What has a pragmatically ‘weak’ and politically ‘strong’ dislocation of the meaning of ‘action’ within leadership education afforded? Why, where and how can liberal individualist subject formations be contravened? Why does instrumentalism’s need to control and channel the meaning of action in order to remain unquestionable, nullify any and every attempt to mount a challenge to dominant regimes of political, economic and educational truth? Following Judith Butler[i], I have attempted to show that our acts as leadership educators are not self-generated, but conditioned and contingent: that this contingency is a result of how we are addressed by others: that others come before and define the individual, both as leaders and leadership educators: that, as a consequence, leadership educators and educational practices have an infinite responsibility to others: and, finally, that a viable, non-totalizing and non-universalist ethical consideration is privileged through a political framing of educational practices. As Critchley says, ‘if ethics without politics is empty, then politics without ethics is blind’[ii]. I fear that the dominant logic underpinning current leadership education is both empty and blind. When we are at once acted upon and acting, our responsibility lies at the constant interplay between these two extremes[iii]. As Butler says of this distinctly Levinasian[iv] formulation of an ethics of leadership education,

this conception of what is morally binding is not one that I give myself; it does not proceed from my autonomy or my reflexivity. It comes to me from elsewhere, unbidden, unexpected, and unplanned. In fact, it tends to ruin my plans, and if my plans are ruined, that may well be the sign that something is morally binding upon me[v]. Post-application conceptions of leadership education are difficult to defend, because they privilege the dirty, detailed, local, particular and infinitely demanding practice of politics and ethics. Following Giroux[vi], the strong sense of action is a site of struggle whose outcome is always uncertain but whose future should never remain in doubt.

[i] J. Butler, Precarious Life (London: Verso, 2004), pp. 128-151.

[ii] S. Critchley, Infinitely Demanding (London: Verso, 2007), p.13.

[iii] J. Butler, Precarious Life (London: Verso, 2004), p. 16.

[iv] From the work of French philosopher Emanuel Levinas 1906-1995.

[v] J. Butler, Precarious Life (London: Verso, 2004), p. 130.

[vi] H. Giroux, ‘Higher Education and Democracy’s Promise: Jacques Derrida’s Pedagogy of Uncertainty’ in P. Pericles Trifonas & M. Peters, (eds.), Deconstrucing Derrida (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 78.

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 and business education institutions are want to talk of their consumers as ‘clients ‘rather than ’students’. Calling someone a student conjours up an image that is at odds with an image of a client: in the language game of business, the term ‘client’ carries greater currency in more senses than one. This post, if nothing else, is a stab – and the beginings of a stab at that – at answering the question Roger Delves posted in a comment on my previous post. It’s also a bookmark on the whole issue of poststructural identity and therefore gloriously open ended. Executivezen will suspend use of the term client and substitute it with, for the moment, the spectral terms of consumer and agent; just for a laugh (!).

 To begin with , helpfully, Johnson, Leiber et al (CETIS PLE Project Report) put forward four generally recognised characterisations of a student: student as product, student as customer, student as worker, and student as member. These are useful designations since they lend the debate a set of signifiers that allow a glimpse of what and who educators might conceive of as a consumer - to use a temporary placename that is, in no way, value-free – of, lets say, leadership education. But since Johnson et al have, eliptically, answered their question before they’ve even started by promoting the signifier ’student’, executivezen will examine the consumer as product, customer, worker and member; here’s hoping that the nature of this consuming agency will emerge during this process.

Regarding the consumer as a product of leadership education implies an end, or telos, to which education is the means and to which education can perfect itself. Can the existence of leadership education be explained solely by the purposes it serves, rather than by an examination of the causes of leadership education? Stating, with some irritable finality, that the purpose of leadership education is to improve the state of leadership simply restates, unhelpfully, the question of the agency of leadership (and it is the agency, don’t forget, that is the purpose of this discursive investigation). But then the cause of leadership education could equally be laid at the same telos, to improve the state of leadership. For executivezen, agency (or consumer or whatever placeholder you choose) as product has utility precisely because of this circular tail chasing: like maddening, so-called, postmodern movies (Cameron’s Solaris, Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction) or postmodern novels (Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow) that seem to refer only to themselves, agency as product has that similar self referential quality which abstracts the consumer and the consumption process from any extra-educational reality. Consumers of leadership education are products of leadership education consumption. Let’s not pretend that this agency, as product, is closer to realising its latent potential of actualising its true leadership essence. Poststructuralism says (a la Garrison) there are no immutable foundations of education, nor is there a telos that represents the perfection of the process of education, as was supposed earlier. The static productness of the product characterisation somehow falls short of a seemingly more useful process-type characterisation, given that what executivezen believes agents become depends on the transactions, hence processes, that they enter. Phew!

Next, agency as customer…

Given the foregoing, leadership education is leadership itself once it acknowledges its ethico-political agency and capitalises on poststructural leadership’s hegemonic status. Maybe the form of leadership that institutional sites of leadership education can claim is that of edification not education. Rorty champions edification as the embrace of abnormal discourse “for finding new, better, more interesting, more fruitful ways of speaking” (1980, p360). For normal discourse there is a consensus among parties concerning the rules that must be followed in order for a question, an answer or an argument to be considered. Contrarily, abnormal discourse breaks all the rules: “the product of abnormal disourse” says Rorty, “can be anything from nonsense to intellectual revolution, and there is no discipline which describes it, any more than there is a discipline devoted to the unpredictable, or of ‘creativity’” (1980, p320). I would like to encourage the reader to take up Rorty’s challenge of abnormal discourse and, thereby, progressive leadership edification.

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.

According to Laclau (in Deconstruction, Pragmatism, Hegemony, 1996) one concept that is central to contemporary political theory is that of representation. “The condition of a good representation is, apparently, [emphasis in original] that there is perfect or transparent transmission, by the representative, of the will of those whom he represents” says Laclau. And yet the tasks of popluar leaders consists, often, of providing followers with a language by which they are able to formulate their political identity and will. When the represented need representation (which is the inherent utility of representation) it is usually because their identities, or voices, need supplementing, in this case via the agency of a representative. This act of supplementarity means that the role of the representative cannot be neutral, not when they are lending, in proxy, their own voice to the absent represented. There cannot be perfect transmission when representatives play an active role in the formation of the collective wills of those whom they represent.

From a political standpoint, is it not agreed that the more democratic a process, the more transparent is the transmission of the will of those represented by their representatives? Does this not also stand for the process of leadership? That the better leadership is demonstrated by the greater transparency of the transmission between leader and follower? That the successful leader embodies, enacts and gives voice to, without manipulation, distortion or corruption, the will of their followers to whom they entrust their intentions? But this seems not the case: there appear to be flaws in the notion of representation: there is (a Derridian) structural undecidability in the notion of representation, an infinite deferral, an impossibility

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.

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.

Surely it is the business of business schools to wean its consumers off notions of certainty and totally founded knowledeges? If, as the view executivezen holds asserts, there is no extra-linguistic certainty, no foundation external to the “conversations” (as Zabala says) that form knowledge, then education becomes ‘edification’, a self-improvement.

 If I’m searching for a nexus with which to anchor further study then ‘representation’ seems to be it: as in Rorty’s distrust of the modern notion that to know is to represent accurately. There are no “permenant, neutral frameworks of inquiry” (Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 1979) and so the whole edifice of epistemology in modern analytic philosophy is built on shifting sands. True assertions are only true by virtue of social context; in which case ‘conversation’ is the ultimate context in which knowledge is to be understood; distinct from getting the facts right, education is about exposure to and aptitude in discourse. This is what Rorty calls “edifying discourse”.

Edification is Rorty’s substitution of Gadamer’s phrase Bildung, which means education or self-formation. Rorty reckons that education sounds too flat and that Bildung sounds too foreign. Edification “stands for this project of finding new, better, more interesting, more fruitful ways of speaking.” (Rorty, 1979, p360). Edifying discourse is supposed to be abnormal, to take us out of our old selves by the power of strangeness, to aid us in becoming new beings. Edification is not a matter of knowing what is out there, as the Platonic-Aristotelian view dictates. This has implications for leadership education.