Greenfield, Thomas Barr

Thomas Barr Greenfield (1930–1992) remains a signal voice in educational administration for a finely developed perspective that critiques, contests, and points beyond many of the assumptions that have guided the development of the contemporary field. Greenfield spoke vehemently and with eloquence for the human, subjective, and contextual realities that interrupt the promise of prediction and control in organizational and administrative life. Where management science envisaged a dispassionate and objective administrative mastery of organizational affairs, Greenfield saw organizations and their administration as an often volatile and sometimes anarchic playing out of power, difference, and volition. It is not in the tepid neutrality of facts, Greenfield argued, but in the examination of discordant values charged with human impulse and leveraged by position and power that we are best able to understand the lived and inexorably complex world of organizational experience.

This still atypical view of organization and administration emerged from an intrepid, lifelong exploration of ideas and their implications for the leadership of educational institutions. Greenfield's path from his boyhood origins on a prairie farm in Saskatchewan, Canada, to Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, where his thinking and writing in educational administration would mature, is marked by both scholarly commitment and intellectual transformation. As experience and reflection would gradually push him to question the scientific perspective and practices that he had adopted as a graduate student, Greenfield was led to a dénouement that resulted in a profound shift in perspective. Consequently, the evolution of Greenfield's scholarship lends itself to being understood in two distinct periods so divergent that they are bridged only by an experience of conceptual conversion.

In the first period, Greenfield's work and study parallel the ascension of overtly scientific models and methods for research in educational administration. This period includes Greenfield's master's and doctoral work at the University of Alberta, a center of the then new and promising scientific approach to organizations and leadership. Adopting the seemingly persuasive, neopositivist approaches grounded in quantitative methodologies and statistical analysis, Greenfield's graduate work culminated in his PhD dissertation, Systems Analysis in Education: A Factor Analysis and Analysis of Variance of Pupil Achievement. He would later critique this title and, by implication, the work it represented as being without substance.

During the 1960s, Greenfield became increasingly uncomfortable with the naturalistic assumptions about organizations and the emptiness of technically correct administrative prescriptions derived through the scientific reduction of human experience to formulaic certainties. Made increasingly uneasy by a perspective that failed to take account of organizations as social inventions and that ruled out the subjective roots of action, experience, and meaning, Greenfield began to question the predominance of positivistic science within what he had gradually come to regard as the thoroughly human enterprise of educational administration.

The most visible line of demarcation between the two periods of Greenfield's scholarship is the 1974 paper that Greenfield delivered at the Third International Intervisitation Programme in Bristol, England. An extensively revised version of that paper was retitled “Theory About Organization: A New Perspective and Its Implications for Schools” and was [Page 440]published in 1975. Although Greenfield was not seeking drama as he made his way to Bristol, his paper would stir considerable consternation and vociferous debate.

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