Meetings as the Practical Accomplishment of Educational Leadership

Boden (1994) highlights meetings as 'where organizations come together' – as 'the very stuff of management'. This paper uses findings from a study of ‘leaders’ and ‘leadership’ in the post-compulsory education sector in the United Kingdom. Drawing upon ethnographic data in which college Principals were ‘shadowed’ as they went about their everyday work, our paper comments on and analyses certain facets of 'leadership work’ in action within this unique educational setting. In particular, the paper documents some of the interactional features of meetings and examines how and in what ways 'leadership' is observably accomplished and how and in what ways 'power' might be an appropriate description of various interactional accomplishments. Our focus is on the accomplishment and employment of 'power' as an aspect of interaction in leadership meetings; 'power' as the management of incumbent roles; and the display of and orientation to 'power' in terms of organising and constituting hierarchy in interaction.