LAUSR

My dear colleague Professor Fenwick W. English often reminds me that you make more friends with honey than vinegar. I would like to say that he has only needed to remind of this on one occasion, but that would be a lie. And in this piece, I am once again going to let him down. In this article, I draw on previous work I have undertaken on social epistemology in educational administration and leadership (e.g. Eacott, 2017b) and bring that into conversation with a recent publication of mine that was met with mixed reviews (Eacott, 2017a). In doing so, I argue that educational administration and leadership, and arguably education research at large, is not well equipped for dealing with dialogue and debate. Instead, what we are more likely to experience, both as consumers and generators of research is ‘parallel monologues’. Even when debating one another, as many potentially seek in journals and at conferences, there is often little if any serious attempt to engage with the ideas of others as this becomes secondary to enforcing one’s opinion on the other. Attempting to move beyond parallel monologues has become somewhat of a focus of mine. Works such as an edited Special Issue of the Journal of Educational Administration and Foundations (Vol. 26 No. 2) and, more recently, Beyond Leadership: A Relational Approach to Organizational Theory in Education (Eacott, 2018) have sought to demonstrate the normative position that I hold, following Pierre Bourdieu and others, on the logic of scholarship – argument and refutation. For the most part, doctoral programs in educational administration and leadership do not prepare candidates for dialogue and debate. Neither do conferences and/or scholarly journals. Long gone are the back and forth exchanges in the pages of the field’s journals such as those seen between Willower (1983), Hills (1982, 1983), Gronn (1982, 1987) and Thomas (1986) regarding the usefulness of observational studies or the programmatic articulation, critique and defense demonstrated in Colin Evers and Gabriele Lakomski’s (1991, 1996, 2000) trilogy, Knowing, Exploring and Doing Educational Administration. While I am aware of Bush’s (2017) rebuttal (not refutation) of my claim of parallel monologues, I am more persuaded by the insights of Robert Donmoyer (2001), Martin Thrupp and Richard Willmott (2003), and Jill Blackmore (2010), that in educational administration and leadership we treat those with whom we disagree with benign neglect and apathy more than intellectual engagement. For the most part, one finds their community or network of like-minded scholars with accompanying journals, conferences and the like and carves out a career – often blissfully unaware of scholarly dialogue and