Hardt & Negri

Leadership educators, as influential arbiters of the theory and practice of leadership, have a political responsibility to those whom they educate since the processes of education are concerned with the acquisition of agency. So when politics is about ‘collective action’ and of ‘action in the social world’; when leadership, broadly speaking, is about provoking right action in the social world, collective or otherwise; and when leadership education involves the acquisition of agency, one must face and face-off resistances to a purely political definition of both leadership and those processes of leadership education. Framing leadership education politically – with all the attendant antagonisms and political activism this implies – is the basis of my challenge to the current apolitical hegemony of leadership education. To precipitate a sense of radicalized action (political ‘activism’) within a politically realigned leadership education that then acknowledges ‘equality’, ‘moral obligation’, ‘just action’ and ‘emancipation’ as the new focuses of a leadership educator’s struggles, is to begin to overturn a form of education that has not, hitherto, accepted the role it plays in legitimizing dominant or oppressive political regimes. Such agitation within the institutions of educators and educated – itself, a political act – prefigures the mobilization of that combined class to undertake direct action outside of the classroom. Few in the current politically inert leadership education establishment are sufficiently brave to dare question the ontology of the market, the causality of customer demand, the superordinacy of economic efficiency, or the sanctity of profit[i] on which their educative practices supposedly positively influence. The political 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 leadership education espouse; but instead to re-cast those claims as entirely political and therefore better able to dismantle orthodoxies via the franchise of leadership.

Using the philosophically eclectic yet influential manifestos of Hardt and Negri’s Empire[ii] and Multitude[iii], together with their critics, I will examine how the dominant conceptions of leadership education privilege ‘constituted power’ of the leader above ‘constituent power’ of the ‘multitude’, and the impact this has on politically oriented leadership education. These impacts include reappraisals of the educational/political notions of representation, hierarchy and inclusion, as they relate to a radicalized educative practice. 

The utility I believe there to be in the linkages from Hardt and Negri’s political framing to a host of intractable problems that an educationally chauvinist position seems less qualified to pronounce on, stem from their employment of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic model[iv] of the multitude. Politically-undertheorized leadership education seldom challenges the dominance of ‘the individual’ nor explores the fortune immanent in the networks, or rhizomes, of politically educated leaders.

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[i] Pippa Carter & Norman Jackson in Stephen Linstead (ed.) Organization Theory and Postmodern Thought (London: Sage, 2004), p. 113. [ii] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). [iii] Michael Hardt and Antonia Negri, Multitude (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2006). [iv] Gile Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (London: Continuum, 1988)