(Re)imaging method in educational leadership and management research - Lesley le Grange

Over the past thirty years we have witnessed a proliferation of educational methods/methodologies aimed at helping us to make sense of the world - to provide clarity about the meaning of social reality. However, altough these methods/methodologies are useful frameworks, they do not capture fully the untidy realities of the real world. The discipline of Educational Leadership and Management is embedded in a broader social world and therefore resonates within fields of complexity, fluidity, heterogeneity, multiplicity, unpredictability, messiness, and so on. I suggest that conventional methods do not adequately capture social/educational reality fully, and argue that research should be less concerned about seeking clarity, but should rather - in Law's terms - be concerned with seeking a '[d}isciplined lack of clarity'. Put simply, methods cannot give coherence to a world that is itself incoherent. The argument presented has applicability to social science research generally, but also to the field of Educational Leadership and Management more specifically.
From: South African Journal of Education, Vol. 27 (3) 2007, pp. 421-429