Louise Hard
Charles Sturt University
Leadership is a contested term in many contexts and means various things to different people. In early childhood education and care (ECEC) it is understood in multilayered terms. This paper draws on a qualitative research study which employed symbolic interactionism as a methodological tool and drew data from 26 participants from the ECEC field (in particular the birth-to-five sector). The enactment of leadership in ECEC emerges as heavily influenced by factors both internal and external to the field. This paper will discuss horizontal violence as one of the significant internal impediments to leadership enactment. The notion of horizontal violence originated in nursing literature and in this paper highlights contradictions between a lingering discourse of niceness and a culture which condones behaviours that marginalise and exclude others. The outcome of this culture is a powerful expectation of compliance which does little to foster or encourage leadership activity. Suggestions are made which focus on an open discussion of this phenomenon within the ECEC field in order to address behaviours which are currently constraining leadership activity.
Keywords: Early childhood education and care, horizontal violence, leadership
The notion of leadership has been defined by numerous authors and there has been considerable work in this area over the past century, yet the picture remains incomplete. Terms related to leadership include individual traits, influence over people, role relationships and situational characteristics. Other related factors include meeting people’s needs, mobilising power, negotiating agreements and political actions. According to Macbeath (2004), the term is ‘full of ambiguity and has a range of interpretations. It is a “humpty-dumpty” word that can mean “just what we want it to be”’ (from Humpty Dumpty, in Alice in Wonderland) (p. 4). Management and leadership are interrelated concepts and a clear separation is not necessarily possible or desirable, particularly in early childhood education and care (ECEC). According to Jorde Bloom (2003), management involves systems to attain a vision, while leadership goes beyond to create ideas and motivate people. Management positions often do incorporate some leadership, and most often leadership involves management duties. Perhaps the essence of the term leadership revolves around the notion of creating positive change in organisations. This paper explores the relationship between the notion of leadership in ECEC and factors identified as internal to the field which inhibit leadership enactment.
Literature review
Three schools of thought have traditionally dominated leadership literature; and these include individual traits, behaviours of leaders, and the context of the leadership. Individual traits have often been characterised as self-confidence, dominating, achievement-orientated and social agreeableness. Trait theories see leaders as concerned with the big picture rather than process, and this approach is often associated with the ‘great person’ notion of leadership (Northcraft & Neale, 1994). According to Hill and Ragland (1995), leadership understandings have not progressed far from ‘assuming that the tallest man would naturally be the best leader’ (p. 9). Current literature suggests that consideration of traits should not be dismissed entirely, since the personality of the leader does make a difference (Lingard, Hayes, Mills & Christie, 2003). Leadership behaviours often polarise into either task- or production-orientated leaders or socio-emotional leadership. It seems that effective leaders demonstrate moderate levels of both behaviours, with subordinates more satisfied by leaders with high socio-emotional behaviours (Black & Porter, 2000). Leadership in context, and particularly the work by Fiedler (1967), suggests that flexibility in leadership behaviour from autocratic to participative depends on the context. For Fiedler (1967) there needed to be a match between the individual traits and their situation.
Contemporary leadership approaches have defined concepts of transformational and transactional leadership. Transformational leaders often exhibit a charismatic style, have vision, are risk-takers, and usually see themselves as agents of major change. According to Robbins, Millet and Waters-Marsh (2004) these leaders are able to arouse, excite and inspire their followers to achieve group goals. This approach has resonance with the ‘great person’ or ‘great man’ trait approach and has been influential in social perceptions of what defines leadership. Transactional leadership rewards workers for their achievements and is concerned about improving working conditions and benefits and providing more engaging working conditions. These leaders engage in shared decision-making and develop teams. Their success is somewhat dependent upon the followers’ perceptions of the leader’s ability (Schultz & Schultz, 1998). This style is more pragmatic than that of the transformational leader but not exclusive, and both approaches make a contribution to leadership understandings.
The terms visionary leadership and charismatic leadership are now also part of contemporary leadership discussions. According to Nanus (1992), the visionary leader sees what is possible and desirable, is able to communicate their vision and persuade others to commit to make the vision a reality. The charismatic leader inspires and influences others and communicates high expectations.
More recently, feminist perspectives are focusing on leadership and questions are being asked about traditional concepts. According to authors such as Collinson and Heam (2003) and Hill and Ragland (1995), these traditional concepts have been defined in male terms. Sinclair’s (1998) work suggests that leadership has been linked to male traits and consequently marginalises many females. In discussing leadership in the corporate world, Sinclair (1998, p. 320) states that:
These archetypes of corporate leadership derive from embedded cultural stories and icons; they continue to pervade the supposedly objective assessment of leadership potential in our organisations. And threaded through these archetypes are emblems of masculinity … rites of passage, in the language of combat and sport, in-jokes and assertions and demonstration of sexual and physical prowess.
The stoic, hardworking and heroic image of the leader is, according to Collinson and Hearn (2003) and Wajcman (1999), associated with authoritarian, competitive and independent notions of leadership. The dominance of such images has marginalised many females from leadership and made it problematic when women do enact leadership. In its enactment, women need to contest the perception that females do not possess characteristics such as logic and toughness, while also suggesting that these are not the only qualities valuable for effective leadership.
According to Horner (2003), leadership is moving towards a team-based environment where there is less focus on the leader and the follower and more on the process of leadership. These authors cite the work of Drath and Palus (1994), who ‘suggest studying the social process that happens with groups of people who are engaged in an activity together’ (p. 35). Here leadership involves coordinating the efforts of the group in moving together, with all participants playing an active role. In such a leadership landscape, the process of supporting the team demands collaboration and openness in order to achieve a shared meaning that elicits commitment from group members. Hersey, Blanchard and Johnson (2001) discuss group and team leadership and highlight the need for goals which are understood by all participants. ‘Common or at least harmonious goals or purposes are, therefore, not criteria of groups, but of effective groups’ (p. 318). Blake, Mouton and Allen (1987) discuss the potential for team synergy when the interaction in a team transcends the contribution possible by individuals creating ‘spectacular teamwork’ (p. 6). However, these authors acknowledge the need for vision, and the consequence of its absence for a team can mean ‘it will drift from day to day in a survival mode’ (p. 5). This approach has implications for later discussion of leadership understandings in ECEC. Discontinuities emerge between the team-based leadership literature and the interpretation of this notion by participants in this study.
Leadership in education has focused in the main on notions of context and leadership beyond those of positions such as principal. Spillane, Halverson and Diamond (2001) suggest that distributed leadership views teachers as potential leaders, however; York-Barr and Duke (2004) refer to a number of studies which indicate that reality reflects more traditional forms of one-person leadership, suggesting that traditional models of leadership continue to have currency in school settings.
Until recently, leadership in the Australian field of early childhood education and care had not been widely researched. Leadership research revolved mainly around the work of Rodd (1998), Stonehouse (1994) and Hayden (1996), although recently Boardman (2003), Boyd (2001), Geoghegan, Petriwskyj, Bower and Geoghegan (2003), Nupponen (2001), Stamopolous (2003) and Waniganayake (2000) have examined leadership in various ECEC contexts. Such research has elucidated issues around leadership in ECEC which include incongruence between the rhetoric of democratic governance with the reality of traditional line management approaches. There is recognition of ECEC personnel drawing on an eclectic mix of traits and behaviours in their enactment of leadership. Carter and Curtis (1998) provide an ECEC interpretation of visionary leadership with a model that includes attention to three areas. These are leadership involving managing and overseeing; coaching and mentoring; and building and supporting community. Literature in ECEC leadership has in the main focused on specific contexts, while this present study sought to explore broader understandings of leadership from multiple ECEC contexts and variously trained professionals to understand their interpretations of leadership.
Methodology
The principal research question in this study focused on how ECEC personnel understand leadership and its enactment within the field. Specific interview questions afforded participants the opportunity to explore their own understandings of leadership and to reflect and comment on how they see leadership enacted within their field, well beyond their own service context. This provided the potential to understand what informs leadership ideas and if these are factors external and/or internal to the field. I was interested to see how influential traditional notions of leadership are informing ECEC personnel in their definitions of leadership. I was also interested to understand how these participants see leadership enacted within and for the ECEC field. How do the understandings of leadership align or contradict with the enactment of leadership as understood by these ECEC personnel? Are there tensions and discontinuities or is leadership a clearly defined and coherent notion within the field? Given the highly feminised nature of the ECEC field, how is a notion of leadership so heavily imbued with traditional heroic male dominant constructs of leadership interpreted by these participants?
In seeking a research design which would afford the exploration of these issues I identified a qualitative approach and, in particular, the use of symbolic interactionism as a methodological tool. Symbolic interactionism involves the study of individuals in society and what impacts on their own subjective insights and feelings. Importantly, symbolic interactionism maintains that individuals structure their external world by their perceptions and interpretations of what they conceive that world to be (Benzies & Allen, 2001). George Herbert Mead is considered the father of symbolic interactionism and his work was later developed by Blumer (1969), who provided a conceptual frame around which a significant amount of interpretative/ethnographic research has been conducted over the past century. According to Blumer (1969), symbolic interactionism involves interpretation of the actions or remarks of another person and how one is to act. It is through this process that participants fit their own acts to the ongoing acts of one another and guide others in doing so. Mead (1934) asserted that individuals develop socially by entering into their community and coming to recognise the conditions that determine thought and practice. It is the individual who modifies the social influences through their interpretation of the particular context. Consequently, this methodological tool affords the opportunity to view how ECEC personnel interpret leadership influenced by social factors and cultural aspects in the ECEC field. The individual is an active agent, not passively responding to social forces but undergoing the experience, and also being aware of the experience.
Appreciation of feminist theory was pertinent to this study, given the highly feminised nature of the ECEC field. Feminist theory assists in unpacking some of the taken-for-granted aspects of the ECEC field as well as the heroic, male dominance of the leadership literature. Feminist authors make problematic leadership as being historically and culturally associated with men. According to Wajcman (1999), leadership ‘is seen as intrinsically masculine, something that only men do. The very language of management is resolutely masculine’ (p. 7). This study sought to ask questions about these notions through exploring how leadership is understood and enacted in a highly feminised field. What role do traditional notions of leadership play in the enactment of leadership?
Data collection
To address the research question in a way that is consistent with symbolic interactionist data collection methods, interviews and focus groups were used as the main means to gather data. In addition, during the interviews I asked the participants if there were any materials they accessed and used to inform their understandings of leadership. These artefacts were accessed or acquired in some cases and their relevance to participants’ understandings of leadership explored in the analysis. In total, I conducted 26 semi-structured interviews with participants from a range of ECEC services. Of the 26 interviews, 16 participants were from a regional area and the remaining 10 were from New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria and Tasmania. Participants included long day care directors, family day care coordinators, early childhood undergraduate students, early childhood academics, preschool directors, and people working in organisations associated with the provision of services for children and families. The interviews and focus groups were audio-taped and later transcribed. Emerging themes were coded, and categories emerged related to the research questions. The interviews were also saved as audio-text on the computer.
The findings
Analysis of the data revealed two interrelated categories, the first being Interpreted Professional Identity and the second Interpreted Leadership Capacity, and I propose that the interpretation of one’s professional identity is linked to one’s interpreted leadership capacity. In other words, I am suggesting that this data and analysis indicates that the capacity of participants to enact leadership is influenced by their own interpretation of their professional identity.
Figure 1. Diagrammatical representation of data analysis
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Interpreted professional identity emerged from the participants’ accounts of the ECEC field and the wider community. It involves how individuals interpret the expectations of these cultures in terms of their individual sense of self. It became apparent that, for many participants, their own professional sense of self is informed by multiple factors, some of which they recognise as external to the ECEC field and others as evident within the field itself. In addition, participants recognise incongruence between leadership beyond ECEC and leadership within the field, and this made apparent tensions about how leadership is understood and enacted. The interpretation of social expectations which require nurturance and care in ECEC personnel appeared as somewhat incompatible with the requirements for leadership as understood by many participants. The interpretation of others’ views creates uncertainties for some participants about their own professional identity. The discourse of niceness continues to pervade images of what is required of ECEC personnel, and for participants this was a leadership inhibitor. For participants there were limited images of how to be an ECEC leader, and, for the early childhood student participants, this was a notable absence since they had few images with which to inform their own emerging professional identity.
For participants in this study, their interpretation of the ECEC culture impacts significantly on their ability to enact leadership. They articulated this for themselves and recounted how they saw this happen for others. I will elaborate on this in more depth by providing some rich data to illustrate the power of such interpretations and its inhibiting effect on ECEC leadership.
Interpreted Professional Identity is influenced by factors external to the ECEC field as well as by internal or cultural aspects of the field. Participants identified numerous factors external to the field as significant to their professional identity. These comments, by others, were recounted by participants and, while they themselves held an intrinsic belief in the value of their work in ECEC, these external values played a powerful role in influencing participants’ understandings of themselves as professionals. In many cases participants’ interpretations of their sense of self (and their professional identity) were strongly influenced by the views of others. This did not manifest into a robust image of themselves as professionals. A relationship between the interpretation of factors external to the ECEC field (such as remuneration levels and low social kudos) and aspects of horizontal violence will be explored later in this paper.
One of the most notable factors internal to the ECEC field was the expectation that leadership be enacted in a non-hierarchical manner. Participants’ understandings of leadership in ECEC were strongly articulated along the lines of a team-based leadership approach. Participants interpret their field as requiring an approach to leadership that is more dispersed amongst numerous workers, and those in positional leadership roles are expected to ‘not be too much the boss’. One early childhood academic stated that ‘in early childhood … we want to be seen as one of the team a little bit more than the all-powerful one that makes all the ultimate decisions’. According to the director of a long day care centre, ‘I think as a leader you have to be part of the team as well.’ For a preschool teacher leadership meant that you ‘don’t have to be the “top dog”’ and ‘you don’t want to be too much of the person in charge’ … in case ‘it puts the staff off.’ One early childhood academic recounted a personal experience when she stated:
What I probably see as the biggest problem for good leadership or effective leadership is that people … like if there’s a director of a centre or they’re in a leadership role, they like to be seen as one of the team players or one of the gang and if there are any privileges or anything that stands them out separately they quickly adjust and pretend they are one of the team again.
For this participant, being part of the team can be problematic. She sees it demanding a conformity that prevents notoriety often associated with leadership. Leadership enactment emerges as non-positional in many respects, and this is congruent with what participants describe as a pervading culture of niceness. Niceness surfaces as an ironic category with links to compliance and other behaviours. Although Not Just Nice Ladies by Anne Stonehouse was published in 1994, the discourse of niceness continues as a powerful expectation. Participants illustrated this when they made the following comments. ‘We’re the soft option for being a teacher … I still think we’re those nice ladies in pearls’. In addition, there were other specific references to the notion of niceness when another participant noted, ‘There’s niceness there indirectly, directly, it’s there and in a way you’re swayed into being you know nice, nice, nice. I reckon it’s at odds with us as a profession.’ Work by Griffin (1995, as cited by York-Barr & Duke, 2004) on leadership inactivity in school contexts identified a similar behaviour or what he terms ‘politesse’, where teachers were reluctant to draw attention to the shortcomings of other teachers lest such attention would be generalised to the whole group.
So what are the implications of this team-based leadership expectation and the lingering discourse of niceness? For participants, this cultural expectation of niceness demands a degree of compliance. This is evident in the following comment by an early childhood academic: ‘I see that they [EC services] are little environments of conformity and of course like minded ideas group together.’ Similarly, a comment from a participant working in a support organisation elaborates this point: ‘If someone is getting a little too confident, there is this “you get back in your box,” because that’s not your position, that’s not your role … we can’t have that happening.’ Again from another participant, the comment that ‘I think it is your peers that … hold you back the most’ illustrates a need to comply with expectations in the ECEC field. For the director of a long day care centre, her concern was for a preschool teacher and how she was received within the staff team: ‘…some people were quite nasty to her … [they] have got particular points of view and get together and create their own little culture and they expect everyone else to be the same—it’s worrying isn’t it?’. It seems ironic that, within a culture of niceness and an understanding of leadership as somewhat team-based or focused, such behaviours are possible or tolerable. These interpretations suggest a relationship to the notion of horizontal violence identified in nursing literature (Farrell, 2001; McKenna, Smith, Poole & Coverdale, 2003) as well as a relationship to the ‘crab bucket mentality’ articulated by Duke (1994). This has similarities to the work of York-Barr and Duke (2004), who suggest that ‘…one of the most prevailing norms in the teaching profession is egalitarianism which fosters the view that teachers who step up to leadership roles are stepping out of line’ (p. 272). Consequently, there emerges a relationship between cultural behaviours and the potential for individuals to enact leadership.
Horizontal violence
Horizontal violence is explored extensively in nursing literature as an attempt to explain staff conflict (Farrell, 2001). Specifically it is defined as ‘psychological harassment, which creates hostility, as opposed to physical aggression. This harassment involves verbal abuse, threats, intimidation, humiliation, excessive criticism, innuendo, exclusion, denial of access to opportunity, disinterest, discouragement and the withholding of information’ (McKenna, Smith, Poole & Coverdale, 2003, p. 92). Horizontal violence is related to self-concept development and in particular self-confidence and self-esteem. Randle (2003), in the nursing literature, links the construction of different selves to the social interaction people undertake and the feedback they receive. Are participants recognising a culture that is constrained by expectations of niceness but which manifests into aspects of horizontal violence as a result of low professional status?
A poignant account of a personal experience of horizontal violence is provided by an early childhood academic reflecting on her teaching career:
I did enter a childcare centre years ago and had a lot of confidence knocked out of me. If there was anything that was a bit different, which I did have some different practices, people would sort of, not tall poppy syndrome but—people would try and pull you apart because I wasn’t part of the normal culture. For example, you know, taking inside toys like dinosaurs outside got to be the big issue and I really basically I resigned over that. I worked for a city council not really very far from here and, um, the collective were very different to me and if the director of the centre was a little bit more visionary she could actually see where I was coming from and that differences are a good thing, you know. She could have helped me out but she didn’t; she was a lousy leader—she basically humiliated someone like myself who wanted to do things a bit differently—like simple things like bring all the drawing and all the painting materials and everything to the children’s level, just really basic things—every little thing was a big issue.
The director of a long day care centre provided a detailed account of an experience she witnessed:
I actually think I saw that kind of thing happening in our centre when I first got there with our new preschool teacher. Now she’s an outsider in a sense because she’s got different training to everyone else and there was a lot of things that other staff did, in, you know, quite subtle ways that, you know, made her uncomfortable and kind of kept her from expressing things or even attempting new things the way that she wanted to … Some people were quite nasty to her, which, I found out later but, you know, just in like derogatory comments or not including her in any social thing that was being organised for all the staff or, you know, just those things really. Some of them were quite overt but some of them were quite subtle things or just ignoring what she might have had to say or even just saying something about her program—and it is really where people don’t want someone to be a bit different.
And from an academic near retirement:
It’s often now older women because they’re people like me where we’re at the point where we are saying, ‘I don’t care now—I’m going to say it because this is important and, whether people like it or not, I’m going to say it, because we need to say these things for the profession.
Somewhat similar to the notion of horizontal violence, Duke (1994) defined the term ‘crab bucket mentality’. This was in the context of leadership in education, and he made use of this as a metaphor to explain what he identified as the prevailing norms of the culture of teaching that constrain leadership behaviour.
Anyone who has gone crabbing knows that it is unnecessary to cap a crab bucket because as soon as one crab tries to scuttle out, the others drag it back down. Some faculties function in the same way, actively resisting the efforts of any member to press beyond normal practice. Teacher leadership can hardly thrive in such circumstances (Duke, 1994, pp. 269-270).
This powerful metaphor by Duke (1994) correlates with the notion of horizontal violence. It suggests that, in education, cultures exist to constrain leadership by requirements for personnel to conform to accepted expectations. One participant in the present study referred to state organisations where people do a lot of ‘watching the person next to you to make sure they’re not getting too up themselves you know’. Another participant, on the subject of ECEC workers, suggested, ‘If someone is getting a little too confident, um, there is this you get back in your box because that’s not your position, that’s not your role;’ and facetiously added, ‘We can’t have that happening.’ These are examples of the crab bucket mentality and horizontal violence in action. An abdication of one’s place can apparently marginalise individuals, making leadership enactment problematic and potentially unattractive.
Why horizontal violence and a crab bucket mentality?
In this present study, there is resonance between the ECEC participants and nursing literature in terms of horizontal violence and ways this affects the culture of the field. This appears relevant to the formation of an individual’s interpreted professional identity based on expectations prevalent within the field. McKenna et al. (2003) investigated neophyte nurses’ experiences of horizontal violence and reported that, in the main, interpersonal conflict involved being undervalued by peers, having learning opportunities blocked, and feeling neglected and distressed by the conflict between others. Randle (2003) makes a link between the effects of horizontal violence and self-esteem. Randle’s study linked the construction of different ‘selves’ to the social interaction people undertake and the feedback they receive. While Randle (2003) does not refer here to symbolic interactionism, there is a connection with the present study. The nursing literature supports a relationship between workplace culture, self-concept and confidence, and this is relevant to the suggestion that professional identity has links to ECEC leadership capacity. In addition, the notion suggested by Randle (2003), that self-esteem is a major predictor of behaviour, provides support for the concept that cultural aspects of the field can influence self-concept and consequently constrain an individual’s interpreted leadership capacity.
Do ECEC personnel demonstrate horizontal violence and the crab bucket mentality as the result of low self-esteem and confidence? Goffman’s work with restaurant personnel elicited the notion of ‘”front” and “back” regions’ (1959, p. 107) to explore how the persona adopted by waiters, as they serve the public, contrasted with their attitude while back of house. This work illustrated that the performance the waiters provided for the client reflected an attitude not actually held by the staff. ‘The staff, then, mount a collaborative performance to project themselves as the capable and committed deliverers of that service; they play back the clients’ own self-conceptions as the well-regarded, gratefully and gracefully serviced clients’ (Cuff, Sharrock & Francis, p. 141). In ‘back of house’, staff are able to express their alternative persona, reversing the relationship of servility and reinforcing their sense of self. This example illustrates symbolic interactionist concerns about how people involved in work which has a low or negative social esteem maintain their sense of self-worth ‘in a society which told them they were worthless individuals’ (Cuff et al., p. 140). What this suggests is that waiting staff express their own value behind the scenes by behaving in ways that demean the clients in order to assert themselves. It is possible that the horizontal violence acknowledged by many participants in this study is a demonstration of the frustration felt by ECEC personnel when they are required to conform to a discourse of niceness and its constraining expectations.
Those investigating horizontal violence link such behaviour to oppressed groups who lack power and consequently ‘attack one another in order to vent their frustration and anger with the system they find themselves in’ (Randle, 2003, p. 399). This behaviour is particularly relevant given Goffman’s assertion that the back-of-house behaviour is a means to reinforce a sense of self in a profession that has a low social standing (Cuff et al., 1984). Other aspects of this present study (reported in Hard, 2005) suggest that participants interpret factors external to the field as strong influences on their professional identity. The interpretation of low social kudos for ECEC was demonstrated in comments such as the following:
I mean, I can give an example. My daughter, years ago, commented at 15 that she went and looked after a child after school each night because his mother [was] a school teacher, an educated person, and when they went away she looked after the dog each night and they paid her more to feed the dog. What is this telling us?
The implication is that a perceived low social standing can contribute to a limited professional identity which can result in behaviours such as horizontal violence and the crab bucket mentality. These actions demand that others comply or risk marginalisation, and such a culture is not one in which leadership activity is encouraged or supported.
Implications for ECEC leadership
The discourse of niceness continues to pervade participants’ interpretations of the ECEC culture, yet the emergence of its antithesis in horizontal violence demands debate and discussion. Aspects of horizontal violence and crab bucket mentality manifest in behaviours which covertly and overtly marginalise others through demanding compliance with certain ways of being and acting. If such elements are part of the ECEC culture, as these participants suggest, then the outcome is likely to be limited leadership activity. Participants felt constrained in their activities in case they draw undue attention to themselves as individuals. The interpretation of a team-based leadership approach appears superficially to suggest a progressive and innovative leadership style which other spheres of leadership literature have explored only recently. However, this remains contentious given team-focused leadership literature discussed earlier which describes such leadership as involving an articulation of a vision or shared goals. The interpretation of team-based leadership by participants in this study was not couched in terms which involved specific vision or common articulated goals but, rather, may be an expectation of similarity and a lack of potential to challenge expected norms.
Rather than an egalitarian rationale, this team-based approach suggests an expectation of certain behaviours and aspirations which avoid individual notoriety. In itself this may be laudable. However, when it demands compliance to certain ways of acting and thinking it is constraining. The initial definition of leadership in this paper involved change in organisations, and this is difficult to achieve in a culture which does not support varied ideas and discussions. In a climate where effective leadership is increasingly a measure of an organisation’s or a profession’s success, ECEC personnel might well consider alternative ways of acting. Discussions with undergraduate students showed that they too have already witnessed, if not directly experienced, horizontal violence on placements. Incorporating discussions of how the culture of ECEC can demand compliance and its implications for leadership could be an important element of undergraduate courses. Without conversations around such issues, leadership is unlikely to prosper, and strategic leadership for the field will not be supported. The pervading nature of this discourse is such that, without overt and deep exploration of how this activity occurs, the ECEC field will continue to crave leadership but be unable to provide the culture in which it can be fostered and flourish.
Conclusion
This study explored how leadership is understood and enacted within the field of ECEC. What emerges is a complex interplay of factors that interact in people’s understandings of leadership. In addition, the use of symbolic interactionism as a methodological tool helps to illustrate that individuals interpret their professional identity through their engagements with others, both within and beyond their field. These engagements have a powerful influence in assisting or constraining leadership aspirations and enactment. What emerges as a significant cultural factor is horizontal violence, which plays out in behaviours that exclude or marginalise those who do not conform to expected norms. In conjunction with Duke’s (1994) metaphor of the crab bucket mentality, horizontal violence illustrates a powerful constraint interpreted by participants. The challenge is to openly discuss this cultural expectation and the ways it is evident in behaviours in the field. Further, it is important to consider this as a non-productive and potentially destructive aspect which requires overt attention to avoid the ongoing constraints it puts upon leadership behaviour.
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AJEC Volume 31 No 3 September 2006, pp. 40-48.
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