Fashioning leadership in schools: An ANT account of leadership as networked practice

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how leadership can be conceptualised as a social fashioning process performed in everyday practice as a de-centred web of sociomaterial network building activity. Rather than positioning investigations of leadership according to units of analysis or a priori variables of interest, the leadership approach adopted is underpinned by the assumption that leadership is an unbounded practice. Accordingly, it is proposed that complex empirical accounts of actual leadership experiences are those that are positioned to detect signs of fluidity and multiplicity. To develop and demonstrate the use of such an approach, the resources of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) are used to investigate how leadership related to changes in teaching practices, curriculum and professional learning is fashioned in two Australian schools