Fighting Fires in Educational Administration
- 1 October 1996
- journal article
- research article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Educational Administration Quarterly
- Vol. 32 (4) , 565-578
- https://doi.org/10.1177/0013161x9603200406
Abstract
Educational administrators often invoke the metaphor of fighting fires to describe the nature of their work. Recent research on wild and firefighting illustrates that the use of this metaphor is unusually apt. Nuances associated with fire fighting shed light on subtle conditions in educational organizations that increase their vulnerability to failure. These parallels suggest five conditions that determine whether volatile conditions in schools will escalate or be containedKeywords
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