b-school & leadership edification

Surely it is the business of business schools to wean its consumers off notions of certainty and totally founded knowledeges? If, as the view executivezen holds asserts, there is no extra-linguistic certainty, no foundation external to the “conversations” (as Zabala says) that form knowledge, then education becomes ‘edification’, a self-improvement.

 If I’m searching for a nexus with which to anchor further study then ‘representation’ seems to be it: as in Rorty’s distrust of the modern notion that to know is to represent accurately. There are no “permenant, neutral frameworks of inquiry” (Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 1979) and so the whole edifice of epistemology in modern analytic philosophy is built on shifting sands. True assertions are only true by virtue of social context; in which case ‘conversation’ is the ultimate context in which knowledge is to be understood; distinct from getting the facts right, education is about exposure to and aptitude in discourse. This is what Rorty calls “edifying discourse”.

Edification is Rorty’s substitution of Gadamer’s phrase Bildung, which means education or self-formation. Rorty reckons that education sounds too flat and that Bildung sounds too foreign. Edification “stands for this project of finding new, better, more interesting, more fruitful ways of speaking.” (Rorty, 1979, p360). Edifying discourse is supposed to be abnormal, to take us out of our old selves by the power of strangeness, to aid us in becoming new beings. Edification is not a matter of knowing what is out there, as the Platonic-Aristotelian view dictates. This has implications for leadership education.

The Absolute in Executive Education

Terry Eagleton suggests (in his short piece Marx, part of The Great Philosophers series, 1997, p19) that Marx was “profoundly hostile to such metaphysics” [as duty, morality, religious sanctions & the Absolute Idea]. It makes executivezen wonder about whether executive education holds something of that same absolute idea that was so anathema, not only to Marx, but to the a roll-call of ‘anti-philosophers’ such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin, Wittgenstein, Derrida & Rorty. Members of that same list of honour, says Santiago Zabala (in his introduction to Rorty & Vattimo’s Future of Religion, 2005, p4), view objectivity more as a question of a poststructuralist tinted “intersubjective linguistic consensus between human beings and not some sort of accurate representation of something that transcends the human sphere”. I’m equating here the Absolute Idea to objectivity: but I think what is expected of business school oriented executive education by its consumers is – mildly – adherence to this absolute, to objective truth and – strongly – to proclaim and justify such a truth through its research practices. As for executivezen’s evidence for this tendency (ahem), this is the subject of future study.