3. A Political Framing

Using this political framing, I want to acknowledge the hegemony inherent in leadership education itself, distinct from hegemonic practices of leaders themselves. The hierarchical status implicit in the ‘leadership-ness’ of this subject position – the individual who is both the subject and object of leadership education – is the practice of a political, not an educational, discourse. So, not surprisingly, I believe there to be utility present in linkages from this political framing to a host of intractable problems that a pure educational framing – what I term educational chauvinism – seems less qualified to pronounce on. Namely, the struggles and antagonisms over limited resources, inequality, responsibility, goods, rights, injustice, suffering and freedoms as they relate to both the subject position of the leader, the constituents whom they influence, and the wider geopolitical (neoliberal) environments affected by the actions of leaders. By using the word ‘framing’ my intention is to represent both a distinct adoption of an existing conventional discourse and its associated ideology, as well as an acknowledgement of the contingency of that frame as a representational system. From a poststructuralist perspective education ‘re-presents’ (i.e. presents back, via a mediating interpretation) the world, in just the same way as politics re-presents the world. This is in contradistinction to the redundant epistemological view that sees the world ‘out there’ to be discovered, objectively somehow, in its pristine and uninterpreted form. Leadership educators – and education establishments – sometimes forget about the representational powers of education, either assuming them to be neutral or, worse still, invisible or entirely transparent. I believe 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. Traditional conceptions of leadership education rely, at the very least, on a degree of unquestioned referentiality (a term borrowed from Saussarian[i] semiotics, denoting that to which leadership refers) that sees the need for this tradition to interpret various texts and events according to a wider context (whether described as psychological, organisational, social, national, or cultural) to which these phenomena remain unbreakably tied. This unquestioned referentiality accords the traditional and normative conceptions of leadership education a basic level of coherence. By challenging this coherence I hope to rouse and radicalize leadership education from its political slumbers. To this end, by using a political framing, I intend to split apart weak and strong conceptions of the signifier ‘action’ in the phrase ‘knowledge into action.’ And then, as part of a process of radicalization of leadership education, promote a ’strong’ and decidedly off-median conception of the signifier ‘action’ that draws its inspiration from contemporary anarchist political philosophy and which, more boldly, creates new borderlands between education and politics and moves some way towards meeting the need for innovative thinking in the field of leadership education in times of ecological and political crisis.

I claim three things from the distinction between ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ senses of action in the phrase ‘knowledge into action’. Firstly that the weak sense of action currently dominates leadership education: secondly, that the distinction is only made possible by an explicitly political analysis of leadership education: and thirdly, that both senses only gain their meaning from the difference between each other and that they possess no intrinsic weakness or strength.

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[i] F. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (Geneva: 1916).