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School Leadership and Complexity Theory
Keith Morrison
Routledge Falmer 2002
ISBN 0-7619-6554-8 (hbk) or 0-7619-6555-6 (pbk)
US$29.95
245 pp.
The field of organisational theory and its implications for the practice of leadership have never been quite the same since Greenfield suggested that human organisations are, in effect, existential realities characterised by complexity, uncertainty and wistfulness. In setting out a new agenda for future enquiry into organisations, Greenfield argued that an increased emphasis should be placed on understanding power relations, conflicts, values and moral dilemmas in educational leadership.
In similar vein the micropolitical perspective of organisations has stipulated that as the political dimension of institutions, including that of schools, is both inevitable and desirable, the political process needs to be revealed and accepted as a vehicle for change and educational improvement. Hence, leaders in schools who are sensitive to the micro-political landscape of their own institutions command an insight that helps them to secure support for change in general. More recently, the distributed perspective on leadership is also claimed to be predicated on an understanding of organisations which highlights their increasing complexity as well as their proclivity to rapid change.
Enter "complexity theory" and Keith Morrison's book. Complexity theory has apparently become well-established in the business and scientific communities over recent years and Morrison's book is a convincing attempt to apply complexity theory to the educational context as well as discussing the theory's implications for school leadership.
The first chapter of the book sets out to define complexity theory and examines its key components. According to the author complexity theory is concerned fundamentally with survival, evolution, development and adaptation. The theory is the offspring of chaos theory but is claimed to move beyond it. Chaos theory, it is argued, cannot apply readily to human interaction because human behaviour is not deterministic. Complexity theory, on the other hand, is actually predicated on unpredictability and atypical behaviour in order to account for change, development and novelty through self-organisation.
Put simply, an organisation is conceptualised within the frame of complexity theory as the processes of people relating to and interacting with each other over time. These processes give rise to emergent new forms within the organisation whose nature and structure it might not have been possible to predict. Indeed,...