Three Possibilities for Progress in Educational Administration: Reform, Techno-Science Rationality, Research.

During the 1980s major changes occurred in the field of educational administration. Three antecedents for change were the restructuring of education administration by governments across the world as a function of the economic management of state, the general availability of powerful information technology to meet the processing and communication needs of practitioners, and the attention by researchers to epistemological concerns in the field of educational administration. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the impact of restructuring, information technology, and the move to scientific realism in research, on the field of educational administration. Three cases are described: (1) the reform of education administration in New Zealand; (2) the desktop computer; and (3) the epistemological movement in Australia. Following this is a brief analysis of the cases which leads to a section detailing possibilities for progress in the 1990s. (Contains 41 references.) (RR)