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Various changes in the spheres of education policy and school management over recent decades have sparked a renewed interest in the issue of school culture and its potential to understand processes of leadership and academic performance. What are the contributions and potentialities of organizational culture for understanding school organizations and their leadership processes? This article has two goals: (i) to identify trends and theoretical particularities inherent to the major approaches to organizational culture, focusing on research carried out in the school setting; (ii) to debate the heuristic usefulness of a theoretical proposal for studying organizational culture in the school setting. The article presents a multidimensional analysis of school organizational culture, considering political, social and educational factors, aiming to capture the unique nature of school cultures and their links to processes of leadership and management. By linking these to different leadership perspectives, this model may inspire further comparative study of educational management in an international context. This approach demonstrates the need to tailor models for analysing organizational culture to the school environment, to achieve a deeper and more solid understanding of school life and leadership and management phenomena.

The mechanisms of academic distinction of the best students, such as the Honours Boards of Excellence and Value, emerge in Portuguese state schools as important institutional management strategies for promoting the school image and attracting the best students. This is what the authors propose to discuss, and that they identify as being a new form of accountability--the "educational marketing accountability." In other words, at the theoretical level, this article intends to explore the relationship between the results obtained by students, the promotion of academic excellence and a new form of accountability in the Portuguese non-higher education system. The empirical focus was the analysis of the institutional marketing strategies of management adopted by the head teachers and their impact on the school choice by the students. The authors used data from a questionnaire applied to students from four secondary schools who were asked to complete, interviews with head teachers and content analysis of documents from most Portuguese schools with academic distinction rituals. The research confirms the obsessive centrality of academic results in the daily management of schools; simultaneously, the distinction of the best students is an institutional marketing strategy that influences the choice of school, projects a desired social image and further reinforces the performance and leadership style of the head teachers.