hackr

 Whilst there may be no ’objective’ web-two-point-zero-ness to be found outside the hype of the media’s use of the term Web 2.0, I’m interested in acknowledging the connection I see between a political designation of conventional conceptions of executive education (see previous posts on the topic) and the user-generated-content alluded to in the use of ‘web 2.0′ descriptor. But for me, this new political designation affords more than an acknowledgement of content being user generated: this seems a democratic given. Web 2.0 doesn’t seem to go far enough.

Framed in the newly politicized vocabulary of executive education there is something of the hacker – or ‘hackr’ in Web 2.0 parlance – implicit in this politically educated executive citizenry; and by hackr I don’t mean a poor golf player or unskilled amateur. The hackr I’m referring to is a meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. An example of sensitive information I talk about in this blog is the (politically) non-neutral nature of normative executive education practices. Interestingly, one of the principles of the ‘hackr ethic’ is the belief that information-sharing is a powerful positive good, and that it is an ethical duty of hackers to share their expertise by writing free software and facilitating access to information and to computing resources wherever possible. I see the politically educated executive (see previous post) as just such a hackr; someone who is willing to hack into, to meddle with, politically ’sensitive’ information; to poke around and to share access to this information. And by ‘meddle’ I  mean metaphorically ’hopping over fences’ and challenging the legitimacy of enshrined values, knowledge and boundaries. This is the activism, radicalism and insurgency I’ve referred to before. The hackr I’m referring to would, for instance, be willing, as an executive actant undertaking a political education, to acknowledge and question the dominant neoliberal paradigm (see Chomsky’s 1999 ‘Profit over People’) inside of which normative executive education takes place. And if not that lofty goal, to at least examine political power differentials within the organisations in which they operate and relate these the power differentials present in the processes of their personal and professional development.

Radicalizing Exec Ed

I’ve just been watching a YouTube clip of Jacques Derrida talking about the fear he encounters, subconsciously, when he “advances into new territory”, somewhere he hasn’t been before: that such advancement can often be taken as aggressive “with regard to other thinkers or colleagues,” “and can cause anxiety or even hurt others.”  Deconstructive gestures can appear to be destablizing, Derrida says in this clip. I suppose this post is an acknowledgement of this appearance of aggression in my writing on this blog, and a half-apology of such gestures. The new territories I am currently stumbling into are political, and the ruptures are across the non-agonistic (Mouffe, 2005) and conflict averse face of executive education.

Why is there so little adversarial politics in the hallowed halls and classrooms of business and management education institutions? Why does so little agonism surround the professing of truth claims in what are hotly contested business and management topic areas? Why isn’t there an overthrow of educational hegemony and academic author-ity by those intrigued to re-establish a non-educational equality to this process of professing? The answer, I’d suggest, lies in the fearful flight, by educational chauvinists, from a ‘reputation-wrecking’ embrace of educational and political philosophy: an embrace so deadly that it renders it’s victims unable to profess on absolutes, hopelessly intellectual and open to the accusation of ‘contingency junky’. By any other name, a rowdy and upsetting band of destabilizers and political activists, willing to disrupt and cause anxiety to other thinkers and colleagues. But if such victimhood within the disciplines of educational and political philosophy rouses and radicalizes executive education from its slumbers within both the practice arena and the academy, then the resultant antagonism has to be welcomed as a reinvigorating force for good.

It seems apt (lexically) that the ranks of the ‘professing underclass,’ the revolutionaries that strive to overcome the iniquitous apparatuses of education, the amateur professors that are willing to introduce agonistic practices, be mustered from a body of practicing profess-ionals. But the temptation of the apolitical educational chauvinists is to smooth over the partisan nature of these distinct constituent groups,  namely the educational ’supply side’ professionals and consumer ‘demand side’ professionals. An embarrassment towards the political in executive education manifests itself as a relegation of overly partisan, combative and adversarial behaviours to an uncivilized and bygone era from which executive education has long since progressed. It is from this untainted and rational liberal vantage point that the clerisy – the authorized class of learned persons – of business, management and leadership education subconsciously lay the foundations of inviolable professing practices, via the mechanisms of the university and the aura of research.

So, as part of my radicalizing agenda for executive education, I suggest the following. That, firstly, the student/teacher duality be disrupted, via a revealing of the process of establishing and professing truth claims. Derridian deconstruction is my preferred method for this – more on this later. Secondly, that as a result of this deconstruction of the status of professorship, the hegemonic practices of education be acknowledged. And that, thirdly, via a process of agonism and antagonism (see Mouffe’s definition of ‘radical democracy’) professorial agency becomes the subject and object of executive education.

Educational Chauvinism

The “education” I’m referring to is executive education and by “chauvinism” I mean a fervent, and possibly narrow minded, support for a cause. After the last post I felt it necessary to justify further my claim about framings. My use of  “framing” represents both a distinct adoption of a conventional discourse and its associated ideology, as well as an acknowledgement of the contingency of that frame as a representational system. Education re-presents the world just as much as politics re-presents the world. My point is that we – and I’m speaking from within an education establishment, working as I do at a university-based management school - sometimes forget about the representational powers of education, either assuming them to be neutral or, worse still, invisible or entirely transparent. I’m claiming that it is often only through novel framings (in this case, political) within an established and conventional discourse (i.e. education) that one sees the inadequacies of existing framings. My substitution of a political framing for an educational framing is an extension of my adoption of a poststructuralist interpretation of executive education; and the use of “chauvinism” betrays my interest in radicalizing executive education: part of the strong and political activist sense of the phrase “knowledge into action.”  The radicalizing agenda is wholly dictated by applying a political, not educational, frame to the hegemonic practices of conventional executive education. There can be no other ‘darker forces’ of propaganda or hidden militancy of my re-framing, outside of a political conception in which such conspiratorial motives already make sense.