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The purpose of this paper is to report on the superintendent portion of the UCEA Voices III project.

A four‐year study to determine how school leaders, from several locations and contexts, describe their perceptions of and experiences with educational leadership related to the study themes, school improvement, democratic community, and social justice.

Study findings indicate that superintendents articulated these study themes in more general and practical terms than found in the academic literature, and share a belief that the themes may be mutually exclusive, and require contextual interpretation to be functional. The paper concludes by calling for extending our ideas of how to practice social justice, solicit broader community voice, employ shared decision making, and measure accountability.

Authors recommend that practitioners place more emphasis on individualized contextual and cultural realities that can minimize or even counter the intended effects of these leadership approaches in practice. Conclusions suggest that superintendents understand and practice a more inclusive form of social justice, sometimes having to control and filter majority stakeholder inputs to achieve more ethical, socially just, educational decisions. The study provides a critical and needed empirical evaluation of the theoretical concepts of shared decision‐making, inclusion of community stakeholders, and practicing social justice. As superintendents attempt to practice these concepts in a real‐world context, they have discovered and provided insights into the limitations of these ideas.

The purpose of this study is to provide an empirical measure of how principals enact prescribed leadership standards into practice. The aim of the study was to ascertain how current school principals perceive the practice of a specific set of leadership standards.

A total of 61 practicing school principals in North Carolina were asked to rate (in a forced distribution) how they currently enact the North Carolina Standards for School Executives (their professional standards for certification and evaluation). Using Q‐methodology, factor analysis generated three model sorts. These factors are examined with the sorting data along with data from a post sort questionnaire.

The three factors that emerged in this study highlight that there is no one way leadership practices are lived in schools. Specifically, this study provided three distinct categories of how school principals practice leadership. The three factors that accounted for 38 percent of the variance in this study. The factors were named collaboration focus, policy focus, and vision focus. Each provides illustrative descriptions of what fosters and inhibits practices within each factor.

The findings have clear and present implications for how, why, and to what extent current school principals enact professional standards in the face of contextual factors that may complicate or even negate the efficacy of standardized practice. Such analysis holds promise that practices can be mediated in a meaningful manner.

This study adds value to the field by virtue of examining the dissonance between standards and practice. This study's methodology that seeks to operationalize subjectivity is original in the field of principal leadership.

Small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) are increasingly making use of e‐commerce. This study seeks to identify the reasons that are causing such businesses to adopt e‐commerce (adoption intentions); the benefits they are realising from their e‐commerce developments; and, importantly, to determine if the areas identified as important are indeed those where benefits are being realised. It was found that responding to competitive pressure was the main reason leading companies to adopt e‐commerce. Information sharing and communication between employees within the firm were found to be the e‐commerce activities where firms are realising the greatest benefit. Areas where e‐commerce could be considered as “under‐performing” were found to be online recruitment and procurement. Areas that could be considered to be “over‐performing”, and hence may indicate an appropriate starting point for those firms yet to adopt e‐commerce, are in internal knowledge sharing and communication.

The purpose of this paper is to present the gap between conceptualizations of social injustices and the desired social transformation that addresses multiple social subsystems and levels on one hand, and social justice leadership that addresses intra-school efforts on the other. The paper aims to expand the conceptualization of social justice leadership and tie it together with concepts of activism and social change.

The paper adopts a socio-ecological perspective. It reviews works about social justice leadership in education, activism, and social change to present the notion that in light of existing social justice barriers educational leaders should serve as activists in schools and in the community and policy areas.

The paper presents a macro framework, focussing on individual leaders in the field and on the consolidation of intentions, actions, and outcomes in a manner necessary for using social justice as an effective socio-political agenda in a socio-ecological system.

The paper presents a conceptual framework which can enable practitioners and researchers to better understand social justice efforts.

The purpose of this paper is to report on a full‐scale testing of the role of marketing and its relevance in small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). The objective is to present the results of a rigorous assessment of a new model of marketing in SMEs.

A positivist approach relied on the use of the hypothetico‐deductive method to produce the theoretical model. Both quantitative and qualitative research methods were applied to investigate the model. This paper reports on a large‐scale questionnaire survey, follow‐up interviews with SMEs owner‐managers and the use of published accounts to show how companies have performed during this study.

The role and relevance model of marketing in SMEs has been thoroughly investigated and tested. The model offers a straightforward way of diagnosing the situation within an SME. The simplicity of the model allows for a clearer understanding of what is often a complex and messy situation within these companies and their business environment. Some findings suggest a positive link between a company's financial performance and its approach to marketing within the model.

The paper concludes that the model goes a long way to explaining the behaviour of SMEs with regard to marketing. The model appears to be viable and could be used to analyse and diagnose the situation regarding marketing within SMEs.

The paper offers a unique theoretical and practical insight into the issue of marketing in SMEs.

There has been a notable growth in the number, participants, and frequency of international assessments of student academic performance over the past 50 years. This chapter provides a structure for the perspectives that could be used to analyze this rise. This chapter highlights case study examples of specific countries' choices to participate in particular assessments. It further describes the utility of three analytic frameworks in understanding the decision factors, diffusion mechanisms, and environmental dynamics that relate to international testing. Factors such as the cost of testing, the cultural connections between nations participating, and the temporal relevance of testing to today's focus on accountability arise in illustrations of the transmission mechanism for international achievement tests. This chapter organizes large and diverse amounts of important testing sampling frame information in a unique way. The questions we ask are driven by the framework we begin analyzing with. Organizations conducting these tests can better understand the touchpoints for nations deciding whether or not to participate. Concerns about developing country participation, for example, can be better addressed.

This study aims to use the original data collected from school board members representing nonprofit charter schools in the state of Minnesota to examine the relationship between the distribution of board-executive governance responsibilities and the performance of organizations operating as part of a New Public Management style macro-governance reform.

A combination of survey data collected from Minnesota charter school board members and hard performance data were utilized in two OLS regression models to predict the link between organizational governance and school performance.

The authors find that boards can improve hard measures of organizational performance by shifting responsibility of day-to-day operations closer to the executive, and public advocacy duties closer to the board. The results build on the existing literatures on school board governance and board-executive relations. Overall, the findings suggest the existence of an ideal balance between board-executive governance responsibilities in key functional areas on charter school boards.

Though a healthy literature exists regarding the value of charter schools, very few studies have actually explored the way in which these organizations are governed. This study is the first to link charter board governance responsibilities to performance.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the differing ways in which nonprofit charter and traditional public school board members define the concept of accountability in the school or schools they oversee. The findings speak to the governing consequences of shifting oversight of public education from democratically elected bodies to unelected nonprofit governing boards.

The authors use originally collected survey data from democratically elected school board members and nonprofit charter school board members in Minnesota to test for differences in how these two populations view accountability. Open-ended survey questions are coded according to a previously used accountability typology.

The authors find that charter school board members are more likely than traditional public school board members to define accountability through high stakes testing as opposed to staff professionalization and bureaucratic systems.

The results speak to the link between board governance structure and accountability in the public education sector, providing new understanding on the way in which non-elected charter school board members view their accountability function.

Concepts of values-based leadership posit that school principals’ professional practice must be informed by values to ensure coherently purposeful activities. Contingency models stress the contextual dependency of professional practice and the need to match activities to local opportunities and constraints. The purpose of this paper is to reconcile both positions from an integrative perspective and to illustrate examples of “values-based contingency leadership” (Day et al., 2001).

Analyses draw on survey data from 56 German schools in order to relate professional values stated by the principals as well as organizational features of their schools to teacher ratings on leadership behaviour (n=910). Instead of scrutinizing singular variables in isolation, a typological approach serves to identify value profiles as well as organizational configurations. Analyses of variance are applied to examine the combined effects of both factors on leadership behaviour.

Interactional effects in the sample indicate that contextual influences are not homogenous across differing value profiles of principals who operate under equal conditions. Descriptive patterns of leadership behaviour within each organizational configuration reveal how principals accentuate leadership activities according to their value profile.

Due to the low statistical power of the small sample, findings are clearly exploratory in nature. However, replication and extension studies seem fruitful, as effect sizes of value-context interactions are consistent with theoretical assumptions and not artificially inflated by common-source variance.

This paper elaborates and exemplifies the moderating role of values in contextual influences on leadership behaviour. It also provides deeper insights into the content and structure of professional values advocated by school principals.

Using Hong Kong as the context of study, this paper examines the role of education policy, particularly professional standards for teachers (PST) and principals (PSP), in enabling leadership for action on contemporary challenges and crises such as climate change.

This paper utilises critical policy analysis (CPA) and an associated analytical framework to examine key policy texts that are designed with the intent to frame the professional roles, practice and learning of educators and leaders in Hong Kong. The data analysis process involved rounds of descriptive coding, which was then collated into broader themes for discussion.

Policy texts emphasised the scope for educators to exercise leadership and decision-making that supports innovation, improvement and collaboration in the pursuit of a broad social mission for education, emphasising the skills students do and will need to respond to dynamic contemporary challenges. However, how this relates to broader policy goals, and limited articulation of the means through which this is possible, questions remain about the extent to which teachers and leaders are able to exercise leadership for action on climate change.

This study has important implications for how those in policymaking, research and practice spaces understand the framing of the role of teachers and school leaders in policy and the influence of this on their capacity to lead action on contemporary challenges and crises, such as climate change.