the end of business school education

Where executivezen states/foretells the end (the lexical ambiguity is deliberate) of business school education: what the form of endeavour, called education, within business schools (in particular) produces and how this system is no longer tenable. How so? Executivezen blames the rise of managerialism. By managerialism executivezen is echoing Lyotard’s analysis of “maximising the performativity of the economic system”, where the pressures (from both a normative and critical perspective) of globalization are being applied across business education. “A new educational pragmatism, impelled by globalization, seems to be draining [educational] practice of normative interest and validity,” says Blake, Smeyers, Smith & Standish in their introduction to the Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education (2003). The universities are under constant assault from managerialist reformers who seem to be deploying (to use a managerialist term) a common sense solution (-here’s another) to a taken-for-granted worldview of economic crisis. And so the red card has been shown to the current managerialist paradigm of business education in two ways: firstly, managerialism is a desired end product of business education: b-schools produce managers and a school’s performance can be rated in the number and quality of this managerially competent workforce. Secondly – and here’s the killer – it is the same managerialism that spells the end, the finality, of business school education. The world in which b-schools operate, the backstory of capitalism and globalization that form not only the b-school’s raw input but also its (raw) output, the context of its education, its servicing, of business, itself conceives of this educated output reductively as merely workforce, due to the same globalizing pressures that exact competitive supremacy in vocational achievements from entire populations.

Now, the theories informing this new managerialism are, according to Blake et al, unsurprisingly fiercely unphilosophical. Whether denoted as common sense or positivist, the managerialist theoretical emphases are on statistics, observation and testing and on the sovereignty of utility or “what works” (Blake et al, p8). As we know, the watchwords of this managerialism are skills, competencies, performance measurement, critical success factors, learning outcomes and increased profit. Understandably, objections to these self-evident measures are severely dismissed as nonsensical, irrelevant, counter-productive and self-defeating.

What executivezen, and this blog, stand for is a re-theorization of business education: or as I prefer to call it, a la Rorty, business edification. Education seems to blank and presumptuous a term: it is, crucially, an insufficiently self-reflective term when applied to practices that are blind to the effects on the conditions of its own possibility. And by theory executivezen means not as a legitimation for principles and actions but, rather, as a “deeper reflection on the nature and implications of the very educational [edificational] enterprise. Conceived like this, the role of theory begins to look like interpretation rather than explanation” (Blake et al, p9). This leaning toward hermeneutics comes as a response, in part, to the loss of faith in foundations of the poststructuralist and deconstructive philosophies, which themselves no longer hold out as foundations. Yes; this verbose blogs’ intentions are unashamedly philosophical – in the continental tradition of the philosophy of education – and act as a windbrake to shelter a vestige of critical reflection on the runaway-train of capitalist, globalist, vocationalist inspired business education. My edification soapbox is not intended as perjorative but as part of the strategy to redefine (ha! I knew it!) a more appropriate style of edifying endeavour – mutually appropriate to business and to humankind.

Derridian undecidability and leadership

According to Laclau (in Deconstruction, Pragmatism, Hegemony, 1996) one concept that is central to contemporary political theory is that of representation. “The condition of a good representation is, apparently, [emphasis in original] that there is perfect or transparent transmission, by the representative, of the will of those whom he represents” says Laclau. And yet the tasks of popluar leaders consists, often, of providing followers with a language by which they are able to formulate their political identity and will. When the represented need representation (which is the inherent utility of representation) it is usually because their identities, or voices, need supplementing, in this case via the agency of a representative. This act of supplementarity means that the role of the representative cannot be neutral, not when they are lending, in proxy, their own voice to the absent represented. There cannot be perfect transmission when representatives play an active role in the formation of the collective wills of those whom they represent.

From a political standpoint, is it not agreed that the more democratic a process, the more transparent is the transmission of the will of those represented by their representatives? Does this not also stand for the process of leadership? That the better leadership is demonstrated by the greater transparency of the transmission between leader and follower? That the successful leader embodies, enacts and gives voice to, without manipulation, distortion or corruption, the will of their followers to whom they entrust their intentions? But this seems not the case: there appear to be flaws in the notion of representation: there is (a Derridian) structural undecidability in the notion of representation, an infinite deferral, an impossibility

Levinasian ethics & leadership

For Emmanuel Levinas “the whole history of metaphysics…, in its search for foundations, certainty, presence-to-self, unity and so forth, has proceeded by subsuming alterity” (Roffe, J., p39 of Reynolds & Roffe, 2004). Says Roffe, the whole history of western thought, for Levinas, insists on the primacy of being and ontological concerns rather than with alterity or what is otherwise than being (p.39). Levinas calls this the ‘imperialism of the same’, or as executivezen is calling it, the overdetermination of being and ontology, or of the metaphysical reducing of otherness to similarity. Instead, as Levinas claims in Totality and Infinity, it is the radical otherness that structures our existence. Our overburdening (e.g. in Heidegger) of ontological concerns within philosophy is only possible if alterity is continually marginalised. Levinas states that before there is an identity of any kind, there is an other who calls me forth, who constitutes me as that being who is responsible for the other. Not surprising, then, the line of sight between Derrida’s Saussurian concept of words relying for meaning on and being instantiated in other words, and his priviledging Levinas’ ethics.

Now, to executivezen, this has important implications for the study of leadership. Not so that a Levinasian ethic can be applied to or be seen in leadership, leadership studies or to leadership development: rather, that leadership becomes Levinasian ethics. Leadership is called forth by the other; before there is leadership there in an other who constitutes leadership, for whom the leader is responsible; leadership is responsibility for the other, for alterity. Levinasian ethics puts pay to the tendency within exec.ed to reduce leadership to foundations of the subject (via psychologisms) and its prior metaphysical correlate of being. Instead, it serves an injunction on the ontology of leadership by deconstructing ontology’s limits and its comprehensive claims to mastery, as evidenced by the bulk of the leadership literature. The other human being is the one by whom leadership is called to justice and to justify itself/him/her self. An ethical (Levinasian) relation is based on avoiding all forms of totalization and responding to the call of the other, without instituting an imperialism of the same.

Levinasian ethics annuls traditional notions of leadership development.

a critique of liberalism

Reading Richard Rorty’s embrace of liberalism (in Achieving Our Country, and Contingency, Irony and Solidarity and Philosophy and Social Hope) you’d be forgiven for thinking that pragmatism’s close links with the deconstruction of Derrida implies that these two programmes of rejection of foundationalism naturally embrace liberalism (phew; I can’t believe I wrote that!). Thankfully, help is at hand, in the guise of Michael Sandel and his Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. I’m seeing now that liberalism as per Sandel reaches it limits at its conception of the person – the autonomous, free though strangely transcendent agent that traditional (Rawlsian) liberalism posits. This struck me as an interesting (in a nerdy kind of way) critique of liberalism, which hitherto I’d felt some allegiance to, via Rorty and inferentially via Derrida. So maybe I’m no longer a liberal? Right now I need to find out how Sandel’s communitarian views fit with deconstruction, it at all, as well as the impact his critique has on Rorty’s liberal conception. For this I’m reading Sandel and the intriguing symposia proceedings from Critchley, Derrida, Laclau & Rorty called Deconstruction and Pragmatism. Wouldn’t it be great to build a communitarian based critique not just of liberalism, but of deconstruction and pragmatism? I suspect deconstruction will come out clean.

destabilising exec.ed

Ok, so what is this destabilising? And what possible benefit does this anarchic sounding practice have for executive education? Firstly, before you can destabilise you have to acknowledge that which is stable, why it is stable and what stability means. Not only that, you have to have a reason for questioning the stability of your chosen cannon, orthodoxy and acepted knowledge (in executivezen’s case, executive education) if your (political, or dare I say, communitarian) actions are not to be deemed as gratuitous epistemic vandalism. Executivezen’s understanding of Derrida is that his deconstructive acts do not simply rubbish the texts he examines, just for the sake of it. Very often he sides with the author (Husserl, Rousseau, Heidegger) he is deconstructing and his intentions are to aid in the intent of the text – his revealing of metaphysical ambiguities hidden within texts is a constructive (not destructive) action.

How this works for executivezen is as follows: I acknowledge that which is stable in the field of executive education as the interconnected belief systems present in the community of followers (suppliers and consumers) of our non-workbased, institutionalised educational practices. I identify these namely as the validity of a (higher) educational institutions as sites for executive education; the validity of subject matter experts within those institutions and their authorial status; as the belief in research-led educational practice; as the belief in existing modes of global techno-capitalism; as belief in the orthodoxy of educational practice; this list could go on (as will my explaination of belief). I acknowledge that this stability has grown up around the neccessity of these educational institutions to establish credentials sufficient to garner trust from their consumers, sponsors and stakeholders; also around the ideology that surrounds higher educational and into which consumers invest without question. This stability has led to an “economy of the same” as Derrida, in ‘Writing and Difference’, calls it.

Why then would one wish to destabilise the ‘text’ that is executive education, given the perfectly understandable conditions of its evolution above? For executivezen this is about being dissatisfied with the status quo, yearning for a better way of being in the world, ceasing from evil, doing only good and doing good for others. Some aspects of global techno-capitalism are, at best, not effective and at worst, wrong. Maybe – so executivezen’s thinking goes – what stands as part-palliative care for the illness of global techno-capitalism is better management, leadership and business education to, in part, provide these. Given that the pedagogy of exec.ed is bankrupt, here is my motive for destabilising exec.ed texts. Executivezen does not count this as epistemic vandalism but as constructive betrayal.