International Journal of Leadership in Education

The Challenges of Contemporary School Leadership and School Principals’ Emotional Labour

The guest editors invite high-quality contributions for a forthcoming special issue of the International Journal of Leadership in Education (IJLE) focussing on “The Challenges of Contemporary School Leadership and School Principals’ Emotional Labour”.

This special issue seeks to better understand school principals’ experience of contemporary school leadership, exploring the changing demands of the role and its more invisible but crucial ‘caring’ aspects, including the emotional labour of the work. This is important because internationally, school principals are reporting that they are sick, stressed and/or increasingly unwilling to do the job (Chandler et al, forthcoming; Maxwell & Riley 2017; Thomson & Greany 2024). Exploring the changing demands of school leaders’ roles is also important in the context of increasing local and global volatilities that include climate, health, economic and geopolitical crises, pressures from neoliberal and new public management regimes, race and gender injustice, and inequity and exclusion of marginalized communities. All of these factors are exacerbating the affective economies of school communities (Wilkinson et al. 2021).

The special issue will examine how the principals’ emotional labour is changing over time in response to the factors outlined above, and examine themes including care, gender, and principals’ wellbeing. Emotional labour and care will be regarded as societal and systemic issues, rather than exclusively individual or psychological ones. Therefore, the papers will engage with a range of theoretical perspectives to gain purchase on issues such as exploitation, inequality, workplace health and safety, and discourses of care, conceptions of place and identity. Furthermore, they will take an intersectional approach to exploring principals’ differing experiences of their roles in connection to emotional labour.

The special issue call

The special issue will explore experiences of emotional labour associated with the principalship in a range of educational and international contexts. Diverse methodological approaches will illuminate the issue, including case study research based in school sites and critical incident methodologies that examine moments of heightened emotion.  The aim is also to make a theoretical contribution by drawing on theories of place, identity, feminist theories of care such as Tronto’s framework for an ethic of care (1998) and Hoschshild’s concept of emotional labour (1983), and practice theories such as the theory of practice architectures to illuminate the practices of caring in contemporary school leadership.

The key areas of interest for this call are, but are not limited to, papers from non-English speaking contexts addressing the exploration of principals’ differing experiences of their role in relation to emotional labour, especially from an intersectional perspective. For example, studies that explore how issues of race, gender, and other socio-cultural constructs that influence people’s identity and experiences intersect with the experience of the school principals’ role and emotional labour.