who/what does education have a relationship with? – product

 Leadership and business education institutions are want to talk of their consumers as ‘clients ‘rather than ’students’. Calling someone a student conjours up an image that is at odds with an image of a client: in the language game of business, the term ‘client’ carries greater currency in more senses than one. This post, if nothing else, is a stab – and the beginings of a stab at that – at answering the question Roger Delves posted in a comment on my previous post. It’s also a bookmark on the whole issue of poststructural identity and therefore gloriously open ended. Executivezen will suspend use of the term client and substitute it with, for the moment, the spectral terms of consumer and agent; just for a laugh (!).

 To begin with , helpfully, Johnson, Leiber et al (CETIS PLE Project Report) put forward four generally recognised characterisations of a student: student as product, student as customer, student as worker, and student as member. These are useful designations since they lend the debate a set of signifiers that allow a glimpse of what and who educators might conceive of as a consumer - to use a temporary placename that is, in no way, value-free – of, lets say, leadership education. But since Johnson et al have, eliptically, answered their question before they’ve even started by promoting the signifier ’student’, executivezen will examine the consumer as product, customer, worker and member; here’s hoping that the nature of this consuming agency will emerge during this process.

Regarding the consumer as a product of leadership education implies an end, or telos, to which education is the means and to which education can perfect itself. Can the existence of leadership education be explained solely by the purposes it serves, rather than by an examination of the causes of leadership education? Stating, with some irritable finality, that the purpose of leadership education is to improve the state of leadership simply restates, unhelpfully, the question of the agency of leadership (and it is the agency, don’t forget, that is the purpose of this discursive investigation). But then the cause of leadership education could equally be laid at the same telos, to improve the state of leadership. For executivezen, agency (or consumer or whatever placeholder you choose) as product has utility precisely because of this circular tail chasing: like maddening, so-called, postmodern movies (Cameron’s Solaris, Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction) or postmodern novels (Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow) that seem to refer only to themselves, agency as product has that similar self referential quality which abstracts the consumer and the consumption process from any extra-educational reality. Consumers of leadership education are products of leadership education consumption. Let’s not pretend that this agency, as product, is closer to realising its latent potential of actualising its true leadership essence. Poststructuralism says (a la Garrison) there are no immutable foundations of education, nor is there a telos that represents the perfection of the process of education, as was supposed earlier. The static productness of the product characterisation somehow falls short of a seemingly more useful process-type characterisation, given that what executivezen believes agents become depends on the transactions, hence processes, that they enter. Phew!

Next, agency as customer…

educational militancy – exec.ed. insurgency

I’m all for making the world of executive education (even that phrase sounds odd) a little strange again. The philosophy of education, which is the topic of this blog, is a space in which to attempt to militate against the unreflective, bovine and uncritical acceptance of any educational status quo. Executivezen would like to reveal the contingency of an education that attempts erase its traces of power, of force and will by naturalizing or essentializing its genealogy and its structures. Of the views which reveal their naturalizing tendency via statements such as ”executive education is, was and always will be for business, not about it” or  that “management and leadership development is obviously about improving the state of the organization”, executivezen, an exec.ed. insurgent, would rather clownishly (re) reveal the contingencies of the trappings of the educative mechanism before continuing.

the practice fetish – educational voodoo

This post relates to my September 22nd ‘06 post of the same title. A fetish, a thing abnormally stimulating, is a concept picked up by Marx in volume 1 of ‘Capital’ (p.165) and related to capitalist commodity production and consumption. Usefully, we know the concept for its alllusion to attracting sexual desire in a particular object, often man made: useful since the currency of meaning of the term itself has a charge which is carried over in its signification. Far from being a transcendental signified, executivezen would like to re-spice the term within a Marxist and capitalistic frame on the commoditized products of leadership education labour – namely the sovereignty of ‘practice’ over theory and the practice (!) of theory. Following Lyotard, one key aspect of poststructuralism (and my practice) is the denial of the theory/practice distinction – executivezen does not believe that theory is separate from practice, nor that theories are applied to practical situations; rather that they emerge in them. There’s nothing radical in this: the Marxist concept of praxis stems from the ancient Greek designation of the term meaning ‘doing’ or ‘acting’. The general thrust of praxian dialogue is to undermine the traditional theory and practice split, where praxis-oriented endeavours “antedate both theory construction adn the construal of practice as mere application of theory” (Schrag, Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, p.731).

Now executivezen thinks a lot of leadership (and exec.ed) education has lost – has stopped practicing – this praxian discourse. This is manifested in the triumphal return of the bifurcation; of the hierarchical placement of practice over theory; of the boast to serve practicing managers not with abstract theory but with practical, pragmatic (doublespeak) practices! Executivezen is not demonizing practice: just reinstating the blur between the theory and practice. In short, executivezen is stating that we should stop fetishizing practice, in the same way we should stop fetishizing theory. We should stop using ‘practice’ as if it were a master-word, imbued with secret transcendental voodoo powers that draws, pied piper fashion, edu-consumers through the practice-hallowed halls of institutionalised education. We are not closer to an educational essence by chanting the litany of practice: education has no essence, no telos, no perfection by reference to proximity to such essence.

long live Rortian abnormal discourse!

Given the foregoing, leadership education is leadership itself once it acknowledges its ethico-political agency and capitalises on poststructural leadership’s hegemonic status. Maybe the form of leadership that institutional sites of leadership education can claim is that of edification not education. Rorty champions edification as the embrace of abnormal discourse “for finding new, better, more interesting, more fruitful ways of speaking” (1980, p360). For normal discourse there is a consensus among parties concerning the rules that must be followed in order for a question, an answer or an argument to be considered. Contrarily, abnormal discourse breaks all the rules: “the product of abnormal disourse” says Rorty, “can be anything from nonsense to intellectual revolution, and there is no discipline which describes it, any more than there is a discipline devoted to the unpredictable, or of ‘creativity’” (1980, p320). I would like to encourage the reader to take up Rorty’s challenge of abnormal discourse and, thereby, progressive leadership edification.

leadership writing and reading machines

Absolute leadership is impossible, given the Derridian notion of representation as an infinite deferral: leadership is spectral in that it is always to come: leadership is aporetic in that it is, or can be, absolutely fulfilled. As a consequence of these claims leadership education must relinquish such totalising devices as neo-positivist research and psychologistic discourses which, apparently, constitute its ascendant, transcendent and arbitrational status. When leadership is regarded as text that is both written and read into existence by consumers of leadership, no sovereign status exists for any one canon, doxa or institution: we are all authors and consumers in a pluralist democracy of leadership: leadership is always textual, in the Derridian sense, including the con-texts in which it is experienced, observed and written. There exists no hierarchy of sites of leadership writing and reading: institutional sites are just as much leadership writing and reading machines as any other site

reinstating the universal – thanks Ernesto Laclau

After Laclau, given that the ethico-political can be granted a reinstated universalistic status, traditional business education offered by Thrift’s cultural circuit of soft capitalism seems incommensurable with the revised polity of leadership education. The discursive apparatuses of business schools are status quo maintaining institutions that are colluding with the other components of the capitalism’s cultural circuit in sustaining a repressive orthodoxy of leadership and leadership education. The revised task within institutionalised leadership education is to subvert this orthodoxy, both at the site of its generation within the business school and at the point of its consumption: this will involve challenging consumers’ preconceptions about what institutional leadership education can offer

Levinas and ethico-political leadership

Following Levinas leadership practices are first and foremost ethical and political in nature: consequently leadership education, for it to be congruent with its espoused subject, must be reconfigured to reflect this ethico-political nature. This reconfigured educative practice has a duty to disrupt, via antagonisms and conflict, the traditional apparatuses of education for instance, by relinquishing the conflict-stabilising classroom; developing more complex, more ethically and politically relevant notions of student and teacher subjectivities; challenging simple-minded accounts of automony and agency; reappraising models of interpretations of texts and their relations to various contexts – social, cultural, institutional, pedagogical; reassessing and developing, consequently, richer notions of Derridian reading and writing considered as social practices; dissembling 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; paying greater attention to the discursive power of the languages of business education – those of educational administration, economics, management, measurement, and policy – in the constitution of education in the broadest sense; utilising, in innovative ways, various forms of discourse analysis, deconstruction, archaeology, and genealogy as new means of analysis of educational institutions, practices, and policies; championing the notions and principles of becoming and process over questions of being and ontology in understanding educational practices; and critiquing binary modes of thinking per se.