Some of the concerns raised in the education sector about ‘greedy organizations’ and how these affect women may have particular resonance within the Church, which holds the idea of sacrifice for others in high esteem. Yet this raises the question of what is worthy of sacrificing oneself for.
Further research is needed in identifying challenges and then exploring the enabling, delimiting and frustrating mechanisms and structures in addressing them.
This research might involve empirical projects including:
- Taking gender seriously in education contexts and elsewhere.
- Looking at leadership practice in less formal and informal settings.
- Drawing on insights from the intersections between church and schools and between leaders and their religious and spiritual lives.
- Identifying the ‘micro-inequities’ by which discrimination operates.
- Uncovering the complex relationship between agency and structure.
- Tackling assumptions including those that might appear well-intentioned and those ‘safest possible solutions’ that fail to question the suitability of the basic modes of operation of organizations and their existing power relations.
- Exploring awareness by leaders of culture at micro, meso and macro levels.
- Imagining how current leadership development might be reconfigured including seeing thinking deeply about culture is as a leadership skill.
- Investigating issues around the distribution of power and influence, and analysing how far current solutions address the power balance.
- Identifying the extent to which religious schools in Britain are challenging and providing alternatives to neo-liberal discourses of carelessness.
- Asking what a leadership with an expanded lexicon might look like.