Digitalization and school leadership: a scoping review

Research on digitalization and school leadership is emerging, but remains fragmented and under-researched, as indicated in recent reviews. Based on this, we conducted a scoping review of 38 empirical studies published between 2014 and 2024. The review focuses on the descriptive characteristics of the field, how digitalization and digital school leadership are defined, which themes researchers address, and how existing research can be organized into emerging research streams. The findings show that the field is expanding, but remains scattered across disciplines and journals, with a strong geographical focus on Europe, particularly Sweden, and parts of Asia. Although qualitative and quantitative approaches are relatively balanced, mixed-method, longitudinal, and comparative designs are underused. As a result, much of the literature provides snapshot accounts or examines the relationship between digital leadership and teachers’ technology use. Digital school leadership is often treated as complex, yet this complexity is rarely unpacked analytically, leading to few studies of how leadership is enacted in everyday practice. Furthermore, the field reveals limited theoretical engagement and an unclear understanding of digitalization. The review also identifies a paradoxical approach to digital leadership. On the one hand, studies often lack explicit definitions; on the other hand, their research designs and methods create two knowledge logics: a predefined, expectation-oriented logic and a situated, practice-oriented logic. Consequently, the review argues for research that moves beyond individualized understandings of digital leadership and examines how it is enacted across organizational, technological, and governance contexts. It concludes by proposing a research agenda to address these gaps and guide future studies in more coherent and theoretically grounded directions.