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Politicizing articulation: applying Lyotard's work to the use of standards in educational leadership

This paper presents a case for the importance of an application of Jean-Francois Lyotard's ideas to the analysis of educational leadership. Through exploring Lyotard's concepts of language games, the differend and performativity, this paper argues that the approach taken through the development of leadership standards cannot capture the messy, complex and contradictory phenomenon of leadership, and in fact, works against alternative understandings and approaches. An example of a leadership capabilities framework is used to illustrate the incommensurability of language games at work in these approaches. The paper then considers other ways of undertaking research in educational leadership to provoke further study in the ‘field'.