study Operations

Recent work suggests that viewing school leadership from a distributed perspective has the potential to provide useful insight into how management and leadership unfold in the daily lives of schools. Writing in the area of distributed leadership has identified numerous entities in the school across which leadership can be distributed, including people and aspects of the situation such as routines and tools (Harris, 2005; MacBeath et al., 2004; Spillane, 2006). While there have been advances in articulating conceptual frameworks for taking a distributed perspective on school leadership and management (Gronn, 2000; Spillane et al., 2004), the empirical research base in this area is less developed. With a few exceptions (Camburn et al., 2003; Leithwood et al., 2007; Spillane et al., 2007), most empirical work has involved small samples of schools. But as we argue in this chapter, before researchers begin to accumulate evidence on distributed leadership in schools, an important intermediate step needs to be taken: the operationalization of concepts, or in other words, the translation of theory into measurement. It is this intermediate step that is the primary focus of this paper. In this chapter, we examine the entailments of the distributed perspective for collecting and analyzing data. We then go a step further and examine the results obtained for different operationalizations of a distributed perspective, considering along the way the strengths and weaknesses of each operationalization. Within the larger domain of distributed leadership, we are concerned with the epistemological and methodological challenges involved in studying the distribution of leadership across people within the school – the leader-plus aspect of a distributed perspective (Spillane, 2006). Researchers who wish to study the leader-plus aspect of distributed leadership face two basic questions: