The evolution of educational administration as a distinct academic
subspecialty now spans 12 decades across three different centuries. During
that time, there has been an ongoing concern for the development of knowledge in the field and a concomitant concern for how persons should be prepared to participate in the production of knowledge. These concerns are
animated by such questions as whether the knowledge available is of sufficiently
high quality, whether it addresses the most pressing and significant
problems in the field, whether the knowledge is actually used and to what
ends, and whether the most appropriate persons are doing the most appropriate
things to produce knowledge. In this article, we enter these debates by
exploring common and emerging conceptions of what constitutes knowledge
in educational administration, relating knowledge to practice, and considering
how individuals in universities and in schools can engage in particular
kinds of knowledge work—that is, research.