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Introduction: reflections on a journey
An invitation from the co-editors of the Journal of Educational Administration to submit a paper on authenticity in educational leadership for consideration as a legacy paper started me on a lengthy reflective investigation of my journey on the topic. Initially, I started looking for the year in which I first formally used the terminology "authentic leadership" (about 1995) but soon realised that my formation began long before that in about 1974 when I was undertaking my doctoral studies in educational administration at the University of Alberta (U of A), Canada.
My doctoral research consisted of an observational study of eight Alberta superintendents and drew on many of the insights of [66] Henry Mintzberg's (1973) influential research on The Nature of Managerial Work . My research broke with the dominant positivist and behaviourist framework for doctoral research at the Department of Educational Administration, U of A and was the first observational study conducted within that department. This research began my commitment to study and understand administrators and leaders as human beings living and working within complex organisations. The findings consisted of a number of dilemmas that characterised superintendents' work, namely, balancing pace and quality; responding to current and emerging issues; being efficient while running a humanistic organisation; and prioritising between actions that are managerial and those that are educational ([24] Duignan, 1979, pp. 210-211). These challenges and dilemmas are as relevant today as they were in 1979 ([18] Duignan, 2012).
My next formative experience was meeting the internationally renowned Professor William Walker in 1978 when I was a staff member at Memorial University, Canada. I felt privileged when he selected me to join his staff at the Centre of Administrative Studies, University of New England (UNE) in Australia (1979). Apart from strongly supporting my people-centred perspectives on educational administration, he also encouraged me to continue to challenge the dominant positivist-based "theory movement" which by then was being strongly critiqued by Thomas Greenfield, Ontario Institute for Studies of Education, University of Toronto. Every new staff member and student of educational administration at UNE was expected to read Professor Walker's favourite critique of classical administrative theories, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance , which highlighted what the author ([70] Pirsig, 1974)...