Enacting care and control: leadership in Chinese secondary school dining halls

Abstract

ABSTRACTCaring is considered an essential quality for principals and vice-principals in China, which is explicitly stated in the standards-based policy for school leaders at the national level. This study delves into this concept of caring and investigates how standards related to caring leadership were enacted in one particular setting: the school dining hall. The study drew upon both theoretical discussions and qualitative findings from three secondary schools in northern China. Adopting a spatialized lens of policy enactment, this study reveals the strategies used by school leaders to show they care for their (teaching and administrative) staff, such as ensuring food provision and encouraging non-formal conversations. However, we also argue that school dining halls are socio-cultural spaces where school leaders were able to enact control over staff. As a result, school hierarchies were reinscribed by school leaders’ exercise of benevolent governance within school dining halls, which became contradictory spaces of caring, control, inclusion and exclusion. Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsWei WeiDr. Wei Wei is a graduate of the Faculty of Education, Western University. Her doctoral research focused on the transfer of leadership standards and its contextualization in China. Currently she is based in Beijing, China and continues to research and publish on the cultural politics of policy mobilities and the modes of educational governance driven by the datafication and platformization in education.Marianne LarsenDr. Marianne A. Larsen is a Professor Emerita at the Faculty of Education, Western University. Within the field of comparative and international education, Dr. Larsen is a global expert on the internationalization of higher education. She is currently also an Academics Without Borders volunteer providing capacity building expertise to a Kenyan university developing its internationalization strategic plan.