Poststrutural Politics as Executive Education

Executivezen has not written to this blog recently: too busy bringing up kids, upgrading my computer and working lots and lots. But not too busy to read: my library of poststructural political theory is expanding, thanks to some very timely advice to be “more promiscuous” in my reading. Thanks Paul! Now, alongside my Derrida and Deleuze & Guattari is Laclau, Sandel, Butler, Mouffe, Walzer, Dews, Bobbio, Ranciere, Williams, Zizek, Kymlicka and Giroux. Executivezen is sad to say that a recent holiday was spent reading Mouffe’s “The Return of the Political” – a jolly good ‘radical democracy’ kick-about around liberalism’s backyard, using a communitarian ball. It’s got the ole pompous git in condition at least.

I feel able now, with this renewed and radical political fitness (intellectual shape only, I’m afraid), to bring to executive education a new  ‘political’ framing. The framing’s novelty rests on a deliberate intention not to continue to valorize explicit educational inputs, educational outputs or any other educationally chauvinist claims or processes that institutions of higher education espouse; but instead to re-cast those claims as entirely political. I’m not claiming that there is nothing else to be learned, or that higher educational endeavors are bankrupt or that technical training serves no purpose, or even that one can’t learn via politics. Rather, my claim is that by positively discriminating in favour of a political conceptualization of executive education, and by consciously substituting a pedagogic term for a political term when describing organizations, organizing and the execution of decisions within hierarchical structures, one is acknowledging an all-consuming aspect of the executive’s role hitherto obscured by the language of pedagogy. This aspect is political agency. Amy Gutmann says of education that “it is always political because it is connected to the acquisition of agency, to the ability to struggle with ongoing relations of power, and is a precondition for creating informed and critical citizens” (Democratic Education, 1998, p. 42). 

I’ve been long in coming to this conclusion, which accounts for my recent break, spending time, promiscuously, crafting a political vocabulary by burying myself in political texts. For instance, among others mentioned, I’m inspired by Gramsci when he says  things like “every relationship of hegemony is necessarily an educational relationship.” And by Giroux, quoting Gramsci thus, who urges us to view education as a “cultural pedagogic practice [which] takes place across multiple sites as it signals how, within diverse contexts, education makes us both subjects of and subject to relations of power” (Terror of Neoliberalism, p138). Via this new political framing, I hope to acknowledge the hegemonic practices inherent in executive education; and thereby begin my claim that the hierarchical status implicit in the ‘executive-ness’ of this subject position – the individual who is both the subject and object of ‘executive education’ –  is the practice of a political, not an educational, discourse. I will have to defend this mutual exclusivity, I know, and hope to do so in subsequent posts. What isn’t captured here though, in this rather self-conscious articulation, is a sense of the utility I feel present in linkages from this political framing to a host of intractable problems that a pure educational framing – what I’m calling, educational chauvinism – seems less qualified to pronounce on. Namely, the struggles and antagonisms over limited resources, inequality, responsibility, goods, rights, and freedoms as they relate to both the subject position and social construction of the (non-unitary) entity of ‘executive.’ Lots more work to do here, though, on unpacking these linkages. Oh well.

 To begin this process, I am keen to radicalize (to use Laclau & Mouffe’s phrase) executive education (see previous post on militancy). I believe radical political agency, distinct from aspirational civic virtue, is the means to provide impetus in striving for organizational democracy – after, that is, I’ve convinced myself of the congruence of ‘liberal democracy’ as a polity for executives and organizing structures. One way I can introduce this notion of radicalization of executive education in my own institution (a university-based management school) is to begin to provoke ruptures in the serene discursive surfaces of the dominant educational hegemony. For instance, I intend to split apart ’weak’ and ’strong’ conceptions of the signifier ‘action’ in the phrase “knowledge into action,” which is my institution’s strap line. The institution employs this jaunty phrase to distinguish between universal knowledge and particular action, where the signified of ‘action’ is deemed unitary and a sufficiently robust contrast to the abstractness of universal knowledge, and where public promises are made not to dilute the instrumentality of the insitution’s output. The ‘weak’ conception, which I won’t defend here, of this pragmatically focused rhetorical device centres on the aspiration to “improve the practice of management through research and education.” This, currently, is the only conception of ‘action’ within our institution and is expounded elsewhere. As part of my regime of radicalization I’d like to introduce a ’strong’ and decidedly off-median conception of the signifier ‘action,’ which I will at least begin to defend by establishing an outline of this new, political, framing. For this I use poststructural political theory from Mouffe and Laclau & Mouffe, as well as experimental interpretations of Deleuze & Guattari’s organizational theory; not to mention Derrida’s political thought. I am indebted to my colleague, Dr Martin Clarke, the reading of whose work has helped me put forward a tentative articulation (checklist) of this new political framing, which includes, but is not limited to:

• a valuing of antagonisms between the constituents of conventionally conceived executive education; via Schmitt, Laclau and Walzer
• an acknowledgement of hegemonic practices within executive education; via Giroux and Mouffe
• introducing richer, Foucauldian, notions of power; from Peters & Trifonas
• a bracketing of the belief in universals; from Laclau and most poststructuralists
• relinquishing simplistic notions of the individual; through Sandel and most poststructuralists
• acknowledging executive education’s creation of new subject positions; via Giroux and Mouffe
• critiquing that liberal hero, the apparently autonomous corporate executive; from Walzer
• an exploration of political philosophy in order to ground the concepts of liberalism, utilitarianism, liberal individualism, pluralism and communitarianism: through Mill, Berlin, Rawls, Nozick, Sandel, Taylor, MacIntyre and Walzer
• committing to the radicalization of executive education – via me, at the moment
• analyzing the modes of consumption of executive education
• critiquing ‘ideal types’ of political ideologies or of anything for that matter, courtesy of Derrida