The Cupboard is Bare: The Postmodern Critique of Educational Administration

Abstract

Educational administration as a scholarly discipline continues to be dominated by a world view of modernity. This perspective posits that “reality” lies “out there” waiting to be discovered by the researcher using rational-logico, positivistic procedures. This tradition of scholarship denigrates alternative world views as “subjective,” and hence less rigorous and worthy of serious study. The most prized trophy of all is encapsulated in the “knowledge base,” that core of factual information which epitomizes all that is “worth knowing” in the discipline. The knowledge base represents the foundational claim of legitimacy and distinctiveness protecting the boundaries of the discipline against absorption into other organizational units in the university. The postmodern critique of positivism has called the basic premises of foundational legitimacy into question, and represents the most serious intellectual challenge confronting the definition of the field, its methods of inquiry, and its assertions regarding exclusivity since T. B. Greenfield's (1978) critique several decades earlier. This article reviews the claims and counterclaims of the current debate in educational administration and offers some promising trends for the future.

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