Abstract
Critiques of educational-leadership research have long highlighted the dominance of Global North theories and frameworks, prompting calls for greater geographical diversification and more equitable knowledge production, often treated as causally related. Such calls frequently assume an implicit binary between Global North and Global South knowledge, implying that epistemically distinct or purer forms of research-based knowledge production can be located in, or recovered from, particular contexts. This conceptual article interrogates that presumption. I argue that ‘pure’ Global South knowledge production in educational-leadership research is conceptually untenable under historically layered conditions of globalisation and coloniality and requires further theorisation. The article develops two typologies. The first identifies four interrelated forms of impossibility – epistemic, discursive, subjective and methodological – that delimit how research knowledge is produced and legitimated. The second conceptualises hybridity as a patterned feature of contemporary scholarship, distinguishing between assimilative, strategic, disavowed and reflexive modes. By shifting attention from geographical origin to epistemic condition, the article reframes debates on diversification and equity. It argues that the task is not the pursuit of epistemic purity, but reflexive research engagement with epistemic inheritance and hybridity as unavoidable, power-laden features of a globalised field.
Keywords
Introduction
There are sustained claims in the educational-leadership literature that the field is overly represented by Western, Anglo-American or Global North models, concepts and methods, and that this impoverishes the field (e.g. Lumby et al., 2009; Mertkan et al., 2017; Hallinger, 2018, McGinity et al., 2022). In their recent summary of this position, Campbell and Mertkan (2025), for instance, write that ‘[t]he significance of attending to the unique socio-cultural, historic, and discursive contexts of different regions, and their implications for the conceptualizations, practice, and study of leadership, has been increasingly stressed’ (p. 2). It follows that a focus on local context in knowledge production through research is treated as axiomatic, which I leave unexplored here. Instead, I examine the associated assumption that epistemically distinct forms of research-based knowledge production can be located in, or recovered from, particular marginalised or ignored geographical contexts.
This assumption underpins recent work in the field (e.g. Bush, 2025). Dei and Adhami (2022) exemplify it by locating the warrant for their contribution in rejecting Western knowledge production and products to which they ascribe an inherent oppressive function: It is in a tradition of empowerment that we participate in the development of academic practices and discussions of educational leadership by speaking from our multiple locations and critically grounding in the worldviews we identify with, which enables us to do things differently and resolve traditional knowledge hierarchies. (Dei and Adhami, 2022: 782)
The terms ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’ are used here, capitalised, as analytic and relational constructs rather than fixed geographical or cultural categories. They refer to historically constituted, internally heterogeneous positions within global knowledge-production systems shaped by colonialism, globalisation and academic institutionalisation. The distinction is deployed heuristically to analyse epistemic power and circulation, consistent with the argument that knowledge production is characterised by hybridity rather than separation.
This analysis has broader significance because it is widely recognised that context matters to educational leadership (e.g. Truong et al., 2016; Hallinger, 2018). Work on policy borrowing, leadership localisation and cultural transfer (Li, 2025) has challenged universalist claims and foregrounded socio-cultural and political conditions shaping leadership across contexts (e.g. Dimmock, 1998; Steiner-Khamsi, 2004). Bibliometric analyses (e.g. Hallinger and Kovačević, 2022) and critiques of them (e.g. McGinity et al., 2022) have documented shifts in where research-based knowledge is produced and by whom. However, these contributions rarely interrogate the conceptual conditions under which epistemic differentiation itself is presumed possible within a globalised field of research knowledge production. In particular, the field lacks a sustained account of how inherited concepts, methods, discursive norms and researcher subjectivities – shaped through historically layered globalisation – structure what can be produced and recognised as ‘local’ or ‘Global South’ knowledge. This article intervenes at that level by examining the limits of epistemic purity and theorising hybridity as a patterned feature of contemporary research knowledge production. Through two typologies – one specifying forms of epistemic impossibility and the other differentiating modes of hybridity – I reframe debates on equity and diversification towards reflexive engagement with the power-laden conditions under which educational-leadership research knowledge is produced.
My argument does not rest on the claim that scholars explicitly advocate epistemic ‘purity’. Much work on policy borrowing, contextualisation, and localisation emphasises adaptation, mediation, and the limits of transfer (e.g. Dimmock, 1998; Steiner-Khamsi, 2004; Hallinger, 2018). Rather, I focus on the implicit assumption that epistemically distinct research knowledge can, in principle, be located in or recovered from particular geo-cultural contexts. The critique is directed not at individual authors’ positions, but at the conceptual level, where epistemic differentiation is rendered intelligible.
This analysis is situated within a critical sociological approach to knowledge production that foregrounds the historical and structural conditions under which knowledge is formed. While positionality is central to contemporary debates, my argument operates at the level of conceptual conditions rather than standpoint. Epistemic impossibility is not derived from positional perspective, but from historically layered processes of epistemic inheritance shaping all knowledge production. This does not remove the need for reflexivity, but situates it within these conditions. I do not address here how forms of knowing minoritised for reasons other than geography are treated in the field. While links can be drawn between ‘Global South’ and ‘Black’ or ‘Indigenous’ knowledge production, where the latter co-exists with and is marginalised by dominant forms (Dei and Adhami, 2022), these dynamics concern primarily racism and lie outside the scope of this article (but see Wright, 2022).
Conceptual framing: Knowledge production, globalisation and internalisation
Debates about diversification in educational-leadership research are inseparable from broader questions about how academic knowledge is produced, disseminated and valorised under conditions of globalisation. While much educational-leadership scholarship acknowledges the importance of context, functionalist contributions have tended to conceptualise context primarily as a spatial or cultural variable in making leadership more effective rather than as a historically layered epistemic condition. As a result, calls for localisation or geographical diversification often operate with an under-theorised as well as empirically underdeveloped account of how cultural, institutional and global influences are internalised within educational-leadership practices, concepts and subjectivities over time. It is only fair to note that school-improvement researchers are largely not asking this question, but instead are aiming at ‘specifying a “context-specific set of actions”’ (Hallinger, 2018), where, as Hallinger goes on to point out, ‘there will always be a limit to the degree that research can formulate an “optimal strategy or set of actions” for this level of specificity’ (p. 19). This is obviously true, and so, whilst functionalist research laudably recognises the importance of context, its associated research agenda cannot be satisfied because each end user of such research will require such specificity as Hallinger identifies as impossible.
Critical research, which is where I locate my own work, asks different questions and so must address different challenges in its conceptualisations of how to ‘do localising’. When critical researchers invoke localisation or contextualisation, it is mostly both in conceptual abjection and moral refutation of globalisation, which is materialised in education through discrete features captured under the term, GERM, or the global education reform movement (Sahlberg, 2011). I am not taking issue here with these features, which comprise standardisation, a focus on literacy and numeracy, teaching to the test, corporatisation, high-stakes, test-based accountability and increased state control of schools and schooling. Rather, my focus is on problematising what these features are held, implied or assumed to have extruded, or made impossible. I aim here to refute conceptualisations of globalisation as a recent or external force acting upon otherwise bounded national or cultural knowledge systems whose discrete characteristics may be captured and identified as differing from so-called global practices, and hence are local. Rather, globalisation is a long-term process through which ideas, categories, institutional forms, and evaluative criteria have travelled, sedimented, and been reworked across contexts in ways that have also fundamentally altered the practices and discursive architecture that they encountered. In other words, that which might be termed local today was long ago kneaded into global practices and made intelligible in new ways through a global lens. This analysis consequently refutes the foundational premise of Connell's (2007) Southern Theory, which is that ‘peripheral societies produce social thought about the modern world which has as much intellectual power as metropolitan social thought, and more relevance’ (p. xii). I do not refute the substantive points about intellectual power and relevance, but only the notion that such Global South knowledges are able to be disentangled entirely from Global North ones. Educational leadership as a field has also developed within this process of disciplinary and epistemological entanglement, drawing heavily on organisational theory, management science and policy analysis that themselves emerged within particular political and intellectual traditions. These traditions have been reproduced not only through formal theory transfer, but through doctoral training, publication norms, funding regimes and professional networks that collectively shape what counts as legitimate knowledge (Gunter, 2005, 2016).
This perspective aligns with sociological accounts of wider processes of knowledge production that emphasise internalisation rather than diffusion alone. Baek (2022), for instance, identifies the ways in which a number of countries’ lead policymakers internalise international knowledge in distinctive ways. In their work on educational-leadership identity formation, Courtney and McGinity (2020), following MacIntyre (2013 [1981]), identify a ‘leader character’ composed of dominant discourses, policy mandates and popular representations of leadership. We argue that individual educational leaders may agentically and reflexively engage with that character in their identity formation, internalising to differing extents its characteristics, methods and goals. A key transferable insight from this literature is that epistemic forms do not simply arrive in other contexts as external templates to be accepted or rejected; they become embedded in local research cultures, policy languages and professional identities. Over time, they are taken up, modified and normalised, often losing their association with particular origins. This process complicates binary distinctions between global and local, or North and South, by highlighting how epistemic formations are co-constituted through uneven but entangled histories.
Within educational-leadership research, this internalisation is evident in the widespread adoption of shared vocabularies – leadership styles, effectiveness, improvement and accountability – even where these are mobilised for different normative ends. Internalisation is also too conceptually limited a word to fully capture the ways in which this shared understanding suits the purposes of the ‘Transnational Leadership Package’ (in Gunter, 2014: vii) that it operationalises. The TLP is: an assemblage of ideas and activities that focus primarily on the needs of educational systems and national governments [which] do not necessarily meet the needs of individual schools, their students or their communities. (p. x)
This framing underpins the argument advanced here. By conceptualising globalisation as internalised and historically layered, rather than as a detachable influence, it becomes possible to explain why epistemic purity is an incoherent goal and why hybridity is an unavoidable condition of contemporary educational-leadership research knowledge production. The typologies developed in the following sections are therefore heuristic tools for analysing and questioning how diversification unfolds within a globalised epistemic field.
While this article is primarily concerned with the epistemic conditions of knowledge production through research, it is important to acknowledge that educational-leadership scholarship is also structured by differing normative orientations. Functionalist traditions have typically framed leadership practice in relation to system effectiveness and student learning outcomes, often conceptualising leadership as a lever for measurable improvement (e.g. Sun and Leithwood, 2015). By contrast, critical and Indigenous or decolonising approaches frequently articulate alternative moral purposes, including social justice, resistance to marginalisation, and the reconstitution of relationships between schools and communities (e.g. Khalifa et al., 2019). These differences are significant and are not collapsed in the present analysis. However, the argument advanced here is that variation in moral purpose does not, in itself, constitute epistemic separation. Competing normative projects are still articulated through concepts, methods and discursive forms that have been historically shaped within a globalised research field of knowledge production. The question addressed in this article is therefore not which moral purposes educational leadership should serve, but how such purposes – whether oriented towards attainment, equity or decolonisation – are epistemically constituted, mediated and rendered intelligible within that field.
The first typology identifies four interrelated forms of impossibility – epistemic, discursive, subjective and methodological – that delimit the conditions under which educational-leadership knowledge is produced, articulated and legitimated. Together, they offer a new evidential precision in response to the problem of localising knowledge production. Impossibility here operates at the level of conceptual conditions, not normative endorsement: it does not suggest that current arrangements are acceptable or unchangeable, but that they cannot be transformed through imaginaries of epistemic purification.
Typology 1: The impossibility of epistemic purity in research knowledge production
Calls for greater geographical diversification in educational-leadership research are often underpinned by an implicit assumption that epistemically distinct forms of knowledge production can be located in, or retrieved from, particular contexts. Elonga Mboyo (2017), for instance, argues that Ubuntu, when used as a leadership approach, ‘becomes the exception to the call that school leaders should distinguish between their leadership models as “a means” and the “purpose/end” of education’ (p. 209), precisely because Ubuntu is capable of simultaneously fulfilling both functions. In a similar fashion, Khalifa et al. (2019) state that ‘Indigenous approaches to educational leadership often exist in contrast to Eurocentric leadership models as they are not institutionalized or promoted within formal structures; nor do they use organizations as a source of legitimacy or protection, or enact bureaucratic, top-down leadership’ (p. 580), although they do go on to trouble this idealised binary somewhat later. This sort of approach is legitimated by thinkers such as Foucault in his description of genealogical research: What it [genealogy] really does is to entertain the claims to attention of local, discontinuous, disqualified, illegitimate knowledges against the claims of a unitary body of theory which would filter, hierarchise and order them in the name of some true knowledge and some arbitrary idea of what constitutes a science and its objects. (Foucault, 2008: 75, my italics)
The first form, epistemic impossibility, concerns the inherited ontological and epistemological foundations of educational-leadership research. Core concepts in the field – such as leadership, organisation, effectiveness, accountability, improvement, professionalism and governance – are historically situated and structuring constructs shaped by particular intellectual traditions (Gunter, 2004). These traditions are overwhelmingly rooted in Enlightenment rationalism, liberal individualism, Weberian bureaucracy, managerialism, and positivist or post-positivist social science. Even where such concepts are translated, rearticulated or locally contextualised, they retain traces of these genealogies. Consequently, researchers cannot simply step outside Global North epistemic frames, because these frames constitute the very conditions of intelligibility through which educational leadership is conceptualised, debated and studied. Research knowledge production does not begin from a blank slate; it proceeds through sedimented conceptual architectures that pre-date the specific research encounter – this, incidentally, helps explain longstanding critiques of grounded theory as a method of data analysis (Thomas and James, 2006). In this sense, Global North epistemologies function as internalised tools for meaning-making.
My argument does not rest on the empirical claim that Anglo-Western concepts are universally dominant, nor that English-language scholarship exhausts what can be known. Rather, it concerns the conditions under which knowledge becomes recognisable as research knowledge within the field. Epistemic inheritance operates not only through institutional dominance, but through the historically layered conceptual resources that render phenomena intelligible, analysable and communicable as research. In this sense, the impossibility identified here is not merely a reflection of current publication practices or linguistic hierarchies, but a conceptual condition: knowledge cannot be accessed or articulated outside the epistemic forms through which it is mediated.
This epistemic inheritance is particularly pronounced in educational leadership, a field that emerged historically in close proximity to policy science, organisational theory and management studies (Gunter, 2016). Critical leadership scholarship, too, has its own traditions, for instance about what constitutes evidence – for example, where qualitative data are often preferred to quantitative, and what forms of explanation are legitimate – for example, where the causal relationships between social phenomena constructed by functionalists as variables are rejected by critical researchers as failures of epistemological truth, coherence and rigour (see Courtney et al., 2021). In other words, in post-positivist paradigms, A (e.g. leadership) does not cause B (e.g. school improvement) in the linear way that functionalist research often claims or implies (see Sun and Leithwood, 2015; Waters and Marzano, 2006). Consequently, attempts to produce epistemically ‘pure’ Global South knowledge frequently operate through concepts that have already been shaped elsewhere, even when they are applied to different normative projects or cultural settings. Epistemic impossibility thus refers not to the absence of alternative ways of knowing, but to the impossibility of accessing them outside historically mediated conceptual frames within research-based knowledge production. This analysis does not imply that alternative insights, practices, or epistemic forms do not exist, nor that the current configuration of the field is either exhaustive or desirable. Rather, it suggests that such possibilities may be partially obscured, transformed or rendered unintelligible within dominant frameworks of research knowledge production. The issue is therefore not one of ‘giving in’ to existing conditions, but of more precisely identifying how those conditions shape what can be seen, articulated, and legitimised as knowledge. In this sense, the typology is intended to support more reflexive engagement with the limits of the field, including what may be excluded from, or only partially visible within, its epistemic horizon.
The second form, discursive impossibility, concerns the political economy of knowledge production through research. Educational-leadership research is produced, circulated and legitimated within discursive regimes that are deeply uneven in their geographical and linguistic distribution (Khalifa et al., 2019). English-language dominance, Global North journals and publishers, citation economies, and peer-review norms collectively shape what counts as rigorous, original and publishable scholarship (Mertkan et al., 2017; McGinity et al., 2022). These discursive conditions do not merely influence how research is presented; they actively structure what can be articulated in the first place. Researchers seeking to contribute to international debates must render their work legible within these regimes, adopting particular styles of argumentation, forms of evidence and conventions of theorisation (Campbell and Mertkan, 2025). In my role as a journal Editor-in-Chief, I recognise that my influence in overcoming these structural challenges is limited but important, and work to ensure the publication of discursively non-normative or resistant articles (e.g. Lussier and Denford, 2024).
Discursive impossibility therefore arises because claims to epistemic difference must themselves be expressed through dominant discursive forms. Even research grounded in local philosophies, Indigenous traditions or alternative ontologies must be translated into the language of global academic exchange if it is to circulate beyond its immediate context. This process of translation entails selection, simplification and reframing, often privileging those elements that align most closely with established scholarly expectations. It may not even be entirely conscious (Bourdieu, 1990). As a result, discursive conformity becomes a constitutive feature of Global South knowledge production, not a contingent obstacle that can be overcome through greater awareness or goodwill.
The third form, subjective impossibility, shifts attention from texts and concepts to researchers themselves. Educational-leadership researchers located in the Global South are often, though not uniformly, trained within or socialised into intellectual traditions that have developed through globalised academic institutions, publication practices and citation networks. To the extent that they participate in research knowledge production, their scholarly habitus (Bourdieu, 1990) is therefore shaped – albeit unevenly and in different ways – by these epistemic conditions. This does not imply homogeneity, nor does it deny the existence of knowledge practices that remain partially outside such circuits. Rather, it indicates a structural tendency: that knowledge becomes recognisable as research through engagement with historically constituted and already hybridised epistemic forms.
This has important implications for knowledge production through research. There is no pre-global, epistemically uncontaminated subject capable of producing ‘pure’ local knowledge, because subjectivities themselves are formed through historically layered educational and intellectual processes. This applies not only to researchers in the Global South, but equally to those located within the Anglosphere, whose epistemic frameworks are likewise inherited, internalised and institutionalised. The apparent neutrality or universality of Anglo-Western subjectivities reflects their historical dominance within global knowledge-production systems, rather than an absence of mediation. Epistemic hybridity is therefore not a condition of some subjects and not others, but a general feature of how scholarly subjectivities are constituted.
The fourth form, methodological impossibility, concerns the epistemological commitments embedded within research methods. Methods are often treated as neutral instruments that can be detached from their theoretical origins and redeployed across contexts (Eacott and Riveros, 2021). However, research methods carry implicit assumptions about what constitutes data, how knowledge claims can be validated, and what forms of explanation are credible. Surveys, interviews, statistical analyses, and even participatory or narrative approaches are underpinned by epistemological commitments that have largely emerged within Global North social-science traditions. Claims to methodological localisation frequently overlook these deeper commitments, focusing instead on surface-level adaptation. Hameed et al. (2021) exemplify this in their educational leadership study, in which yarning – an Indigenous method that is relational and narrative – is deployed within an overarching positivist methodological framing, with a focus on ‘data collection’ (as if the data pre-existed the act of their co-generation with the researcher), a ‘coding system’, and ‘reliability in the coding’ (Hameed et al., 2021: 100). Of course, I do not reproach the researchers for this: my very argument is that methodological purity is one of the four types of impossibility that I have set out, so it follows that no researcher could attain it.
That said, it would be useful if researchers could recognise this. Methodological impossibility becomes apparent when Global South concepts or practices are studied using methods that presuppose positivist, interpretivist or critical realist logics without explicit reflexivity. In such cases, epistemic difference is asserted at the level of content while epistemological continuity persists at the level of method. This does not render such research illegitimate, but it complicates claims to epistemic autonomy. Methods actively participate in the construction of social reality. As such, methodological inheritance represents another layer at which epistemic purity becomes untenable.
Taken together, these four forms of impossibility highlight the cumulative and mutually reinforcing nature of epistemic inheritance. Epistemic, discursive, subjective and methodological dimensions do not operate independently; they intersect and amplify one another. Attempts to address one dimension in isolation – for example, by adopting local concepts while retaining dominant methods, or by diversifying authorship without interrogating discursive norms – are therefore unlikely to achieve epistemic separation. This does not imply that efforts towards equity, diversification or contextual sensitivity are futile. Rather, it suggests that the goal of epistemic purification rests on a flawed conceptualisation of how research knowledge is produced under conditions of globalised academic exchange. Neither does my argument seek to minimise the profound epistemic injustices produced through colonialism and globalisation, nor to suggest that existing configurations of knowledge production are either neutral or acceptable. On the contrary, these histories are central to understanding how contemporary epistemic forms have been constituted. The claim of impossibility operates at a different level: it concerns the conditions under which knowledge is articulated as research within these historically produced systems. Recognising this does not foreclose critique or transformation, but indicates that such efforts cannot coherently be framed in terms of epistemic purification. Instead, it calls for more precise engagement with how epistemic forms are constituted, combined and contested, particularly through hybridity.
The task, as I argue in the next section, is to understand the patterned ways in which hybridity manifests and the normative implications that follow.
From impossibility to hybridity: Reframing the analytic problem
I have argued above that epistemic purity in Global South educational-leadership knowledge production is conceptually untenable. Epistemic, discursive, subjective and methodological inheritances constitute the conditions under which research becomes intelligible, publishable and recognisable as knowledge. Acknowledging the impossibility of epistemic purity does not entail abandoning concerns with equity, justice, or diversification, nor does it imply epistemic fatalism. However, it does require a shift in how the problem is conceptualised. If epistemic inheritance is cumulative and historically layered, then hybridity is a constitutive feature of research knowledge production rather than a failure of localisation. From this perspective, the normative task is not to pursue epistemic purification as an unattainable objective, but to examine how epistemic forms are combined, how power operates within those combinations, and how more reflexive and accountable forms of knowledge production might emerge.
This distinction is important because where the literature addresses hybridity at all – the more common assumption being, as I have argued, that purity is at least theoretically available – it is treated as a second-best outcome – a compromised state that falls short of epistemic autonomy or authenticity. Or, hybridity is conceptualised as combining two or more forms of Global North knowledge, for instance, individual and collective leadership (Ho et al., 2024). Within calls for localisation, hybridity often appears as an unfortunate residue of Global North influence, acknowledged only because it exists and may be pointed out. Otherwise, as Khalifa et al. (2019) exemplify below, hybridity might be acknowledged but rejected: while we recognize that contemporary leadership theories and practices may share some overlap with certain aspects of IDSL [Indigenous, Decolonising School Leadership], we resist (and encourage our readers to resist) situating and interpreting IDSL in ways that resemble White Western practices couched in contemporary top-down educational reform models.’ (p. 574)
Reframing hybridity in this way allows it to be treated analytically rather than normatively. Instead of asking whether research is sufficiently local, the more productive question becomes how different epistemic strands are combined, negotiated, foregrounded or disavowed within particular research practices. This shift moves debate away from questions of origin and towards questions of configuration.
Crucially, recognising hybridity as unavoidable does not imply that all hybrid formations are equivalent. Nor does it collapse distinctions between dominant and marginal epistemic forms. On the contrary, treating hybridity as a central analytic category makes it possible to examine how power operates within research knowledge production, shaping which elements travel easily, which are marginalised, and which are rendered invisible. Some forms of hybridity may reproduce existing hierarchies by assimilating local concerns into dominant frameworks, while others may open space for critique, re-signification or resistance. The challenge, therefore, is not to celebrate hybridity per se, but to differentiate its modes and assess their implications.
This reframing also helps to clarify the normative stakes of debates about diversification. If hybridity is inescapable, then equity in knowledge production cannot be reduced to the pursuit of epistemic separation or the replacement of one set of theories with another. Instead, equity becomes a matter of how epistemic inheritances are engaged, contested and made visible. Reflexivity, rather than purity, is foregrounded as the key scholarly demand. This does not resolve the power asymmetries embedded in global research knowledge production, but it does provide a more realistic and accountable basis for addressing them.
The remainder of the article builds on this reframing by conceptualising hybridity as a set of patterned responses to epistemic impossibility rather than as a singular or homogeneous condition. My second typology therefore distinguishes between different modes of hybridity, each characterised by particular orientations towards inherited epistemic forms and their implications for diversification and equity in educational-leadership research. By moving from impossibility to hybridity in this way, I shift the analytic focus from what knowledge production through research should ideally avoid to how it is constituted under contemporary conditions.
Typology 2: Modes of hybridity in educational-leadership knowledge production
In this section, I introduce a second typology that is intended as a set of analytic ideal-types, rather than as an empirical classification or a normative framework. It distinguishes patterned ways in which epistemic hybridity is enacted under conditions of epistemic inheritance. These forms are not mutually exclusive, nor are they presented as equally desirable or valuable. Rather, they function heuristically to make visible different orientations to inherited epistemic forms and the implications these have for knowledge production. The typology provides a conceptual vocabulary for analysing how hybridity is variously configured, negotiated, and made to operate within educational-leadership research. It distinguishes four modes of hybridity: assimilative, strategic, disavowed and reflexive.
Assimilative hybridity refers to forms of knowledge production in which Global North theories, models or frameworks are incorporated into Global South contexts with minimal contestation. In this mode, dominant concepts are adapted superficially to local settings, often through contextual variables or cultural modifiers, while their underlying assumptions remain largely intact. Assimilative hybridity is common in policy borrowing, leadership standards, effectiveness research and comparative studies that treat context as a background condition rather than an epistemic problem. Local specificity is acknowledged, but primarily as variation around a presumed universal core.
This mode of hybridity tends to reproduce existing power relations, extending the reach of dominant paradigms while presenting adaptation as responsiveness and any lack of full, faithful implementation as a problem (e.g. Cansoy et al., 2025). It is often justified through appeals to pragmatism, policy relevance or international comparability. While assimilative hybridity may generate insights into how global frameworks operate in different settings, it does little to challenge the epistemological foundations of the field; indeed, it does not seek to. Instead, it normalises the authority of Global North knowledge by positioning it as the benchmark against which local practices are understood.
Nevertheless, assimilative hybridity may, in some contexts, offer instrumental advantages. By aligning with established conceptual frameworks, it can facilitate policy relevance, enable forms of international comparability, and support engagement with dominant policy and research discourses. Such alignment may be strategically valuable, particularly where research seeks to influence policy or participate in transnational conversations. However, these advantages are context-dependent and may come at a cost. The incorporation of dominant frameworks can reduce sensitivity to local conditions or re-inscribe epistemic hierarchies, limiting the extent to which alternative conceptualisations can emerge. Assimilative hybridity is therefore best understood as analytically ambivalent rather than intrinsically limiting.
Strategic hybridity involves a more self-conscious and instrumental engagement with dominant epistemic forms. Since this is a subjective condition, indicative examples are impossible. In strategic hybridity, researchers draw on Global North theories, methods or discursive conventions not because they are uncritically accepted, but because they confer legitimacy, visibility or access within unequal academic fields. Strategic hybridity may be enacted by scholars navigating the constraints of international publication, funding regimes, or institutional evaluation systems. Dominant frameworks are mobilised tactically, sometimes in combination with local concepts or concerns, to advance particular scholarly or political projects.
This mode of hybridity recognises the realities of epistemic governance while seeking to work within them to create space for alternative questions, priorities or interpretations. Strategic hybridity can therefore be enabling, allowing scholars to participate in global debates while retaining a degree of local orientation. However, it also carries risks. Tactical engagement with dominant paradigms may inadvertently reinforce their authority, particularly where critical intent is not made explicit. The boundary between strategic use and assimilation is often blurred, and the political effects of strategic hybridity are contingent rather than guaranteed.
Disavowed hybridity refers to situations in which hybridity is present but unacknowledged. In this mode, research claims local, or Global South epistemic grounding while implicitly relying on Global North assumptions at the level of ontology, epistemology or method (see e.g. Hameed et al., 2021). Disavowed hybridity is particularly evident where local concepts are operationalised through positivist logics of measurement, causality or generalisability without reflexive interrogation. The result is a rhetorical assertion of epistemic difference that is not matched by epistemological divergence.
As noted above, this mode is almost never the product of bad faith. It largely arises from the naturalisation of dominant epistemic assumptions, which come to be experienced as methodological common sense rather than as historically situated choices (see Eacott and Riveros, 2021). However, disavowed hybridity is analytically and politically significant because it obscures the conditions under which research knowledge is produced. By presenting hybridity as absence rather than presence, it forecloses critical engagement with epistemic inheritance and limits the scope for meaningful transformation. Claims to localisation may thus function symbolically without altering the underlying structure of knowledge production.
Reflexive hybridity represents a more explicit and critically engaged orientation towards epistemic inheritance. In this mode, hybridity is not treated as an unfortunate residue or a strategic necessity, but as an object of analysis. Researchers practising reflexive hybridity foreground the historical, epistemic and political conditions under which their work is produced. They acknowledge the genealogies of their concepts and methods, articulate the tensions these generate, and justify their epistemic choices in relation to their normative aims (see e.g. Atkinson-Ross and Wu, 2025; Lin, 2025; Lin et al., 2023; Lin et al., 2025).
Reflexive hybridity incorporates uncertainty, contradiction and partiality as inherent features of research knowledge production. By making hybridity visible, it enables accountability and critique, allowing readers to assess how power relations shape research claims. Reflexive hybridity thus aligns with broader traditions of critical scholarship that emphasise reflexivity, positionality and epistemic humility (see Courtney, 2024). It does not dissolve Global North influence, but it renders that influence contestable. Not all reflexively hybrid research is critical: Emiru and Gedifew (2024) provide an insightful example where they interrogate forensically the properties of distributed leadership in Ethiopia to see what works or fits and what doesn’t. Their aim is not to explore power relations, but to expand and refine distributed leadership within this new context through reflexive conceptual engagement.
The value of this typology lies not in ranking these modes according to moral worth, but in clarifying their different implications for equity and diversification in educational-leadership research. Assimilative and disavowed hybridity tend to stabilise existing epistemic hierarchies, even where they appear to promote localisation. Strategic hybridity occupies an ambivalent position, capable of both reinforcing and unsettling dominant paradigms depending on context and intent. Reflexive hybridity, while demanding and potentially unsettling, offers the greatest scope for critical engagement with the complex realities of globalised research knowledge production.
Importantly, these modes should not be read as fixed categories into which research can be neatly sorted. Individual studies may exhibit multiple modes simultaneously, and researchers may move between modes over time. The typology is therefore offered as a heuristic device, not a classificatory scheme. Its purpose is to enable more precise critique and reflection on the conditions under which educational-leadership research knowledge is produced.
When read alongside the typology of impossibility developed in the previous section, this analysis reframes hybridity as a necessary and generative response to epistemic inheritance rather than a failure to achieve localisation. The normative challenge for the field is not to eliminate hybridity, but to engage with it responsibly. This entails moving beyond purification imaginaries and towards reflexive practices that acknowledge the layered, power-laden conditions of contemporary knowledge production in educational-leadership research.
Implications for research practice and scholarship
The argument advanced here has implications for how educational-leadership research is conducted, evaluated and critiqued. Much contemporary work on diversification is nuanced and does not advocate simple replacement of dominant frameworks, instead emphasising plurality and contextual sensitivity. The critique is directed at a more implicit assumption: that epistemic differentiation can be achieved through localisation. This may underestimate the cumulative and internalised nature of epistemic inheritance and the extent to which knowledge production is already constituted through hybridised conditions.
For researchers, this suggests a shift from asserting epistemic difference towards articulating epistemic positioning. Rather than claiming purity or authenticity, scholars might reflect on how inherited concepts, methods, and discursive norms are taken up, adapted, and contested. Reflexivity becomes a central scholarly responsibility under conditions of hybridity.
For reviewers and editors, the typologies offered here provide a language for more precise critique. Rather than evaluating research in terms of geographical origin or adherence to dominant paradigms, it becomes possible to ask how hybridity is being navigated and with what degree of reflexive engagement. This would enable the recognition of diverse scholarly strategies without collapsing them into binaries of domination and resistance.
At a field level, my argument also has implications for how diversification is conceptualised in bibliometric and mapping studies. While such work documents shifts in authorship and location, it cannot on its own address questions of epistemic equity. The typologies suggest that diversification in where research knowledge is produced does not automatically entail diversification in how it is produced. Attending to this distinction can help avoid overstatement of internationalisation and support more grounded assessments of change.
Finally, my argument has implications for doctoral supervision and capacity building. If hybridity is unavoidable, the goal is not to insulate scholars from dominant paradigms, but to equip them to engage with epistemic inheritance critically and reflexively. This includes making epistemological assumptions explicit, recognising the politics of method and understanding how academic knowledge is shaped by global power relations.
Conclusion
My analysis aligns with Campbell and Mertkan's (2025) argument that ‘[w]hile geographical diversification has expanded the field's reach, epistemic hegemony persists’ (p. 5) but departs from their implied construction of this hegemony as ontologically discrete and capable of being opposed by ‘marginaliz[ed] critical, locally grounded perspectives from historically underrepresented regions’ (p. 5). Rather, hegemonic features derive from Global North epistemologies’ infiltration into so-called ‘local’ forms, producing epistemological assemblages rather than discrete categories (Wilkins et al., 2024).
Accordingly, I have argued that ‘pure’ Global South knowledge production in educational-leadership research is not a coherent or attainable goal under conditions of historically layered globalisation. Rather than treating this as a normative failure, I have reframed it as a generative condition requiring more precise conceptualisation. In contrast to Campbell and Mertkan's (2025) call to prioritise epistemic diversity by asking ‘who produces knowledge, what epistemologies are applied, and whose voices are heard’ (p. 5), this article offers a more detailed conceptualisation through two typologies – one specifying forms of epistemic impossibility and the other differentiating modes of hybridity – thereby sharpening debates about diversification and equity.
The contribution lies in moving the field beyond calls for diversification alone, or asking whose epistemology counts, through explicitly refining and typologising the conceptual foundations of such calls. By shifting attention from geographical origin to epistemic condition, the article moves beyond binary imaginaries towards more reflexive engagement with contemporary knowledge production. Hybridity is not a deficit, but a structured and power-laden condition to be navigated.
If educational-leadership research is to advance equitable ways of knowing, it must do so with a clear understanding of its epistemic inheritance, requiring sustained attention to how knowledge is produced, legitimated and transformed within a globalised research field.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.