Abstract
School superintendents are at the heart of the governance of municipal education, whether this is seen as a chain or networks of governance. Because educational governance and structures in the Nordic countries are currently undergoing much restructuring and reconceptualisation at the hands of national governments influenced by transnational agencies, the research project presented here investigates the functions and relations of school superintendents in four Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. In our presentations of the project’s surveys of superintendents, school boards and school leaders, we use a number of overarching theories – theories of comparison, of new institutionalism and networks, and of translation, power and social technologies. We investigate our subject from two perspectives. One is the Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish country reports, written within a shared frame so as to give national images of superintendents; the other is the cross-cutting, thematic Nordic and international investigations and discussions. We begin this opening chapter with an account of our starting point, our interests and our methods, and an introduction to the theories examined; we end it with a discussion of our work in a comparative perspective and a further discussion of some of the themes chosen for the thematic chapters.
This is Volume 2 of the Springer book series on Educational Governance Research from our research project on School Superintendents. The first volume is: Moos, L. and Paulsen, J.M. (Eds.)(2014) School Boards in the Governance Process. Dordrecht: Springer
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Moos, L., Nihlfors, E., Paulsen, J.M. (2016). Directions for Our Investigation of the Chain of Governance and the Agents. In: Moos, L., Nihlfors, E., Paulsen, J. (eds) Nordic Superintendents: Agents in a Broken Chain. Educational Governance Research, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25106-6_1
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