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