Pedagogical leadership and participation : A governmentality analysis of the significance of leadership for a successful school

‘Pedagogical leadership’ is a taken for granted part of Swedish schools and has become a substantial managerial structure within which pupils and teachers are meant to develop and learn. This thesis focuses on how pedagogical leadership is described in management literature and how its discourse and proposed truths shape practices that are put into play as techniques of governing. The literature is analyzed with a theoretical Foucauldian framework of governmentality, discourse, subject and genealogy that enables an analysis of how pedagogical leadership as a phenomenon fabricates a desired teacher subject. The empirical material subjected to analysis consists of two prominent books within the literature on pedagogical leadership. The analysis in turn is conducted through the asking of the following questions: What conceptions of leadership emerge as a solution to the perceived problems in Swedish schools? What is described as a problem within the discourse? Which practices have been put into play to implement the pedagogical leadership, and how are they characterized? Which teacher subject is thereby requested and postulated? The results of the analysis show that pedagogical leadership has been constructed to remedy the problems created within its own discourse, and that an ideal leadership creates the conditions of possibility for practices that enable participation in which the subject is fabricated trough self-governing.