Mapping the intellectual lineage of educational management,administration and leadership,1972

Abstract

This review has two purposes. First, we document the body of knowledge that has accumulated in Educational Management, Administration & Leadership over its five decades of publication. Second, we seek to identify the distinctive contributions of Educational Management, Administration & Leadership as a research journal in educational leadership and management. The review employed the bibliometric method in order to analyze the forms of corpus of 1438 articles published in Educational Management, Administration & Leadership between 1972 and the end of 2020. Bibliometric analyses used to document and assess the Educational Management, Administration & Leadership corpus included descriptive statistics, document citation and co-citation analysis, author co-citation analysis and keyword analysis. The review found that articles authored outside the UK have continued to grow as a proportion of the journal’s annual volume, thereby strengthening Educational Management, Administration & Leadership’s status as an ‘international educational leadership journal’. Document and keyword analyses found that ‘leadership’ has supplanted ‘administration’ and ‘management’ as the dominant driver in Educational Management, Administration & Leadership content since 2012. These analyses further affirmed the continuing strength of the journal’s conceptual contributions to the literature as well as its publication of a significant set of papers on shared forms of leadership. The review highlighted two areas for Educational Management, Administration & Leadership’s future development: further enhancing its citation impact and managing the growth of its international contributions.

Keywords

Bibliometric review science mapping educational management administration and leadership educational administration educational leadership

Introduction

The 50th anniversary of a journal is a time for both celebration and reflection. A journal’s success is grounded in the seldom recognized efforts of many stakeholders, including editors, editorial board members and anonymous reviewers as well as the scholars who contribute their research. Educational Management, Administration & Leadership (EMAL) has now sustained a record of successful publication for five decades. Indeed, the journal arguably reached its zenith in the most recent decade with acceptance into the Web of Science (WoS) in 2011 and achievement of the highest WoS impact factor among educational leadership and management (EDLM) journals in 2019 (Clarivate, 2021).

When a journal is launched, the editorial team typically offers a vision that reflects their aspirations for what the journal might become. That vision is translated into explicit aims and policies that editors and editorial board members use as filters when making publication decisions. Over time, each journal develops a unique character that is reflected in the particular composition of manuscripts that it attracts and publishes (Campbell, 1979; Ribbins, 1997; Strain, 1997). Because journals grow organically in response to the dynamically changing research environments in which they operate, the resulting corpus of articles does not always, or perhaps even usually, match the original vision. For example, during its first decade of publication (1972–1981), EMAL was titled Educational Administration. This reflected the dominant paradigm of the field during that era. In 1982, the journal was retitled Educational Administration and Management and in 2004 Educational Management, Administration & Leadership. This series of retitling decisions tracked the broader evolution of the field and the gradual incorporation of management and leadership into its intellectual hierarchy (Bush, 2003; Hallinger and Kovačević, 2019, 2021).

Since the journal’s launch in 1972, several scholars have sought to outline the roots and branches that form the EMAL corpus. Reflections were previously published in recognition of EMAL’s 15th (Glatter, 1987), 25th (Fitz, 1999; Hughes, 1997; Ribbins, 1997) and 40th anniversaries (Bush and Crawford, 2012). The most comprehensive effort, undertaken by Bush and Crawford in 2012, employed a content analysis of EMAL publications from 1972 through 2011. The reviewers identified the journal’s roots in the United Kingdom’s (UK) education context, as well as a trend of increasing contributions from ‘international contexts’. They also highlighted a commitment to publishing critical conceptual articles, and articles representing multi-levels and sectors of education organizations (Bush and Crawford, 2012). Topics that had gained favor since the turn of the millennium included ‘leadership development’, ‘culture and values’, ‘organization at the institutional level’, ‘research concepts and methods’, ‘gender and diversity’ and ‘appraisal’. Bush and Crawford’s (2012) longitudinal analyses of the EMAL corpus affirmed the dynamic, organic nature of the knowledge base that had accumulated in EMAL between 1972 and 2011.

This year, on the occasion of the journal’s 50th anniversary, the authors build on these prior efforts by offering another empirically grounded reflection on the intellectual journey traveled by EMAL. Our review has two broad purposes. First, we wish to document empirically the body of knowledge that has accumulated in EMAL over its five decades of publication. Second, we seek to identify the distinctive contributions that EMAL has made to the field of educational leadership and management (Hallinger, 2020). These broad goals were enacted in the form of four research questions.

What are the geographic sources from which the EMAL corpus of knowledge has been built, and how has their distribution changed over the past decade?

What documents published in EMAL have had the greatest scholarly impact on the broader field, and which documents have most significantly influenced EMAL’s content?

What is the intellectual structure of the knowledge base represented by the corpus of EMAL articles?

What topics have gained the greatest currency in EMAL during its five decades of publication, as well as over the past decade?

This review is based on the analysis of 1438 articles published in EMAL between 1972 and 2020. Bibliometric analyses were applied to bibliographic data associated with these documents. Analyses included the use of descriptive statistics, document citation and co-citation analysis, author co-citation analysis and keyword analysis. In concert with Ogawa et al. (2000), we believe that efforts to develop the EDLM knowledge base can benefit from informed direction. This review aims to provide an empirically grounded perspective on the EMAL corpus as a ‘body of knowledge’ that will yield useful recommendations for the journal’s future development.

Central concepts underpinning the review

This review was guided by a conceptual framework that proposes a set of interactive factors that shape efforts of a journal to achieve its mission (see Figure 1). We propose that a journal’s impact is achieved through publication of a corpus of documents that have been attracted from authors, and subsequently filtered, reviewed, revised and accepted as meeting scholarly standards of quality and relevance. Documents published in peer-reviewed journals form an essential portion of the ‘knowledge base’ in any field of study (Campbell, 1979; Fitz, 1999; Hallinger and Kovačević, 2019; Oplatka, 2010; Ribbins, 1997). Indeed, it is through building a theory-informed, empirically validated knowledge base that all disciplines and fields of professional practice achieve intellectual coherence, advance their reputational status, and gain practical significance (Aypay et al., 2010; Campbell, 1979; Donmoyer, 1999; Ogawa et al., 2000; Ribbins, 1997; Ribbins and Gunter, 2002).

Figure 1.

Conceptual model of the role journals play in knowledge production.

As part of the ‘legitimated knowledge base’, articles published by peer-reviewed journals have the potential to contribute to education policy formation, shape practice in schools, and advance scholarly discourse (Aypay et al., 2010; Campbell, 1979; Hallinger and Kovačević, 2019; Hughes, 1997; Strain, 1997; Willower, 1987). Thus, the analysis of journals offers one means of illuminating the nature of the broader knowledge base in a field of study (Campbell, 1979; Hallinger, 2020; Murphy, et al., 2007). We agree with Fitz (1999: 12) who observed as follows.

Journals…assemble and disseminate what is ‘out there’. In all respects EMA (EMAL) is an interesting example and, therefore, worthy of some consideration. It provides a basis from which to survey and decode the field of EMS and trajectories within it, and in particular the field’s intellectual basis.

Indeed, we assert that the longitudinal mapping of a journal’s content represents perhaps the most direct way of visualizing the dynamic evolution of a field of study (Bush and Crawford, 2012; Hallinger and Kovačević, 2019, 2021; Murphy et al., 2007; Wang et al., 2017).

The framework also places journals within the context of the global enterprise of academic publication. Publishers, editors, editorial boards and authors influence, directly and indirectly, the content published in a journal. Publishers influence the dissemination of ideas through financial support of the journal, approval of its mission, selection of editors, approval of an editorial board, and setting basic manuscript guidelines such as the number of articles to be included in an annual ‘volume’. Editors shape content through their articulation and interpretation of the journal’s mission, selection of editorial board members, approval of special issues, assignment of reviewers and application of quality standards to manuscript decisions. Editorial board members advise on the journal’s direction, provide a symbolic snapshot of the journal’s current academic priorities, and review manuscripts. Authors make decisions on whether and what to submit to a particular journal based upon their perception of its aims (e.g. stated mission), standards (e.g. acceptance rate, quality of reviewers) and reputation (e.g. ranking, impact factor, acceptance in scholarly indexes, editorial board members).

In addition, every journal operates within an informal ‘community of journals’ that publish related content (Ding et al., 2001; Hallinger, 2020). Some journals are direct competitors for content, while others contribute corollary knowledge. For example, in the field of EDLM, Educational Administration Quarterly (EAQ), Journal of Educational Administration (JEA) and EMAL simultaneously compete with each other for manuscripts and influence each other’s content through cross-referencing of articles.

Finally, the publication process exists within a broader environment that encompasses political priorities, policy structures, research trends and the publication marketplace. Politics are implicitly infused in the publication process. For example, the prominence of English-language journals advantages scholars in societies where English is the primary spoken language, and gives precedence to policy priorities and ideas that arise within those societies (Clavero, 2010; Mertkan et al., 2017). Similar examples could be offered with respect to journal content authored by scholars from non-dominant communities based on gender, race or culture (Hallinger, 2020; Mertkan et al., 2017; Oplatka, 2010). The priorities of the publication marketplace implicitly shape the publication equation. For example, through a desire to increase profits, a publisher may insist that the editors increase the number of articles published in a volume. While this market-based decision increases publication opportunities to authors, it may also dilute a journal’s quality.

Method

This systematic review of research relied on the bibliometric review method (Hallinger and Kovačević, 2019; Small, 1973; Zupic and Čater, 2015). Bibliometric reviews use quantitative methods to analyze bibliographic data associated with a delimited body of literature. Bibliometric reviews leverage the ability of software programs to analyze larger bodies of documents than is typically possible in other forms of research review. As such, bibliometric reviews aim to highlight broad trends in knowledge production and dissemination rather than to evaluate research quality or integrate research findings (Hallinger and Kovačević, 2019). Thus, this method of systematic review was deemed suitable to the goals of this reflection on the accumulated knowledge represented in EMAL after its first 50 years of publication.

Identification of documents

The Scopus index was used to identify the full corpus of articles published in EMAL. In contrast with Google Scholar, Scopus offers the capability both to identify a set of published documents and export associated bibliographic data. In the Scopus search engine, the authors used the ‘source’ field to search on the keyword term ‘education* management administration’ where the asterisk acts as a ‘wildcard term’. This instructs the search engine to include any word with education as its root (e.g. education or educational). This search term enabled the identification of documents published in EMAL under the slightly varying names used at different periods in its publication history.

The search yielded 1616 documents published in EMAL from 1972 through 2020. It should be noted that, for some unknown reason, documents published in 2000, 2001 and 2002 were not indexed in Scopus. Thus, the review omits data associated with 80 documents that were published in EMAL during those three years. Due to the requirements of the analytical software used in this review, there was no workaround capable of including these omitted data.

The total of 1616 documents included articles, reviews, editorials, letters, errata, notes and ‘In press’ articles published online. The authors used Scopus filters to limit the review to ‘articles’ and ‘reviews’, which led to the exclusion of 176 editorials, letters, errata and notes. Thus, the final database consisted of 1438 articles and reviews published in EMAL from 1972 to 1999 and 2003 through 2020.

The bibliographic data associated with these documents were exported from Scopus to an MS Excel file. The Excel file consisted of 1438 rows corresponding to the documents published in EMAL and 40 columns of bibliographic data describing features of these EMAL articles. For example, the data included authors, publication year, title, author affiliations, citations, abstract, keywords, co-citations and more. These represented the ‘data’ analyzed in this review.

Data analysis

Bibliometric analyses can be broadly divided into two types. Descriptive statistics were used to describe trends related to the overall size of the corpus, annual publication volume and geographic distribution of authors. In this review, descriptive analyses conducted in Tableau (Tableau, 2020) and MS Excel 2019 software were used to analyze the geographical distribution of articles published in EMAL.

The second set of data analyses fall under the rubric of ‘science mapping’ (Van Eck and Waltman, 2011a, 2017a; Zupic and Čater, 2015). Science mapping employs analytical tools such as citation analysis, co-citation analysis and keyword analysis to illuminate the underlying features of a body of knowledge. The science mapping analyses used in this review were conducted in the VOSviewer software program version 1.1.16 (Van Eck and Waltman, 2017b).

Citation analysis was used to identify ‘high impact documents’ published in EMAL since its launch in 1972. High citation counts are generally interpreted as indicators of ‘scholarly impact’ based on the assertion that the ideas expressed in cited documents have been read and used by other scholars (Garfield and Merton, 1979). When conducting document citation analysis, VOSviewer counted the number of times that articles published in EMAL have been cited in other Scopus-indexed documents. Notably, the resulting count, referred to as ‘Scopus citations’, differs from citation counts yielded by Google Scholar or WoS for the same document due to differences in the size of these indexes (Zupic and Čater, 2015).

Co-citation analysis (Small, 1973) offered a complementary perspective on scholarly impact by analyzing the frequency with which authors or documents had been cited in the reference lists of EMAL articles. For example, this analysis was employed in order to identify the documents that have most significantly influenced articles published in EMAL.

Co-citation analysis incorporates a second ‘relational’ feature that goes to the heart of science mapping. Small (1973) observed that when pairs of authors are frequently cited in the same reference lists, there is likely to be an intellectual similarity in the content of their work. Thus, for example, in EDLM, we might expect to find Gronn and Spillane, Harris and Day, Murphy and Leithwood, or Ribbins and Gunter frequently ‘co-cited’ in the same documents based on the similarity of their work. This proposition holds regardless of whether or not the scholars had ever co-authored any documents.

In this review, co-citation analysis was used to calculate the frequency with which ‘pairs of authors’ had been cited in the reference lists of EMAL articles. For example, assume that a document authored by Ribbins and a separate document authored by Gunter both appear in the reference of an EMAL article authored by Bush. In this case, the VOSviewer software would assign one (co-)citation to Ribbins and one to Gunter, as well as a ‘link’ between the two of them.

Drawing upon these data, VOSviewer software (Van Eck and Waltman, 2017b) generates a matrix which forms the basis for a social network map that visualizes the network of relationships among scholars frequently cited by EMAL’s authors. In this review, an author co-citation map was used to identify the ‘intellectual structure’ of the EMAL corpus (White and McCain, 1998). Zupic and Čater (2015) defined ‘intellectual structure’ as the key research streams or theoretical orientations that emerge within a knowledge base over time.

Finally, several forms of keyword analysis were used to highlight topical trends in EMAL publications. In order to gain a broad perspective on the topical content of the journal’s corpus, we used ‘term analysis’ in VOSviewer software. Term analysis is a form of text mining that analyzes the co-occurrence of ‘noun terms’ in the content of the review documents (Van Eck and Waltman, 2011). These co-occurrences are then used to create a network map that visualizes relationships among “co-occurring keywords”. As Van Eck and Waltman (2011: 1) explain, ‘(a) term map is a two-dimensional map in which terms are located in such a way that the distance between two terms can be interpreted as an indication of the relatedness of the terms’. The term map is employed both to identify frequently occurring terms in the body of literature and to highlight ‘conceptual spaces’ that emerge within a literature over time (Ding et al., 2001; Zupic and Čater, 2015).

A second set of keyword analyses were also conducted with the intent of explicitly extending the topical trends reported by Bush and Crawford (2012) through 2011. For this analysis, we restricted the dataset of articles to the period from 2012 to 2020. First, keyword frequency was used to identify dominant topics published in EMAL for the most recent decade. Then keyword co-occurrence (co-word) analysis was employed to gain insight into the ‘conceptual structure’ of the recent EMAL corpus (Ding et al., 2001).

Results

As stated earlier, the broad purposes of the review are to document empirically the body of knowledge that has accumulated in EMAL and identify the journal’s distinctive contributions. The results are presented in the sequence of the research questions.

Growth trajectory and changing geographical distribution

The EMAL corpus comprised of 1438 articles is not evenly distributed across its 5 decades of publication. During its first 35 years of publication, EMAL published an average of 30 articles per year. Since 2009, its annual publication volume increased to an average of 70 articles per year. This means that the article corpus is skewed towards the latter 12-year period during which 48% of EMAL’s articles were published.

The geographical distribution of EMAL publications from 1972 through 2020 is displayed in Figure 2. While a plurality (36%) of EMAL articles have been authored in the UK, the heatmap indicates that EMAL authors come from a broad international array of nations (see also Bush and Crawford, 2012). The significance of this spatial distribution lies in the contextualized nature of educational leadership and management research and practice (Clarke and O’Donoghue, 2017; Hallinger, 2018). Development of a globally valid knowledge base depends upon research published from diverse national contexts (Hallinger, 2020; Hallinger and Chen, 2015; Mertkan et al., 2017).

Figure 2.

Geographical heatmap showing the distribution of EMAL articles, 1972–2020.

This finding extends results earlier reported by Bush and Crawford (2012) who found a trend of increasing publications authored outside the UK since 2000. More specifically, they found that from 2000 to 2011, 41% of the EMAL corpus had been authored outside the UK. Since their analysis ended in 2011, the current review focused on the ensuing period of 2012–2020. We found that during this period, 76% of EMAL’s articles were authored outside the UK, with 33% contributed from by authors located in ‘emerging regions’ outside of Anglo-American-European societies (not tabled). These patterns are reflected in Figure 3 which shows the nations whose scholars contributed the most articles to EMAL between 2012 and 2020. Thus, we conclude that although EMAL continues to maintain a ‘UK focus’ (i.e. 24% of authored content), the journal has significantly ramped up its ability to attract and publish content from more ‘international contexts’.

Figure 3.

Top contributing nations/territories contributing research to EMAL, 2012–2020.

Document citation analysis of EMAL’s content

Before presenting our Scopus-based document citation analysis of the EMAL corpus, we wish to establish the journal’s impact factor based upon WoS data. As shown in Figure 4, EMAL’s impact factor has risen consistently and quite dramatically in recent years from 0.692 in 2015 to 2.448 in 2019. This reflects a similarly large increase in annual citations of the EMAL’s content by other WOS-indexed documents from 401 in 2015 to 1298 in 2019. These data offer a clear picture of EMAL’s increasing impact trajectory.

Figure 4.

EMAL’s Web of Science journal impact factor trend, 2011–2019 (downloaded on 25 February 2021, 10:42:43, from ‘Journal citation reports’ (Clarivate, 2021)).

Next, we conducted document citation analysis of articles published in EMAL using the Scopus database. There were two reasons for choosing Scopus for this analysis. First, Scopus includes articles reaching back to the time of EMAL’s inception. Second, use of Scopus data further allows a comparison of EMAL trends with those of other key EDLM journals such as School Leadership and Management, Journal of Educational Administration and the International Journal of Educational Management that are not indexed in the WoS (Hallinger and Kovačević, 2019, 2021).

First, we note that in Table 1 most of the articles are of fairly recent vintage with a mean publication year of 2009. Indeed, only one of the high-impact articles was published prior to 2000 (Hoyle, 1982). This trend could be due to changes in the content of the journal published in the post-2000 era, changes in the journal’s readership during these periods, and the larger proportion of articles published during the 2000s. The fact that 10 of EMAL’s most highly cited articles have been published since 2010, and 5 since 2015 (e.g. Gumus et al., 2018; Hallinger, 2018; Hallinger and Chen, 2015; Marsh and Farrell, 2015; Tian et al., 2016) is quite unusual. Seldom do so many recently published articles feature among a journal’s top-cited publications. This possibly reflects the impact that acceptance into the WoS has had on the journal’s visibility and impact.

Table 1.

Top-cited documents published in Educational Management, Administration & Leadership, 1972–2020.

Rank	Document	Nation	Type	Topic	Scopus citations	CPD
1	Hallinger and Heck (2010) Leadership for learning. Does collaborative leadership make a difference?	HK	Emp	Shared Leadership	140	14
2	Bolden et al. (2009) Distributed leadership in higher education: Rhetoric and reality.	UK	Con	Shared Leadership	135	12
3	Woods et al. (2004) Variabilities and dualities in distributed leadership.	UK	Rev	Shared Leadership	130	8
4	Heck and Hallinger, 2005 The study of educational leadership and management.	Thai	Rev	EDLM Research	122	8
5	Hoyle (1982) Micropolitics of educational organisations.	UK	Con	Politics of Education	121	3
6	Hallinger (2018) Bringing context out of the shadows of leadership.	Thai	Con	Leadership Concept	111	56
7	Muijs and Harris (2007) Teacher leadership in (in)action.	UK	Emp	Shared Leadership	98	8
8	Bush (2008) From management to leadership: Semantic or meaningful change?	UK	Con	Leadership Concept	89	7
9	Tian et al. (2016) A meta-analysis of distributed leadership from 2002 to 2013.	FIN	Rev	Shared Leadership	79	20
10	Harris (2013) Distributed leadership: Friend or foe?	MAL	Con	Shared Leadership	77	11
11	Mitra and Gross (2009) Increasing student voice in high school reform.	USA	Con	Ed Reform	77	7
12	Simkins (2005) Leadership in education: ‘What works’ or ‘what makes sense’?	UK	Con	Leadership Concept	77	5
13	Marsh and Farrell (2015) How leaders can support teachers with data-driven decision making.	USA	Con	Decision-making	75	15
14	Levin and Fullan (2008) Learning about system renewal.	CAN	Con	Ed Reform	74	6
15	Blackmore (2006) Deconstructing diversity discourses in the field of educational management and leadership.	AUS	Con	Social Justice	74	5
16	Gumus et al. (2018) A systematic review of studies on leadership models in educational research from 1980 to 2014.	TURK	Rev	Leadership Concept	73	37
17	Lumby (2013) Distributed leadership: The uses and abuses of power.	UK	Con	Shared Leadership	73	10
18	Shatzer et al. (2014) Comparing the effects of instructional and transformational leadership on student achievement.	USA	Emp	Leadership Effects	70	12
19	Crossman and Harris (2006) Job satisfaction of secondary school teachers.	UK	Emp	Teachers	70	5
20	Glatter (2012) Persistent preoccupations: The rise and rise of school autonomy and accountability in England.	UK	Con	Ed Reform	69	9
20	Hallinger P and Chen J (2015) Review of research on educational leadership and management in Asia.	Thai	Rev	EDLM research	69	14

EDLM: educational leadership and management Con: conceptual; Emp: empirical; Rev: review; AUS: Australia; CAN: Canada; FIN: Finland; MAL: Malaysia; THAI: Thailand; TURK: Turkey; UK: United Kingdom; USA: United States Ed Reform refers to Education Reform.

At the same time, we note that the Scopus citation counts for the journal’s ‘top-cited articles’ are lower than expected. Bibliometric analyses of other highly ranked EDLM journals have tended to evidence higher Scopus citation impact. For example, Hallinger and Kovačević (2019: 347) reported the following total Scopus citation counts for EDLM specialization journals through 2018: EAQ 21,415, JEA 13,376, School Effectiveness and School Improvement (SESI) 11,792, International Journal of Educational Management (IJEM) 10,408, EMAL 7096. These data offer a contrasting perspective on EMAL’s citation impact drawing upon a more broadly comparative metric.

In addition, in line with trends discussed above, the geographical sources of top-cited articles are quite diverse. Fourteen of the 22 top-cited articles were authored outside the UK, with contributions from Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia, Turkey, Australia, Canada, Finland and the United States of America (USA). Given earlier remarks on the need for building a global knowledge base, this is a very positive result.

It is also notable that the focus of these articles is centered clearly on ‘leadership’ as opposed to ‘management’ or ‘administration’. More specifically, 13 of the 22 top-cited articles focused explicitly on leadership. Moreover, although an eclectic range of leadership models is evident in these documents, we note that forms of shared leadership, whether defined as collaborative, distributed or teacher leadership, are predominant (e.g., Bolden et al., 2009; Hallinger and Heck, 2010; Lumby, 2013; Muijs and Harris, 2007; Tian et al., 2016). This suggests the currency of collective sources of leadership among EMAL’s authors and readers.

Finally, we noted that 12 of the 22 top-cited articles were conceptual articles (e.g. Bolden et al., 2009; Bush, 2008; Glatter, 2012; Hallinger, 2018; Harris, 2013; Lumby, 2013). In the authors’ experience of conducting similar reviews, this represents a higher than expected proportion of the highly cited articles. The strength of these conceptual articles reaffirms EMAL’s ‘roots’ as a theory-based journal that continues to offer a welcoming home for conceptual articles (Bush and Crawford, 2012; Hughes, 1997; Ribbins, 1997; Strain, 1997).

Document co-citation analysis again emphasizes the journal’s transition towards a focus on ‘leadership’ (see Table 2). More specifically, 20 of the 21 documents most frequently cited in the reference lists of EMAL articles explicitly addressed ‘leadership’. These encompassed articles focusing on leadership for learning (Hallinger, 2011a, 2011b; Leithwood et al., 2008; Marks and Printy, 2003; Robinson et al., 2008), leading change (Fullan, 2001; Hallinger, 2003; Leithwood, 1994), teacher leadership (York-Barr and Duke, 2004) and distributed leadership (Gronn, 2000, 2002; Harris, 2008; Hatcher, 2005; Spillane, 2006; Spillane et al., 2004). Again, we note that conceptual articles also predominated among the top ‘co-cited documents’, further reinforcing the strongly theoretical orientation of EMAL publications.

Table 2.

Document co-citation analysis of top cited references in articles published in Educational Management, Administration & Leadership (EMAL) 1972–2020.

Rank	Cited reference	Source	Nation	Type	Topic	Co-citations
1	Leithwood et al. (2008) Seven strong claims about successful school leadership.	SLAM	CAN	Rev	Leadership for Learning	40
2	Marks and Printy (2003) Principal leadership and school performance.	EAQ	USA	Emp	Leadership for Learning	31
3	Hallinger (2003). Leading educational change.	CJE	Thai	Con	Leadership for Change	31
4	Gronn (2002) Distributed leadership as a unit of analysis.	LQ	UK	Con	Distributed Leadership	27
5	Spillane et al. (2004) Towards a theory of leadership practice: a distributed perspective.	JCS	USA	Con	Distributed Leadership	23
6	Spillane (2006) Distributed Leadership.	Book	USA	Con	Distributed Leadership	20
7	Gronn (2000) Distributed properties: A new architecture for leadership.	EMAL	UK	Con	Distributed Leadership	19
8	Robinson et al. (2008) The impact of leadership on student outcomes.	EAQ	NZ	Rev	Leadership for Learning	18
9	Harris (2008) Distributed leadership according to the evidence.	JEA	UK	Rev	Distributed Leadership	18
10	Fullan (2001) Leading in a Culture of Change.	Book	CAN	Con	Leadership for Change	18
11	Leithwood et al. (2010) Testing a conception of how school leadership influences student learning.	EAQ	CAN	Emp	Leadership for Learning	17
12	York-Barr and Duke (2004) What do we know about teacher leadership?	RER	USA	Rev	Distributed Leadership	17
13	Burns (1978) Leadership.	Book	USA	Con	Leadership	17
14	Leithwood (1994) Leadership for school restructuring.	EAQ	CAN	Con	Leading Change	16
15	Braun and Clarke (2006) Using thematic analysis in psychology.	Book	NZ	Meth	Qualitative Research	16
16	Hallinger (2011a) A review of three decades of doctoral studies using the principal instructional management rating scale.	EAQ	HK	Rev	Leadership for Learning	15
17	Hallinger (2011b) Leadership for learning: Lessons from 40 years of empirical research.	JEA	HK	Rev	Leadership for Learning	15
18	Bush and Glover (2014) School leadership models: What do we know?	EMAL	UK	Rev	Leadership	15
19	Harris (2004) Distributed leadership and school improvement: Leading or misleading? (2004).	EMAL	UK	Con	Distributed Leadership	13
19	Hatcher (2005) The distribution of leadership and power in schools.	BJSE	UK	Con	Distributed Leadership	13
19	Cuban (1988) The Managerial Imperative and the Practice of Leadership in Schools.	Book	USA	Con	Leadership & Management	13

SLAM: School Leadership & Management; EAQ: Educational Administration Quarterly; CJE: Cambridge Journal of Education; LQ: Leadership Quarterly; JCS: Journal of Curriculum Studies; JEA: Journal of Educational Administration; RER: Review of Educational Research; BJSE: British Journal of Sociology of Education; Con: conceptual; Emp: empirical; Rev: review.

Moreover, the body of knowledge on which EMAL authors have drawn comes from diverse sources. These include EAQ (Leithwood et al., 2010; Marks and Printy, 2003; Robinson et al., 2008), JEA (Hallinger, 2011b; Harris, 2008), Review of Educational Research (York-Barr and Duke, 2004), School Leadership and Management (Bush and Glover, 2014; Leithwood et al., 2008), The Leadership Quarterly (Gronn, 2002), the Cambridge Journal of Education (Hallinger, 2003), Journal of Curriculum Studies (Spillane et al., 2004), British Journal of Sociology of Education (Hatcher, 2005), EMAL itself (Gronn, 2000; Harris, 2004), as well as several books (Burns, 1978; Cuban, 1988; Fullan, 2001; Spillane, 2006). These sources, which extend well beyond journals specializing in EDLM, highlight the field’s roots in sociology, psychology, management, curriculum and general education.

Intellectual structure of the EMAL ‘knowledge base’

White and McCain (1998) proposed that author co-citation analysis can provide a visual representation of the ‘intellectual structure’ of an academic discipline, a field of inquiry or a journal. When conducting author co-citation analysis of the EMAL corpus, we set VOSviewer to a threshold of at least 60 citations of an author in the reference lists of EMAL documents. Using this threshold, VOSviewer generated an author co-citation map which displays 105 authors (see Figure 5).

Figure 5.

Author co-citation map created in VOSviewer showing intellectual structure of the EMAL corpus, 1972–2020 (threshold 60 citations, display 105 authors).

In Figure 5, the relative frequency of author co-citations is reflected by the size of the node associated with a given scholar. Lines, or ‘links’, connecting pairs of scholars represent co-citations of the scholars by other authors. Authors located in close proximity tend to be frequently co-cited by EMAL authors and thereby bear an intellectual similarity. The colored clusters, formed out of these co-citation relationships, represent ‘schools of thought’ or key research streams within the literature. These schools of thought can be interpreted by reference to the key works of the authors that comprise them.

This map visualizes three coherent ‘schools of thought’ that comprise the EMAL corpus. These consist of Leadership for Learning, Distributed Leadership, and Managing Education Reform and Change. The emergence of these schools of thought reaffirms the centrality of a ‘leadership’ perspective in the journal’s corpus. Author co-citation analysis identifies Leithwood (821citations), Hallinger (800), Harris (649) and Bush (523) as the authors whose scholarship has most directly influenced authors who have contributed articles to EMAL.

The largest school (56 authors) is comprised of a somewhat diverse cluster of authors whose interests encompass Managing Education Reform and Change. This school is led by Bush (523 co-citations), Fullan (324), Ball (284), Hopkins (272) and Gunter (256). In fact, this large school is comprised of two sub-groups located in the central and lower left regions of the map. Authors in the upper central group have focused on managing change and school improvement, with a focus on the role of teachers (e.g. Fullan, Hopkins, A Hargreaves, Stoll, MacBeath). A second sub-group in the left region is comprised of scholars who have researched leadership development (e.g. Bush, Earley, D Hargreaves, Wallace), critiqued management approaches to education reform (e.g. Lumby, Gunter, Ribbins) and highlighted social justice issues raised in the reform of education systems (e.g. Blackmore, Lumby, Gunter, Crawford, Coleman).

The second largest school (30 authors) is represented by authors whose scholarship has focused on Leadership for Learning. Led by Leithwood (821 citations) and Hallinger (800), this school incorporates research conducted on instructional leadership and transformational leadership (Hallinger, 2011a; Leithwood, 1994; Shatzer et al., 2014). More recently, it features efforts that seek to integrate both models into a broader conceptualization of leadership for learning (Hallinger, 2003, 2011b; Hallinger and Heck, 2010; Leithwood et al., 2008, 2010; Marks and Printy, 2003).

The third school (13 authors) centers on scholars who have authored key works on distributed leadership such as Harris (649 citations), Spillane (324) and Gronn (311). As observed earlier in the results of document analysis, this is a key theme within the EMAL corpus. Although this is the smallest of the 3 schools of thought, its appearance on the map further reinforces this conclusion.

Past and present topical foci of EMAL

In order to gain a complementary perspective on the topical content of the journal, we conducted term analysis of the EMAL corpus. In contrast with author co-citation analysis, term analysis is based on actual content of the published articles themselves. Thus, it represents a ‘lower inference’ method of analyzing conceptual trends in the literature (Ding et al., 2001; Wang et al., 2017). The term map presented in Figure 6 is interpreted using similar guidelines to those used for the author co-citation map.

Figure 6.

Term map showing conceptual themes in the EMAL corpus, 1972–2020.

The term map highlights five conceptual themes within the EMAL corpus of publications. These include System Administration, Schools in Society, Higher Education Management, Leadership for Learning, and Social Justice Leadership. Notably two of the themes (i.e. Leadership for Learning, and Education Reform and Change) figure prominently on both maps. At the same time, however, the term map offers a somewhat more differentiated perspective on the EMAL corpus.

Indeed, examination of the frequently occurring terms that appear in Figure 6 extend findings from the author co-citation analysis (e.g. university, England, educational leadership, leadership practice, power, commitment, schools, government, head teacher, accountability, local education authorities (LEAs)). In addition, this analysis offers evidence of the journal’s coverage of leadership and management issues across the full spectrum of educational organizations including primary schools (Elonga Mboyo, 2019; Lazaridou and Beka, 2015), secondary schools (Barrell, 1991; Mitra and Gross, 2009), international schools (Gardner-McTaggart, 2019; Keller, 2015), school systems (Addi-Raccah and Gavish, 2010; Tan and Dimmock, 2014), LEAs (Addi-Raccah and Gavish, 2010; Hellawell, 1990; Millward and Skidmore, 1998), universities (Gandhi and Sen, 2020) and higher education systems (Harding and Scott, 1982). While early childhood education did not emerge on this term map, we noted that it was present on maps that used a somewhat lower threshold (e.g. Fonsén et al., 2020; Gibbs, 2020).

We next used co-word analysis to hone in on the most recent topical trends featured in the EMAL corpus. This analysis extends both the Bush and Crawford (2012) findings and the term analysis presented above. The map in Figure 7 shows the topical trend of articles published in EMAL between 2012 and 2020. The dominant topic of this decade has been educational leadership (261 occurrences). This dominance gains further perspective when considering the other frequently occurring keywords: principals (79), educational management (78), schools (72), educational administration (60), distributed leadership (43), change (27) instructional leadership (25), school improvement (24), transformational leadership (23), gender (21) and teachers (21).

Figure 7.

Keyword co-occurrence map for the EMAL corpus, 2010–2020 (N=646; threshold 5 occurrences, display 75 keywords).

While educational administration and management remain pillars of the overall EMAL corpus (Bush and Crawford, 2012), they have been eclipsed in recent decades by scholarly interest in understanding how educational leadership is distributed (Bolden et al., 2009; Harris, 2013; Hatcher, 2005; Lumby, 2013; Tian et al., 2016), how it develops (Berkovich and Eyal, 2020; Gibbs, 2020; Smylie and Eckert, 2018) and how it shapes teaching and learning, change, school improvement and social justice (Bush and Glover, 2014; Grobler et al., 2017; Hallinger and Heck, 2010; Leithwood et al., 2010).

Four conceptual spaces emerge on the co-word map shown in Figure 7. The focus on Educational Leadership and on School Change and Improvement reprises schools of thought identified in the earlier analyses, and further highlights the continuing relevance of Educational Management and Administration (Connolly et al., 2019; Dormann et al., 2019) as well as Social Justice (Gómez-Hurtado et al., 2018; Ward et al., 2016) as key research streams in EMAL.

Discussion

This empirically grounded review of EMAL builds on a lineage of prior efforts to make sense of the journal’s evolution and identify its signature contributions to the field of educational leadership and management (Bush and Crawford, 2012; Fitz, 1999; Hughes, 1997; Ribbins, 1997; Strain, 1997; Willower, 1987). The analyses selected for this review aimed to fill gaps (e.g. citation and co-citation analyses), and extend findings from earlier efforts (e.g. geographical and topical analyses). In this concluding section, we highlight limitations of the review, offer our interpretation of the results, and suggest several implications for the journal’s further development.

Limitations

The first limitation is that the findings presented in the review are based on the analysis of bibliographic data associated with articles published in EMAL rather than on a critical analysis of the articles themselves. Thus, the review neither offers insights into the quality of research published in EMAL nor syntheses of substantive findings. The review is delimited to an assessment of the evolution of the corpus of EMAL publications.

Second, we note that bibliometric analyses tend to emphasize ‘dominant trends’ within a literature. This can lead to the review ignoring non-dominant but potentially important features of the knowledge base under examination. For example, due to the skewed distribution of the EMAL corpus towards post-2008 publications, articles published during the earlier era might have been disadvantaged in the citation analysis.

Third, as noted in the Method section of this article, the review omitted 80 articles published in EMAL during 2000, 2001 and 2002. This was due to limitations of the Scopus database which failed to include EMAL articles for these three years. While the omission is unfortunate, it represents only about 5% of the full EMAL publication corpus. Indeed, the only analysis conducted for the review that might yield a potentially different result is document citation analysis. Thus, we assert that the broad results of the review would not change in any significant way were the data on these articles included in the database.

Finally, it should be emphasized that the analysis of trends extracted from the EMAL corpus cannot be generalized to the field as a whole. No matter how important a journal may be within a field of study, every journal has its own genetic markers. While these distinguish a journal’s unique contributions to the field, they also limit the extent to which these can be taken as representative of the field as a whole.

Interpretation of the findings

This review identified five distinctive features of the EMAL corpus. First, consistent with Bush and Crawford (2012), we found that the EMAL corpus encompasses articles on management, administration and leadership in educational organizations ranging from early childhood settings through K-12 (kindergarten to 12th grade) schooling and higher education. Moreover, the journal’s content incorporates many articles that contextualize learning and analyze intersections in the provision of education across different types of educational organizations and the societies they serve. Thus, the journal offers a comprehensive perspective on education management and related processes. This is not necessarily the case with all EDLM specialization journals which often specialize in leadership and management practices at particular educational levels.

Second, five decades on from its launch, our findings affirm that EMAL evidences a dual focus on the UK and ‘international’ education contexts (see also Bush and Crawford, 2012; Hallinger, 2020). This is a significant finding. Elsewhere, the authors have asserted that the context of research in EDLM has changed rapidly since 2010. This shift has been driven first and foremost by a growing cadre of EDLM researchers in ‘emerging regions’ located outside the traditional intellectual centers of the field in the USA, UK, Canada and Australia (Hallinger, 2018, 2020; Hallinger and Kovačević, 2019, 2021). This trend has presented a challenge for the field’s specialization journals, all of which have historically relied heavily on content authored in English-speaking, Anglo-American nations (Bush and Crawford, 2012; Hallinger, 2020; Hallinger and Kovačević, 2019, 2021; Mertkan et al., 2017). Our review finds that the custodians of EMAL approached this challenge as an opportunity and have succeeded beyond expectations.

For EMAL, navigating this change meant finding the right balance between the publication of articles that reflect its roots in the UK education firmament and nurturing smaller international branches that emerged over time. Early reviewers of the journal (Fitz, 1999; Ribbins, 1997; Strain, 1997) emphasized EMAL’s deep roots in the UK education context. Yet, in 2012, Bush and Crawford (2012: 538) observed:

As a UK-based journal, EMAL will always seek to publish high quality articles from all four countries in the UK. However, the growth of international articles (over the past decade) reflects a deliberate strategy to position EMAL as the preferred outlet for international, as well as UK-based, authors.

This review found that 76% of EMAL’s articles published between 2012 and 2020 came from sources outside the UK. Moreover, 33% of those articles were authored by scholars located in the ‘emerging regions’ of Asia, Africa and Latin America. To place this in perspective, consider the composition of the EAQ corpus for this same period. Only 25% of EAQ’s 2012–2020 corpus was authored outside the USA, and just 16% came from authors located in the emerging regions.

EMAL’s success at achieving strong international representation in its content was no doubt boosted by the journal’s inclusion in the WoS in 2011. This increased EMAL’s attractiveness to scholars in many ‘international contexts’ where full academic credit for publication remains limited to WoS-indexed publications (e.g. Iran, Turkey, China). Nonetheless, the editorial leadership team of the journal deserves credit for formulating a vision and executing a nuanced strategy aimed at ensuring that EMAL could provide intellectual leadership as the wave of internationalization gathered pace (see Hallinger, 2020; Hallinger and Kovačević, 2019, 2021).

A third distinctive feature of the journal lies in the journal’s continuing emphasis on conceptually grounded discourse and inquiry. Citation analyses found that conceptual a surprisingly high proportion of the top-cited articles (55%) published in EMAL (e.g. Bolden et al., 2009; Bush, 2008; Hallinger, 2018; Harris, 2013; Hoyle, 1982). Conceptual papers represented a similar proportion of the top co-cited documents (e.g. Burns, 1978; Cuban, 1988; Fullan, 2001; Gronn, 2000, 2002) on which EMAL authors have drawn. These trends reaffirm the journal’s continuing commitment to theoretically informed discourse, a characteristic frequently noted in prior reflections on the journal (Bush and Crawford, 2012; Fitz, 1999; Hughes, 1997; Ribbins, 1997; Strain, 1997; Willower, 1987). Thus, we find that a strong theoretical orientation continues to be deeply rooted in the journal’s lineage.

Fourth, findings from citation, co-citation and keyword analyses all converged on the conclusion that ‘leadership’ has superseded ‘management’ and ‘administration’ as the dominant driver in the journal’s corpus. While educational administration and management remain pillars of EMAL content, they now tend to be organized around education reform and school change and improvement (Bush, 2008; Bush and Glover, 2014). Moreover, these conceptions have been eclipsed in recent decades by global interest in understanding how ‘educational leadership’, writ large, shapes teaching and learning, change, school improvement and social justice. This paradigm shift towards leadership first emerged in the 1980s and gathered pace in subsequent decades (Hallinger and Kovačević, 2019, 2021). Thus, we conclude that EMAL’s editorial team made a timely decision 20 years ago to incorporate ‘leadership’ into the journal’s banner.

Finally, while the discourse on leadership featured in EMAL is eclectic, the authors detected a special emphasis on shared forms of leadership (Gronn, 2000; Hallinger and Heck, 2010; Hatcher, 2005; Lumby, 2013; Muijs and Harris 2007; Tian et al., 2016). We believe that this also qualifies as a signature contribution the journal has made to the broader field of educational leadership and management.

In reflecting on these signature features of the EMAL corpus, the authors wish to recognize the efforts of the editorial teams that have guided the journal successfully through succeeding decades of change. Our data support the conclusion that a stronger focus on educational leadership and a strategy of publishing more articles authored internationally laid the groundwork that led to EMAL’s acceptance into the WoS in 2011. That, in turn, led directly to a rapid four-fold increase in the number of manuscript submissions, and enabled the editorial team to increase selectivity and content quality. This no doubt has had a knock-on effect of boosting EMAL’s annual citations and its WoS impact factor.

Conclusions

These conclusions beg the question, where should the journal go from here? The authors wish to highlight two implications from the findings of this review.

First, despite the highly positive tenor of our results, one finding remains potentially troubling. This concerns the observation that the journal’s Scopus citation impact lags behind those of related journals such as EAQ, JEA, SESI and IJEM. We recognize that some readers give scant credence to citation metrics, but they are an increasingly influential basis for decision-making at the individual, institutional and disciplinary levels. Indeed, it is citation impact that has boosted EMAL’s own reputation. Therefore, we urge the editorial board to develop strategies aimed at enhancing the journal’s citation impact in order to ensure its long-term health.

Second, while EMAL’s internationalization strategy has been highly successful, the journal is in danger of becoming a victim of its success. At least for the moment, EMAL remains the only WoS-indexed, mainstream EDLM research journal that is actively publishing a broad array of ‘international’ research on EDLM. This means that EMAL is guaranteed to continue receiving an abundance of submissions, including many manuscripts from developing societies. While this is a ‘problem’ many journal editors would welcome, there are potentially negative consequences. First, this situation has created a huge increase in the workload of the editorial team which could potentially compromise the quality of the review process. Second, the large number of submissions means that the editor must squeeze more manuscripts into the limited space available for accepted articles. Currently, the publisher and editors have responded by increasing the number of articles per issue and moving more articles into the ‘online-in press’ category. However, these are stop-gap strategies which do not necessarily lead to higher-quality content. Perhaps it is time for a new phase of refinement in the journal’s strategy.

We agree with Ogawa et al. (2000) who asserted that development of the EDLM knowledge base should result not only from individual initiative, but also from facilitated and coordinated efforts. Journals can play a proactive or passive role in knowledge accumulation. In order to be more proactive in shaping international discourse and the nature of submissions, it might be useful to appoint regional sub-editors. These sub-editors would be responsible for communicating with local (e.g. Africa) scholars and even sourcing special issues on high interest and emerging topics. More broadly, special issues can be used to focus the journal’s content on priority themes. This is one of the important ways that EMAL can exercise intellectual leadership in the next decade.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

ORCID iDs

Philip Hallinger

Jasna Kovačević

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Mapping the intellectual lineage of educational management,administration and leadership,1972–2020

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Central concepts underpinning the review

Method

Identification of documents

Data analysis

Results

Growth trajectory and changing geographical distribution

Document citation analysis of EMAL’s content

Intellectual structure of the EMAL ‘knowledge base’

Past and present topical foci of EMAL

Discussion

Limitations

Interpretation of the findings

Conclusions

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iDs

References