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The legacy of educationaladministration: a historical analysis ofan academic fieldKhalid Husny Arar aa The College of Academic Studies, Graduate School of Education,Or Yehuda , IsraelPublished online: 02 Feb 2012.

To cite this article: Khalid Husny Arar (2012) The legacy of educational administration: a historicalanalysis of an academic field, School Leadership & Management: Formerly School Organisation,32:1, 103-105, DOI: 10.1080/13632434.2011.642355

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BOOK REVIEW

The legacy of educational administration: a historical analysis of an academic field,

by I. Oplatka, Frankfurt, Peter Lang, 2010, 209 pp., £33.00 (paperback), ISBN

978-3-631-60007-8

Although much has been written on educational administration and leadership, only

few authors have focused on scholarly development of the field of Educational

Administration (EA) epistemology. Gunter and Ribbins’ (2003) work is an

exception. There has been no attempt to trace the philosophical and historical

foundations of this academic field of study that deals with the management and

operation of educational organisations.

Izhar Oplatka’s book reviews important epistemological developments in the

field of EA since the early 1960s, explaining that this is a ‘field considered to be

fragmented into many unconnected views and paradigms’ (Oplatka 2009, 10). In

order to delimit and describe the field of EA, the author poses several pertinent

questions, inquiring: which issues should be included within the field of EA? Which

core topics have characterised this field in each of the last five decades? What is its

unique identity? What has been published and which methodological tools are

employed by scholars and researchers active in this field?

To answer these questions the author conducts a qualitative analysis of the

content of the three original academic journals in the field (EAQ, JEA, EMAL)

and four other major journals appearing from the 1980s onward (SLM, LPS US,

IJLE, IJEM).

The book includes seven chapters: the first chapter identifies the boundaries and

structure of the academic field: ‘the discipline has three basic goals: to transmit, to

extend and to apply knowledge relating to EA’ (12), and provides the reader with the

EA field’s theoretical background.

The next three chapters describe the scholarly work published in the field’s

journals in the last 50 years. Oplatka exposes readers to a variety of topics and

empirical directions and implicitly indicates the field’s purposes and boundaries in

each decade. Glatter’s definition of this field (cited in Bush 2007, 1) indicates the

different levels of consideration that the field covers:

Educational management is concerned with the internal operation of educationalinstitutions, and also with their relationships with their environment, that is, thecommunities in which they are set, and with the governing bodies to which they areformally responsible.

Oplatka notes the ‘trendy’ nature of the field and the challenges involved in

designating its future directions. He considers the extent to which current research

and scholarship is relevant for the improvement of educational practice and to

School Leadership & Management

Vol. 32, No. 1, February 2012, 103�105

ISSN 1363-2434 print/ISSN 1364-2626 online

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address important educational problems, noting the nature of the accumulated

knowledge and disciplinary outcomes. He points out issues that have not been

previously addressed within EA as a distinct scientific applied field.

In contrast to the view that this is a fragmented and non-cohesive field of

knowledge, Oplatka advocates the perception that the field of EA has a particular

although diffuse and wide-branching intellectual identity, demarcated by boundaries,

which are discernable throughout its history.

The next four chapters present Oplatka’s analysis of journals in this field over five

decades, relating to contents, types of work, authorship styles and methodologies,

distinguishing core, prominent and minor topics to demonstrate the field’s research

trends and areas of study in each decade. He describes how during the 1960s and

1970s EA as a field of study was exported from the USA to other countries, leading

to the establishment of professional organisations that represented the field around

the world (British Educational Leadership and Management Society [BELMAS], the

Commonwealth Council for EA and Management [CCEAM], the European forum

in EA [EFEA] and the Australian Council for EA). These organisations aim to foster

high-quality standards in the practice and study of EA at all levels (47).

In the 1990s, in many western countries, as a result of disappointing student

achievements, the political spotlight was focused on education as it never had been

before with the adoption of privatisation, accountability and marketing tactics in

order to ‘save’ the national educational systems and improve students’ academic

achievements. Significant interest was expressed in the study of education systems

and schools in these countries, highlighting policy and management issues. New

journals were created with a strong international orientation, so that the field’s

knowledge base was now produced by international scholars from the four corners of

the earth (107), relating to diverse topics and research issues. This increased

academic activity has led to the prominence of the issues of educational leadership

and educational reform as core areas of study, including attempts to explore the

principal’s role and career, policy and governance, change and innovation and school

accountability and evaluation (110). However, Oplatka notes that:

what came to light in the 1990s, . . . was the upsurge of varied, fragmented knowledgeproduction, expressed by a massive generation of paradigms, essays, empirical works,case studies and the production of knowledge in a host of global countries. (Oplatka2010, 138)

In the sixth chapter, the author provides a reflective perspective on the field,

indicating how globalisation has influenced the spread of multiculturalism and

pluralism. Similarly, he demonstrates how the international academic organisations

influenced economic, social, technological and cultural phenomena, and stimulated

governments to review educational policy, pointing out the need for effective

leadership development for school improvement and fostering equity in schools. This

shift by the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the new millennium generated an

increase in the appearance of new core areas of study (leadership, reforms,

principalship, change, moral and ethical dimension in educational leadership), while

older areas of study with intellectual origins in other disciplines (e.g. economics of

education, sociology of education, higher education) almost vanished.

104 Book review

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One salient conclusion from this period was that the study of educational

leadership and affiliated subjects are critically important for school organisation.

This conceptualisation that highlights the issue of educational leadership has done

much to assist policy-makers and practitioners in improving public education andrestructuring it to accommodate to the needs of our changing world. This influential

and effective role, pointing to and providing knowledge on crucial issues of concern,

in turn, provides social legitimacy and epistemological justification for EA as a field

of study both in the academic world and in educational systems worldwide.

Most interesting, and in my view, most commendable, is the final chapter, in

which the author tries to successfully answer the question ‘What is EA?’, identifying

the glue that binds the field’s members together and distinguishing EA from other

administration studies. Oplatka notes the dynamic nature of the field and its legacy,again highlighting the contribution of research in educational leadership and

affiliated areas of study to school organisation.

Despite Oplatka’s contribution, it is clear that the formation of a distinctive

identity for this applied field necessitates some sort of international agreement

concerning the core areas of the field and a move beyond contextual influences and

constraints.

As a scholar in leadership in education, I found this book very interesting and

informative, as the author successfully explores and outlines the distinctiveintellectual identity of the field, which crosses local contextual and international

arenas. His conclusions are based authentically in the writings and scholarship of EA

field members throughout the last 50 years; he indicates the common characteristics

of the work of these international scholars that tie them together into a field called

EA, and clearly distinguish the field from other educational fields of studies.

The book is highly recommended for scholars and teachers of educational

administration and leadership and for policy-makers who seek to promote high-

quality school leadership and administration, as it identifies the field’s streams andresearch topics in both the theoretical and applied levels. The book may also act as a

compass for journal editors in EA, as it points to the foci of the field’s discourse and

specific issues of concern, indicating both local contextual and international agendas

for theoretical and applied research in the EA field.

References

Bush, T. 2007. Theories of educational leadership and management. 3rd ed. London: Sage.Gunter, H.M, and P. Ribbins. 2003. The field of educational leadership: Studying maps and

mapping studies. British Journal of Educational Studies 51, no. 3: 254�81.Oplatka, I. 2009. The field of educational administration: An historical overview of scholarly

attempts to recognize epistemological identities, meanings and boundaries from the 1960sonwards. Journal of Educational Administration 47, no. 1: 8�35.

Oplatka, I. 2010. The legacy of educational administration: A historical analysis of an academicfield. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Khalid Husny Arar

The College of Academic Studies

Graduate School of Education, Or Yehuda, Israel

khalidarar@hotmail.com

# 2012, Khalid Husny Arar

School Leadership & Management 105

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