This paper aims to examine principals’ emotional, and often invisible, work (cf. Wilkinson, 2021). Recent studies undertaken in a long-term network collaboration, between school principals in low socioeconomic status (SES) Swedish communities and educational researchers, show how leadership is learned and shaped in and by context specific circumstances, entailing several challenges. The most prominent challenges are connected to a) high population mobility, b) comprehensive linguistic and cultural diversity, c) comprehensive knowledge diversity, and d) an intense problem complexity; a dense flow of extraordinary incidents in and around the schools (Hirsh et al., 2023). Although not explicitly elaborated on in these studies, the results also indicate that emotions are a prominent, albeit often unspoken, part of the principals' work.

 A practice architectures lens is here combined with the notion of emotional labor (Hochschild, 1983). Principal leadership i.e., leading is here explored as a practice that consists of sayings, doings and relatings conditioning and conditioned by site-specific cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political arrangements (Kemmis et al., 2014). From a practice perspective, emotions ‘do not belong to individuals but – in the form of knowledge – to practices’ (Reckwitz, 2002 p. 254).  

We used the above-mentioned findings (Hirsh et al., 2023) and carried out a re-analysis of the same data, this time specifically aimed at finding discursive manifestations of emotional labor. Additionally, the new analysis is directed towards understanding and explaining principals’ emotional labor in the light of the practice theory.    

The empirical data consists of 20 principals’ peer group-dialogues over three years. The conversations of their everyday practices were recorded and examined (Hirsh et al., 2023). In this paper, five audio-recorded sessions (each approx. 2h from 2020, 2021) were analyzed.   

Our preliminary results show how the intertwined site-specific arrangements conditioning the leading practices became visible, challenged and re-negotiated in the principals’ peer-dialogues, and how the principals navigate and learn ‘how to go on’ based in the emotional labor. These results suggest that emotional labor can be understood as multi-dimensioned conditions of educational leading practices, sometimes perceived as a burden for the individual but indeed also as important, site-based practice knowledge that gives principal work joy and meaning.   

Further, the methodological approach in the seminar series - the peer-dialogues – seems to empower principals to (propose) educational changes to politicians and municipality organizer (cf. Hirsh et al, 2023), a contribution to both (Nordic) research and practitioner communities. 

References 

Hirsh et al., 2023 Far from the generalised norm: Recognising the interplay between contextual particularities and principals’ leadership in schools in low-socio-economic status Communities. Educational Management Administration & Leadership. 1-18. 

 Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.  

Kemmis, S., Wilkinson, J., Edwards-Groves, C., Hardy, I., Grootenboer, P., & Bristol, L. (2014). Changing Practices, Changing Education. Springer.  

 Wilkinson, J. (2021). Educational Leadership through a Practice Lens. Springer.