Leadership and Intercultural Dynamics

The work will explore issues related to educational leadership in various settings in the 21st century. It will argue that the context for leadership within many nation states and international scenarios involves interaction between multiple and diverse social cultures. A further proposition is that the dominant leadership theory and discourse in the past reflects forms of western hegemony and mono-cultural assumptions drawn largely from the Anglo-American worldview. It will argue that such frameworks have limited validity in multicultural societies such as Australia, Britain, Canada, Europe and the USA and with indigenous communities within such nations. These societies contain significant populations which do not share the core values which inform established leadership practice and institutional paradigms in such nations. The consequence can often be insensitivity towards non-mainstream cultures, inappropriate structures, failed interventions and alienation of individuals from major institutions and traditions. Another proposition is that as more developing nations increase in affluence and view education as a key economic strategy, they become increasingly exposed to western discourses about leadership and management. Whilst acknowledging that western traditions have much to offer, there is a danger that this can involve forms of cultural imperialism whereby local traditions are ignored or subjugated. There is a need for developing nations to recognise and value the traditions and practices from their own cultures and assess the extent to which they are compatible with borrowings from other nations. Such processes require a sophisticated degree of reflective analysis to determine potential compatibilities and conflicts. This is an alternative to unmediated cultural borrowing, cloning, and hybridization. Western leadership scholars who work in such contexts have some responsibility to address this interaction instead of blithely offering practices and recipes fro