Transformative Leadership—From Technical to Equity Reform: Evolution or Revolution?

• In Event: 46.021 - Theory, History, Debates, and Paradigm Wars: Whence the Field of Educational Administration?

Abstract

A recent trend in the educational leadership literature is a focus on what some have called “social justice leadership.” However, this concept is elusive, often remaining, with the rest of the field, both ahistorical and atheoretical. Indeed, social justice leadership is sometimes used to refer to leadership within organizations that attempts to level the playing field for all participants. It is also used to describe a more critically-grounded form of leadership that purports to examine social inequity and to identify and rectify some of its cultural, political, and economic causes. The confusion may be traced, in part, to the seminal early work of James McGregor Burns (1978): Leadership, in which he developed two distinctly different concepts of leadership—transactional leadership and what he called transforming leadership. Transactional leadership, grounded in an exchange of mutual benefit needs little explanation.
His concept of transforming leadership, however, has given rise to two distinctly different leadership theories—transformational leadership and transformative leadership. Despite these theories having some areas of similarity and possible overlap, transformational leadership has its roots firmly in more traditional organization theory and focuses on creating organizations that are effective and efficient. As explicated and advanced by Leithwood and Jantzi (1999), transformational “leadership fundamentally aims to foster capacity development and higher levels of personal commitment to organizational goals on the part of leaders’ colleagues” (p. 453).
Transformative leadership, in contrast, breaks with tradition, focuses on those who are most neglected and marginalized within existing structures, and is more consistent with what Burns called revolution—“a complete and pervasive transformation of an entire social system” (p. 202). Blackmore (2011) argues that transformational leadership depoliticizes the “social justice intent because the notion of transformational leadership has been framed narrowly within the school effectiveness/improvement paradigms” (p. 21). Transformative leadership, she argues, promotes “emancipator pedagogies.” Shields (2011) asserts that transformative leadership begins, not with commitment to organizational goals, but with questions of justice and democracy; it critiques inequitable practices and inextricably links education and educational leadership with the wider social context within which it is embedded.
This paper will delineate these two theories, each derived from Burns transforming leadership, but distinctly different in conception and purpose. It will demonstrate that the tenets of transformative leadership tend to reside in technical approaches to reform, while those of transformative leadership respond to the call of Oakes and Rogers (2006) for equity reform. They argue that reforms whose explicit goals are not equity and social justice will not result in increased equity and that “technical changes by themselves, even in the hands of committed and skillful professional "change agents" or backed by court orders, are too weak to interrupt the intergenerational transmission of racial inequality” (p. 21-22).
A careful comparison of Leithwood’s (2011) framing of transformational leadership and Shields (2013) will show how each derives from different theoretical and philosophical roots. This thoughtful description will demonstrate, again, how the field has evolved and can still evolve, by both acknowledging its roots and simultaneously, looking to the future.

Author

• Carolyn M. Shields, Wayne State University