Chapter 11: Context is Interesting and Important

In this chapter we discuss the relevance and importance of school contexts and how they may serve as an influence on school leaders’ change priorities, strategies, and approaches. We also explore some of the insights from teachers about how the context can influence their attitudes and activities as these tend to influence school cultures. As Williams (2004, cited in Bate, n.d.) indicated context can mean very different things including the situation inside or outside an organization and have an influence on various stakeholders, the political climate that may influence an organization or sector, or it may be a prevailing view or agenda that a particular stakeholder group is driving, and so on. In education we frequently use the term “context” to explain the potential of the environment “to shape the very meaning underlying organizational behaviour and attitudes” (Johns, 2006, p. 388). Some researchers indicate that context is crucial, while others who perceive context variables as relatively constant across different organizations do not. Hence, it is important to consider whether context variables are influencing the phenomena under study. In this book we have included context as it did tend to influence leaders’ change agency.