Conceptualizing school leadership and management from a distributed perspective

A distributed perspective on school leadership and man-agement has garnered considerable attention from policy makers, practitioners, and researchers in many countries over the past decade.However,we should be skeptical of its appeal as ameasure of worth.While optimism is high with respect to taking a distributed perspective, we urge caution by arguing for more attention to research fundamentals in the form of study operations and researchmeasures before seeking causal inferences. The question is not, does distrib-uted leadership work? but rather, how are leadership and management related to school and classroom conditions and school outcomes? To answer this question from a dis-tributed perspective, we need to engage study operations and measures when taking a distributed perspective in school leadership and management research. This article attempts to extend that conversation