5. Strong Action

In contrast, rather than standing merely as the producers of an official memory[i] from which action in the weak conception is enacted, the strong conception of action draws political and activist conclusions from the contingency of such official narratives. The interrelated conclusions are twofold: that adoption of political communitarian theories moves leadership education beyond the language of instrumentalism and educational chauvinism towards collectivism; and that, consequently, acknowledging the ethical subjectivity afforded by a collectivist responsibility to others, paves the way for a new kind of leadership activism and educational practice.

Firstly, leadership, like language, is public. As Wittgenstein[ii] states, a private language is unlearnable and untranslatable, and yet it must appear that its speaker is able to make sense of it. But this, as Wittgenstein asserts, would constitute and incoherent language and, as such, is not a language at all. Similarly, private leadership, untranslatable into any behaviour, is not leadership at all. Leadership is an entirely social phenomenon. Consider then the radically isolated liberal hero of the weak sense of action, bearer of natural rights, the utility maximiser and rational subject. Says Michael Walzer, for this untenable subject ‘[t]here is no consensus, no public meeting-of-minds, on the nature of the good life – hence the triumph of private caprice, revealed, for example, in Sartrean existentialism, the ideological reflection of everyday capriciousness’[iii]. Community is the exact opposite of the atomized fragmentation of liberal society; so any notion of leadership education founded on liberal principles of individualism, which is true of most instrumental pedagogies, is immediately orphaned from social union and from the collective force of action that that union holds. This conclusion would not be a problem, had not so many pages been written by instrumental educational chauvinists on the impact of leadership behaviour on teams and wider communities. Secondly, throughout the management and leadership education literature, insufficient attention has been given to ethical and social responsibilities[iv]. A modest clarion call to this effect from Burgoyne and Reynolds states that [a]lthough ‘values’ are much discussed, it is usually in the context of their dissemination, sharing or reconciliation, rather than their legitimation and justification. [Leadership] learning as an arena for the moral and ethical debate about organization, management and the learning process itself can be promoted with some confidence as a priority for the future.[v]

I believe that one way to promote considerations of ethical issues for conceptions of leadership education is to work though the arguments of the liberalism-communitarianism debate. One of the claims of liberal individualism in the weak sense of action is that the ‘right’ is prior to the ‘good’: that justice and fairness are antecedent to what is agreed to be morally good. In leadership education this would translate as what is considered fair for a particular individual, or even fair for a collective, must take priority over considerations of what is morally good for that individual or collective. But as Michael Sandel affirms, ‘one cannot define the right prior to the good, for it is only through our participation in a community which defines the good that we can have a sense of the right and a conception of justice’[vi] in the first place. Once we recognize the dependence of the creation of leaders on society, ‘then our obligations to sustain the common good of society are as weighty as our rights to individual liberty’[vii]. And yet, in the context of neoliberalism – or ‘capitalism with the gloves off’[viii] as it is termed – the common good is often an inconvenience to leaders, who, as Chomsky states, ‘must be free to operate in “technocratic insulation,” to borrow current World Bank terminology’[ix].

Conspicuously absent from the standard conceptions of the homo economicus leader that constitutes the axiomatic basis of pragmatist conceptions provided by neoliberals, is an acknowledgement of the elitist nature of this individualist conception. David Harvey’s seminal history of neoliberalism recognizes that advocates of the neoliberal way now occupy positions of considerable influence in education[x] (business schools and universities): interestingly, the same institutions that provide leadership education from within the unquestionable dominance of the neoliberal polity. When Harvey is able to interpret neoliberalism as ‘a political project that re-establishes the conditions for capital accumulation and which restores the power of economic elites’[xi], can we conclude that this is the sole telos of ‘action’ for leadership education? In other words, should we (do we not already?) harness the entirety of our leadership educative endeavours to further the ends of the current global economic-political regime? Even defending, let alone attacking, this singular focus would require that leadership education practices be sufficiently political in the first place to legitimise such an articulation and basis of action. Instead, the academy’s vapid conceptions of action, based only on knowingness[xii], have been drained of any progressive campaigns of activism. For instance, it is not difficult for members of the community of liberal leadership educators to delude themselves into believing that they are maintaining a ‘neutral, value free’ position when they are simply responding to intellectual and practical demands set elsewhere. Such collusion is equal to ratifying the existing distribution of power, authority and privilege within educational regimes and to take on a commitment to reinforce such regimes[xiii]. My claim is that the academy(s) of leadership education are not just intellectual spheres but politically active ones too. To borrow from the activist energy of Kitty Krupat[xiv], I do not advocate abandoning the classroom: whose interest would that serve? Instead we must go back to the classroom and workplace to continue to learn about leadership, but now with a heightened sense of responsibility to those whom we educate, and for those who can be impacted by that education. This requires that academics and public intellectuals, on whom we rely for inspiration about leadership, function within institutions as ‘exiles,’ as Edward Said[xv] suggests they become. It is the job of these political intellectual exiles, homeless and living in the ideological borderlands, to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than produce them), to refuse to be co-opted by the dominant economic-political polity or those that are unable to countenance questioning such regimes.

Which brings me to the role that I see articulated by the spectacular tactical politics of contemporary anarchist theory[xvi]. Actually existing anarchism – distinct from the anti-capitalist ‘anarcho-primitivsm’ of Kropotkin, Bakunin and Proudhon that give rise to the popular conflation of anarchism with chaos and violence – for me is typified by Bakhtinian carnivalesque humour, non-violent warfare and new languages of civil disobedience[xvii]. I claim that it is through radical politics that one finds a clearer engagement with an ethical moment that, in turn, provides the motivational force into my strong, and heterodox, conception of action[xviii]. If leadership education is to unshackle itself from the deadly instrumentalism[xix] that has shaped the dominant (neo)liberalist leadership educational model, and to extirpate its political lethargy, it must use dissensus, antagonisms and the techniques of anarchic multiplicity to call into question the authority of ‘the individual’ and its associated totalizing notions of truth espoused by educational ideologues. From an anarchist viewpoint, why is there so little adversarial politics in the hallowed halls and classrooms of leadership education institutions? Why does so little agonism surround the professing of truth claims in what are hotly contested business and leadership topic areas? Why is there not an overthrow of educational hegemony and academic ‘author-ity’ by those intrigued to re-establish a non-educational, non-academy equality to this process of professing? Given the complete absence of student militancy[xx] within formal postgraduate programmes of business education that include aspects of leadership education (e.g. the Masters of Business Administration) it seems apt (lexically at least) 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 leadership education manifests itself as a relegation of overly partisan, combative and adversarial behaviours to an uncivilized and bygone era from which leadership 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 individual and the universalizing aura of research and intellectual stability.

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[i] H. Giroux, The Terror of Neoliberalism (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2004), p. 133.

[ii] L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), p. 91.

[iii] M. Walzer, Politics and Passion (Yale: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 145

[iv] J. Burgoyne & M. Reynolds (eds.), Management Learning (London: Sage, 1997), p. 330-1.

[v] Ibid, p. 331.

[vi] M. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 133.

[vii] W. Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 212.

[viii] R. McChesney in N. Chomsky, Profit over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999), p. 8.

[ix] N. Chomsky, Profit over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999), p. 54.

[x] D. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 3

[xi] Ibid, p. 19.

[xii] R. Rorty, Achieving Our Country (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 126.

[xiii] N. Chomsky, ‘The Function of the University in a Time of Crisis’ (1969) in N. Chomsky, Chomsky on Democracy & Education (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003), p. 181.

[xiv] D. Cornell & K. Krupat in J. Downs & J. Manion, Taking Back the Academy (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 127.

[xv] E. Said at www.opendemocracy.net and at http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/000568.php

[xvi] S. Critchley, Infinitely Demanding (London: Verso, 2007), p. 12.

[xvii] D. Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004)

[xviii] S. Critchley, Infinitely Demanding (London: Verso, 2007), p. 93.

[xix] H. Giroux, The Terror of Neoliberalism (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2004), p. 151.

[xx] J. Downs & J. Manion, Taking Back the Academy (New York: Routledge, 2004).