Guest Edited by Kate Rousmaniere

The school principal is the most complex and contradictory figure in the pantheon of educational leadership and accordingly the history of the school principal offers a fascinating keyhole view into the development of school culture and organisation. In the past five years, there has been a virtual explosion of new empirical and analytic studies of the history of the principal that apply just such a cultural lens to the subject. The Journal of Educational Administration and History contributes to this emerging collection of scholarship with five new studies of the cultural development of the principal in five different international settings.