Abstract
The Danish educational sector is increasingly being drawn into the general public governance, in line with other municipal sectors. Thus it has been influenced by transnational thinking, by hard and soft governance approaches and by social technologies with international inspiration and origins. Municipal governance and administration is being restructured to fit new concepts. As a consequence, schools superintendents’ position and relations are changing as the system moves from welfare-state thinking towards competitive-state thinking. The results of our surveys to schools superintendents, school board members and school leaders illustrate aspects of the new situation confronting superintendents located at the midpoint of governance chains and networks. The division of labour between political and administrative responsibilities is at the forefront of the images of emerging and changing networks of political, administrative and educational practitioners.
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Notes
- 1.
The name and the area of responsibility change from municipality to municipality, but there is always a committee that has schools as its responsibility.
- 2.
When talking about how the municipalities are governed, it is important to stress that there is no single picture of how the municipalities are organised; there are variations among the municipalities because there is room for discretion in the law, so the description is an ideal type description.
- 3.
Nyt fra Danmarks Statistik, Dec. 2012: http://www.dst.dk/pukora/epub/Nyt/2012/NR657.pdf. The numbers are corrected by removing students and the retired, etc., approximately equal to the national numbers out of employment (30–40 % of the total population).
- 4.
- 5.
In a survey from 2001 (Moos 2001), only 23 % were more than 56 years, while 56 % were 45–55 years and 235 were ‘young’ leaders.
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Moos, L., Kofod, K.K., Brinkkjær, U. (2016). Danish Superintendents as Players in Multiple Networks. 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_2
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