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

So, continuing from the previous post, what does the signifier ‘customer’ bring to the unpacking of the consuming agency of leadership education? In what way is an actant in the drama of leadership education a customer? Consumer and customer are largely synonymous, with the addition of the latter designating the trappings of a formal transaction in the process of consumption of the goods and services that they consume: the former merely implies such a formal transaction may, or may not, take place. The goods and services that form the basis of both the process of consuming and the transacting to consume are, executivezen would say, the resources of the formal programme of leadership education. These goods and services are, variously, access to the lecturers involved in delivering the programme of education; access to the materials and resources used by the lecturer; and access to supporting agencies – personal coaches, psychometric instruments, peers within the intervention, staff tasked with managing the intervention – of that programme of education. This list goes on, but notice it does not contain the goods of learning about leadership since such a consumable is not a necessary and sufficient condition of the transactive act.

But, as troubled in prevous posts of this blog (Oct 5, 06: Sept 30, 06), what are the boundaries of a programme of education and at what point can one claim that a particular resource (as above) falls within a nominated resource library of such a programme? Using the specific goods and services of the formal transaction that are warranted via the customer relationship as defining the relationship between educational ’supplier’ and consuming agency is misleading; such a focus serves only to highlight the spectral (to use the language of Derrida) or the un-real quality of education. In that sense then, the tag of ‘customer’ as the type of agency with whom suppliers of formal leadership education have a relationship, seems less useful. To what is the consuming agent of leadership education, once she has entered into a transactive relationship (i.e. the consuming agency as customer) with the supplier of leadership education, entitled to precisely? What has her purchasing (direct or indirect) power bought her that she doesn’t already have? Answering this with ’simply access to the goods and services of a programme of leadership education’ isn’t quite fair since this aludes to the customer as inexpert and passive; neither does it acknowledge the genuine learning outcomes that may emerge as a result of this purchase. But it does highlight the relative arbitrariness of the relationship between the notion of customer and consumption, a breakage that is a consequence of a poststructural view of education.