Neoliberal Contestations & the Shadow Academy

Following Alain Badiou – writing in the ‘New Left Review’ [Jan/Feb 08, 49] about the ages of socialism in Sarkozy’s France and about the precarity of the communist hypothesis – it would appear that similar forces of ‘capitulation and servility’ [ii] explain the inertia regarding the cultivation and uptake of hypotheses of contestation to the hegemony of neoliberalism within business schools: key sites in the maintenance of the neoliberal orthodoxy within executive and leadership education. Says Badiou,

“A wide variety of 19th century phenomena are reappearing: vast zones of poverty, widening inequalities, politics dissolved into the ’service of wealth’, the nihilism of large sections of the young, the servility of much of the intelligentsia; the cramped, besieged experimentalism of a few groups seeking ways to express the communist hypothesis… Which is no doubt why, as in the 19th century, it is not the victory of the hypothesis which is at stake today, but the conditions of its existence” [iii] [emphasis added].

What counts as ‘progressive’ in the education of the executants [iv] of the neoliberal order? It is, as Badiou states, the creation of the conditions for the existence of countervailing hypotheses, this time on our sedate business-school campuses. As an inhabitant of the university, it is not difficult to see how higher education business schools are contributing to the process of neoliberalization of the economy [v] through the servility of much of its intelligentsia and the apolitical character of its educative practices. This servility and capitulation towards the dominant regime explains not only the besieged communist hypothesis but any contestation to neoliberal globalization within the b-school’s ambit of narrative authority. Progressivism in the education of executants, then, is the consideration of a range of alternative realms of practice, such as those identified by Leitner, Sheppard, Sziarto and Maringanti [vi]. Arising from within the discourse of urban geography, their four realms of practice for progressive contestations of neoliberalism are:

1. direct action
2. lobbying and legislative action
3. alternative knowledge production
4. alternative economic and social practices.

As a radicalising framework for a shadow academy tasked with educating neoliberal executants, Leitner et al’s alternatives praxes appear realistic, balanced and capable of affecting a reformation of the capitulative pedagogic stasis within the existing structures of executive education. Such structures are legitimate sites of struggle, given the hopelessly utopian and largely rhetorical claims of the anti-capitalists, anti-corporatists and anti-globalists: and as the basis of reformatory praxis these sites represent hope for the ‘conditions of existence’ of contestatory efforts.

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[i] New Left Review, No.49, Jan/Feb 2008, pp.29-42: [ii] ibid, p.33: [iii] ibid, p.42: [iv] after the distinction Castoriadis makes between directors and executants and how the elimination of this crucial distinction is the means of eliminating capitalism – see T. May, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism, pp. 42-43: [v] M. Casa-Cortes, S. Cobarrubias, “Drifting Through the Knowledge Machine”, p.121, in Shukitis, Graeber, Biddle Constituent Imagination, AK Press, Oakland: [vi] H. Leitner, E. Sheppard, K. Sziarto, A. Maringanti, “Contesting Urban Futures: Decentering Neoliberalism”, p.15, in H. Leitner, J. Peck, E. Sheppard, Contesting Neoliberalism: Urban Frontiers, The Guilford Press, New York

2. The Hegemony of Neoliberalism and Educational Chauvinism

Of all the projects of educational theory, leadership education theory is the project under the most extreme pressure to conform to the new and pervasive educational pragmatism situated within the current macro-economic market and political contexts of neoliberalism[i]. Blake et al claim that ‘[t]his new educational pragmatism, impelled by globalization, seems to be draining practice of normative interest and validity.’ They go on to claim that ‘[t]he traditions that have long mediated teaching and learning are currently under radical assault from managerialist reformers, operating within a taken-for-granted worldview of economic crisis[ii].’ I do not call into question the taken-for-granted-ness of these pressures felt by traditional liberal, or leadership, education, i.e. I do not oppose capitalism, as this is the global context whose emergence and continuation we, as leadership educators, find ourselves in. But consequently, I do take issue with the form of idealism represented by Blake et al’s call to a revised educational theory to ameliorate the affects of this managerialist and economic crisis. Only, my critique of this idealism concerns the absence of an acknowledgement of a political formulation to leadership education as the basis of a solution to the pressing concerns of neoliberalism, rather than a straightforward complaint that such education is overly prescribed by this particular cultural and political regime. Instead, my claim is that leadership education – both its creation and consumption – is not just situated within the global contexts of neoliberalism, but that it actually bolsters that regime. It is not just a case of politics entering into leadership education endeavours as the content of that education. Leadership educators have a political responsibility to those whom they claim to educate. But this balance of responsibility is an act of ‘becoming’ that cannot ever be completely fulfilled. Paraphrasing a reference Chomsky[iii] makes about neoliberalism’s aversion to gaining general public consent, ‘the people who own leadership education ought to govern it’ – which, of course, begs the question of who owns leadership education? Rather than new theories of leadership education simply critiquing the impact of dominant political worldviews on, say, the politically inert ‘instrumental versus intrinsic’ debate, progressive theories of leadership education should, as Giroux urges, [d]istinguish professional caution from political cowardice and recognize that their obligations extend beyond deconstructing texts or promoting a culture of questioning. These are important pedagogical interventions, but they do not go far enough. We need to link knowing with action.[iv]

To this end, I believe it is necessary to trouble the axiomatic status of the sentiment embodied in the phrase ‘knowledge into action’ as it relates to leadership education, and to radically destabilize the duality between the instrumental and intrinsic divide outlined at the start. My post-application viewpoint breaks with the tradition[v] of employing purely educational philosophy (principally of the analytic and positivist varieties) and instead draws on political philosophy (mostly from poststructuralist-inspired and communitarian thinkers) as the more relevant basis for examining the truth claims made in reference to ‘action’ in the name of so-called ‘pragmatic leadership education.’ The political 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 leadership education espouse; but instead to re-cast those claims as entirely political. I am not claiming that there is nothing else to be learned, or that higher educational endeavours are bankrupt or that technical training in leadership serves no purpose; nor, even, that one cannot learn via politics. Rather, my claim is that by positively discriminating in favour of a political conceptualization of leadership education, and by consciously substituting a pedagogic term for a political term when describing organizations, the acts of organizing and the execution of decisions within hierarchical structures, one is acknowledging an all-consuming aspect of the leader’s role of determining and undertaking action in the social realm. This activist role of the leader has hitherto been obscured by the language of pedagogy. This activist-building aspect of the education of the leader comes through the development of collectivist 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’[vi]. The same is true when these relations of power are viewed conversely, such as when Gramsci claims that ‘every relationship of hegemony is necessarily an educational relationship’[vii]. Henry Giroux, referencing Gramsci, 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[viii]. This is illustrated when institutionally oriented processes of leadership education (e.g. business schools in particular) play a part in creating the subject position of ‘leader’ by creating and accepting onto ‘programmes’ of leadership such subjects. By continuing to privilege a humanist and individualistic conception of education stripped bare of the antagonisms of ‘the political’, normative leadership educators are embargoing an entire realm of action (namely, activism) that has increasing validity and currency at a time in the world when the overthrow of hegemonies is rife[ix]. I will come on to critique the belief in the liberal hero, the dominant individualist orientation of leadership education, via communitarian political theory as I believe this critique is one of the few capable of countering the unstoppable force with which a psychologistic conception of leadership education is nullifying debate in the field, and perpetuating educational chauvinism.

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[i] Mark Beeson [‘Competing Capitalisms and Neoliberalism’, in K. England & K. Ward, Neoliberalization: States, Networks, Peoples (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), p.47n.] says “the basic tenets of neoliberalism have been captured by John Williamson’s (1994) idea of the “Washington Consensus,” which provides a template both for neoliberal public policy and for an “appropriate” environment for private sector economic activity. The key ideas are now the familiar staples of much governmental rhetoric in the “west,” at least: small government, low taxation, deregulation, privitization, and enhanced competition.” For some useful critical commentaries about neoliberalism and its consequences, see N. Chomsky, Profit over People (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999); H. Giroux, The Terror of Neoliberalism (Boulder: Paradigm Press, 2004); D. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); M. Peters, Poststructuralism, Marxism and Neoliberalism (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001); K. England & K. Ward, Neoliberalization: States, Networks, Peoples (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007).

[ii] N. Blake, P. Smeyers, R. Smith & P. Standish, The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), p. 8.

[iii] Chomsky was referencing the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the US, John Jay; see N.Chomsky, Profit over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999), p. 46.

[iv] H. Giroux, The Terror of Neoliberalism (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2004), p. 123.

[v] A tradition embodied in the work of Ronald Barnett, Colin Symes and John McIntyre.

[vi] A. Gutmann, Democratic Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 42.

[vii] A, Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Press, 1971), p. 350.

[viii] H. Giroux, The Terror of Neoliberalism (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2004), p. 138.

[ix] R. Koch & C. Smith, Suicide of the West (London: Continuum, 2006).

3. A Political Framing

Using this political framing, I want to acknowledge the hegemony inherent in leadership education itself, distinct from hegemonic practices of leaders themselves. The hierarchical status implicit in the ‘leadership-ness’ of this subject position – the individual who is both the subject and object of leadership education – is the practice of a political, not an educational, discourse. So, not surprisingly, I believe there to be utility present in linkages from this political framing to a host of intractable problems that a pure educational framing – what I term educational chauvinism – seems less qualified to pronounce on. Namely, the struggles and antagonisms over limited resources, inequality, responsibility, goods, rights, injustice, suffering and freedoms as they relate to both the subject position of the leader, the constituents whom they influence, and the wider geopolitical (neoliberal) environments affected by the actions of leaders. By using the word ‘framing’ my intention is to represent both a distinct adoption of an existing conventional discourse and its associated ideology, as well as an acknowledgement of the contingency of that frame as a representational system. From a poststructuralist perspective education ‘re-presents’ (i.e. presents back, via a mediating interpretation) the world, in just the same way as politics re-presents the world. This is in contradistinction to the redundant epistemological view that sees the world ‘out there’ to be discovered, objectively somehow, in its pristine and uninterpreted form. Leadership educators – and education establishments – sometimes forget about the representational powers of education, either assuming them to be neutral or, worse still, invisible or entirely transparent. I believe 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. Traditional conceptions of leadership education rely, at the very least, on a degree of unquestioned referentiality (a term borrowed from Saussarian[i] semiotics, denoting that to which leadership refers) that sees the need for this tradition to interpret various texts and events according to a wider context (whether described as psychological, organisational, social, national, or cultural) to which these phenomena remain unbreakably tied. This unquestioned referentiality accords the traditional and normative conceptions of leadership education a basic level of coherence. By challenging this coherence I hope to rouse and radicalize leadership education from its political slumbers. To this end, by using a political framing, I intend to split apart weak and strong conceptions of the signifier ‘action’ in the phrase ‘knowledge into action.’ And then, as part of a process of radicalization of leadership education, promote a ’strong’ and decidedly off-median conception of the signifier ‘action’ that draws its inspiration from contemporary anarchist political philosophy and which, more boldly, creates new borderlands between education and politics and moves some way towards meeting the need for innovative thinking in the field of leadership education in times of ecological and political crisis.

I claim three things from the distinction between ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ senses of action in the phrase ‘knowledge into action’. Firstly that the weak sense of action currently dominates leadership education: secondly, that the distinction is only made possible by an explicitly political analysis of leadership education: and thirdly, that both senses only gain their meaning from the difference between each other and that they possess no intrinsic weakness or strength.

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[i] F. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (Geneva: 1916).

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).

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.

Foundations

Take the following elaborate theatrical metaphor as a way of describing what I’m trying to do here: this blog is attempting to catch a glimpse of leadership education from behind, as it were; off guard, and engrossed in the global political contexts of its ethically-adrift practices. Creeping up on a leadership education conducting its business oblivious to scrutiny provides a thrilling chance to spy on its consorts, associates and fellow conspirators whom I have long suspected of helping enshrine an ethically inert leadership education hegemony, but who retain an independent and aloof legitimacy seemingly beyond question. Not surprisingly, then, with my suspicion raised, this piece of snooping reveals an assortment of unusual and seemingly upright confederates, bolstering leadership education in the maintenance of its paradigm. My difficult task then is, firstly, to connect an apparently disparate band of suspects together into a meaningful whole associated with the leadership educative process: secondly, to convince the reader of the suspect status of those identified: and thirdly to concoct a compelling motive that incriminates these suspects in sustaining an ethically uninspiring hegemony.

Theatrical metaphor aside, far from reifying the concept of leadership education into a singular entity, these jottings represents a heady condensation of thought and reading concerning the role that chauvinism, hegemony, instrumentalism, neoliberalism, and, principally, politics, play in the contemporary and socially constructed institutionalized leadership education movement. I range among this disparate band of interlocutors the countervailing forces of poststructuralism, anarchism and activism as the methodological means of escape from a sadly delegitimized moral authority [1] of the leader – the espoused product of leadership education. This blog, and the manner of its eclectic gathering from diverse sources of inspiration, is an attempt to distract attention away from standard psychological conceptions of leadership education, towards a base of influences that lay a stronger and more relevant claim on the field in which I operate. As a result the paper will appear doubly disjointed from more standard treatments of leadership education: firstly because I attempt to employ the language of politics; and secondly because my style is overtly antagonistic. My intention with this paper is to raise new issues for the field of leadership education in an innovative and creative way, distinct from closing off debate.

[1] Rakesh Khurana, “From Higher Aims to Hired Hands”, Princeton, 2007

Hardt & Negri

Leadership educators, as influential arbiters of the theory and practice of leadership, have a political responsibility to those whom they educate since the processes of education are concerned with the acquisition of agency. So when politics is about ‘collective action’ and of ‘action in the social world’; when leadership, broadly speaking, is about provoking right action in the social world, collective or otherwise; and when leadership education involves the acquisition of agency, one must face and face-off resistances to a purely political definition of both leadership and those processes of leadership education. Framing leadership education politically – with all the attendant antagonisms and political activism this implies – is the basis of my challenge to the current apolitical hegemony of leadership education. To precipitate a sense of radicalized action (political ‘activism’) within a politically realigned leadership education that then acknowledges ‘equality’, ‘moral obligation’, ‘just action’ and ‘emancipation’ as the new focuses of a leadership educator’s struggles, is to begin to overturn a form of education that has not, hitherto, accepted the role it plays in legitimizing dominant or oppressive political regimes. Such agitation within the institutions of educators and educated – itself, a political act – prefigures the mobilization of that combined class to undertake direct action outside of the classroom. Few in the current politically inert leadership education establishment are sufficiently brave to dare question the ontology of the market, the causality of customer demand, the superordinacy of economic efficiency, or the sanctity of profit[i] on which their educative practices supposedly positively influence. The political 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 leadership education espouse; but instead to re-cast those claims as entirely political and therefore better able to dismantle orthodoxies via the franchise of leadership.

Using the philosophically eclectic yet influential manifestos of Hardt and Negri’s Empire[ii] and Multitude[iii], together with their critics, I will examine how the dominant conceptions of leadership education privilege ‘constituted power’ of the leader above ‘constituent power’ of the ‘multitude’, and the impact this has on politically oriented leadership education. These impacts include reappraisals of the educational/political notions of representation, hierarchy and inclusion, as they relate to a radicalized educative practice. 

The utility I believe there to be in the linkages from Hardt and Negri’s political framing to a host of intractable problems that an educationally chauvinist position seems less qualified to pronounce on, stem from their employment of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic model[iv] of the multitude. Politically-undertheorized leadership education seldom challenges the dominance of ‘the individual’ nor explores the fortune immanent in the networks, or rhizomes, of politically educated leaders.

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[i] Pippa Carter & Norman Jackson in Stephen Linstead (ed.) Organization Theory and Postmodern Thought (London: Sage, 2004), p. 113. [ii] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). [iii] Michael Hardt and Antonia Negri, Multitude (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2006). [iv] Gile Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (London: Continuum, 1988)

Knowledge into Activism

In discourse surrounding the fashionable consumption of leadership education, and vocational education generally, the phrase ‘knowledge into action’ is regarded as axiomatic and unquestionable. I want to question the political naivety with which this phrase is generally used. This, in order to precipitate a sense of radicalized action (political ‘activism’) within leadership education that acknowledges the role of duty, moral obligation and right action of a form of education that has not, hitherto, accepted the role it plays in legitimizing dominant political regimes. The phrase ‘knowledge into action’ implies a mutually consistent set of ideas with which sense can be made of the world via a form of education, and as such I will call it an ideology. As a lexical device (to recognise the full semiotic contingency of the phrase ‘knowledge into action’) and as an ideology, the phrase has as its unstated claims that all knowledge is actionable; that the two components of knowledge and action are separable; that action is a better mode of existence for knowledge; and that action is founded on imparted ‘knowingness’. The sentiments of the phrase also imply that leadership education should be instrumentally opportune and real-world directed, as distinct from an intrinsically worthwhile education from, say, the liberal arts. Endeavours in the latter form of education, it is said, ‘merely’ cultivate in individuals a sense of mind and intellectual grace for a mutually respectful engagement with society. In sharp and ideologically nuanced distinction to this, proponents of vocational and instrumental educational endeavours side with Illich’s deschooling claim that individuals should learn from the world, not about it. For Symes and McIntyre (‘Working Knowledge, 2000, p.3) knowledge is no longer the product of idle curiosity, pursued in the spirit of open and disinterested inquiry, but is something which now invokes use-value and application. But what exactly is being applied? I think this model has run its course: it has run out of rails.

hackr

 Whilst there may be no ’objective’ web-two-point-zero-ness to be found outside the hype of the media’s use of the term Web 2.0, I’m interested in acknowledging the connection I see between a political designation of conventional conceptions of executive education (see previous posts on the topic) and the user-generated-content alluded to in the use of ‘web 2.0′ descriptor. But for me, this new political designation affords more than an acknowledgement of content being user generated: this seems a democratic given. Web 2.0 doesn’t seem to go far enough.

Framed in the newly politicized vocabulary of executive education there is something of the hacker – or ‘hackr’ in Web 2.0 parlance – implicit in this politically educated executive citizenry; and by hackr I don’t mean a poor golf player or unskilled amateur. The hackr I’m referring to is a meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. An example of sensitive information I talk about in this blog is the (politically) non-neutral nature of normative executive education practices. Interestingly, one of the principles of the ‘hackr ethic’ is the belief that information-sharing is a powerful positive good, and that it is an ethical duty of hackers to share their expertise by writing free software and facilitating access to information and to computing resources wherever possible. I see the politically educated executive (see previous post) as just such a hackr; someone who is willing to hack into, to meddle with, politically ’sensitive’ information; to poke around and to share access to this information. And by ‘meddle’ I  mean metaphorically ’hopping over fences’ and challenging the legitimacy of enshrined values, knowledge and boundaries. This is the activism, radicalism and insurgency I’ve referred to before. The hackr I’m referring to would, for instance, be willing, as an executive actant undertaking a political education, to acknowledge and question the dominant neoliberal paradigm (see Chomsky’s 1999 ‘Profit over People’) inside of which normative executive education takes place. And if not that lofty goal, to at least examine political power differentials within the organisations in which they operate and relate these the power differentials present in the processes of their personal and professional development.

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.