Knowing Educational Administration: Contemporary Methodological Controversies in Educational Administration Research

Educational administration is a field currently undergoing great intellectual change. The dominant scientific tradition now competes with a range of alternative, systematically different, accounts of such major concerns in the field as: the nature of administrative and organizational theory, explaining and improving educational leadership and practice, the place of values and human subjectivity in our accounts of educational organizations, the nature of educational policy and the conduct of research. Knowing Educational Administration surveys and analyzes all of the most important theories in the field. However, as differences among these theories reflect ultimately different philosophical positions, the book offers a new philosophical perspective on educational administration. For administrative theories to count as sound knowledge they must meet the demands of our best theories of knowledge. The book outlines and defends a particular coherentist view of knowledge and then uses that view both to criticize existing administrative theories and to develop a distinctive alternative. The alternative is a new postpositivist science of administration which is able to include ethics and subjectivity within the scope of sound administrative knowledge.