The wagon of neoliberal ideology rolls on, despite the rotting of its chassis. As Paul Mason says, writing in the New Statesman,  ‘an ideology does three things: it justifies the economic dominance of a ruling group; it is transmitted through that  group’s control of the media and education; and it describes the experience of millions of people accurately enough for them to accept it as truth’[i]. While Alan Greenspan’s post-Lehman Brothers congressional testimony may have marked the collapse of the neoliberal ideology, that ideology persists, as Mason states, as a dominant philosophy that underpins the educational practices of business schools (at least). Tariq Ali goes a step further and claims that the pillars of the Washington Consensus world order have been viewed as almost divine institutions whose authority derived from the mere fact of their existence [ii]. When the popular press muckrake over the recent falls from grace of the god-like banking masters of the universe, can we expect a similar casting out of the divine institution of neoliberalism from the curricula, methodologies and philosophies of business-schools – those elite clearing houses of the language of market fundamentalism, anti-statism, and deregulation? What cataclysms, above and beyond the bankruptcy of the neoliberal ideology itself, are left to fall on those educational institutions tasked with professionalizing the executant class of that ideology? None.

Then what counts as progressivism in the education of executants of the post-neoliberal world order is surely any pedagogic platform from which the failings of that old world order are addressed, in the manner talked about in this blog. And what better place to seed a new (Obama-esque?) post-neoliberal lexicon than from business schools themselves – the venerable coaching houses of most management and organisational bandwagons. The register of such a revolutionary lexicon is defiance towards an old guard that persists in championing Friedman-ite shareholder profit over human emancipation. The logic of this new lexicon is polarizing, deciding whether you’re either part of the problem or part of the solution. As Philip Kovacs says, ‘I think there is a moment here where we can and should separate business leaders who genuinely want to contribute to the world we share (we’ll call them progressive) from those business leaders who follow a consume/produce/dominate model. The former need to be recognized, rewarded, and encouraged, and the latter critiqued, punished, and avoided’ [iii]. Via the register of defiance and the logic of polarisation, the new grammar of a post-neoliberal pedagogy for executives could do a lot worse than embrace the emancipatory potential of the political philosophy of  Jacques Ranciere and Alain Badiou. In the fashion of this blog – that of offering new angles of approach to the process of overturning the stagnant educational philosophies underpinning the practices of business schools – I’m hoping my next post will begin to show the utility inherent in the work of Badiou and Ranciere (the ‘change’ and ‘new hope’ heirs to the fading poststructuralist tradition) that might rescue business schools from complete irrelevance in the face of a new demand in executive competence.

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[i] Paul Mason, ‘A Last Chance’, p.22. New Statesman, 10 November 2008. [ii] Tariq Ali, (2008) ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope’, London, Verso. [iii] email to the author.

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

The ineluctable primacy of application and utility within the field of leadership education is both the consequence of embracing ideologies typified by dictums such as ‘knowledge into action’, as well as the ground on which such pragmatist catchphrases are founded. Asking which of these values came first – is the value ascribed to pragmatism, or is the value attributed to the intentionality of the lexical device? – is not only a good determinant of one appetite for philosophical analysis, but holds to account the notion of pragmatism itself. Some instrumentalist educators[i] look to pragmatism as a ruse to bolster the fiercely unphilosophic[ii] tendency in their thinking. Few in leadership education are sufficiently politically brave to ‘dare question the ontology of the market, or the causality of customer demand, or the superordinacy of economic efficiency, or the sanctity of profit’[iii], say Carter and Jackson, quoting the poststructuralist philosophers Deleuze and Guattari. The notion of ‘perfectibility’ (of apparently discretely defined organizations and individuals) inherent in the instrumentalist’s faith in the ‘application of knowledge’ is strongly critiqued by Deleuze and Guattari, for whom perfectibility is a meaningless construct. My contention is that leaders are ‘understood to be only ever in a state of becoming and emergence [where] [p]erfection cannot (literally, is not possible to) be prescribed [and where] [m]oreover, the very concept implies the desirability of a stasis, which is unachievable’[iv] no matter how pragmatic one’s thinking is.

Pragmatism (or anti-Platonism or anti-foundationalism as it is sometimes called) has strong links with the Nietzschian anti-essentialist traditions on which much of so-called continental philosophy is based, and from which my philosophical and political arguments are based. According to Rorty, the late recent champion of the Deweyan tradition of American pragmatism, Nietzsche is of little use to political theory apart from how ‘his thought can help contemporary, liberal societies recognize the groundlessness and contingency of their values and their existence’[v]. Like me, Rorty does not believe that one can get ‘outside our language’[vi] to ‘a self which is [not] a tissue of contingencies’[vii]. As a formal philosophy, pragmatism concerns the view that inquiry aims at utility for us, as language users, rather than an aiming for an accurate account of how things are in themselves. Pragmatists, not unlike Illich, cannot make sense of the idea that we should pursue truth for its own sake: pragmatists cannot regard truth as a goal of inquiry. So, says Rorty, ‘[t]he purpose of inquiry is to achieve agreement among human beings about what to do, to bring about consensus on the ends to be achieved and the means to be used to achieve those ends’ [viii].I argue that whilst pragmatism is an apparent first choice philosophical basis for examining the truth claims of leadership education of the ‘knowledge into action’ orientation, it fails to acknowledge the political import of action. Whilst Deweyan pragmatism claims to be an educational philosophy of action, ‘a philosophy that takes action as it most basic category [emphasis in orginial]’[ix], I share Mouffe’s[x] serious concern over Rorty’s treatment of politics as ‘something to be deliberated about in banal, familiar terms – terms which do not need philosophical dissection and do not have philosophical presuppositions’ [xi].My claim is that an explicit political formulation of leadership education is prescient of the issues of pluralism, multiculturalism, and antagonism that lay dormant in the educational language of leadership education. These issues are neither familiar nor banal. Instead they will allow me to conclude that a significant displacement of meaning in the concept ‘action’ in the innocuous phrase ‘knowledge into action’ ushers into leadership education new forms of activism and new forms of educational practice. As to which of these comes first, that is yet to be seen.

[i] R. Barnett, Beyond all Reason (Maidenhead: The Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University Press, 2000), p.17

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

[iii] P. Carter & N. Jackson in S. Linstead (ed) Organization Theory and Postmodern Thought (London: Sage, 2004), p.113

[iv] Ibid., p110

[v] N. Widder, in D. Boucher and P. Kelly (eds), Political Thinkers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p.451

[vi] R. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin Books, 1999), p.59

[vii] R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p.32

[viii] R. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin Books, 1999), p.xxv

[ix] G. Biesta & N. Burbules, Pragmatism and Educational Research (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003), p.9

[x] C. Mouffe (ed), Deconstruction and Pragmatism (London: Routledge,1996), p.6

[xi] R. Rorty in C. Mouffe (ed), Deconstruction and Pragmatism (London: Routledge,1996), p.17

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.

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

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].

[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.

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

I feel as though a lot of my critical energies are spent building ways of resisting sovereignty; of the autonomy – because, apparently, independently verifiable – of the technologies of management, of the mechanisms of executive education and of the structures of the individual. One way of resisting, one line of questioning that makes transparent the violence of the sovereignties I’m talking about is to reveal ‘dogma’ for what it is. Dogmatism narrows the range of theoretical possibilities available to us. The dogmatic is averse to viewing things other than through the prescribed doctrine, which, for whatever reason has become the settled, the established opinion.

My wife, as she saw me sat this evening watching a movie slumped in the chair in our comfortable house with my comfortable job, told me that I was “just a little bit” anti-establishment. Yeah: I recognize that caveat in her description. But how unsettled does one have to be to call oneself a rebel? So this thing with sovereignty and dogma? Comfy chair or no comfy chair, I can’t bring myself to invoke an absolute. Or rather, I can’t resist the chance of spotting the contingency of a moment to spoil the extra-linguistic or extra-political call to transcendence. Reductionistic and totalizing teleologies, especially in the ethical realm, are compelling. But one has ethical responsibilities too in the face of yielding to subjugation and servitude: and unquestioned dogma is the force of that yielding. Revealing the dogmatic in educational or managerial practices is what one does by adopting eclecticism as one’s method of questioning: thus is my argument.  Making decisions on the basis of what seems best instead of following some single doctrine or style is what I mean by eclecticism. Methodologically this entails being promiscuous, which is what I’ve done with my reading concerning executive & leadership education and with my attempt to set up, what Michael Hardt calls, “new constellations.” Poststructuralism is the philosophical basis of the eclectic and promiscuous approach I’m taking. As Hardt says, what is really at stake through this promiscuity ”is the formation of a new canon, a new constellation of political and philosophical traditions” [1]. Poststructuralism is just such a new philosophical tradition when superimposed on management and leadership education. Looked at the other way, my attempt is presumptuous and wanting of legitimation or external authority, transcendent or otherwise. However - so the cyclic argumentation goes - such totalizing legitimation is not forthcoming due to my (not yet sufficiently) stated resistance towards the sovereign. Instead, and for the foreseeable future, I’ve decided to stick with my promiscuity and eclecticism as a means of unsettling the settled. Obviously, I need longer to state my objections to sovereignty, and quite what this notion itself is. Though, armchair rebel or otherwise, I can but make a start.

The basis of my stubbornness is a growing appreciation of the ethical responsibilities I have towards those with and for whom acts of leadership education are provided; the constituents of which are my fellow educators; the managers, executives and leaders as consumers of that educative process; those organizationally-bound individuals affected by the actions of that educated (or otherwise) elite; and the wider society and environment affected by the actions of those in-corporations. In total, a ‘multitude’, in the words of Hardt & Negri [2]. That sense of infinite responsibility – qua Derrida – demands radical innovation of that educative process, if unquestioned dogma does indeed ‘narrow the range of theoretical possibilities available to us.’ The radicality and breadth of this innovation necessitates an examination of the political aspects on which dogmas are founded and legitimated. And radicality, by another name, is activism.

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[1] Michael Hardt in ‘Sovereignty, Multitudes, Absolute Democracy: A Discussion between Michael Hardt and Thomas L. Dumm about Hardt’s and Negri’s Empire‘ in Passavant & Dean’s Empire’s New Clothes, (New York: Routledge, 2004), p169. [2] M.Hardt, A.Negri Multitude (London: Penguin Books).

This movie captures some of the thinking of this blog over the last year:

‘Future of Customized Executive Education’ 

“Unfortunately the term “political” tends to hint at a seedy underhand style of management/leadership. Can you quickly define political in your context”

It’s interesting to see politics framed in the negative, as in ‘politicking.’ Politics cannot be purged of negativity, and I’m not attempting some utopian conception of the term. Stating ones concerns over power, control and inclusion in national and international public affairs involves one in active opposition. Leadership & management are the imposition of one’s concerns on others, and therefore cannot avoid antagonisms. Education is therefore also political, leadership education doubly so.

Conflating ‘politics’ with ’seediness’ betrays a faith in an unsullied form of supra-political engagement: one that transcends corruption. If one believes that underhand practices must be countered by forces of accountability, transparency and inclusive deliberation, then one’s attention is already in the realm of politics. Recognizing the error of inculcating a ’seediness of style’ via educative processes is the embodiment of a political conception of leadership education. But beware of an apolitical negation of antagonism.

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.

[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)

 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.