This article critically reviews two bodies of literature that potentially share common concerns, yet rarely overlap: distributed leadership and educational micropolitics. Alternative explanations for the split between these two analytical approaches to school organization are explored in sections on problem framing, methodology, and the marketplace of educational research and publishing. The article concludes that the separation between explorations of educational micropolitics and distributed leadership is both consequence and reflection of an increasingly prevalent managerialism required in the current policy context, which emphasizes smoothing out micropolitical conflict rather than examining it or learning from it. (Contains 1 table and 1 footnote.)