what fixed, immutable, ultimate essence?

Given that there are no fixed essences (a view endorsed by most poststructuralists and by Derrida), then there is no fixed human essence. As Jim Garrison says (‘Dewey, Derrida and the Double Blind’ p.105 in Derrida, Deconstruction and Education, 2004, Blackwell), “without a fixed essence, [leadership and management] education has no ultimate, immutable and eternal fixed telos that represents the perfection of the process of education. There can be, then, no fixed immutable foundations of education”. To paraphrase Garrison, [managers or leaders] “are not substances … with the latent potential to actualise … their essence any more than acorns alone have the latent potential to actualise their essence as a giant oak tree. What [managers & leaders] become depends on the transactions they enter.”

This means what, exactly, in respect to executive education? It seems to be a truism that management and leadership education (exec.ed) is not a fixed entity; obviously, programmes of education, learning, development, arise from the conditions of the client organisation and as such are contingent and not fixed or immutable (though, perhaps, this is less true of programmes of formal, curricula-bound, education such as an MBA or MSc). However, executivezen is not sure this holds true of programmes of espoused ‘customised’ education and is certainly of the belief that these programmes are not politically neutral. By programme, executivezen means a defined system, structure and agenda, in this case pertaining to education: the term ‘programme of education’ refers as much to a perceived lack of education that may form the basis of the commissioning of a piece of education, up to scheduled instances of formal classroom education. All programmes belie an agenda, a postion formed in advance that makes a programme political in nature. Programmes of education are political in nature (see Politicising Executive Education and Exec.ed and Politics posts). At some point, the programme of a programme of education falls back into stasis, which in this case is back to the political agenda implicit in that programme of education. This is not to say that the chosen political agenda that constitutes a programme is the essence of that programme: as per Garrison (and deconstruction) there is no essence to education. Sometimes, that resultant political agenda does not arise via a conscious choice but instead is a manifestation of the inheritance (metaphysical or otherwise) of corporate culture.

Surely, then, those involved in (the programmatization of) exec.ed have the ability to challenge both the commissioning client’s views as to the essential-ness of exec.ed and the type of political agenda they adopt or conform to? Not just the ability; perhaps this is the sole job of educational programmatization; or perhaps this is an overlooked aspect of the role of educational advisors. Maybe what brokers of b-school expertise should be about is not the marshalling of business & management content into a sellable programme of education, but instead to help clients to come to terms with their cultural, metaphysical, logocentric inheritances so that they can more accurately and appropriately commission suitable change (educational?) interventions, i.e. given the current climate of chaos and complexity, openness against closure, difference against identity, perpetual movement against stasis. This would signal a change in the nature of b-schools towards a more consultative stance towards exec.ed, distinct from the more traditional purveyor of knowledge.

poststructural leadership

Here’s an attempt at a poststructural definition of leadership:

“a leadership act is constituted within a context which produces or transforms the situation in which it occurs; it has no referent and it does not describe anything that pre-exists it outside language. Consequently, a leadership act, however exemplary, is only fully complete when it is witnessed and recounted by those that are implicit in that act and that are changed for the good by that act.”

Executivezen is dazed from having pushed this out and hopes, after recuperation, to unpack these layers in the next set of posts.

Naming the Multiple

Naming the Multiple: Poststructuralism and Education, (edited by Micheal Peters, 1998, Bergin & Garvey) is helping me appropriate the insights of poststructuralism for higher education, executive education and networked learning. I’ve found a (long, sorry) quote (pp.12-13) that summaries the broad categories of application that Micheal Peters attributes to the French reception (largely Deleuzian) of Nietzsche:

“These Nietzschean philosophemes (emphasis in original) serve as a reference point for education theorists in seeking both to understand and to appropriate the insights of poststructuralism. The also serve as an interpretive basis for detecting and tracing the influence of poststructuralism in much recent educational theorizing: the critique of the Enlightenment subject of both liberal and Marxist perspectives, with the attendant development of more complex notions of student and teacher subjectivities; the challenge to simple-minded accounts of automony and agency; the reappraisals of models of interpretations of texts andtheir relations to various contexts – social, cultural, institutional, pedagogical; the reassessment of and consequent richer notions of reading and writing, considered as social practices; the intimate connections between power and knowledge in, for instance, not only classroom settings but also constructions of educational policies and the development of new pedagogical practices; the greater attention paid to the discursive power of “the languages of education” – those of educational administration, economics, management, measurement, and policy – in the constitution of education in the broadest sense; the utilisation, in innovative ways, of forms of discourse analysis, deconstruction, archaeology, and genealogy as new means of analysis of educational institutions, practices, and policies [executivezen emphasis]; both an awareness and a political suspicion of the new communications and information technologies as, in part, the means for achieving globally what has been referred to as the information society, knowledge society, or information superhighway; the emphasis on notions and principles of becoming and process over questions of being and ontology in understanding educational practices; the critique of binary modes of thinking per se; the rehabilitation of desire as a set of cultural and educational forces; the acknowledgement of forces acting upon forces, indivduals, and groups within educational settings; and the investigation and acknowledgement of the notion of difference, in its various conceptual manifestations, operating as a set of complext sociocultural and educational principles.”

Deleuze & Guattari

Ok – here’s the bad news for mainstream business education delivered by our nomadic poststructuralists, Gille Deleuze and Felix Guattari (from Carter & Jackson, 2004, ‘Organisation Theory and Postmodern Thought’, p.105-126, Sage):

• organisations are not discreet, identifiable entities which can be examined independently of their social contexts – this not only affects how we treat ‘organisation’ academically, but how we conceive our client organisations and how we work with them to define the scope of our joint educative endeavours
• it is a fallacy to think that organisations (whatever these are, given the above) are perfectible – hence the notion of performance improvement is immediately suspect since this implies that attainment of a stasis, which is unachievable. Poststructuralism rejects the 18thC. Enlightenment-based teleology of progress; unfortunately, since executive education is un-selfreflectively footed in the modernist mindset, here is a major blind-spot
• Capitalism’s need to control and channel meaning, in order to remain unquestionable, is operationalised through the capture and control of the signifier. Capitalilsm appears to be aloof from question, certainly in the service industry of business education, when its analysis emerges from within capitalisms own regime of truth – this is a regime that is perpetuated by its own colonisation of signifiers (science, reason, measurement, evidence) on which business education is based and so we are too close to the problem to define it. Within the capitalist regime of truth there exists no mechanism for mounting such a challenge. Wouldn’t this be an excellent basis on which to concieve of a ‘becoming of leadership’?
• Organisations do not exist simply to provide goods and services as efficiently as possible in resonse to customer demand, they exist to channel desire (a key component of D&G’s thinking) into the production and consumption of capitalism’s outputs, and to disable the potential for desire to desire anything beyond, or alternative, to this – which has major implications on how we define what we do for the organisations and individuals that come to us

This is work in progress: I’m sufficiently stirred up to start a deeper reading of Thousand Plateaus and Anti-Oedipus. More later…

why Networked learning?

What if learning did not just reside within an individual? What if other factors (environment, friends/family/colleagues, deadlines) not only contributed to learning, but were the sites of learning? These obscure questions form the basis of the philosophy behind networked learning. Practically speaking, networked learning, learning that takes place amongst colleagues and in workplace settings (not specifically the classroom), is what we encounter every day in our organisations. We use and learn from networks all the time, be they computer-based networks (email, instant messaging, google, wikis) or people networks (team meetings, photocopier conversations, action learning sets). Networked learning does not refer specifically to e-learning, web-based learning or computers in general. Instead, it privileges the role that all types of networks have in our day-to-day learning processes. Thinking practically, networked learning moves beyond the classroom and the trappings of formal education. When business schools are about improving the practice of management, networked learning places business schools’ knowledge of management at the heart of the workplace through these networks.

fetishizing practice

Are we in danger of fetishizing practice, practicality, implementable practical value? What other agendas are business schools exposed to, besides those of excellence, performativity, and economic growth, that balance the quest for practicality? Is practicality at the expense of, and in permanent contradistinction to, theory? What is a practical theory? It’s as if the theory/practice distinction falls foul of Derridian logocentrism, bipolar opposites, with the privileging of practice over theory.

Following Lyotard, executivezen believes that theory cannot be separated from practice, in that theories emerge within practical situations and cannot stand independently of them. A practical and ongoing experimentation with matter sounds suspiciously like a theory to executivezen. Take networked learning theory (see the following post in this blog): the theoretical terms come out of and can only be explained in practical cases, e.g. networks and the ambiguity that this term carries. It is interesting to see, when you read Lyotard (for example, ‘Libidinal Economy’), that he asks “Did it work for you?” and “What is of value here, for you, now?” rather than the more abstract and theoretically sterile questions of “What does it mean?” or “Is it good?”. These questions have a wonderful pragmatic sense to them that seems beyond the ‘empirical testing’ (in terms of confirmation or refutation) convention alluded to in instances of fetishizing practice. As Williams (Poststructuralism, 2005, p.96) says of Lyotard, so executivezen says that theory “emerges with the material and with the event. It is not so much tested as ‘evolved with’.”

So, does networked learning theory fetishize (to use Derrida’s sense of the term) practice or does it evolve with the material, the event, practice? Let’s take a look at networked learning theory…

communitarianism

It would seem judicious after my avowal of the politicising nature of executive education to back this claim up with a small-to-median ‘p’ political stance. So the following is an attempt by executivezen to try on a political label, that of communitarianism.

According to the Wikipedia article on communitarianism, philosophically, communitarianism emphasizes the role of the community in defining and shaping individuals. Ideologically, communitarianism emphasises the community and is sometimes marked by leftism on economic issues and conservatism on social issues. Communitarian philosophers are primarily concerned with ontological and epistemological issues, as distinct from policy issues; they have recently been distinguished by their dissatisfaction with the image Rawls presents of humans as atomistic individuals. Executivezen likes this disaffection whilst at the same time aknowledging that s/he feels disconnected with, or should that be, from a specific community. Does that make me an existential communitarian?

Communitarians claim values and beliefs exist in public space, in which debate takes place. They argue that becoming an individual means taking a stance on the issues that circulate in the public space. For instance, Charles Taylor rejects naturalism, mediational epistemologies, and what, following Bakhtin, he calls “monological consciousness” (or the intellectualist’s perspective). Following Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein, Taylor argues that it is mistaken to presuppose that we are inherently cut off from the world and our understanding of it essentially mediated by representations. This ties nicely into Rorty’s assertion that the world is not re-presented via language.

Politicising Executive Education

Derrida’s response to Rorty, taken from Deconstruction and Pragmatism (page 77 to 88, translated from French by Simon Critchley) concerning the politicising qualities of deconstruction speaks of the potential of a deconstructive reading & writing of exec.ed. promising a political acuity hitherto dormant.

“To move on to a question that Rorty raised in discussion concerning the weakening of the political left in the United States, this would demand a great deal of analysis and perhaps Rorty is right in seeing such a weakening. But even if Rorty is right, my hope, as a man of the left, is that certain elements of deconstruction will have served or-because the struggle continues, particularly in the United States-will serve to politicize or repoliticize the left with regard to positions which are not simply academic. I hope – and if I can continue to contribute a little to this I will be very content – that the political left in universities in the United States, France and elsewhere, will gain politically by employing deconstruction. To a certain extent, and in an unequal way, this is a movement that is already under way.”

Executivezen feels confident that it is not trying to philosophise its way into a political relevance for exec.ed.

Deconstructive Exec.Ed: are these tenets executivezen?

Time to recap over a work-in-progress stipulation of a deconstructive philosophy of executive education (executivezen does intend to elaborate on this somewhat staccato list in the rest of the blog). A deconstructive writing (learning design) and reading (consumption) of an exec.ed text (e.g. events or contexts) includes the following elements:

• learning without a learner is the equivalent of orthodoxy, cannon, knowledge
• there is a metaphysics in education and in exec.ed. Akin to a belief in the absolute of management, of research-led education, of research in general
• a deconstructive approach to studying exec.ed is one vigilant of stepping back into the more doctrinaire metaphysical assumptions (above) that surround exec.ed
• there is a symbolic value of exec.ed which a deconstructive approach reveals
• exec.ed is full of aporia – blindspots
• just as deconstruction welcomes uncertainty, promotes comfort with uncertainty and values the multiple readings of a (educational/learning) text, so too is my approach to writing (designing) exec.ed
• a deconstructive analysis of exec.ed texts reveals the binary opposites that are the mother-tongue of management
• exec.ed is not neutral in the same way that deconstruction is not neutral
• exec.ed should take sides – i.e. openness, difference & movement, rather than closure, identity & stasis.
• there is no final vocabulary for exec.ed
• a deconstructive approach to writing and reading exec.ed texts promotes granular political acts
• all developmental tools can work to realise individual and group political action
• a deconstructive exec.ed text stands for dissent, destabilisation, dissolution and disruption of orthodoxy
• exec.ed is revolutionary (emancipatory)
• invention must take place exec.ed, disrupting institutional norms
• exec.ed is about opening uncloseting aporias
• exec.ed is an experience of the impossible

Invention

According to Derrida (Acts of Literature, 1992) invention is not invention if it does not break with existing institutional procedures. How true this is of innovation and the behavioural & attitudinal inventions from a process of learning! When coupled (in the previous posts) with the overt political functions of exec.ed, invention within and for the subject of education serves to open up the present in order to let the other come: opening, uncloseting, destabilising foreclusionary structures.

Then, exec.ed is an experience of the impossible in that it involves the coming about of something other in the ‘impossible’ above.

Is there a distinction between exec.ed and personal learning? Where personal learning can be changed, added to, is subject to conditions and is modifiable: and where exec.ed is that in the name of which personal learning is modified, added to, is subject to conditions and is modifiable. So that exec.ed is a metaphysical condition of personal learning – um, not sure. But this would mean that exec.ed cannot be experienced other than through personal learning. It is in this way that exec.ed is IMPOSSIBLE.

Is there an unconditional type of exec.ed? That is, does there exist a distinction between contingent or conditional exec.ed and absolute or unconditional exec.ed? Executivezen is not sure if unconditional exec.ed is possible, given that it cannot be experienced other than through personal learning. Maybe, though, this personal learning/exec.ed distinction is untenable. Could this distinction exist in the same way as the distinction between conditional law and unconditional justice? Is the parallel mapping between education and learning?