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.

who/what does education have a relationship with? – customer

So, continuing from the previous post, what does the signifier ‘customer’ bring to the unpacking of the consuming agency of leadership education? In what way is an actant in the drama of leadership education a customer? Consumer and customer are largely synonymous, with the addition of the latter designating the trappings of a formal transaction in the process of consumption of the goods and services that they consume: the former merely implies such a formal transaction may, or may not, take place. The goods and services that form the basis of both the process of consuming and the transacting to consume are, executivezen would say, the resources of the formal programme of leadership education. These goods and services are, variously, access to the lecturers involved in delivering the programme of education; access to the materials and resources used by the lecturer; and access to supporting agencies – personal coaches, psychometric instruments, peers within the intervention, staff tasked with managing the intervention – of that programme of education. This list goes on, but notice it does not contain the goods of learning about leadership since such a consumable is not a necessary and sufficient condition of the transactive act.

But, as troubled in prevous posts of this blog (Oct 5, 06: Sept 30, 06), what are the boundaries of a programme of education and at what point can one claim that a particular resource (as above) falls within a nominated resource library of such a programme? Using the specific goods and services of the formal transaction that are warranted via the customer relationship as defining the relationship between educational ’supplier’ and consuming agency is misleading; such a focus serves only to highlight the spectral (to use the language of Derrida) or the un-real quality of education. In that sense then, the tag of ‘customer’ as the type of agency with whom suppliers of formal leadership education have a relationship, seems less useful. To what is the consuming agent of leadership education, once she has entered into a transactive relationship (i.e. the consuming agency as customer) with the supplier of leadership education, entitled to precisely? What has her purchasing (direct or indirect) power bought her that she doesn’t already have? Answering this with ’simply access to the goods and services of a programme of leadership education’ isn’t quite fair since this aludes to the customer as inexpert and passive; neither does it acknowledge the genuine learning outcomes that may emerge as a result of this purchase. But it does highlight the relative arbitrariness of the relationship between the notion of customer and consumption, a breakage that is a consequence of a poststructural view of education.

leadership writing and reading machines

Absolute leadership is impossible, given the Derridian notion of representation as an infinite deferral: leadership is spectral in that it is always to come: leadership is aporetic in that it is, or can be, absolutely fulfilled. As a consequence of these claims leadership education must relinquish such totalising devices as neo-positivist research and psychologistic discourses which, apparently, constitute its ascendant, transcendent and arbitrational status. When leadership is regarded as text that is both written and read into existence by consumers of leadership, no sovereign status exists for any one canon, doxa or institution: we are all authors and consumers in a pluralist democracy of leadership: leadership is always textual, in the Derridian sense, including the con-texts in which it is experienced, observed and written. There exists no hierarchy of sites of leadership writing and reading: institutional sites are just as much leadership writing and reading machines as any other site

Levinas and ethico-political leadership

Following Levinas leadership practices are first and foremost ethical and political in nature: consequently leadership education, for it to be congruent with its espoused subject, must be reconfigured to reflect this ethico-political nature. This reconfigured educative practice has a duty to disrupt, via antagonisms and conflict, the traditional apparatuses of education for instance, by relinquishing the conflict-stabilising classroom; developing more complex, more ethically and politically relevant notions of student and teacher subjectivities; challenging simple-minded accounts of automony and agency; reappraising models of interpretations of texts and their relations to various contexts – social, cultural, institutional, pedagogical; reassessing and developing, consequently, richer notions of Derridian reading and writing considered as social practices; dissembling the intimate connections between power and knowledge in, for instance, not only classroom settings but also constructions of educational policies and the development of new pedagogical practices; paying greater attention to the discursive power of the languages of business education – those of educational administration, economics, management, measurement, and policy – in the constitution of education in the broadest sense; utilising, in innovative ways, various forms of discourse analysis, deconstruction, archaeology, and genealogy as new means of analysis of educational institutions, practices, and policies; championing the notions and principles of becoming and process over questions of being and ontology in understanding educational practices; and critiquing binary modes of thinking per se.

Levinasian ethics & leadership

For Emmanuel Levinas “the whole history of metaphysics…, in its search for foundations, certainty, presence-to-self, unity and so forth, has proceeded by subsuming alterity” (Roffe, J., p39 of Reynolds & Roffe, 2004). Says Roffe, the whole history of western thought, for Levinas, insists on the primacy of being and ontological concerns rather than with alterity or what is otherwise than being (p.39). Levinas calls this the ‘imperialism of the same’, or as executivezen is calling it, the overdetermination of being and ontology, or of the metaphysical reducing of otherness to similarity. Instead, as Levinas claims in Totality and Infinity, it is the radical otherness that structures our existence. Our overburdening (e.g. in Heidegger) of ontological concerns within philosophy is only possible if alterity is continually marginalised. Levinas states that before there is an identity of any kind, there is an other who calls me forth, who constitutes me as that being who is responsible for the other. Not surprising, then, the line of sight between Derrida’s Saussurian concept of words relying for meaning on and being instantiated in other words, and his priviledging Levinas’ ethics.

Now, to executivezen, this has important implications for the study of leadership. Not so that a Levinasian ethic can be applied to or be seen in leadership, leadership studies or to leadership development: rather, that leadership becomes Levinasian ethics. Leadership is called forth by the other; before there is leadership there in an other who constitutes leadership, for whom the leader is responsible; leadership is responsibility for the other, for alterity. Levinasian ethics puts pay to the tendency within exec.ed to reduce leadership to foundations of the subject (via psychologisms) and its prior metaphysical correlate of being. Instead, it serves an injunction on the ontology of leadership by deconstructing ontology’s limits and its comprehensive claims to mastery, as evidenced by the bulk of the leadership literature. The other human being is the one by whom leadership is called to justice and to justify itself/him/her self. An ethical (Levinasian) relation is based on avoiding all forms of totalization and responding to the call of the other, without instituting an imperialism of the same.

Levinasian ethics annuls traditional notions of leadership development.

a critique of liberalism

Reading Richard Rorty’s embrace of liberalism (in Achieving Our Country, and Contingency, Irony and Solidarity and Philosophy and Social Hope) you’d be forgiven for thinking that pragmatism’s close links with the deconstruction of Derrida implies that these two programmes of rejection of foundationalism naturally embrace liberalism (phew; I can’t believe I wrote that!). Thankfully, help is at hand, in the guise of Michael Sandel and his Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. I’m seeing now that liberalism as per Sandel reaches it limits at its conception of the person – the autonomous, free though strangely transcendent agent that traditional (Rawlsian) liberalism posits. This struck me as an interesting (in a nerdy kind of way) critique of liberalism, which hitherto I’d felt some allegiance to, via Rorty and inferentially via Derrida. So maybe I’m no longer a liberal? Right now I need to find out how Sandel’s communitarian views fit with deconstruction, it at all, as well as the impact his critique has on Rorty’s liberal conception. For this I’m reading Sandel and the intriguing symposia proceedings from Critchley, Derrida, Laclau & Rorty called Deconstruction and Pragmatism. Wouldn’t it be great to build a communitarian based critique not just of liberalism, but of deconstruction and pragmatism? I suspect deconstruction will come out clean.

destabilising exec.ed

Ok, so what is this destabilising? And what possible benefit does this anarchic sounding practice have for executive education? Firstly, before you can destabilise you have to acknowledge that which is stable, why it is stable and what stability means. Not only that, you have to have a reason for questioning the stability of your chosen cannon, orthodoxy and acepted knowledge (in executivezen’s case, executive education) if your (political, or dare I say, communitarian) actions are not to be deemed as gratuitous epistemic vandalism. Executivezen’s understanding of Derrida is that his deconstructive acts do not simply rubbish the texts he examines, just for the sake of it. Very often he sides with the author (Husserl, Rousseau, Heidegger) he is deconstructing and his intentions are to aid in the intent of the text – his revealing of metaphysical ambiguities hidden within texts is a constructive (not destructive) action.

How this works for executivezen is as follows: I acknowledge that which is stable in the field of executive education as the interconnected belief systems present in the community of followers (suppliers and consumers) of our non-workbased, institutionalised educational practices. I identify these namely as the validity of a (higher) educational institutions as sites for executive education; the validity of subject matter experts within those institutions and their authorial status; as the belief in research-led educational practice; as the belief in existing modes of global techno-capitalism; as belief in the orthodoxy of educational practice; this list could go on (as will my explaination of belief). I acknowledge that this stability has grown up around the neccessity of these educational institutions to establish credentials sufficient to garner trust from their consumers, sponsors and stakeholders; also around the ideology that surrounds higher educational and into which consumers invest without question. This stability has led to an “economy of the same” as Derrida, in ‘Writing and Difference’, calls it.

Why then would one wish to destabilise the ‘text’ that is executive education, given the perfectly understandable conditions of its evolution above? For executivezen this is about being dissatisfied with the status quo, yearning for a better way of being in the world, ceasing from evil, doing only good and doing good for others. Some aspects of global techno-capitalism are, at best, not effective and at worst, wrong. Maybe – so executivezen’s thinking goes – what stands as part-palliative care for the illness of global techno-capitalism is better management, leadership and business education to, in part, provide these. Given that the pedagogy of exec.ed is bankrupt, here is my motive for destabilising exec.ed texts. Executivezen does not count this as epistemic vandalism but as constructive betrayal.

what fixed, immutable, ultimate essence?

Given that there are no fixed essences (a view endorsed by most poststructuralists and by Derrida), then there is no fixed human essence. As Jim Garrison says (‘Dewey, Derrida and the Double Blind’ p.105 in Derrida, Deconstruction and Education, 2004, Blackwell), “without a fixed essence, [leadership and management] education has no ultimate, immutable and eternal fixed telos that represents the perfection of the process of education. There can be, then, no fixed immutable foundations of education”. To paraphrase Garrison, [managers or leaders] “are not substances … with the latent potential to actualise … their essence any more than acorns alone have the latent potential to actualise their essence as a giant oak tree. What [managers & leaders] become depends on the transactions they enter.”

This means what, exactly, in respect to executive education? It seems to be a truism that management and leadership education (exec.ed) is not a fixed entity; obviously, programmes of education, learning, development, arise from the conditions of the client organisation and as such are contingent and not fixed or immutable (though, perhaps, this is less true of programmes of formal, curricula-bound, education such as an MBA or MSc). However, executivezen is not sure this holds true of programmes of espoused ‘customised’ education and is certainly of the belief that these programmes are not politically neutral. By programme, executivezen means a defined system, structure and agenda, in this case pertaining to education: the term ‘programme of education’ refers as much to a perceived lack of education that may form the basis of the commissioning of a piece of education, up to scheduled instances of formal classroom education. All programmes belie an agenda, a postion formed in advance that makes a programme political in nature. Programmes of education are political in nature (see Politicising Executive Education and Exec.ed and Politics posts). At some point, the programme of a programme of education falls back into stasis, which in this case is back to the political agenda implicit in that programme of education. This is not to say that the chosen political agenda that constitutes a programme is the essence of that programme: as per Garrison (and deconstruction) there is no essence to education. Sometimes, that resultant political agenda does not arise via a conscious choice but instead is a manifestation of the inheritance (metaphysical or otherwise) of corporate culture.

Surely, then, those involved in (the programmatization of) exec.ed have the ability to challenge both the commissioning client’s views as to the essential-ness of exec.ed and the type of political agenda they adopt or conform to? Not just the ability; perhaps this is the sole job of educational programmatization; or perhaps this is an overlooked aspect of the role of educational advisors. Maybe what brokers of b-school expertise should be about is not the marshalling of business & management content into a sellable programme of education, but instead to help clients to come to terms with their cultural, metaphysical, logocentric inheritances so that they can more accurately and appropriately commission suitable change (educational?) interventions, i.e. given the current climate of chaos and complexity, openness against closure, difference against identity, perpetual movement against stasis. This would signal a change in the nature of b-schools towards a more consultative stance towards exec.ed, distinct from the more traditional purveyor of knowledge.

Deconstructive Exec.Ed: are these tenets executivezen?

Time to recap over a work-in-progress stipulation of a deconstructive philosophy of executive education (executivezen does intend to elaborate on this somewhat staccato list in the rest of the blog). A deconstructive writing (learning design) and reading (consumption) of an exec.ed text (e.g. events or contexts) includes the following elements:

• learning without a learner is the equivalent of orthodoxy, cannon, knowledge
• there is a metaphysics in education and in exec.ed. Akin to a belief in the absolute of management, of research-led education, of research in general
• a deconstructive approach to studying exec.ed is one vigilant of stepping back into the more doctrinaire metaphysical assumptions (above) that surround exec.ed
• there is a symbolic value of exec.ed which a deconstructive approach reveals
• exec.ed is full of aporia – blindspots
• just as deconstruction welcomes uncertainty, promotes comfort with uncertainty and values the multiple readings of a (educational/learning) text, so too is my approach to writing (designing) exec.ed
• a deconstructive analysis of exec.ed texts reveals the binary opposites that are the mother-tongue of management
• exec.ed is not neutral in the same way that deconstruction is not neutral
• exec.ed should take sides – i.e. openness, difference & movement, rather than closure, identity & stasis.
• there is no final vocabulary for exec.ed
• a deconstructive approach to writing and reading exec.ed texts promotes granular political acts
• all developmental tools can work to realise individual and group political action
• a deconstructive exec.ed text stands for dissent, destabilisation, dissolution and disruption of orthodoxy
• exec.ed is revolutionary (emancipatory)
• invention must take place exec.ed, disrupting institutional norms
• exec.ed is about opening uncloseting aporias
• exec.ed is an experience of the impossible

Invention

According to Derrida (Acts of Literature, 1992) invention is not invention if it does not break with existing institutional procedures. How true this is of innovation and the behavioural & attitudinal inventions from a process of learning! When coupled (in the previous posts) with the overt political functions of exec.ed, invention within and for the subject of education serves to open up the present in order to let the other come: opening, uncloseting, destabilising foreclusionary structures.

Then, exec.ed is an experience of the impossible in that it involves the coming about of something other in the ‘impossible’ above.

Is there a distinction between exec.ed and personal learning? Where personal learning can be changed, added to, is subject to conditions and is modifiable: and where exec.ed is that in the name of which personal learning is modified, added to, is subject to conditions and is modifiable. So that exec.ed is a metaphysical condition of personal learning – um, not sure. But this would mean that exec.ed cannot be experienced other than through personal learning. It is in this way that exec.ed is IMPOSSIBLE.

Is there an unconditional type of exec.ed? That is, does there exist a distinction between contingent or conditional exec.ed and absolute or unconditional exec.ed? Executivezen is not sure if unconditional exec.ed is possible, given that it cannot be experienced other than through personal learning. Maybe, though, this personal learning/exec.ed distinction is untenable. Could this distinction exist in the same way as the distinction between conditional law and unconditional justice? Is the parallel mapping between education and learning?