6. Conclusion

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.

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[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.

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.

Educational Chauvinism

The “education” I’m referring to is executive education and by “chauvinism” I mean a fervent, and possibly narrow minded, support for a cause. After the last post I felt it necessary to justify further my claim about framings. My use of  “framing” represents both a distinct adoption of a conventional discourse and its associated ideology, as well as an acknowledgement of the contingency of that frame as a representational system. Education re-presents the world just as much as politics re-presents the world. My point is that we – and I’m speaking from within an education establishment, working as I do at a university-based management school - sometimes forget about the representational powers of education, either assuming them to be neutral or, worse still, invisible or entirely transparent. I’m claiming 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. My substitution of a political framing for an educational framing is an extension of my adoption of a poststructuralist interpretation of executive education; and the use of “chauvinism” betrays my interest in radicalizing executive education: part of the strong and political activist sense of the phrase “knowledge into action.”  The radicalizing agenda is wholly dictated by applying a political, not educational, frame to the hegemonic practices of conventional executive education. There can be no other ‘darker forces’ of propaganda or hidden militancy of my re-framing, outside of a political conception in which such conspiratorial motives already make sense.

Poststrutural Politics as Executive Education

Executivezen has not written to this blog recently: too busy bringing up kids, upgrading my computer and working lots and lots. But not too busy to read: my library of poststructural political theory is expanding, thanks to some very timely advice to be “more promiscuous” in my reading. Thanks Paul! Now, alongside my Derrida and Deleuze & Guattari is Laclau, Sandel, Butler, Mouffe, Walzer, Dews, Bobbio, Ranciere, Williams, Zizek, Kymlicka and Giroux. Executivezen is sad to say that a recent holiday was spent reading Mouffe’s “The Return of the Political” – a jolly good ‘radical democracy’ kick-about around liberalism’s backyard, using a communitarian ball. It’s got the ole pompous git in condition at least.

I feel able now, with this renewed and radical political fitness (intellectual shape only, I’m afraid), to bring to executive education a new  ‘political’ framing. The framing’s novelty rests on a deliberate intention not to continue to valorize explicit educational inputs, educational outputs or any other educationally chauvinist claims or processes that institutions of higher education espouse; but instead to re-cast those claims as entirely political. I’m not claiming that there is nothing else to be learned, or that higher educational endeavors are bankrupt or that technical training serves no purpose, or even that one can’t learn via politics. Rather, my claim is that by positively discriminating in favour of a political conceptualization of executive education, and by consciously substituting a pedagogic term for a political term when describing organizations, organizing and the execution of decisions within hierarchical structures, one is acknowledging an all-consuming aspect of the executive’s role hitherto obscured by the language of pedagogy. This aspect is political agency. Amy Gutmann says of education that “it is always political because it is connected to the acquisition of agency, to the ability to struggle with ongoing relations of power, and is a precondition for creating informed and critical citizens” (Democratic Education, 1998, p. 42). 

I’ve been long in coming to this conclusion, which accounts for my recent break, spending time, promiscuously, crafting a political vocabulary by burying myself in political texts. For instance, among others mentioned, I’m inspired by Gramsci when he says  things like “every relationship of hegemony is necessarily an educational relationship.” And by Giroux, quoting Gramsci thus, who urges us to view education as a “cultural pedagogic practice [which] takes place across multiple sites as it signals how, within diverse contexts, education makes us both subjects of and subject to relations of power” (Terror of Neoliberalism, p138). Via this new political framing, I hope to acknowledge the hegemonic practices inherent in executive education; and thereby begin my claim that the hierarchical status implicit in the ‘executive-ness’ of this subject position – the individual who is both the subject and object of ‘executive education’ –  is the practice of a political, not an educational, discourse. I will have to defend this mutual exclusivity, I know, and hope to do so in subsequent posts. What isn’t captured here though, in this rather self-conscious articulation, is a sense of the utility I feel present in linkages from this political framing to a host of intractable problems that a pure educational framing – what I’m calling, educational chauvinism – seems less qualified to pronounce on. Namely, the struggles and antagonisms over limited resources, inequality, responsibility, goods, rights, and freedoms as they relate to both the subject position and social construction of the (non-unitary) entity of ‘executive.’ Lots more work to do here, though, on unpacking these linkages. Oh well.

 To begin this process, I am keen to radicalize (to use Laclau & Mouffe’s phrase) executive education (see previous post on militancy). I believe radical political agency, distinct from aspirational civic virtue, is the means to provide impetus in striving for organizational democracy – after, that is, I’ve convinced myself of the congruence of ‘liberal democracy’ as a polity for executives and organizing structures. One way I can introduce this notion of radicalization of executive education in my own institution (a university-based management school) is to begin to provoke ruptures in the serene discursive surfaces of the dominant educational hegemony. For instance, I intend to split apart ’weak’ and ’strong’ conceptions of the signifier ‘action’ in the phrase “knowledge into action,” which is my institution’s strap line. The institution employs this jaunty phrase to distinguish between universal knowledge and particular action, where the signified of ‘action’ is deemed unitary and a sufficiently robust contrast to the abstractness of universal knowledge, and where public promises are made not to dilute the instrumentality of the insitution’s output. The ‘weak’ conception, which I won’t defend here, of this pragmatically focused rhetorical device centres on the aspiration to “improve the practice of management through research and education.” This, currently, is the only conception of ‘action’ within our institution and is expounded elsewhere. As part of my regime of radicalization I’d like to introduce a ’strong’ and decidedly off-median conception of the signifier ‘action,’ which I will at least begin to defend by establishing an outline of this new, political, framing. For this I use poststructural political theory from Mouffe and Laclau & Mouffe, as well as experimental interpretations of Deleuze & Guattari’s organizational theory; not to mention Derrida’s political thought. I am indebted to my colleague, Dr Martin Clarke, the reading of whose work has helped me put forward a tentative articulation (checklist) of this new political framing, which includes, but is not limited to:

• a valuing of antagonisms between the constituents of conventionally conceived executive education; via Schmitt, Laclau and Walzer
• an acknowledgement of hegemonic practices within executive education; via Giroux and Mouffe
• introducing richer, Foucauldian, notions of power; from Peters & Trifonas
• a bracketing of the belief in universals; from Laclau and most poststructuralists
• relinquishing simplistic notions of the individual; through Sandel and most poststructuralists
• acknowledging executive education’s creation of new subject positions; via Giroux and Mouffe
• critiquing that liberal hero, the apparently autonomous corporate executive; from Walzer
• an exploration of political philosophy in order to ground the concepts of liberalism, utilitarianism, liberal individualism, pluralism and communitarianism: through Mill, Berlin, Rawls, Nozick, Sandel, Taylor, MacIntyre and Walzer
• committing to the radicalization of executive education – via me, at the moment
• analyzing the modes of consumption of executive education
• critiquing ‘ideal types’ of political ideologies or of anything for that matter, courtesy of Derrida

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.