Recognition and power relations in the supervision of school principals

1 Introduction

This conceptual paper argues that the supervision of school principals constitutes a critical site where recognition and power intersect, shaping not only how leadership is evaluated but how it is constituted. While teachers' supervision has been a common research topic, literature on school principals' supervision constitutes less than ten percent of the latter (Cortez Ochoa and Thomas, 2023).

The supervisory role of school principals is arguably their most important professional duty with a wide range of consequences for staff and students. During supervision of school principals, there is a structural role inversion: Principals switch their persona from supervisor to supervisee, from evaluator to evaluated. Supervision of school principals is particularly significant because it involves a dual evaluative focus: School principal as an individual moral agent and school principal as the responsible chief of overall situation of the school in its many dimensions. It is thus possible to argue that supervision of principals is to both the head and the body of the school, a dual evaluative structure in which principals are assessed both as individual moral agents and as representatives of institutional performance.

The word 'supervision' originated from Medieval Latin supervidere, literally, to oversee or to inspect, and can be traced to the 1630s. It denotes “act of overseeing, management and direction” (Etymonline, 2026; OED, 2026). Its Spanish counterpart, supervisión, was used consistently only in the 19th century and defined as “action and effect of supervising” (RAE, 2014). With synonyms inspección, control, revisión, verificación, vigilancia, observación, comprobación, examen, supervigilancia, Spanish supervisión took a semantic turn towards control, moral appraisal, and surveillance. Supervision of school principals has indeed far more implications than just evaluation; it comes with goal setting and developmental plans for the principal as an individual and for the entire school.

This semantic trajectory foregrounds two analytical dimensions central to this paper: the phenomenology of the agentic perspectives of the observer and the observed, and power dynamics between controller/manager and controlled/managed. The experience of observing others and being observed could reframe supervision through the lens of recognition (Park, 2009) whereas Michel Foucault's theory of power (Foucault, 1983; Foucault and Gordon, 1980) could explain how supervisory policies institutionalize systems of differentiations, rationalization, and control. This paper contends that principal supervision is not merely an administrative or compliance-oriented practice but a morally charged site of recognition, where authority, justice, and leadership are actively constituted.

Existing scholarship on principal supervision has predominantly examined issues such as accountability systems, instructional leadership, evaluation frameworks, professional development, and governance arrangements. While these perspectives have generated important insights, comparatively less attention has been devoted to principal supervision as a site where recognition and power relations simultaneously shape professional agency, authority, and moral judgment. Consequently, supervision is often approached as a technical or managerial process rather than as a relational and political practice through which leadership itself is constituted. This article addresses that gap by integrating leadership of recognition and Foucauldian power analysis into a comparative conceptual framework for examining principal supervision.

The article proceeds as follows. After introducing the methodological approach in the next section, Section 3 develops ‘leadership of recognition’ (Park, 2009) as a theoretical framework for analyzing supervisor–supervisee relations. The subsequent section examines systems of principal supervision in three national contexts—the United States, Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, and the People's Republic of China—each representing distinct governance configurations yet sharing tensions between accountability, professional judgment, and state authority. The final section integrates these analyses through a Foucauldian account of power relations, situating principal supervision within broader dynamics of governance and moral agency.

2 Methodological approach

This article adopts a conceptual analysis methodology combined with a comparative education approach. Unlike empirical studies that seek to generate findings from interviews, observations, or survey data, conceptual analysis aims to clarify concepts, examine relationships among ideas, and develop theoretical interpretations of educational phenomena. The purpose of the present study is therefore not to test hypotheses or establish causal relationships but to interpret principal supervision as a site where recognition and power relations intersect.

The comparative component of the analysis draws on published scholarly literature, policy documents, professional standards, and official governmental sources concerning principal supervision in the United States, Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, and the People's Republic of China. These jurisdictions were selected as illustrative governance configurations representing decentralized, semi-centralized, and centralized modes of educational administration respectively. Abu Dhabi emirate was selected rather than the United Arab Emirates as a whole because educational supervision, inspection, leadership development, and accountability mechanisms are administered primarily through the Abu Dhabi Department of Education and Knowledge (ADEK), whose policies and supervisory structures are not uniformly replicated across all emirates. The purpose of case selection is therefore analytical rather than representational. The comparison does not assume internal uniformity within the United States, Abu Dhabi, or China, but instead focuses on policy frameworks and supervisory arrangements that illustrate contrasting governance logics.

The conceptual analysis proceeds in three stages. First, systems of principal supervision are examined comparatively according to governance structure, supervisory mechanisms, standards, and accountability arrangements. Second, these systems are interpreted through leadership of recognition in order to examine how supervision affirms, constrains, or conditions professional agency. Third, Foucauldian analysis of power relations is employed to explore processes of differentiation, institutionalization, rationalization, and control. The resulting typology of instrumental, institutional-developmental, and ideological recognition is therefore presented as an analytical interpretation derived from the theoretical framework and comparative examination of the three cases rather than as an empirical classification intended for statistical generalization.

3 Leadership of recognition in educational administration

Supervision is a major theme in theoretical speculation within the field of educational administration, which itself comprises a community of practitioners and theorists with often conflicting epistemologies (Park, 2015, 2016). Recognition has been examined extensively within philosophy and social theory in relation to questions of identity, authenticity, reciprocity, justice, and moral agency, among others (Ricœur, 2005; Taylor, 1991, 1994). Other influential approaches to recognition include Honneth's intersubjective self-realization and social esteem (1995) and Nancy Fraser's concern with status, participation, and institutional justice (2000). The theoretical framework employed in the present article is Leadership of Recognition (Park, 2009), a philosophical study grounded principally in Paul Ricœur's phenomenology of recognition and informed secondarily by Charles Taylor's dialogical account of identity and recognition, while remaining in dialogue with broader traditions of recognition scholarship. Rather than reviewing the full range of recognition theories, the article draws specifically upon leadership of recognition as an interpretive framework for examining principal supervision.

Recognition, as the theoretical framework informing this study, is neither synonymous with acknowledgement nor reducible to any particular type or aspect of supervision. It is the foundational human act through which persons and their actions are apprehended as intelligible, meaningful, and morally significant (Park, 2009; Ricœur, 2005). Recognition is essential in educational administration and management because it constitutes the ethical, epistemological, and practical foundation through which free human agents are perceived, governed justly, and enabled to act virtuously for both individual and common goods (Park, 2009). Recognition, qua perception, precedes action in that it renders action possible, and it follows action by affirming responsibility, merit, and authority.

Educational leadership and administration, including supervision, depend upon recognition because it is the primary basis of human action, which ought to be rational, free, and purposeful. Recognition functions both as the precondition for action and as the judgment of action after it occurs. It has been argued that recognition is dialogical and not merely reciprocal (Taylor, 1991, 1994). It arises through dialogue and mutual understanding, often involving asymmetry, gift, and mutuality rather than transactional exchange.

Beyond accountability-oriented compliance actions—the minimum necessary—supervision in education is, and ought to be, a praxis requiring fair judgment, deliberation, and moral discernment, that is, Aristotelian phronesis (Aristotle, 2009, p. 106, NE1140b). Furthermore, recognition underpins legitimate authority in supervision because authority emerges when actions and virtues are recognized by others, thereby grounding leadership in moral excellence rather than coercive power. Authority is reified when an agent's actions are recognized as legitimate and oriented toward the common good, not merely when power is exercised (Park, 2009, 2013).

Through recognition, school leaders and supervisors apprehend what is (being), what ought to be (justice/value), and how they perceive, understand, and judge (phronesis). This framing links recognition directly to justice because only through recognition can educational administrators practice distributive justice by allocating roles, responsibilities, and honourable goods according to merit and contribution (Park, 2009; Pieper, 1957). Misrecognition—whether through bureaucratic reduction, technocratic rationalization, or political instrumentalization—erodes both authority and justice by severing leadership from moral agency (Park, 2009).

Supervision, as a core practice of educational administration, is thus a privileged site for theoretically analyzing how recognition is embedded throughout the processes of oversight, management, and direction, including post-evaluation professional development, and how it ultimately determines the quality of leadership.

The next section presents systems of principal supervision in three national contexts using a comparative education approach. Comparative education scholarship has traditionally examined supervision through governance structures, accountability mechanisms, and performance indicators (Bray et al., 2014). While such analyses are valuable, they tend to remain descriptive and often overlook the moral dimensions embedded in administrative practices. The three national systems of principal supervision will therefore be examined through the lens of recognition theory (Park, 2009) in order to analyze how these systems acknowledge or deny professional judgment and affirm or constrain the moral agency of supervisors and supervisees.

4 Supervision systems

Supervision of principals occurs alongside other forms of supervision. While intra-school supervision, both formal and informal, is usually led by the school principal, external supervision involves the whole school or its staff as supervisees, with the state as the ultimate supervisor. Supervision of principals is a form of external supervision, the purpose of which is to assess principals for accountability and, ostensibly, professional development.

There are both similarities and differences among systems of principal evaluation across national contexts. Cortez Ochoa and Thomas (2023) identify two main components of state-run principal supervision systems: standards for the principal as an individual and methods for evaluating principals. With regard to the latter, the most common methods of evaluation worldwide include (Cortez Ochoa and Thomas, 2023): To these elements, the present analysis adds school management modality—centralized or decentralized—as a defining feature of how supervision is structured and enacted within the state. With this framework in place, the following subsections examine three national contexts: the United States, Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, and the People's Republic of China.

• evaluation as part of school inspection that emerged in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century and has traditionally been associated with stress, risk, and high-stakes consequences;
• self-review, involving self-declared accomplishments and areas for improvement;
• written assessments, often in the form of case-based examinations used in recruitment and selection processes;
• surveys of the school community, functioning as opinion-based feedback mechanisms (e.g., in Australia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, England, New Zealand, and Paraguay);
• student learning indicators, whereby student achievement indirectly yet significantly shapes principal evaluation;
• professional development plans for principals, which constitute both a component and an aspirational outcome of supervision systems.

4.1 United States

The supervision of school principals in the United States reflects a decentralized governance structure in which policies and practices vary considerably across states and school districts. Principal supervision is commonly an administrative responsibility assigned to district-level officials such as assistant superintendents or area directors, who assume the role of principal supervisors (Rogers et al., 2019). These supervisors are typically appointed within local district governance structures, while school boards exercise varying degrees of authority over personnel matters depending on state legislation and district arrangements.

Principals are therefore supervised primarily within the district, with limited direct accountability to the federal government. The system emphasizes student performance and teacher effectiveness alongside evaluations of leadership practice, reflecting a strong orientation toward measurable outcomes.

4.2 Abu Dhabi – UAE

In Abu Dhabi, principal supervision operates within a governance model that combines elements of centralization and decentralization (Table 1). School principals are overseen by Cluster Managers from the Abu Dhabi Department of Education and Knowledge (ADEK), each responsible for a group of schools.

Table 1. Cross-country principal supervision.

Evaluation incorporates student achievement, leadership standards, self-evaluation processes, and broader school-accountability mechanisms. Among these, Irtiqaa (Arabic for “ascending”) forms part of the UAE Unified School Inspection Framework (ADEK, 2024) and provides whole-school accountability information relevant to school leadership. While Irtiqaa is not an ad hoc system of principal supervision, its findings may inform judgments concerning leadership effectiveness, school improvement priorities, and institutional accountability (UAE MoE, 2020). This configuration positions supervision as both evaluative and developmental, mediated through formal institutional frameworks.

4.3 China

China's system of principal supervision operates within a formally centralized governance structure, despite policy rhetoric emphasizing decentralization. For years, school leadership has been organized through a dual structure in which principals are supervised or co-governed by School Party Secretaries, who represent the Chinese Communist Party within the school. Although this dual structure remains intact today, the 2022 trial-implementation policy Principal Responsibility System under the Leadership of Party Organizations (Opinions) further formalized and institutionalized the political-administrative relationship already embedded in school governance (Fu, 2026). Rather than replacing the traditional principal responsibility system, the new policy reaffirmed the central role of Party organizations in setting direction, managing the overall situation, making decisions, leading personnel, and ensuring implementation, while retaining the principal as the chief administrative actor (Fu, 2026).

Depending on organizational arrangements, the principal and School Party Secretary may either be separate office-holders or the same individual. School Party Secretaries play various and sometimes conflicting roles, including executor of central policies, stress regulator/filter, accelerator of policy implementation and defenders of ‘Party consciousness’ (Zhao and Liang, 2018). Evaluation prioritizes national examination performance, particularly the college entrance exam Gāokǎo, alongside political and ideological compliance. Supervision is thus embedded within an explicitly ideological framework, where professional evaluation is inseparable from political alignment.

Across all three cases, supervision systems reproduce a lead–led structure of recognition, whereby the state oversees, regulates, and assigns developmental trajectories to individual principals. Principals are appraised against expected standards that range from technical competence to professional conduct and, in some contexts, explicit or implicit political alignment.

Despite varying degrees of decentralization in formal policy, principals remain subject to sustained surveillance and control. Neither physical proximity nor administrative structure necessarily reduces power distance or alleviates perceived pressure (Alkaabi, 2019; Cortez Ochoa and Thomas, 2023). These dynamics may intensify when supervisors lack professional competence or act on partisan or institutional interests.

These configurations underscore that supervision of principals is an act of recognition requiring fair judgment, deliberation, and moral discernment. It cannot be reduced to administrative compliance. Recognition in this context should not become a site of political manoeuvring but rather a practice of distributive justice, through which roles, responsibilities, and professional goods are allocated according to merit and contribution.

Recognition may take different forms and operate through different modes. Table 2 presents an analytical typology of recognition in principal supervision derived from the comparative examination of the three cases through the lens of recognition theory. The categories emerge from the dominant mode through which principals appear to be recognized within each system: performance and measurable outcomes in the United States, institutional procedures and professional-development structures in Abu Dhabi, and political-ideological alignment in China. While all three forms are present to varying degrees across jurisdictions, one mode appears comparatively more salient and therefore serves as the organizing principle of the analysis.

Table 2. Typology of recognition in principal supervision.

In the United States, recognition is largely instrumental; in Abu Dhabi, it is institutional and developmental; and in China, it is ideological and political (see Table 2).

The United States exhibits a form of conditional professional recognition. The use of leadership standards and multi-source evaluations acknowledges principals as professional actors. However, the heavy emphasis on performance metrics risks reducing leadership to measurable outputs, rendering recognition contingent upon results rather than grounded in professional judgment.

Abu Dhabi demonstrates institutional and developmental recognition. Supervision is formally linked to professional growth and capacity building. However, recognition is largely mediated through procedural frameworks rather than sustained dialogical engagement. The supervisory capacity of Cluster Managers—each responsible for multiple schools—further constrains the depth and quality of recognition (Alkaabi, 2019).

China presents the most explicit case of political recognition intertwined with systemic misrecognition. Leadership legitimacy derives primarily from ideological alignment rather than educational reasoning. While such alignment does not necessarily impede positive educational outcomes, the dual leadership structure may subordinate professional agency to political loyalty, redefining justice in political rather than educational terms. As Althusser suggests, although schooling functions as an ideological state apparatus, excessive political instrumentalization may ultimately erode both authority and justice (2006).

5 Principal supervision as power relation

Assistant Superintendents or Area Directors (United States), Cluster Managers (Abu Dhabi–UAE), and School Party Secretaries (China) exercise authority delegated by their respective governing bodies (Table 1). In their engagement with school principals, they occupy a structurally dominant position within the power relation. An interpretive approach to principal supervision as a phenomenon of power can therefore deepen our understanding of its dynamics.

Michel Foucault characterizes this relational approach as “a new mode of inquiry,” consisting of a discursive method focused on relations among subjects, while deliberately avoiding the excesses of purely substantive or rationalistic analysis (1983, pp. 208–210). Within this framework, power relations are examined through processes of centralization and rationalization, whereby “power relations have been progressively governmentalized, that is to say, elaborated, rationalized, and centralized in the form of, or under the auspices of, state institutions” (Foucault, 1983, p. 224). Foucault further argues that power relations presuppose a degree of freedom: they operate only insofar as individuals retain the capacity to act, even as that capacity becomes constrained when power is exercised.

Foucault's analytical framework highlights several key dimensions of power relations relevant to principal supervision: system of differentiations, types of objectives, means of power actualization, forms of institutionalization, and degrees of rationalization (Foucault, 1983).

5.1 System of differentiations

Principal supervision represents an encounter between political authority and institutional leadership. The supervisor and the supervisee are systemically differentiated along multiple axes. These may include disparities in knowledge, competence, and professional qualification; sources and legitimacy of authority; linguistic and cultural backgrounds; national identity; and political affiliation.

As Foucault notes, the effects of power are closely linked with “knowledge, competence, and qualification” (1983, p. 212), which serve as bases for multiple differentiations and interpersonal power distance. When principals transition from supervising others to being supervised, these differentiations become particularly salient, reinforcing hierarchical relations. Such structures persist even within formally decentralized systems, indicating that administrative decentralization does not necessarily entail a redistribution of power.

5.2 Types of objectives

Wherever power is exercised, it is oriented toward specific objectives. In the context of principal supervision, the “types of objectives pursued by those who act upon the actions of others” (Foucault, 1983, p. 223) may include sustaining existing system of differentiations, preserving privileges, and maintaining the authority to dictate professional standards and expectations.

Ideally, the objectives of supervisors and principals converge—such as improving school performance and achieving professional development. In practice, however, these objectives often diverge. Supervisory agendas may prioritize compliance, accountability, or institutional control, while principals may seek professional autonomy and independence in context-sensitive rational decision-making.

5.3 Means of power actualization

The exercise of power in principal supervision is materialized through a range of practices and mechanisms. Consistent with the etymological origins of 'supervision', these include forms of oversight, inspection, and evaluation that render managerial authority visible and operative.

Power may be exercised through strict or inflexible application of rules, the use of legal or administrative sanctions, or the strategic invocation of future consequences, such as budgetary constraints or employment stability. It may also take more subtle forms, including data-driven monitoring, performance metrics, and technology-mediated surveillance, often justified under the language of accountability and effectiveness.

In response to such dynamics, some systems—particularly in the United States—have sought to reorient principal supervision toward instructional leadership and professional support, at least in principle (Rogers et al., 2019). Similarly, in Abu Dhabi, the alignment of professional standards for principals and Cluster Managers suggests an attempt to standardize expectations across hierarchical levels (UAE MoE, 2020). In China, principal supervision reflects a hybrid leadership configuration incorporating elements of both transactional and transformational leadership (Zhao and Liang, 2018).

5.4 Forms of institutionalization

Foucault describes institutionalization as the process by which power relations become organized, stabilized, and embedded within social structures (Foucault, 1983, p. 223). Principal supervision exemplifies such institutionalization: it is a formalized and routinized practice embedded within the administrative apparatus of schooling systems.

Within this framework, supervision operates through hierarchical authority, structured procedures, and established evaluation mechanisms. Supervisors enact institutional power through practices of surveillance (monitoring principals' actions), discipline (correcting and shaping behavior), and normalization (defining standards of acceptable performance).

Schooling itself may be understood as an institutionalized or even ideological apparatus (Althusser, 2006), within which the principal occupies a node of authority. The institutionalization of principal supervision reinforces hierarchical differentiation and formalizes expectations, thereby sustaining the broader system of governance in education.

5.5 Degrees of rationalization

In Foucault's account, rationalization refers to the extent to which power relations become systematic, efficient, and calibrated to achieve their objectives. Foucault argues that power operates within a “field of possibilities,” adapting its instruments and strategies in response to changing conditions.

As Foucault explains, the exercise of power is not a “naked fact” but is “elaborated, transformed, [and] organized,” developing processes that are more or less aligned with specific contexts (Foucault, 1983, p. 224). Rationalization thus varies in degree, reflecting the extent to which power relations are fine-tuned and optimized.

Principal supervision similarly evolves over time, incorporating new tools, data systems, and evaluative frameworks. These developments increase the precision and efficiency of supervision but also intensify its capacity to shape and constrain professional action. Accordingly, supervision is not a static practice but a dynamic and adaptive form of power relation, continuously recalibrated in response to policy shifts and demands.

6 Discussion – the problématique of principal supervision

Problématique (noun, Fr./Eng.) refers to the organized set of questions, problems, and conceptual issues that emerge in relation to a specific topic (OED, 2026). Drawing on theories of recognition and power relations as analytical lenses, this section elaborates the problématique of principal supervision in the literature through a critical and interpretive perspective.

Evaluation has been the most extensively problematized dimension of principal supervision. Frameworks grounded in managerial compliance have been widely criticized, while teaching- and learning-centered instructional leadership frameworks have been proposed as alternatives, emphasizing professional growth, coherence, and instructional focus (Goldring et al., 2009, 2018).

In a more specific formulation, Parylo et al. (2012) argue that the coexistence of formative supervision and summative evaluation creates systemic tensions that often undermine principal's learning. They further contend that when formative objectives are not clearly differentiated from summative ones, principal evaluation fails to fulfil its developmental purpose. Zepeda (2017) similarly suggests that, to avoid reducing supervision to procedural compliance, principal supervision should be organized around trust, reflection, and continuous learning, while deliberately differentiating and subsequently integrating evaluative and developmental functions.

As a conceptual inquiry, it is necessary to revisit the origins of a now taken-for-granted distinction in educational discourse: the binary between summative and formative assessment. Coined by Michael Scriven in 1967, this distinction was originally intended to assess the quality of educational programs; its contemporary use in educational leadership often concerns not only different purposes of evaluation but also the tensions arising when the same evidence is used simultaneously for developmental and accountability purposes (Table 3).

Table 3. Summative assessment versus formative assessment.

Adapted by the author from Scriven (1967).

In principal supervision, formative and summative functions are not necessarily associated with different instruments or sources of evidence. School-performance indicators, supervisory observations, inspection findings, professional portfolios, and feedback discussions may serve both developmental and evaluative purposes. The persistent tension identified in the literature (Parylo et al., 2012; Zepeda et al., 2016) therefore concerns less the evidence itself than the purposes to which that evidence is put and the power relations through which it is interpreted and acted upon.

If the primary purpose of principal supervision were formative evaluation aimed at professional development through instruction, the supervisor would assume the role of instructor and the principal that of learner. In this context, understanding adult learning processes becomes essential for designing meaningful professional development for principals (Alkaabi, 2019). Principals bring to such processes prior knowledge, professional experience, and intrinsic motivation. Accordingly, when principals are “taught” in the context of principal supervision, supervisors must recognize and engage principals' autonomy, reflective capacity, and self-directed learning skills (Conlan et al., 2010; Rebore, 2017).

Knowles (1984) emphasizes that adult learning is most effective when it is self-directed, experiential, problem-centered, and immediately relevant. This suggests that principal supervision and evaluation should be designed keeping in mind subsequent adult learning processes rather than only as top-down accountability mechanisms. Professional learning systems, including principal supervision, should therefore be adaptive and learner-centered in order to foster meaningful growth (Conlan et al., 2010). However, this ideal is difficult to realize in practice due to an entrenched system of differentiations in principal supervision, including hierarchical power structure and power distance (see § 5.1). The frequent idealization of instructional leadership as a remedy for the limitations of summative supervision must therefore be critically examined. Mechanisms of power are already institutionalized, and evaluation—also as a form of recognition—cannot simply be dismissed or eliminated.

There appears to be little to no systematic empirical research or theoretical treatment addressing the possibility of a Hawthorne effect in the supervision of school principals—that is, the tendency of principals to modify their behavior in response to being observed and evaluated. This absence constitutes not only an empirical gap but also a theoretical omission within the field of educational leadership and administration. The Hawthorne effect may be understood as an inherent consequence of power in operation, a dynamic that can be elucidated through Foucault's metaphor of the panopticon (1995). Under conditions of continuous observation and evaluation—where surveillance and normalization function as mechanisms of power actualization (see §§ 5.3-5.4)—principals are inclined to internalize disciplinary expectations. Through this process of internalization, they come to regulate their own conduct, producing forms of behavior that conform to what is recognized as acceptable or desirable by those in positions of authority. In this sense, principal supervision may approximate a panoptic configuration of power relations, wherein control is achieved not through direct coercion but through the subject's own self-regulation, thereby rendering supervision more efficient and less obviously coercive.

Another persistent problem concerns feedback from supervisor to principal. In the field of human resource management, post-evaluation feedback has long been a contested practice, often resisted by supervisees. Such resistance may stem from fear, misunderstanding, lack of trust, or perceptions of unfairness (Rebore, 2017; Tran and Kelley, 2024). A new binary emerges here: formative versus summative feedback.

Zepeda et al. (2016) argue that formative feedback is central to effective principal supervision yet is frequently marginalized under accountability pressures. They maintain that feedback leads to improvement only when it is ongoing, dialogical, instructional, and decoupled from punitive evaluation. Kimball et al. (2009) advance a similar position, suggesting that evaluation systems can foster improvement when performance standards are clearly defined and feedback is used diagnostically rather than punitively.

All three national systems examined in this study (see § 4) employ explicit and clearly defined performance standards. However, it remains uncertain whether such standards can mitigate the underlying dynamics of power relations embedded in supervision. It is equally unclear whether standards alone can generate authentic recognition or cultivate relational practices that strengthen professional trust and foster positive school culture (Tran and Kelley, 2024).

Performance feedback, often in a post-conference, is allegedly intended to “help principals enhance their own knowledge and skills, and/or to hold principals accountable for school improvement and student learning” (Rogers et al., 2019, p. 441). Since both student learning and overall school development constitute integral components of principal evaluation, performance feedback may function as an inducement or coercive pressure. This represents yet another power dynamic with its own set of objectives, reflected in multiple documented cases in U.S. K-12 education, where grades were altered or inflated improperly (and sometimes illegally) to improve graduation rates, performance metrics, or institutional reputation (Link, 2024; Wadhwani, 2024). Moreover, grade inflation and related manipulation under accountability pressures—often justified in the name of professional development, school enhancement, and quality assurance—are not unique to the United States (Chowdhury, 2018; François and De Witte, 2025).

Furthermore, Alkaabi (2019) identifies a less visible but significant issue within supervisor–supervisee relations: role ambiguity. Drawing on existing literature, Alkaabi argues that ambiguity in the supervisor's role—particularly the conflation of coaching, monitoring, and evaluation—undermines system coherence and weakens the developmental potential of supervision. Indeed, role ambiguity implies endowing the supervisor with multiple ways of exerting power in a chameleonic manner: high-stake evaluation, trust-mediated legitimacy to “support” and demand, and administrative liaising by bridging and buffering impacts of power between principal and the apex authority, sometimes “managing upward” and in some others, “managing downward” (Rogers et al., 2019).

From the perspective of leadership of recognition (Park, 2009), some power dynamics risk transforming principal supervision into a disciplinary technique. Paradoxically, recognition itself may become conditional, instrumental, or even coercive, reducing leadership to conformity rather than virtuous action. Foucault's analysis complements this framework by clarifying how institutionalized power structures delimit the conditions under which moral agency can be exercised. Where recognition moderates power, supervision may sustain justice and professional freedom; where power subsumes recognition, supervision operates as a mechanism of control.

7 Conclusion: recognition and power

This article has argued that the supervision of school principals is fundamentally a practice of recognition shaped by power relations. Differences among supervision systems reflect deeper philosophical assumptions about leadership, authority, and justice. Recognition emerges as a plausible analytical lens for comparative education, capable of revealing the moral foundations of educational administration that technical analyses often miss.

Supervision of school principals is a critical site where state power intersects with institutional power. Despite prevailing policy narratives that emphasize decentralization, principals in three jurisdictions examined in this paper remain the undisputed top-level supervisors within their schools. When principals themselves are supervised, a distinct power relation comes into existence by delineating the local supervisee in the periphery and the supervisor with delegated power from government as administrative center. The supervisory relationship reveals a structured power dynamic between the periphery and the center.

What emerges across the three illustrative systems is not simply divergence and variation in supervision characteristics but a deeper convergence: Principal supervision is a governmentalized exercise of power. Recognition, as an ethical condition for just leadership, is persistently mediated—and often distorted—by institutionalized power relations. Principal supervision does not simply evaluate leadership; it produces what counts as leadership through regimes of intentionally identifying differences, professional judgment, and the normalization of what counts as a good principal.

The comparative analysis of principal supervision systems in the United States, Abu Dhabi, and China reveals that systemic differences among them are less about the presence or absence of recognition than about its mode of operation. Instrumental, institutional, and ideological forms of recognition all operate within bounded “fields of power” that predefine what is to be seen, valued, and affirmed/rejected. Thus, even those jurisdictions where decentralization of administration or developmental rhetoric is invoked, the due authentic process of recognition remains conditioned by a system of differentiations and a sophisticated degree of rationalization. What appears as professional judgment is often already pre-structured by metrics, frameworks, or ideological criteria that might delimit the space of moral agency of school principals.

This analysis contributes to scholarship on principal supervision by bringing into dialogue debates on accountability, performativity, professional identity, governance, and principal evaluation through a recognition-power framework. Three principal contributions emerge from this synthesis. First, it reconceptualizes principal supervision not merely as an administrative mechanism of evaluation and accountability but as a site where leadership is recognized, contested, and constituted through relations among authority, judgment, and moral agency. Second, by bringing leadership of recognition into dialogue with Foucauldian analyses of power, it offers a conceptual framework for examining how supervisory arrangements mediate professional agency, legitimacy, justice, and the exercise of authority in educational administration. Third, the comparative examination of the three jurisdictions advances an analytical typology of recognition that distinguishes instrumental, institutional-developmental, and ideological modes of recognition, thereby illustrating how different governance configurations shape what is recognized, valued, and affirmed in principal supervision.

This analysis is also a call for a theoretical inversion manoeuvre. Recognition and power are not merely parallel dimensions of principal supervision but mutually constitutive ones. The analytical perspective therefore cannot remain unidirectional. It must move not only from recognition to power but also from power to recognition, examining how each conditions, enables, and constrains the other.

The central problem of principal supervision may not simply be a lack of recognition, but the ways in which recognition becomes mediated by power's entrenched systems of differentiations, objectives, means of actualization, institutionalization, and degrees of rationalization. The supervisor's gaze, far from neutral, is an instrument with which authority seeks to stabilize itself by translating complex educational practices into legible and governable rubric of acceptable forms of action. In Foucauldian terms, principal supervision is one more technique of governance through the strategic management of freedom and constraint. Principals are recognized insofar as their actions remain intelligible and normalized within supervision systems and expected quality standards; outside these, recognition falters or is withdrawn.

At the same time, recognition cannot be fully reduced to power and about power. Its irreducible moral dimension—grounded in judgment, dialogue, and phronesis—persists as a source of tension within supervision systems. This tension is most visible in the unresolved scholarly binaries plaguing the educational leadership field: formative versus summative evaluation, developmental versus evaluative purposes of analysing individuals with metrics, and autonomy versus accountability of principals' professional and moral agency. These are not merely managerial dilemmas but expressions of a deeper contradiction between recognition as ethical encounter and supervision as administrative apparatus.

This conceptual analysis article is neither an invitation to abandon supervision nor to romanticize its recognition features, but to reconcile supervision and recognition. If supervision is to sustain and advance legitimate authority of school principals, rather than merely enforce compliance, there should be in place dialogical, procedurally fair, and professionally respectful forms of recognition. Such supervision would require institutional arrangements that strengthen recognition as well as accountability. These may include transparent use of supervisory evidence, meaningful opportunities for principals to interpret and discuss assessment findings, clear differentiation between developmental support and administrative sanction, and the use of multiple sources of evidence rather than reliance on a single evaluative indicator. Recognition-based supervision would also require supervisors prepared not only in evaluation procedures but also in judgment, dialogue, and professional ethics, together with procedural safeguards that protect the professional voice and agency of school principals. This process would entail reconfiguring supervisory practice toward dialogical forms of judgment in which principals are regarded as moral agents rather than objects of performance optimization that mainstream neoliberal philosophy of education today seems to advocate.

As a conceptual and comparative inquiry, the present analysis is not intended to provide empirical generalization. Future research may examine how recognition and power relations are experienced, negotiated, or resisted by principals and supervisors across different educational contexts. Furthermore, future theoretical explorations may focus on more specific dimensions of principal supervision or examine the phenomenon through alternative philosophical and theoretical frameworks.

Ultimately, principal supervision is a microcosm of modern governance: a domain where power seeks to render human action measurable and improvable while remaining dependent on forms of recognition it cannot fully control or sustain. An enduring problématique waiting to be resolved, then, is not how to perfect supervision as a system, but whether recognition can retain its ethical integrity once absorbed into power apparatuses designed to measure, regulate, and normalize human action.

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Footnotes

Edited by: Mohammed Borhandden Musah, Emirates College for Advanced Education, United Arab Emirates

Reviewed by: Rizky Amelia, Lambung Mangkurat University, Indonesia

Juhji Juhji, Universitas Islam Negeri Sultan Maulana Hasanuddin Banten, Indonesia