Abstract
This chapter examines the key ideas of Michel Foucault. Foucault’s work is used to highlight a number of prescient issues in education and educational leadership, namely, how discourse works in the creation of particular norms and truths that function in the field of educational leadership. The chapter begins by situating this work in relation to previous work drawing on Foucault’s ideas in education and educational leadership and then discusses some of the main ideas associated with Foucault: discourse, power, governmentality, ethics and the subject. Within each of these sections, links are made to educational leadership discourse that is both useful for further examination and how such approaches may still serve some important use given the age of Foucault’s work and also the previous use of his ideas. The final section provides a brief annotated bibliography of some key works to explore for future readers and research.
I would like my books to be a kind of tool-box which others can rummage through to find a tool which they can use however they wish in their own area…
Foucault (1994, p. 523)
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Notes
- 1.
A note on translations and dates for references. Throughout this chapter, I use and reference a particular English translation so that readers can go to the passages and texts I highlight. For many of these books, there are multiple versions, so rather than referencing the first English translation (as a number of people often do), I use the reference for the specific edition.
- 2.
It should also be noted that many academics do take on positions of leadership in universities and could also feasibly ‘fit’ in the descriptions as practitioners, as do leaders in schools. This point also seems to trouble the practitioner/theoretician divide.
- 3.
In this section, I am drawing on Foucault’s analysis of similar statements in The Archaeology of Knowledge (2002). I am using statements related to leadership to illustrate the point that statements have different enunciative characteristics and functions. This is an example of how Foucault’s analysis can help us to understand and distinguish between different statements made in leadership discourse and their relation to previous statements (see pages 89–91).
- 4.
In this chapter in Discipline and Punish on panopticism (Foucault, 1991a, pp. 195–228), Foucault elaborates at length about these processes of power and further mechanism at work beyond the simple architectural structure. It is worthwhile to have a detailed look at these pages for a very clear example of Foucault’s thinking about this form of disciplinary power.
- 5.
Here, I have summarised a number of main claims that are supported in great details across a number of different texts. I am conscious of such a crude summarisation of deep intellectual work, but for further details, I recommend reading the following key texts: The History of Sexuality Volume 1, pp. 92–98 (Foucault 1990a); Discipline and Punish, pp. 170–194 (Foucault, 1991a); and Power/Knowledge, pp. 78–108 (Foucault, 1980). These are a few selected texts that provide these elements of Foucault’s notion of power. Also see the selective bibliography at the end of the chapter for more general introductions to these ideas both of Foucault’s work and also in education specifically.
- 6.
In relation to education and educational leadership, see Niesche (2015).
- 7.
I acknowledge the important work Foucault did in relation to practices of resistance and of the intimate relationship between power and resistance. However, this was not a well-developed and refined concept, so I have decided not to treat it as a separate concept in this section or chapter.
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Niesche, R., Gowlett, C. (2019). Michel Foucault and Discourses of Educational Leadership. In: Social, Critical and Political Theories for Educational Leadership. Educational Leadership Theory. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8241-3_3
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