reinstating the universal – thanks Ernesto Laclau
November 18, 2006
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
November 24, 2006 at 2:03 pm
If this “repressive orthodoxy” is the case, and I’m entirely inclined to believe it, then what is being done to address this agenda within the revised discipline of leadership education? And what do you intend to do about it? How can we address this issue, for example, through Wikiversity?
Cormac / Cormaggio
November 24, 2006 at 2:34 pm
Stirring questions, indeeed, Cormaggio! Thanks. IMHO, leadership education coming out of the world of higher education (business & management schools where I’m situated) would do well to heed the lessons (pun intended) and educational ethos of Wikiversity. Irrespectsive of the web2.0 discourse, I think institutional business education is in for a rude awakening with ‘generation Ys’ increased expectations of technology use and general info-literacy. Such institutions move slowly; too slowly, I fear, for the pace of transformations currently taking place amongst the workplaces of companies & organisations
November 28, 2006 at 1:46 pm
I would advise caution. It’s easy to want to work with the early adopters of info-literacy such as Generation Y. However, in terms of how we offer what we offer, schools of business must understand first and foremost the lowest common denominator and work to that level in what is offered technically. We must then work intellectually at the level of the highest common factor. But the trap is to confuse the medium with the message – as I learned to my cost in the first e-learning boom of five years ago!