What future for school business leadership? Recent change and looming possibilities

2020 ◽  
pp. 089202062096985
Author(s):  
Karen Starr

Fundamental widespread changes affecting education’s purposes, policies and practices have had transformational repercussions for school business across the developed world. Subsequently, school business demands and accountabilities continue to escalate in scope and complexity and governments, education authorities and school communities are acknowledging the primacy and imperative of proficient school business leadership. International research chronicling the subsequent rapid professionalisation of school business leaders demonstrates pervasive policy moves that have re-focused school business priorities. Drawing on research conducted in Australia, USA, UK, Canada and New Zealand this article describes recent widespread changes before discussing issues and trends portending future professional adaptation for school business leaders whose work lies at the cross hairs of macro pressures and micro necessities.

2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 83-93
Author(s):  
Fiona Creaby

This article explores the increasing professionalisation of school business practitioners in the state school system in England. Often referred to a ‘school business managers’ or ‘school business leaders’, this cohort of the school workforce have been increasingly tasked with leading crucial site-based management functions in schools, such as finance and budgeting, human resources and school operations. As this area of practitioner activity has grown over the last two decades, ‘school business leadership’ has increasingly been positioned by education policy makers and professional bodies as a distinct field of practice within the school system. However, despite increasing recognition of the value of school business leadership within the school system, there is evidence of continued tensions around the inclusion of such practitioners in matters of leadership. Further, there is a paucity of scholarly research exploring school business activity and the increasing professionalisation of its practitioners. Therefore, this article serves to contribute to this gap by exploring the evolution of school business practitioners and their positioning within the wider field of education in England. It argues for further research in England and for knowledge exchange with other education contexts to share insight and explore future potential.


It is held that contemporary Western organizations would neither exist nor develop without leaders who efficiently and effectively manage. Researchers assert that in modern business enterprises, leadership requires the skill of working with and through people and other organizational resources to accomplish organizational goals. In addition, many business leadership studies posit that a key skill is that unique ability to work with the additionally challenging behavior of Millennials and Generation Z geared 24/7 towards accelerated development. Nonetheless, Drucker (2003) looking at modern organizations from a much broader perspective asserted that effective management in the post-industrial arena is probably the main resource of the developed world and the most needed resource in the developing world. This research paper explores perceptions of a leadership yardstick in small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Ninety-three participants drawn from different departments in business organizations were randomly selected as a sample. Two research questions were posed: (1) In your opinion, are business leaders operationally efficient in reaching goals in the SME where you work? (2) In your opinion, are business leaders effective in reaching goals in the SME where you work? The results found that Millennial and Generation Z business leadership in the MENA had a novel moral compass that networked, coordinated, cooperated and united employees into a communal context. Additional research is recommended to further explore the MENA business leadership yardstick as it facilitates measuring the first worldwide horizontal generation whose leadership seems to be socially accountable


Author(s):  
David Thackeray

Brexit is likely to lead to the largest shift in Britain’s economic orientation in living memory. Some have argued that leaving the EU will enable Britain to revive markets in Commonwealth countries with which it has long-standing historical ties. Their opponents argue that such claims are based on forms of imperial nostalgia which ignore the often uncomfortable historical trade relations between Britain and these countries, as well as the UK’s historical role as a global, rather than chiefly imperial, economy. This book explores how efforts to promote a ‘British World’ system, centred on promoting trade between Britain and the Dominions, grew and declined in influence between the 1880s and 1970s. At the beginning of the twentieth century many people from London, to Sydney, Auckland, and Toronto considered themselves to belong to culturally British nations. British politicians and business leaders invested significant resources in promoting trade with Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa out of a perception that these were great markets of the future. However, ideas about promoting trade between ‘British’ peoples were racially exclusive. From the 1920s onwards colonized and decolonizing populations questioned and challenged the bases of British World networks, making use of alternative forms of international collaboration promoted firstly by the League of Nations and then by the United Nations. Schemes for imperial collaboration amongst ethnically ‘British’ peoples were hollowed out by the actions of a variety of political and business leaders across Asia and Africa who reshaped the functions and identity of the Commonwealth.


2021 ◽  
pp. 146394912198936
Author(s):  
Olivera Kamenarac

The impacts of neo-liberal education reforms on the early childhood education sector have been a focal point of scholarly critiques in New Zealand. Interestingly, only a few studies have addressed how teacher professional identities and professionalism have changed in response to the neo-liberal context of New Zealand early childhood education. It has been, however, recognised that understanding the complexity of teacher professional identities within the rapidly transforming landscape of early childhood education is a key consideration in implementing and sustaining a change agenda in education policies and practices. In this article, the author draws on data from her research study about how teachers’ professional identities have been reconstructed in response to the shifting discourses in New Zealand early childhood education policies and practices. Specifically, the author explores the construction of teachers as business managers, which has emerged through an interplay of discourses of marketisation and privatisation driving some of the country’s early childhood education policies and practices. It is argued that the construction of teachers as business managers has altered core professional ethical values underpinning the teaching profession, professionalism and the purpose of early childhood education in New Zealand, which were traditionally embedded in discourses of collective democracy, equity and social justice.


Author(s):  
Enoch O. Antwi. EdD.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the promise of today and future businesses. Any leadership development model that ignores AI could miss out on modern business tools, technology, and resources. Though evaluations in developing business leaders present a positive relationship between AI and leadership development (Husain, 2017; Reese, 2018; Hosanagar, 2019), not many studies have been conducted in these areas. With Roomba Robots listening to social media and iRobot’s identifying customers and reaching out to them through private channels (Carr, 2011), a question arises: will AI be required to use business leadership practices in solving applicable challenges, or it will just be a marketing tool? Leadem (2017) quoted Colin Angle, iRobot’s founder, and CEO in an Entrepreneur Magazine, “I have been able to remain CEO, not because of the fact I was CEO yesterday, but because I've worked very hard to listen, learn and evolve in the seat." Developing business leaders could be rooted in AI knowledge, applicability, challenges, and solutions while paying attention to the three keywords of listening, learning, and evolving in leadership.


Author(s):  
O.G. James

Thank you for the opportunity to present this address in my home district, from where I started my business career in aviation in 1949. The 34 years have been eventful, stimulating and satisfying, particularly when it has been said so many times that the agricultural aviation industry has been the single most important development in post war years, in arresting the lost production from New Zealand hill country. The main contribution tq,the threefold increase in stock unit numbers has been the service provided by the aviation industry. It is a record that we, who created it, and spent our working lifetime on, can be justly proud.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (20) ◽  
pp. 9566
Author(s):  
Tommaso Caloiero ◽  
Gaetano Pellicone ◽  
Giuseppe Modica ◽  
Ilaria Guagliardi

Landscape management requires spatially interpolated data, whose outcomes are strictly related to models and geostatistical parameters adopted. This paper aimed to implement and compare different spatial interpolation algorithms, both geostatistical and deterministic, of rainfall data in New Zealand. The spatial interpolation techniques used to produce finer-scale monthly rainfall maps were inverse distance weighting (IDW), ordinary kriging (OK), kriging with external drift (KED), and ordinary cokriging (COK). Their performance was assessed by the cross-validation and visual examination of the produced maps. The results of the cross-validation clearly evidenced the usefulness of kriging in the spatial interpolation of rainfall data, with geostatistical methods outperforming IDW. Results from the application of different algorithms provided some insights in terms of strengths and weaknesses and the applicability of the deterministic and geostatistical methods to monthly rainfall. Based on the RMSE values, the KED showed the highest values only in April, whereas COK was the most accurate interpolator for the other 11 months. By contrast, considering the MAE, the KED showed the highest values in April, May, June and July, while the highest values have been detected for the COK in the other months. According to these results, COK has been identified as the best method for interpolating rainfall distribution in New Zealand for almost all months. Moreover, the cross-validation highlights how the COK was the interpolator with the best least bias and scatter in the cross-validation test, with the smallest errors.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Rachel Alexa Margaret Tallon

<p>Young people are not passive, homogenous audiences of media that is produced by international humanitarian and development organisations (NGOs). They actively read and engage with the messages cognitively and emotionally and in the process create new meanings. This thesis is an investigation into what interpretations young people make from NGO media. The twin goals of education and fundraising present certain difficulties for NGOs who view developed world schools as a key site for awareness-raising for both their brand and global issues of injustice. Critics are concerned that when representation is aligned directly and simplistically with charity, powerful messages are signalled to the viewers. The nature and impact of these messages are yet to be fully understood as there is little empirical evidence of how young people receive and interpret NGO media.  This research directly addresses this gap. The research identifies and maps various interpretations that young people have on encountering images and messages produced by NGOs. Year 10 social studies classrooms were chosen as the context for data collection and 118 young people and seven teachers from five diverse secondary schools in New Zealand participated. They were canvassed using qualitative methods that included focus groups. The approach for this research was informed by postdevelopment critique which examines the power of the discourse of development in constructing ideas about people and development.  The findings show young people to be astute and critical interpreters of NGO media. Teachers reported that NGO media is very influential and could be problematic in forming a solely negative view of the global South. Most of the young people approved of the sector’s charitable work but many expressed doubts about NGO expenditure and the accuracy of the imagery. A key finding is that many said they knew the images were designed to make them feel guilty in order to elicit action which was usually a donation. The findings support other research among adults and show the early development of attitudes towards NGOs and ideas about the developing world. The significance of a conflicting emotional response towards NGO marketing is a central finding for this thesis. This conflict of wanting to help and yet not being able to do so created a tangible tension within the young people and affected how they viewed people in the global South. Young people in New Zealand are emerging actors in the global development industry and their ideas will shape North-South interactions in the future. This research directly contributes to understanding the power of the NGO sector to mediate global relations across difference, a process of which there are moral and political implications.</p>


2013 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 330-364 ◽  
Author(s):  
David W. Bebbington

‘From some modern perspectives’, wrote James Belich, a leading historian of New Zealand, in 1996, ‘the evangelicals are hard to like. They dressed like crows; seemed joyless, humourless and sometimes hypocritical; [and] they embalmed the evidence poor historians need to read in tedious preaching’. Similar views have often been expressed in the historiography of Evangelical Protestantism, the subject of this essay. It will cover such disapproving appraisals of the Evangelical past, but because a high proportion of the writing about the movement was by insiders it will have more to say about studies by Evangelicals of their own history. Evangelicals are taken to be those who have placed particular stress on the value of the Bible, the doctrine of the cross, an experience of conversion and a responsibility for activism. They were to be found in the Church of England and its sister provinces of the Anglican communion, forming an Evangelical party that rivalled the high church and broad church tendencies, and also in the denominations that stemmed from Nonconformity in England and Wales, as well as in the Protestant churches of Scotland. Evangelicals were strong, often overwhelmingly so, within Methodism and Congregationalism and among the Baptists and the Presbyterians. Some bodies that arose later on, including the (so-called Plymouth) Brethren, the Churches of Christ and the Pentecostals (the last two primarily American in origin), joined the Evangelical coalition.


Author(s):  
Jing Quan

Electronic business (e-business) has been popularly lauded as “new economy.” As a result, firms are prompted to invest heavily in e-business related activities such as supplier/procurement and online exchanges. Whether the investments have actually paid off for the firms remain largely unknown. Using the data on the top 100 e-business leaders compiled by InternetWeek, the leaders are compared with their comparable counterparts in terms of profitability and cost in both the short-run and long-run. It is found that while the leaders have superior performance based on most of the profitability measurements, such superiority is not observed when cost measurements are used. Based on the findings, managerial implications are offered accordingly.


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