Management,leadership and the emotional order of the school

In management theory, attention to the emotions is increasing, mainly for economic reasons. Within the management of education, so‐called transformational leadership is becoming the new orthodoxy, and a central aspect of it is emotional intelligence. This can be interpreted sociologically, from both Durkheimian and Weberian perspectives. It is argued that transformational leadership is not about the transformation of the individual: it is mainly about the translation of corporate and government policy into practice. This is because emotional management and leadership is framed by—and is expected to accord with—the discourse of centralized target‐setting and the auditing of performance. Emotional management seems set to be a technical endeavour, born of modernity, set for standardization, to be rendered as objective and measurable, and made ready for audit.