16 1.3.5. Sociocultural contexts of (leading) collaborative innovation Leading collaborative innovation in networks is embedded in a wider sociocultural context. Teachers and school principals act in school organizations and interact with each other. Their interactions are mediated by aspects of the wider sociocultural context (Pea, 1993; Rogoff, 1990). This means that leadership practices have to be understood in the contexts in which they are embedded (Powell & DiMaggio, 1991). Sociocultural activity theory states the importance of sociocultural contexts for leadership and other practices in schools (Rogoff, 1990; Spillane & Sherer, 2004; Tian et al., 2016). This theory examines the link between activities, such as leadership practices, and the social contexts in which these activities occur (Pea, 1993). It advocates studying various contextual levels since these are linked to one another. There are no clear boundaries between contextual levels, such as individual (teachers and the horizontal level that the collaborative innovation notion refers to), interpersonal (teacher teams), and institutional (school level) levels (Giddens, 1984; Orton & Weick, 1990; Rogoff, 1990; Spillane & Sherer, 2004). While these theoretical underpinnings suggest that the sociocultural context needs to be considered when studying leadership practices in collaborative innovation, so far only a few educational researchers have done so and those who did mainly focused on one contextual level (Liou & Daly, 2014; Liu, 2021; Liu et al., 2018; Tam, 2019). The studies focused on individual (e.g., Liou & Daly, 2014; Tam, 2019), team (e.g., Mehra et al., 2006), school (e.g., Liu, 2021; Liu et al., 2018), or national contexts (e.g., Liu, 2020), meaning that relationships between contextual levels have hardly been addressed empirically. Therefore, several researchers on distributed leadership have highlighted the importance of future studies to identify characteristics of sociocultural contexts that are critical in constituting leadership practices (Daniëls et al., 2019; Liu, 2020; Liu et al., 2018; Or & Berkovich, 2021; Tian et al., 2016). They view the school context as a factor influencing leadership practices aimed at successfully improving the overall school performance. It is thus important to take context into account when investigating leadership (e.g., Daniëls et al., 2019). 1.4. Research context In this dissertation, we study schools that work with an educational program called “leerKRACHT” (see https://stichting-leerkracht.nl/). Studying a large number of schools that use the same program provides us with a unique sample to pursue research on leading collaborative innovation. This dissertation aims to provide insights into leadership practices in collaborative innovation. By providing these insights, we aim to contribute
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