School principals’ professional identity is increasingly shaped by parents’ social media use, yet this process remains theoretically under-developed. Decades of research have framed parental engagement as an unqualified good, leaving largely unexamined the effect of sustained, public parental commentary on principals’ professional sense of self. Drawing on Goffman's dramaturgical framework to map public frontstage exposure, alongside his conceptualization of role distance and role embracement, this qualitative study employed netnography across four principal Facebook communities alongside 10 semi-structured interviews in Canada, the United States, and Switzerland. Using Sort and Sift, Think and Shift analysis, the study produced two primary findings. First, principals’ differential vulnerability to parental social media scrutiny is mediated by role conceptualization. This paper introduces the Continuum of Role Conceptualization , ranging from managerial to familial orientation, explaining why uniform external pressures produce divergent identity outcomes. Second, principals at the familial end experienced identity dissonance—a forced shift from an aspirational Instructional Leader identity toward an involuntary Crisis Manager identity, leading to role adaptation or role exit. These findings offer implications for leadership preparation, professional standards, and theorizing principal identity under persistent digital scrutiny.
International school leadership in China is increasingly shaped by the competing institutional logics of state control and market demand, yet explanations of principal turnover often focus on individual-level factors rather than on how leaders judge their work as professionally sustainable. This qualitative study examines how school leaders in Chinese international schools experience and navigate this institutional collision. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 22 school leaders across 10 provinces, it identifies two dynamics. First, many participants experienced the collision of regulatory demands and market expectations not simply as a tension to be managed, but as experienced impossibility: an interpretive threshold at which the space for ethically and professionally acceptable action appeared to narrow. Second, participants adopted precarious navigation, using grey-space manoeuvring and cultural arbitrage to keep schools operating without resolving the underlying value conflict. The study contributes to institutional logics theory by explaining how macro-level contradictions become consequential when actors come to perceive competing demands as no longer reconcilable through professionally legitimate action. It also extends international school leadership scholarship by positioning turnover as one possible implication of this interpretive and agentic process, not as the primary object of prediction.
Student engagement, learning outcomes, and competency development have garnered growing attention in higher education. However, academic leaders often face challenges in fostering holistic student learning while also enhancing student career prospects. Drawing on student-centered leadership (SCL) theory, this study examines how university Department Heads (DHs) facilitate student learning and development, and explores the extent to which the K-12 SCL model is transferable to higher education contexts. The case study draws on semistructured interviews with eight DHs in a Canadian university. Data were analyzed using abductive reasoning. Findings show that DHs acted as operational actors who sought to improve learning outcomes by integrating high-impact practices into, and enhancing the quality of, teaching and curricula. A deep analysis of the findings suggests that DHs were required to make trade-offs between administrative compliance and student-centered practices, as their professional agency was constrained by intersecting cultural, structural, and resource-related factors. This study has two main theoretical contributions: (i) developing a novel typology of factors enabling or constraining SCL in higher education and (ii) proposing a context-specific framework for understanding how DHs achieve academic goals within their departments. The study concludes with recommendations for practice and future research.
