Conference Agenda

Following the competency-based framework articulated by the OECD, competency-based curriculum reform has emerged as a global trend. The 12-year Basic Education Curriculum Guidelines, officially launched in Taiwan in 2019, represent one of the most significant national education reforms in recent decades, aiming to foster competency-based learning and promote school-based curriculum development. In Taiwan’s education governance structure, the central Ministry of Education (MOE) is responsible for formulating national policies and regulations, while Local education authorities (LEAs) bear the critical responsibility of translating these policies into locally implementable forms. LEAs assume a dual role as both promoters of central policies and local policymakers. They are tasked with mediating national reforms and school-level practices by providing guidance, resources, and support to schools.

The implementation of educational policy is a highly contextualized and interpretive process in which policies, actors, and settings interact and intertwine. Within specific environmental contexts, policy implementation involves processes of sensemaking. Sensemaking occurs when individuals encounter new or unexpected situations and interpret information through the lens of their preexisting beliefs, experiences, and the social contexts in which they are situated (Spillane et al., 2002; Weick, 1995). Collective sensemaking refers to the process through which groups construct shared understandings of their work, thereby enabling coordinated and coherent action (Coburn et al., 2009). Since the interpretation and enactment of policy are mediated by local actors’ sensemaking processes and social interactions (Spillane et al., 2002), LEAs play a pivotal role in facilitating processes of collective sensemaking (Ganon-Shilon & Schechter, 2017).

As Soini et al. (2018) argue, curriculum reform depends on LEAs’ capacity to formulate and enact policies that foster shared sensemaking among school personnel, a process essential for translating initiatives into meaningful instructional practices at the school level. However, existing studies of curriculum reform have predominantly focused on the sensemaking of school-level actors (such as teachers and principals), or tended to examine policy promotion at either the school level or the LEA level in isolation. Little attention has been paid to how LEAs translate abstract national guidelines into local practice and shape school-level sensemaking and enactment of curriculum reform.

Research objectives

Accordingly, this study aims to examine how two LEAs interpret and implement the 12-Year Basic Education Curriculum Policy in Taiwan. The research objectives are as follows:
(1) to examine how LEA personnel make sense of competency-based curriculum reform;
(2) to analyze the policy instruments LEAs employ to facilitate policy implementation;
(3) to compare variations in policy implementation strategies across different local administrative contexts; and
(4) to investigate how LEA policy implementation actions influence school-level educators’ sensemaking and enactment of the curriculum policy.

Theoretical framework

This study draws on sensemaking theory to explore the policy interpretations and implementation processes of actors within LEAs. According to Spillane (2004) cognitive framework, policy implementation is conceptualized as a process shaped by the interaction of individual cognition, situational contexts, and policy representations. Individual cognition refers to actors’ prior knowledge, beliefs, and experiences; situational contexts encompass organizational and social conditions; and policy representations include official texts and design features that convey policy intentions.

Furthermore, in order to examine how LEA actors’ sensemaking shapes their use of policy instruments in enacting curriculum policy, this study uses an analytical framework with reference to McDonnell and Elmore’s (1987) typology of policy instruments and related literature. The framework encompasses mandates, inducements, capacity-building, system-changing, and hortatory persuasion instruments to enforce compliance, provide incentives, increase competencies, appeal to values, and restructure organization framework, power and resource allocation.

In this paper, I explore how educational leadership has become a form of ‘culture industry’. This particular type of consumer capitalism serves to props up the interests of business, entrepreneurs, gurus, consultants, and a discourse of ‘speakers as experts’, rather than thinking critically, reflectively, theoretically, and deeply about entrenched educational problems and educational leadership itself as a concept. As a result, I argue that educational leadership knowledge and discourse is failing to adequately serve the needs of education systems, schools, and educators. In order to show these developments, I draw on the work of Adorno (Adorno, 1991; Horkheimer & Adorno, 1972) in his depiction of the culture industry to show how this situation results in a problematic approach to leadership. In addition, I draw upon Foucault’s notion of bio-power (Foucault, 1990) to show how the governing of leadership and leaders’ work occurs at a discursive and systemic level. Furthermore, I also extend Foucault’s work to draw on Stiegler’s concept of psycho-power (Stiegler, 2010) to show how leaders are made as subjects through the capturing of forms of attention as part of a hyper-industrial consumer economy (Stiegler, 2015). I argue that what results is a malaise and form of ‘systemic stupidity’ in educational leadership research and scholarship (Alvesson & Spicer, 2016; Stiegler, 2015).

The paper begins by bringing into conversation the work of Theodor Adorno, Bernard Stiegler and Michel Foucault to examine how educational leadership, as a field, has been seduced by a consumer capitalist industry in the pursuit of ‘best practice’ approaches and ‘what works’ discourses as answers to educational problems and issues. I argue that there has been a consistent flow of writing in educational leadership that is increasingly designed for ongoing consumption badged for the purposes of solving many problems in education around the world – with ‘leadership’ as a key driver of such reforms and changes. For example, Thomson, Gunter and Blackmore (2013) referred to these kinds of discourses as a Transnational Leadership Package (TLP) while Sahlberg (2014) writes of the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM). I argue that these discourses have manifest largely through school effectiveness and improvement research that can also linked to the rise of gurus, experts and edu-preneurs to form what Kellerman calls a ‘leadership industry’ (Kellerman, 2012) but in education.

In the final section, I bring these conceptual ideas together to unpack and problematise the leadership fads, seductive rhetoric, hero discourses and packaged products to be bought and sold as solutions for educational problems, that are so prevalent as a part of this consumerist industry. My over-riding concern through the writing of this chapter is that, as educational leadership researchers and scholars, it is our responsibility to maintain theoretically informed work that continues to trouble and disrupt these narrow, self-serving, instrumentalist and ‘edu-preneurial’ approaches to educational leadership and administration. I believe there is a need to think deeply and critically about work that will lead to those potential leadership practices that may prove more helpful for educators rather than serve the interests of the international gurus that beset the field and social media platforms (see Eacott, 2017, 2018, 2020). The role of universities and academics and researchers is examined as key spaces for contestation of these ideas rather than say, at the school level. This paper is not a criticism of leaders and educators in schools but rather of the educational leadership industry for which educators are subsumed as consumers to their detriment. As busy professionals working hard in challenging circumstances, they deserve an alternate educational leadership discourse.

Educational leadership is frequently depicted in policy and professional standards as a primary driver of school improvement and effectiveness. Initiatives such as the Global Education Reform Movement and the Transnational Leadership Package have produced a widespread consensus on what constitutes “good” or “effective” leadership. However, this consensus often embeds problematic assumptions, overlooking sociopolitical factors and privileging certain forms of knowledge. Critical perspectives remain marginalised, with scholarship that questions dominant practices frequently sidelined in favour of “what works” or best practice approaches. To strengthen the field, it is essential to examine educational leadership as a discourse, which shapes the dominant conceptualisations influencing both research and practice.

This paper examines the emergence of educational leadership discourse in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, with particular attention to the Local Schools, Local Decisions policy, the Australian Professional Standards for Principals, and the Professional Standards for Middle Leaders. These policies collectively promote a narrow, functionalist view of leadership.

The study traces the development of leadership discourse within the NSW Department of Education from the 1980s to the present, focusing on how policy normalises particular leadership models. Two research questions guide the analysis: (a) which leadership conceptualisations have been promoted or normalised through key policy documents, and (b) how have NSW policies shaped the discourse of educational leadership? Adopting a critical interpretive approach grounded in Foucault’s concepts of discourse, power/knowledge, and critique, the study reviews policies relating to management, administration, and leadership. Key documents, including the AITSL Principal and Middle Leader Standards, Local Schools, Local Decisions, and the School Excellence Framework, are systematically examined for explicit and implicit signals of leadership models. Emphasis on instructional leadership is evident in recurring themes such as “building teacher capacity” and “monitoring student learning,” and policies increasingly link leadership to performance metrics, accountability, and funding. School leaders are described as responsible for student achievement, reflecting neoliberal and capitalist assumptions embedded in normative criteria and standards.

The study concludes that policy discourse has normalised and privileged particular, primarily Western, models of leadership, a process described here as the “colonisation” of leadership. By analysing the sociohistorical and economic factors shaping these practices, the study offers a critical perspective on their dominance and the potential for challenging entrenched assumptions.

Educational-leadership research has been widely critiqued for its historical reliance on global-northern theories, concepts, and methodological traditions, leading to sustained calls for greater geographical diversification and epistemic equity (e.g., Lumby et al, 2009; Mertkan et al, 2017; Hallinger, 2018). These calls commonly assume that moving research to different regions, or privileging “global-south” or local perspectives, enables the production of epistemically distinct—or even purer—forms of knowledge. Drawing on a systematic conceptual analysis of contemporary educational-leadership scholarship, this paper challenges that assumption.

The paper argues that “pure” global-south knowledge production is conceptually untenable under sedimented conditions of globalisation. Rather than treating this as a political or methodological failure, it reframes it as a structural condition that demands clearer theorisation. Educational-leadership knowledge is shown to be shaped not only by geographical location, but by historically layered epistemic inheritances embedded in concepts, academic discourses, researcher subjectivities, and methodological traditions.

To develop this argument, the paper introduces two novel typologies. The first identifies four forms of epistemic impossibility that delimit the conditions under which leadership knowledge can be produced and legitimated:
(1) epistemic impossibility arises from globlalised conceptual foundations that are overwhelmingly rooted in Enlightenment rationalism, liberal individualism, Weberian bureaucracy, managerialism, and positivist or post-positivist social science.
(2) discursive impossibility is linked to global publication norms and academic power structures. These discursive conditions actively structure what can be researched.
(3) subjective impossibility reflects the internalisation of global epistemic traditions by researchers. Educational-leadership scholars are not epistemically innocent observers; they are socially and intellectually formed within particular professional fields and academic cultures.
(4) methodological impossibility is rooted in the epistemological commitments embedded in research methods. Methods are often treated as neutral instruments that can be detached from their theoretical origins and redeployed across contexts (Eacott and Riveros, 2021). However, research methods carry implicit assumptions about what constitutes data, how knowledge claims can be validated, and what forms of explanation are credible.

Building on this analysis, the paper advances a second typology that conceptualises hybridity as a patterned and politically consequential feature of contemporary educational-leadership research. It distinguishes four modes of hybridity—assimilative, strategic, disavowed, and reflexive—each representing different ways scholars navigate epistemic inheritance and global academic power relations. This framework reframes hybridity from a residual compromise into a central analytic lens for understanding how knowledge is produced across diverse contexts.

The paper draws on analytical illustrations from international leadership scholarship, including research in East Asia (Lin et al, 2025) and examples of claimed methodological localisation (Hameed et al, 2021), to demonstrate how epistemic impossibility and hybridity operate in practice. These illustrations function not as empirical case studies but as heuristic sites that illuminate broader structural dynamics shaping knowledge production.

In a European context, the paper contributes to ongoing debates about research internationalisation, epistemic justice, and intellectual dependency. It complements bibliometric (e.g., Hallinger & Kovačević, 2019) and regional mapping studies (e.g., Hammad et al, 2022) by shifting attention from where knowledge is produced to how it is epistemically constituted. The analysis speaks directly to European policy and intellectual traditions concerned with critical theory, sociology of knowledge, and reflexive scholarship (Courtney et al, 2021), and to contemporary agendas surrounding global research partnerships, open science, and equitable knowledge exchange.

Rather than advocating epistemic purification or replacement of dominant frameworks, the paper argues that the most productive normative orientation for the field is reflexive hybridity—a stance that acknowledges epistemic inheritance, interrogates power relations, and promotes accountable engagement with the complex realities of globalised educational research. In doing so, the paper aims to strengthen European dialogue on diversification, equity, and the future of educational-leadership knowledge production.