**2. Literature informing the study**

Effective school leaders aim to develop schools as places of innovation and efficiency. There is much evidence in Bourdieu's concept to support this, and yet, we have noticed that leading for educational innovation and efficiency are difficult to implement, particularly in developing countries [2, 3]. This situation can be partially explained in ways that leaders' roles are understood, enacted as a command rather than leadership as a process of influencing and rendering service [2]. It is found that in school systems where leaders suppress teacher agency schools tend to remain traditional, and 'legitimate and institutionalise dominant beliefs and values; a process that both undermines critical thinking as a democratic educational and social practice' ([4], p. 8).

Pierre Bourdieu's work seeks to problematize and uncover the confounding effects of subjugation, exclusion and representation that perpetuate notions of superiority in educational leadership and management [5]. Bordieuan constructions of leadership and leaders' roles offer a socio-critical space to examine and analyze discursively how capital and habitus (belief and value systems) are structured in fields (networks of relations) to create hierarchical meanings and practices of educational leadership. Therefore, through Bordieuan analysis, the arrays of power, identity and subjective/

objective relationships that exist among leaders and leadership processes can be identified and transformed [6].

## **2.1 Bourdieu's view of leadership**

Pierre Bourdieu's theory has had great influence on reflexive practice, inequality and injustices in education. His theory helps researchers and practitioners to interrogate and disrupt how education systems produce and reproduce existing orthodoxies of leadership as a process of domination [6, 7]. The purpose for using Bourdieu's theory is to create transformative spaces for developing education to serve the interest of all. However, little of his work has been applied to educational leadership.

In this chapter, we focus on Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, capital and field to explicate how leadership can be enacted as a dynamic and collaborative process to counter inequality and create efficient education systems. Contemporary research emphasized that shared decision-making, where leadership processes are distributed, can have powerful effect on educational effectiveness [1]. Thus, taking a social critical perspective highlights the need to examine leadership through habitus, capital and field – the complex and interrelated theoretical lenses of Pierre Bourdieu.
