The Cultural and Social Foundations of Ethical Educational Leadership in Finland
This chapter provides the Finnish scope on cultural and social foundations of ethical educational leadership. Finland is often seen as an outlier. Predominant transnational trends are recognized but they tend to reach Finland with a delay and manifest themselves somewhat differently from the mainstream. There are contextual reasons for the deviance. We will present these focusing on how cultural and social aspects have been evolving in Finland. Furthermore, we will analyse the constituents, organisation and responsibilities embedded in the Finnish education system. This analysis makes use of contemporary education policy documents including legislation and other regulations, curricula, and …
Governmentality through translation and sense-making
Public education governance is currently subject to change in the Nordic countries because regulations, norms and values are changing. This in turn has transformed structures and positions and has thus compelled agents to change their behaviour, mindset and identity.
Symbolic leadership and leadership culture in one unified comprehensive school in Finland
The research presented in this article is a description of the symbolic leadership and leadership culture in one unified comprehensive school in Finland. The study is a phenomenological qualitative case study based on triangulation. Leadership is studied through its functional, verbal and material dimensions. Leadership culture is regarded as one of the part cultures of the organisation culture. It is a product of the meaning and interpretation process which forms itself through the symbols of the principal's leadership. According to the present study, the leadership culture of the unified comprehensive school can be described as consisting of respect, communality, equality and humour.
A meta-analysis of distributed leadership from 2002 to 2013 : Theory development, empirical evidence and future research focus
This article provides a meta-analysis of research conducted on distributed leadership from 2002 to 2013. It continues the review of distributed leadership commissioned by the English National College for School Leadership (NCSL) ( Distributed Leadership: A Desk Study, Bennett et al., 2003), which identified two gaps in the research during the 1996–2002 period. The review found that the studies had been unable to conceptualise distributed leadership or empirically outline its application. The two research gaps identified by Bennett et al. (2003) constitute the focus of the present review, which attempts to determine whether recent research has been able to fill these gaps. Based on the find…
Symbolic leadership culture and its subcultures in one unified comprehensive school in Finland
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe a symbolic-interpretative research on the leadership culture and its subcultures in one unified comprehensive school in Finland. Design/methodology/approach – The research is a phenomenological, qualitative case study. Its methodology is based on triangulation. Findings – The leadership culture of the unified comprehensive school studied in the present research seemed to be based on equality, communality, appreciation, flow of information and humor. Besides examining the general leadership culture of the school, an attempt was made to study the possible subcultures of the school by examining the six subject groups into which the teachers w…
Democracy in complex networks:political leaders and administrative professionals
The core assumption in this chapter is that political actors and civil servants on the municipal level share in the common societal responsibility for the education and upbringing of the next generation. Using a filter of five core public-governance logics in the analysis of our data – the marketplace logic, the managerial, the public, the professional and the ethical –we find both similarities and differences between politicians and civil servants. We analyse how politicians and administrators are positioned in the system and how they develop their commitment to, and their competencies to take part in furthering, both a democratic education and an efficient and effective governance system,…
Superintendent Leadership in Hierarchy and Network
School superintendents are coupled hierarchically with the top apex of municipality organization through their membership of leadership teams and through personal ties to the top municipal manager, which provides opportunities to take part in strategic decision-making processes beyond the educational sector. Superintendents are also vertically linked to their school leaders through strong and dense network ties. Along the horizontal axis superintendents are active network players with peers, for example through superintendent associations or more frequently mentioned through personal ties to superintendent colleagues. Superintendents are linked to school boards through strong formal ties. I…
Local Decisions Under Central Watch: A Nordic Quality Assurance System
Quality assurance or accountability, as we use the term, refers to when an actor, in virtue of contractual obligations, has the right to hold another actor responsible to a set of standards, to judge whether the standards have been met and to impose sanctions if the standards are deemed unfulfilled. In this chapter, we compare how (and if) these rights have been distributed and enacted in educational administration in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. By specifying contractual obligations, we wish to separate accountability from other kinds of asymmetric power relations, such as those between parent and child, and focus on acts of delegation and control.
Finland: Finnish Principal
The presentation of principalship in Finland begins by giving an overall description of the Finnish education system and of the formal position of principals in Finland. The more detailed examination of the Finnish principal comprises two main sources. Both sources are reviews on research on principals in Finland in 2000–2010. The first one was conducted for the Swedish Research Council by Risku and Kanervio (Doctoral and regular research on principals in Finland 2000–2010. In: Johansson O (ed) Rektor – en forskningsoversikt 2000–2010 [Principal – a research report]. Vetenskapsradets rapportserie 4:161–186, 2011). The second one is a report by Alava et al. (Changing school management. Statu…
Superintendent leadership under shifting governance regimes
Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to analyse the superintendent position, its relation to the local political system and the function as superior of principals in the school district in order to illuminate important district-level conditions for student learning. Influences from historical legacies and policy cultures are investigated by means of cross-country case analyses.Design/methodology/approach– This paper is based on data from national surveys of superintendent leadership in Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway.Findings– A key point is the observation of a mix-mode system of hard and soft governance. Municipalities, schools, teachers and pupils are – in different degrees across t…
The Nordic Superintendents’ Leadership Roles: Cross-National Comparison
The chapter focuses on what happens when national education policies meet structures of implementation at the local school district and school levels. Focus is on the position that is subordinated to a municipal committee or board responsible for education. This position is here called superintendent, even if precise titles vary. By focusing on this position, its relation to the political board and the function as superior of principals in the school district, it will be possible to investigate some of the preconditions for learning in the school districts.
Finnish Superintendents Are Striving with a Changing Operational Environment
When one considers Finland’s education system through the 10-year curriculum reform cycle, slogans of trust and mild evaluation or results from international surveys on learning outcomes, one may think that Finnish superintendents’ operational environment is placid and serene. The truth, however, is very different. For historical reasons, Finnish society is now undergoing many of the changes that, for example, the other Nordic countries already encountered decades ago. Of course, the same contemporary international trends which affect the other Nordic countries influence Finland as well, but because they do so in a nation that is in many ways in a different developmental phase, they often m…
School Boards in Finland
In today’s global societal development, Finland in many ways seems to be an outlier relying on policies, the goals, contents and enactment of which differ from those of many other countries. Furthermore, the policies Finland relies on appear to provide outlying results concerning both the education system and the society (Risku M, Ital J Sociol Educ, forthcoming; Risku M, Kanervio P, The Finnish superintendent. In: Nir A (ed) The educational superintendent: between trust and regulation: an international perspective. Lambert Academic Publishing, New York, 2014). The many-sided outlying character of Finland makes it an interesting case of research.
A distributed leadership perspective on the Finnish curriculum reform 2014
Bridging curriculum research with educational leadership, we examined the 2014 Finnish curriculum reform compilation and enactment process through the lens of distributed leadership.As a tool for t...
Competence and Understanding in the Governance Chain
Education is of fundamental value for a society; to raise and foster a new generation of citizens in a global and local multicultural context. It is therefore crucial to identify the competences that are needed for multiple actors in the school governance chain, with the aim of achieving this mission in different contexts over time.
Finland: Changing Operational Environment Changing Finnish Educational Governance
The main purpose of this chapter is to examine how Finland is developing its educational governance to meet the challenges of its changing operational environment. For our examination, we applied two theoretical frameworks on education policy development. The one constructed in the Comparative Analysis of Dynamics in Education Politics Project (CADEP) by Simola, Kauko, Varjo, Kalalahti and Sahlstrom (Dynamics in education politics. Understanding and explaining the Finnish case. Routledge, Oxon and New York, 2017) provided us with the theoretical lenses of political situations, political possibilities and politicking, as well as with valuable contextual information. The one for the Policy En…