Educational leadership in Italy: A ‘war’ of discourses?

This article is about a process of «formation of actors» (Hasselbladh, Kallinikos, 2000). In Italy, during the last ten years, this process created the heads of autonomous schools. In order to read the process, we provide the conflict between ‘old discourses’ (bureaucratic and professional) and ‘new discourses’ (managerial and democratic-critical-critical) as a reading key. These are in a constant struggle for affirmation on the grounds of educational policy (Ball, 2006). After presenting these two clashing discourses, the article provides a synthesis of the features of the autonomous school system and of the role of school heads as they were redefined by the reforms approved about ten years ago. In order to implement policies for the training of school heads, the «triad [selection, recruitment and training] of institutionalised processes» (Gronn, 2002, p.1032) had to be carried out. These will be examined in the following paragraphs, with the scope of the various discourses progressively touched on. In order to further qualify the nature of these processes, we will try to combine the analysis of the various discourses with the ‘conceptual’ instruments provided by the trend of new-institutionalism. These are, first of all, «regulative, normative and cognitive pillars» which support all social institutions (Scott, 1995). Secondly, they are those aspects of «path dependencies, mimesis and coupling» that concern the educational system (Meyer, Rowan, 2006). Finally, we will observe how the policies for «designing» new head teachers produce a certain degree of contradiction. In fact, the processes of recruitment and training witness the rise, also in Italy, of forms of marketisation typical of a managerial discourse. At the same time, though, there is still a strong ‘resistance’ of bureaucratic and professional discourses towards processes of tight-coupling in the selection and evaluation of school heads. There still seems to be a weak response by the democratic-critical discourse. The formation of these actors through policies that are strongly influenced by the competition among different discourses can raise the levels of allomorphism in the Italian school system. The war among discourses, in fact, is open. At present, there seem to be no certain winners that could promote a more widespread isomorphism