Leader ou manager? Le faux dilemme politique du personnel de direction en Italie

The argument presented in this chapter draws on researches and publications carried on in the last years and focusing on the reform of the Italian education system, on its education policies and, more specifically, on the training, selection and evaluation of Italian headteachers. The article sections are structured as follows. First, we present the plural theoretical frame and the methodology that have ‘shaped’ the researches whose results are presented in the article. Second, we offer a brief outline of how headteachers were ‘formed’ as educational subjects before the 1997 Autonomy Reform. In the final sections, we present and discuss some tensions that emerge in and between the discourses on headship, analysing a particular set of ‘dispositifs’ (Foucault, 1975; Deleuze, 1992) that intend to S-Objectivate specific headteachers profiles rather than others. The analysis will allow us to shed light on what we think of as an invisible and politically relevant dilemma that is at stake here: headship as a managerialist dispositif to ‘control’ education policies.