Tensions that stultify education: school principals reflecting on their professional relationships

This paper explores the relationships that principals identify as most significant to their leadership and how these shape their professional identities. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of the ‘made subject’ and Biesta’s ‘impulse society’, the study situates principalship within a web of power relations that render the principal both accountable and emotionally vulnerable. Interviews with sixteen principals identified five key relationships, with each relationship exerting distinct disciplinary pressures. Two intertwined tensions emerge for the principals: a fear of failing students’ education and a fear of being publicly exposed as a failure. The study contributes original insights into the emotional labour of leadership, the confessional nature of accountability and self-governance and the seeming absence of ethical resistance among principals. It offers a critical, relational and affective account of principalship, advancing theoretical understandings of subjectification and governmentality situated within the impulsive society while highlighting the ethical and emotional consequences of leading.