Chapter 14: Epistemic Drift: Theory Building and Research in Educational Leadership

The purpose of this chapter is to evaluate the knowledge development gains around educational leadership and leadership effectiveness, focusing on the theory-building efforts and the research methods used to study our field. In this chapter, we examine contemporary scholarship in educational leadership to assess how and the degree to which theory is being advanced in our field. As a point of comparison and direction, we also examined reviews of research in the broader leadership field. We focus on reviews of research and their account of how scholarship has contributed to theory and theory building, and how research methods have informed and advanced theory and knowledge development generally. Among studies on leadership and leadership effectiveness in the fields of educational leadership and leadership generally, we note how leadership is defined or measured, the degree to which research is building on prior work, and how it has been informed by more discipline-based theory and research. By explicitly examining recent reviews of educational leadership and leadership effectiveness research, we seek to determine the extent to which and in what ways knowledge development is advancing in our field.