Overviews and intellectual authority in educational leadership research: How we know ‘what we know’

Systematic reviews and meta-analyses have proliferated in educational administration and leadership research, creating a need for reviews of reviews (overviews, umbrella reviews, meta-meta-studies) to consolidate and make sense of them. This article argues that such overviews do more than collate findings and bolster support for practice models; they also present a new form of claiming intellectual authority and scientific legitimacy for educational administration and leadership as a field. This argument draws upon methods from historical epistemology to trace three successive appeals to scientific legitimacy in educational administration and leadership: the philosophy of science, the sociology of scientific knowledge, and, more recently, meta-science. In contemporary educational leadership research, meta-scientific practices, exemplified by overviews, aim to construct a cumulative knowledge base from layers of reviews. The article unpacks an influential overview of reviews to examine how this form of synthesis assembles and legitimates evidence. This article discusses seven pressure points associated with overviews, including the compression of methodological nuance, the amplification of tentative findings and the synthesis of overlapping evidence. Rather than rejecting overviews, the article argues that recognising these vulnerabilities is essential for understanding the conditions under which educational leadership knowledge acquires scientific legitimacy and informs research, policy and practice.