4. Weak Action

There are three interrelated characteristics of the weak sense of action; an ahistorical and asocial individualism; a subjectivity defined by a lack of relation to ‘an other’; and a confusion of universalism for particularism. I state these characteristics in the negative, in distinction to the correspondingly positively affirmed theories on which they are based, as an indication of my partisan allegiance to the strong sense of action, and the belief I have in this second sense as being the future direction of a politically oriented leadership education.

Firstly, as Michael Peters recognizes, in advanced neoliberal states individualism has now become the prevailing ideology[i], since the individual as a concept first came to prominence courtesy of the ancient Greeks. With the exception of a post-conventional[ii] discourse on distributed leadership, the majority of leadership education assumes the basic unit of study is the individual and their particularistic actions within the field of leadership. This apparently self-evident viewpoint emerges from the Enlightenment heritage unquestioningly adopted by most leadership educators. For Caroline Williams, via a genealogy ‘[f]rom the social contract theory of Hobbes, Locke and Kant, to its contemporary presentation in the work of John Rawls, there is a dominant presupposition that the subject is a self-contained, unencumbered, rational and a priori entity who performs a voluntary act of political contract’[iii].It is usually from this heritage that leadership educators employ the dominant en-framing of psychology to articulate the autonomous rationality of leadership agency. This individual-based, atomised conception of leadership action is now commonplace across leadership education[iv]. But an assault on the isolated and politically unreflective enclave that leadership education has become has been taking place within poststructuralist (political) philosophy for some time now. Says Foucault of this atomized subject,

I don’t think there is actually a sovereign, founding subject, a universal form that one could find everywhere. I am very sceptical and very hostile toward this conception of the subject. I think on the contrary that the subject is constituted through practices of subjection, or, in a more anonymous way through practices of liberation, of freedom[v]

This classical liberal concentration on the individual, which seems so unimpeachable, and on which so much of our assumptions about leadership education is based, is strongly opposed by, inter alia, the political theory of communitarianism[vi]. Along with Peters, I believe an understanding of this political theory ‘is a useful theoretical antidote to the excesses of an overconfident individualism’[vii]. According to Mouffe, the communitarian critique of liberal individualism ‘denounces the ahistorical, asocial and disembodied conception of the subject that is implied by the idea of an individual endowed with natural rights prior to society…’[viii]. So this first characteristic of the weak sense of action suggests that leadership educators view the individual as existing prior to and independent of the societal and organisational contexts in which s/he operates. The individual, in this conception, is defined by their capacity to choose an action, not by the specific and particular actions they choose. Those choices are not constitutive of that individual: the individual is not ‘made’ by those choices, which is the counter view of communitarianism and the departure point for a stronger sense of action.

Secondly, and related to the constitutive nature of the individual, the weak sense of action is characterized by a conception of the subject as isolated and self sufficient. In this characterization of the individual liberal hero, identity is not constituted by others and their influence. Instead, as Mouffe states, the identity and interests of these individuals ‘are defined prior to and independent of the construction of any moral or social bond’[ix] between the individual and others. With respect to how ethics is treated in the liberal individualist tradition, the weak sense of action regards moral action, of what constitutes the ‘good act’, as existing secondary to what constitutes ones personal rights. John Rawls, against whom the bulk of communitarians direct their criticisms, affirms justice as the primordial virtue of social institutions. Liberal individualism of this variety appears very strong: stronger, perhaps, than my ‘weak’ designation of these characteristics. It would appear to be wrong to say that the picture of the individual leader given here in the traditional liberal conception, whose identity was their own making; who has a clear and rational conception of their autonomy; who has an innate sense of their own and others rights; it seems inappropriate to call this conception weak. I would disagree. The weakness comes from what Critchely calls a ‘motivational deficit’ that I see in this weak conception of action. As he states, ‘it might be claimed that there is a motivational deficit at the heart of liberal democratic life, where citizens experience the governmental norms that rule contemporary society as externally binding but not internally compelling’[x]. One can (conceivably) be educated in leadership and encouraged to apply that knowledge in action, but if one is not motivated by that form of action, both of these forms of knowledge and action are useless.

This motivational deficit is compounded by the third of my characterizations of the weak sense of action. This concerns the tendency of current leadership education to employ rational and totalizing universals as a basis of educational interventions. By universal I mean a term, a concept or body of thought nominalised into a word or phrase, which is presented as universally to be the case, and which stand independently of any particular instantiation of that universal. Examples relevant to both politics and leadership are democracy, equality, human rights, justice, individual freedom or whichever principle is invoked that makes ‘universalist claims’. As a weak formulation of ‘knowledge into action’ this classical liberal notion of leadership action, like political action, is oriented around, a universal term. Yet, for Critchley, that universality is ‘always already contaminated by particularity, by the specific social context for which the universal term is destined’[xi]. Ernesto Laclau is the political theorist credited with reintroducing the topic of the universal back into a philosophy discourse long suspicious of totalizing fundamentals and essences. To back Critchley’s earlier point about contamination, Laclau states that an early assumption about the distinction between universals and particular is that ‘a) there is an uncontaminated dividing line between the universal and the particular; and b) that the pole of the universal is entirely graspable by reason. In that case, there is no possible mediation between universality and particularity; the particular can only corrupt the universal’[xii]. In a sense, then, leadership action can only ever be particularistic: it can only ever operate within a particular social context. It is not possible for either a singular leader or leadership collective (e.g. a market leader) to incarnate a universal essence of leadership, other than particular instances of action, in particular (non-universal) contexts. Leadership education will forever remain fixed to unobtainable universals, so long as that educative process relies on the application of specific knowledge – imparted during that educative process – as the basis of action. That is, for as long as education remains supplemental[xiii] to action. For the weak conception, leadership education’s singular employment of rational, totalizing universals as the foundation of its educative endeavours, e.g. nomothetic research-based findings, ensures that the knowledge of those universals, as universals, remains untranslatable into particular and contingent action[xiv].

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[i] M. Peters, Poststructuralism, Marxism and Neoliberalism (Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), p. 124.

[ii] K. Grint, Leadership (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 5.

[iii] C. Williams in A. Finlayson & J. Valentine (eds.), Politics and Poststructuralism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), p. 23.

[iv] As an indication of the pervasiveness of the notion of the individual Kock & Smith go so far as to claim that ‘if there is one single ever more powerful, trend driving individualism in the West, it is the personalization of business and business success’ in R. Koch & C. Smith, Suicide of the West (London: Continuum, 2006).

[v] M. Foucault, Foucault Live (New York: Semiotexte, 1989), p. 313.

[vi] For further reading about communitarianism, see M. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); A. MacIntyre, After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1981); M. Walzer, Spheres of Justice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983); C. Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences, vol. ii (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); W. Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

[vii] M. Peters, Poststructuralism, Marxism and Neoliberalism (Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), p. 125.

[viii] C. Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993), p. 28.

[ix] Ibid., p. 29.

[x] S. Critchley, Infinitely Demanding (London: Verso, 2007), p. 7.

[xi] S. Critchley, Is there a normative deficit in the theory of hegemony? (University of Essex: The Centre for Theoretical Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences, http://www.essex.ac.uk/centres/TheoStud/onlinepapers.asp

[xii] E. Laclau, Emancipations(s) (London: Verso, 1996), p. 22.

[xiii] This is the converse of Derrida’s conception of supplementarity [J. Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1974), p. 154] which sees the supplemental action as defining mainstream action, distinct from merely acting as an optional ornamentation.

[xiv] The approach of technical rationality is characterized as the view that professionals need to have command of a body of disciplinary knowledge which they then draw upon to analyze and solve the various problems that they encounter in their daily practice. However, such a technical rationality does not fit well with the actual practice of professionals, for whom ready-made problems seldom present themselves.

educational militancy – exec.ed. insurgency

I’m all for making the world of executive education (even that phrase sounds odd) a little strange again. The philosophy of education, which is the topic of this blog, is a space in which to attempt to militate against the unreflective, bovine and uncritical acceptance of any educational status quo. Executivezen would like to reveal the contingency of an education that attempts erase its traces of power, of force and will by naturalizing or essentializing its genealogy and its structures. Of the views which reveal their naturalizing tendency via statements such as ”executive education is, was and always will be for business, not about it” or  that “management and leadership development is obviously about improving the state of the organization”, executivezen, an exec.ed. insurgent, would rather clownishly (re) reveal the contingencies of the trappings of the educative mechanism before continuing.

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

reinstating the universal – thanks Ernesto Laclau

After Laclau, given that the ethico-political can be granted a reinstated universalistic status, traditional business education offered by Thrift’s cultural circuit of soft capitalism seems incommensurable with the revised polity of leadership education. The discursive apparatuses of business schools are status quo maintaining institutions that are colluding with the other components of the capitalism’s cultural circuit in sustaining a repressive orthodoxy of leadership and leadership education. The revised task within institutionalised leadership education is to subvert this orthodoxy, both at the site of its generation within the business school and at the point of its consumption: this will involve challenging consumers’ preconceptions about what institutional leadership education can offer