Theorising Context in Educational Leadership from a Relational Critical Realist Perspective

Educational leadership scholars are unanimous in their
appreciation of the importance of context. As a concept, however,
context is not unproblematic and, while being scarcely theorised,
the recent growing interest around the topic has shown
fundamental differences in the way that it is approached with
repercussions on how the field progresses. The analysis of
published literature on context undertaken in this article,
therefore, attempts to look beyond current framing of context as
antecedent and moderator, in order to propose a relational critical
realist perspective to framing context and, hopefully, shape as well
as decolonise future policy, practice and theorising in educational
leadership.