Emergent school leader subjectivities in digitized practices: the case of VSware

Abstract

This article provides insight into digitized school leadership practices in Irish schools, and the making of the school leader in mediations with the sociomaterial relations emerging from these practices. Drawing on actor-network theory, the study illustrates how school leaders’ subjectivities emerge through relations and attachments to VSware, a software package for monitoring student attendance, behavior, and performance. VSware elements and interviews with school leaders at three secondary schools are analyzed using material-semiotic methodology. Findings indicate the school leaders constantly emerge in their leadership positions in schools through relations that are intrinsic and external to the VSware software, whereas VSware elements work as highly specific ‘subjectifiers’. Likewise, findings show that school leaders can shape and steer elements in VSware. This suggests the relations and subjectivities that emerge in digitized leadership practices in schools have fluid characteristics, albeit with different and sometimes asymmetrical ways of ‘acting on each other’.