Are we in danger of fetishizing practice, practicality, implementable practical value? What other agendas are business schools exposed to, besides those of excellence, performativity, and economic growth, that balance the quest for practicality? Is practicality at the expense of, and in permanent contradistinction to, theory? What is a practical theory? It’s as if the theory/practice distinction falls foul of Derridian logocentrism, bipolar opposites, with the privileging of practice over theory.

Following Lyotard, executivezen believes that theory cannot be separated from practice, in that theories emerge within practical situations and cannot stand independently of them. A practical and ongoing experimentation with matter sounds suspiciously like a theory to executivezen. Take networked learning theory (see the following post in this blog): the theoretical terms come out of and can only be explained in practical cases, e.g. networks and the ambiguity that this term carries. It is interesting to see, when you read Lyotard (for example, ‘Libidinal Economy’), that he asks “Did it work for you?” and “What is of value here, for you, now?” rather than the more abstract and theoretically sterile questions of “What does it mean?” or “Is it good?”. These questions have a wonderful pragmatic sense to them that seems beyond the ‘empirical testing’ (in terms of confirmation or refutation) convention alluded to in instances of fetishizing practice. As Williams (Poststructuralism, 2005, p.96) says of Lyotard, so executivezen says that theory “emerges with the material and with the event. It is not so much tested as ‘evolved with’.”

So, does networked learning theory fetishize (to use Derrida’s sense of the term) practice or does it evolve with the material, the event, practice? Let’s take a look at networked learning theory…