Recognition and social recognition in particular has been extensively discussed in the disciplines such as political philosophy and sociology but not in educational administration. This article addresses the problem of disengagement of educational administration from recognition. The main question, arising from this neglected issue is the tendency to gauge and practice educational administration with a set of managerial techniques and leadership discourses without an epistemology that takes into account the diversity of educational stakeholders and their deepest yearnings for individual and collective recognition. The central thesis in addressing this question is that recognition is an essential epistemological decoder to understand educational administration, and not merely an alternative perspective. Thus this study proposes a novel theoretical development about the loci and roles of recognition. The research context of this study is in the domain of philosophy of educational administration. It starts with the premise that the dominant epistemologies prevalently regard educational institutions as systems with lineal approach to analysis and application of theories, which are heavily borrowed from the field of business administration. Instead of going deeper into these issues and the competing epistemologies in the field, this article aims at exploring recognition as a key epistemological foundation of educational administration. Thus, the significance of this study lies in offering a new epistemological tool to look at educational administration.
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