Summary
Contents
Subject index
This book explores the limits to rational management. The authors develop the idea of organizational irony as a central concept for analyzing and explaining management activity in a managerialist environment. Drawing on international research as well as their own extensive experience in educational organizations, the authors show that effectiveness is not necessarily the result of over-rationalistic approaches to educational management. Focusing on school leadership and management, authors Eric Hoyle and Mike Wallace suggest that major reforms have had limited success because the changes introduced have diverted school staff from their core task of promoting student learning. The result is dissatisfaction, frustration, and stress. The authors use the ironic perspective to show how practitioners respond by mediating the reforms.
Temperate Leadership and Management: Living with Irony
Temperate Leadership and Management: Living with Irony
In the late nineteenth century Thomas Yates built a highly successful business selling wine relatively cheaply to the working class. Ironic, one might think, as Yates was a leading figure in the temperance movement. But Yates reasoned that he was more likely to wean people away from drinking noxious gin by offering them a more wholesome alternative at a reasonable price in his ‘wine lodges’. Every bottle of Yates’ wine carried the legend: ‘Moderation is true temperance’. We have sought to establish a link between irony and moderation. Irony is an antidote to excess. Moderation is our prescription for what we regard as the excesses of managerialism. Of course, we recognize that ...
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