THEORETICAL FRAMING
3.3. DEVELOPING A GRADED THEORETICAL FRAMING THROUGH THE CHARACTERISATIONS OF DISTRIBUTED THROUGH THE CHARACTERISATIONS OF DISTRIBUTED
Leadership activity is constituted in the interaction of multiple leaders (and followers) using particular tools and artifacts around particular leadership tasks. In this scheme, what is critical are the interdependencies (authors’
emphasis) among the constitutive elements – leaders, followers, and the situation – of leadership activity (2004, p. 16).
Within this framing of distributed leadership as practice lies the possibility of a variety of relationships and connections between and amongst people, depending on the situation at hand. In order to clarify further the nature of relationships between leaders and followers in particular situations, I found Gunter’s (2005) characterisations of distributed leadership useful to describe and explain the nature of the relationships and the location of power within the practice of leadership in my study. I now move on in the next section to present these characterisations of distributed leadership. However, I keep this discussion relatively brief because the entire Chapter Ten of this thesis is dedicated to the insights gathered through the application of the characterisations during the synthesis process in my study.
3.3. DEVELOPING A GRADED THEORETICAL FRAMING
I adopted Gunter’s (2005) three characterisations of distributed leadership to varying degrees in the fourth (pp. 53 – 54)65, fifth (pp. 87 – 88)66, sixth (pp. 291 - 292)67 seventh (pp. 2 – 3)68 and eighth (p. 185)69 chronicles in the study. Gunter suggests that research into the distribution of leadership is being characterised variously as
“authorised, dispersed and democratic” (2005, p.51). This contradicts, to a certain extent, the position of Woods and Gronn (2009) who view distributed leadership and democratic leadership as two distinct entities. They argue that distributed leadership entails “a democratic deficit” (p. 430) and suggest that it be interrogated critically from the perspective of “a concern with building organisations that are more democratic and respectful of the human status of their members and other stakeholders” (Woods and Gronn, pp. 446 – 447). Mindful of this criticism, I elected in my study to conceptualise distributed leadership in a manner which brought a democratic element to it.
To this end, I adopted all three of the characterisations of distributed leadership (after Gunter, 2005), to allow for a range of possibilities within a distributed leadership framing. Furthermore, I elected to view the characterisations sequentially rather than as discrete concepts. Thus, the distributed leadership framing I brought to my research on teacher leadership was developmental in nature and offered levels of distribution of power within the practice of distributed leadership. As a first level of conceptualisation within this sequential distributed process, we have ‘authorised distributed leadership’ which entails a restricted distribution of power within the organisation. As a second level of conceptualisation within this sequential process, we have ‘dispersed distributed leadership’ which brings about an adequate distribution of power while, at the third level of conceptualisation, we have ‘democratic distributed leadership’ which involves an expansive distribution of power. This ranking of the levels within the practice of distributed leadership from level one (authorised) through to level three (democratic) mirrors the increased distribution of power from restricted (authorised) to expansive (democratic).
65 Section 7.2, pp. 223 - 224
66 Section 5.3, pp. 128 - 129
67 Section 5.4, pp. 151 - 152
68 Section 5.5, pp. 163 - 164
69 Section 7.3, p. 232
But before I get ahead of myself, let me present each of the three characterisations of distributed leadership, according to Gunter (2005).
Firstly, authorised distributed leadership (Gunter, 2005) is where work is distributed from the principal to others and is usually accepted because it is regarded as legitimate within the hierarchical system of relations and because it gives status to the person who takes on the work. This type of leadership can also be termed ‘delegated leadership’ and is evident where there are “teams, informal work groups, committees, and so on, operating within a hierarchical organisation” (Woods, 2004, p.6). Teachers often accept the delegated work, either in the interests of the school or for their own empowerment. However, power remains at the organisational level and teacher leadership is dependent on those who hold formal leadership positions.
The second characterisation of distributed leadership, Gunter (2005) suggests, is dispersed distributed leadership which refers to a process where much of the working of an organisation take place without the formal working of a hierarchy. She explains that “while formal structures exist with role incumbents and job descriptions, the reality of practice means that people may work together in ways that work best”
(Gunter, 2005, p.54). In a sense, these working relations in this dispersed distributed practice are heterarchical relations (Woods and Gronn, 2009) because they are not arranged vertically and are undifferentiated in status. Instead heterarchical relations are “random, unstructured and fluid. In this sense, a heterarchical division of labour co-exists with a hierarchical division of rights and authority” (Wood and Gronn, 2009, p. 440). Thus, dispersed distributed leadership is more autonomous, bottom-up and emergent and is accepted because of the knowledge, skills and personal attributes of organisational members who, either individually or in autonomous work groups, develop the work (Gunter, 2005). This type of leadership centres on spontaneity and intuitive working relations (Gronn, 2003). Through sharing the leadership work more widely and redefining roles, the power relations in the school are shifted away from the formal leaders in the accomplishment of the organisational goals.
Democratic distributed leadership is the final characterisation of distributed leadership, according to Gunter (2005). She suggest that democratic distributed leadership is similar to dispersed distributed leadership in that both have an emergent
character where initiative circulates widely (Woods, 2004) and both have the potential for concertive action (Gunter, 2005, p.56). However, it is different in that it does not assume political neutrality, but instead engages critically with organisational values and goals (Woods, 2004, p.7) and raises questions of inclusion and exclusion which include “how meaning is developed, how experiences are understood and how we work for change” (Gunter, 2005, p.57). In other words democratic distributed leaders transform not only individual understandings of self and others, but they “lay the groundwork for challenging social inequities and inequalities” (Shields, 2006, p. 77).
It is from within a democratic distributed leadership framework that “critical transformative leaders enter and remain in education not to carry on business as usual but to work for social change and social justice” (Brown, 2004, p. 96).
I found these characterisations of distributed leadership as discussed above (Gunter, 2005) particularly valuable in determining the nature of the leadership practice and the extent to which teacher leadership was enabled in schools in my study. The application of these developmental characterisations to the practice of teacher