School leadership and the principal’s important role in implementing national goals, efficiency in economy and administration and school development has gained increasingly interest the last decade. Both among politicians and researchers we find a lot of suggestions what kind of leadership is the most efficient to raise standards and solve the problems of decreasing student results and an increasing inequality between schools. In the Swedish context, there is a school form that rarely is mentioned in this debate – the folk high school. On its own path, beside the ordinary school system, the folk high schools during 150 years, has brought education to adults from rural - and working class, served as a knowledge centre for the civil society and, during last years, played an important role in the integration of refugees and immigrants. The leadership in this school form is hardly at all investigated and needs to be highlighted. The aim of this study is to give voice to principals in the Swedish folk high school and describe how they talk, and what they say, about their mission and their leadership. This work builds upon qualitative interviews with eight principals in different folk high schools. Their stories have been processed by using a discourse-analytic approach. I have also identified the presence of different institutional logics working in their organizations. In the analysis, I have used theories made around the organizational field and the social context in schools. My respondents describe a mission that is wide and quite open. The schools are small and the board consists of people who work voluntary to befriend the school. The principle has a large ability to design the mission him/herself. The mission also rephrases in the everyday interaction with the staff and the local culture, a culture where teachers, by tradition, has a lot of independence and great influence. This situation affects the principals’ possibilities and range of action. He/she is at the same time free and bounded. I also find that the principals, increasingly, must deal with multiple institutional logics, that affect ways of thinking, talking and acting, in their organizations.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:kau-57060 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Höber, Hans-Åke |
| Publisher | Karlstads universitet, Fakulteten för humaniora och samhällsvetenskap (from 2013) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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