Conceptualising constructions of educational-leader identity

In this chapter, we conceptualise and present a new typology of educational-leader identity constructions. Our aims are to reconceptualise what it means to be an educational leader, to reveal the processes involved in identifying leaders and to prompt questions for the field about the implications of such labelling. What is new about our typology is its serious engagement with the insight that identification concerns the attribution of labels and characteristics as much as their subjective adoption. Methodologically, our intellectual resources for creating the typology consist in Macintyre’s notion of “characters” and Cunliffe’s conceptualisation of self and critical reflexivity. These provide two dimensions for our typology: “leader-identity stability” and “subject reflexivity concerning leadership”. We interplay these ideas to conceptualise six idealised identity types for the educational leader: the “Right Fit”, “Fabricator”, “Troublemaker”, “Object of Analysis”, “Reinterpreted” and “Influencer”. Our typology provides a new conceptual framework for researchers to think about identity and for educational leaders to do identity work on themselves. It reveals a relative paucity of critical reflexivity in the field of educational-leader identity scholarship and so points the way for future research in this area