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In this chapter, a new methodology is adumbrated for critical scholars who research education leadership. It is argued that this new methodology is necessary for two main reasons. The first is the epistemological inadequacy of dominant functionalist education-leadership methodologies. The second is the way in which the dominant critical methodology in the critical part of the field – policy scholarship – does not enable an explicit focus on education leadership but relegates it conceptually to a by-product of education policy. This enables those critical scholars who see leadership as a ‘tainted’ concept to avoid or deny it altogether. The methodology proposed here is called critical education leadership and policy scholarship (CELPS) and comprises six features: (1) it is epistemologically critical, that is, it focuses on context and power from a post-positivist perspective. (2) CELPS locates and works with education policy in diverse contexts, including the ideological, historical, political, discursive, socio-economic, axiological and cultural. (3) CELPS understands education leadership and policy as mutually constitutive. (4) CELPS enables the ontological deployment of the terms leader and leadership without committing to a project of reification. (5) CELPS requires the explicit theorisation and/or conceptualisation of its objects and assumptive architecture. (6) CELPS makes room for new or diverse approaches, agendas, methods, aims and foci. This chapter makes an important contribution to the critical field’s capacity to address extant and emergent problems in education empirically, as well as conceptually.

In 2023, two international football (soccer) tournaments amplified attention on the women's game in Oceania. Football organisations are efficient at measuring participation of these events, of their training programmes, and related activities. However, their evaluation of the impacts within or on local football communities remains relatively rare, particularly for those marginalised through gender. Women and girls commonly engage in football for more complex reasons than those underpinning the participation of men and boys. Football organisations in the Pacific Islands tend to treat women's football communities differently to those around men and boys. Yet often the same conventional processes of appraisal are applied. This chapter offers critical reflection on evaluation processes of a new initiative, This is How We Football, aimed at participation of young women and girls in safe environments. The initiative is deployed by regional governing body, Oceania Football Confederation (OFC). In its efforts to address a wider range of gender norms and related issues identified within local communities, the programme includes the use of Indigenous/local epistemologies and oratory practices alongside conventional measures. This chapter considers the incorporation of place-based approaches to evaluation and the challenges and opportunities the process presents for OFC. In doing so, it contributes to wider understanding of engagement with local football communities in parts of Oceania.

This study aims to explore Augmented Language Models (ALMs) for synthetic data generation in services marketing and research. It evaluates ALMs' potential in mirroring human responses and behaviors in service scenarios through comparative analysis with five empirical studies.

The study uses ALM-based agents to conduct a comparative analysis, leveraging SurveyLM (Bickley et al., 2023) to generate synthetic responses to the scenario-based experiment in Söderlund and Oikarinen (2018) and four more recent studies from the Journal of Services Marketing. The main focus was to assess the alignment of ALM responses with original study manipulations and hypotheses.

Overall, our comparative analysis reveals both strengths and limitations of using synthetic agents to mimic human-based participants in services research. Specifically, the model struggled with scenarios requiring high levels of visual context, such as those involving images or physical settings, as in the Dootson et al. (2023) and Srivastava et al. (2022) studies. Conversely, studies like Tariq et al. (2023) showed better alignment, highlighting the model's effectiveness in more textually driven scenarios.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is among the first to systematically use ALMs in services marketing, providing new methods and insights for using synthetic data in service research. It underscores the challenges and potential of interpreting ALM versus human responses, marking a significant step in exploring AI capabilities in empirical research.