Thursday, September 08, 2005

Reassembling Executive Education via Networked Learning


I think Zizek's reading (p.18-19 in Organs without Bodies, Routledge 2004) of Deleuze's cyborgian conception of the human - where "it is meaningless to imagine a human being as a biological entity without the complex network of his or her tools" - as dependent on 'protheses' has a wonderful parallel with management/leadership education when one considers the necessary, and therefore defining given the above, prostheses of managers. What prosthesis is required that enables a manager to manage: what external mechanical supplements are necessary for a manager to do their job? The wonderful parallel is not so much the cyborgian conception itself (which is arresting and worthy of more study) but the underpinning this notion gives to a nacent poststructuralist definition of 'networked-learning' within, and in contrast to, traditional business school education. Networked learning is the instantiation of the network of tools a manager needs (as protheses) to function as a manager and/or leader: reassembling executive education, then, is a replication and extension of this prosthesis that serves as role model of this new conception of manager via a pedagogic function with respect to building and enhancing this network of tools. Networked-learning oriented B-school education serves to frame managers as (a potentiality of) a network of social relations. A manager is the totality of his or her network of social relations: what better way to learn how to be a manager than to partake of an education that is framed in this fashion, e.g. networked-learning?