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The purpose of this paper is to explore four women principals’ experiences with power in the course of their daily leadership. The data used in this exploration was collected through in‐depth interviews, conducted from a phenomenological perspective, during the second and third years of a three‐year study on the leadership experiences of the four principals. The thematic findings which emerged from this data included empowerment, positive power, traditional power and negative power, and are discussed in relation to three lenses of power: dominance or “power over”, facilitation or “power through”, and as energy and competence or “power with”. The four principals’ experiences were remarkable in that they were extensively engaged in interpreting, experiencing and using power as “power through” and “power with” rather than as “power over”. The findings from this research serve as examples of ways in which power is enacted by women leaders within traditional organizational settings, and the potential of their actions to positively transform school organizations and the experiences of those who work within them.

Drawing upon Alfred Sohn-Rethel's work, we argue that, just as capitalism produces abstract labor, it coproduces both abstract mind and abstract life. Abstract mind is the split between mind and nature and between subject/observer and observed object that characterizes scientific epistemology. Abstract mind reflects an abstracted objectified world of nature as a means to be exploited. Biological life is rendered as abstract life by capitalist exploitation and by the reification and technologization of organisms by contemporary technoscience. What Alberto Toscano has called “the culture of abstraction” imposes market rationality onto nature and the living world, disrupting biotic communities and transforming organisms into what Finn Bowring calls “functional bio-machines.”

The management of children′s literature is a search for value and suitability. Effective policies in library and educational work are based firmly on knowledge of materials, and on the bibliographical and critical frame within which the materials appear and might best be selected. Boundaries, like those between quality and popular books, and between children′s and adult materials, present important challenges for selection, and implicit in this process are professional acumen and judgement. Yet also there are attitudes and systems of values, which can powerfully influence selection on grounds of morality and good taste. To guard against undue subjectivity, the knowledge frame should acknowledge the relevance of social and experiential context for all reading materials, how readers think as well as how they read, and what explicit and implicit agendas the authors have. The good professional takes all these factors on board.