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.