از “حامی پروری” تا رهبری تحول گرا؟ یک سفر مردم شناسی از گرجستان تا انگلیس From “clientilism” to transformational leadership? An autoethnographic journey from Soviet Georgia to the UK

Introduction Even a brief look into the current system of higher education in the UK enables an observer to witness a visible change from being a social field with a high degree of autonomy and the ability to operate more or less independently from the State to becoming the State’s social appendage, where it has been almost completely submerged in the values, constraints and priorities of economic and political forces associated with neo-liberalism. Though the influence of neo-liberalism in education is obvious, it is not confined just to the UK educational system, but has an immense global impact. As academics across the world continue their struggle against external pressures, researchers (Giroux, 2004; Shore, 2008; Nixon, 2011; Garratt and Forrester, 2012) encourage educational leaders to contest and push back the limits of neoliberal assault on education and continue to cultivate critical retort and collegial resistance to “the scourge of Neo-liberalism”, as Giroux (2004) put it. Notwithstanding a vast richness of literature on educational leadership, very little work in this field seems to have engaged in comparative theoretical discussions about the perceptions and professional applications of leadership across different socio-political terrains. In a previous issue, Doloriert and Sambrook (2012) argued that autoethnographic approach could help to uncover some experiences and voices, which were distorted or silenced because of the discomfort they caused. The authors also identified three epistemological points of departure for an autoethnographic study to include: evocative interpretivist approach conveyed through the writing of emotional accounts, analytical approach where conceptual frameworks support autoethnographic process and, finally, a radical approach, where power relations are examined. Using Doloriert and Sambrook’s (2012) theoretical template and in response to their claim, this paper aims to contribute to the long-established ethnographic tradition in the educational leadership literature to advocate that an autoethnographic approach can provide a unique opportunity for a simultaneous analysis of the particularities of leadership work within two contrasting socio-political environments: a Soviet educational establishment and a contemporary UK higher education institution. The author’s curiosity was also piqued by the ambition to use critical analysis of the embodied autobiographical accounts to detect some parallels between current “transformational” leadership within the UK higher education and a Soviet system of “clientilism”.