12 The third study focuses on the role of both school principals and teachers in leading collaborative innovation by studying how to describe and measure distributed leadership: 3. How can distributed leadership in school teams be described and measured by applying a social network perspective? The fourth study builds on the previous studies and examines how distributed leadership is embedded in the sociocultural context on three levels – individual, team, and school level: 4. How can differences in distributed leadership between collaborative innovation-oriented teacher teams be understood from multiple sociocultural context levels? 1.3. Research perspective In order to answer the main research question, we have used and related various key concepts derived from different bodies of knowledge. By bringing these bodies of knowledge together, we have tried to develop a more overarching perspective on educational innovation in which multiple levels of analysis (school, teams, individuals) and multiple factors (organizational, cultural, educational) are interwoven. The key concepts we used are changing professionalism, collaborative innovation, leadership, networks, and sociocultural contexts. Below, the key concepts are briefly explained. 1.3.1. Changing professionalism The changing roles of teachers and school principals fit into a wider development of changing professionalism, as is studied in organizational literature (e.g., Martin, 2021; Noordegraaf, 2020; Stone & Travis, 2011). For instance, Noordegraaf (2020) argues that professionalism is not ‘made’ by professionals themselves, but is dependent upon many actors, their interactions, and contextual factors. Due to internal and external changes, professional fields are becoming less stable and professional work is being reconfigured. Professional work is embedded in organizational contexts and connected to outside worlds. Such changing forms of professionalism occur in education and many other public and non-profit domains, such as the medical and judicial domains, as outlined earlier. In this dissertation, we focus on teachers and school principals as modern professionals working together in collaborative innovation. Together with other school staff and school board members, teachers and school principals might collectively contribute to the quality of education (Grissom et al., 2013; Leithwood et al., 2020).
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