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This chapter focuses on researchers as knowledge workers in higher education in England as an illustration of what Katznelson (2003, p. 189) identifies as the ‘professional scholar’ undertaking intellectual work as a public intellectual. I begin by examining the challenges to intellectual work and its location in a university, particular from the media and the popularity of what Bourdieu calls Le Fast Talkers ¹ – those who talk a lot but have nothing much to say. After drawing out the tensions within knowledge production, I then locate the analysis of what it means to do research in a period of education policymaking in England between 1997 and 2010, when New Labour called on researchers to produce evidence to support radical reforms. In particular, I argue that school effectiveness and school improvement (SESI) knowledge workers in Schools of Education in higher education in England are an interesting case for investigating the public intellectual positioning as ‘detached attachment’ (Melzner, 2003, p. 4), particularly through their attachment to New Labour governments and the subsequent detachment following a change of government in May 2010.

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.

The author argues that leadership in the public sector operates within the belief of a historical and often mythical hierarchy, and that leadership as a term often is over‐used and under‐conceptualised. This ‘leadership delusion’ is located in a functional approach to leadership where the assumption is that removing dysfunctions from organisations through efficient and effective delivery will automatically bring about changes to standards. While organisational systems, structures and roles are important for quality and improvement, such an approach is not of itself socially critical. This viewpoint argues that we need approaches to leadership that engage with bigger issues such as class, gender and race in ways that are more than counting and measuring.

Reading current accounts of higher education demonstrates the flux and damage of rapid neoliberal changes to the type and conduct of academic work. Opening the Times Higher Education magazine on the 28 April 2011 shows articles about cuts in staffing and undergraduate provision in England, concerns about the quality of for-profit higher education in the USA; the call for French universities to play the high fees international student game; and demands for the further modernisation of higher education so that there is more direct relevance to the workplace. In England the Browne et al. (2010) report is seen as re-locating previously publicly funded university provision firmly into the market place. Hence, Collini (2010, p. 25) argues that “what is at stake is whether universities in the future are to be thought of as having a public cultural role partly sustained by public support, or whether we move further towards re-defining them in terms of purely economic calculation of value and a wholly individualistic conception of ‘consumer satisfaction’”. In this chapter I intend examining what this means in regard to the nature of academic work: what it is that academic's do and why, and the impact that changes in the purposes of higher education are having on identity and professional practice. I do this by focusing on analysis from the Knowledge Production in Educational Leadership (KPEL) Project (2006–2007) funded by the ESRC (RES-000-23-1192), where I investigated the professional practice of knowledge producers in Schools of Education in UK universities during the period of New Labour governments (1997–2010). Through using Rose's (1996, p. 129) analysis of Foucault's concerns with ‘our relation to ourselves’ as ‘a genealogy of subjectification’ I examine the way researchers think about purposes, and generated rationales and narratives about their location in higher education.

In many countries concerns have been expressed about the merits of educational research. This paper reports on the outcomes of a review of reviews of such research in Australia and the UK. Taken at face value, the latest round of reviews are largely critical in the UK (where they have generated much debate) and mainly favourable in Australia (where they have not). In accounting for this difference the paper suggests that it might be explained in part as a function of how the reviews were conducted. In the UK reviews have tended to begin with the research and work forward to practice whereas in Australia they have been inclined to begin with practice and work back to the research. It is suggested that policy makers, practitioners and researchers in Australia and the UK have much to learn from each other's experience, as have those in other countries planning similar reviews.

The Galbraith article gives us the opportunity to think out loud about the purposes and practices of field activity, and in responding this article argues that Galbraith is more concerned with the technical application of a method rather than investigating knowledge production. Using Bourdieu's theory of practice enables critical evaluation to be a social practice and the author positions herself as a knowledge worker concerned to describe and understand the interplay between agency and structure. Chaos theory enabled the author from the mid‐1990s to problematise systems theory as the preferred way of generating leadership and management prescriptions for educational professionals. This remains relevant today and it is argued that Galbraith's continued reliance on improving systems theory means that the opportunity is lost to examine the exercise of power within and surrounding complex organisations.