Growing awareness of and interest in the phenomenon of globalisation of educational policy and practice is creating the need for the development of a comparative and international branch of educational leadership and management (Dimmock & Walker 1998a, 1998b). Interest in, if not willingness to adopt, imported policies and practices without due consideration of cultural and contextual appropriateness is justification for developing a more robust conceptual, methodological and analytical approach to comparative and international educational management. Currently, educational management has failed to develop in this direction. Indeed, as we argue below, it shows every tendency to continue its narrow ethnocentric focus, despite the internationalising of perspectives taken by policy-makers and others to which we have already alluded. In this respect, it could be argued that our field is lagging behind conceptually and epistemologically trends and events already taking place in practice. In addition, it has already failed to keep pace with comparative and international developments in other fields, notably business management and cross- cultural psychology.