The Cosmopolitan Challenge and the Need for a Communicative Leadership

• In Event: Cosmopolitanism, Communication, and Citizenship Education

Abstract

Recent understandings of education and educational leadership tend to focus primarily on economic dimensions and interpretations. Nussbaum (2010) believes that education has merely become a tool for economic growth, and a means for improving people’s capacities to act in their roles as economic agents. Educators all over the world do in fact experience increasing demands to educate children and young people for flexible labour and entrepreneurship in knowledge-based economies (Hargreaves, 2003 and European Commission, 2002). Education is not only geared at improving people as economic agents, it is also increasingly governed by economic norms. The introduction of New Public Management (NPM) rests on the assumption that economic norms should have primacy in the governance of the public sector (Christensen and Laegred, 2002). Educational researchers frequently report how the primacy of economic norms in education shape and change the roles, identities and relationships of school actors at different levels (eg. Bagley, 2006, Ball, 2009, Lindblad and Popkewitz, 2004, McInerney, 2003, Oplatka et al, 2007). However, educational change motivated by the primacy of economy is highly problematic, or so I will argue in relation to educational leadership.

The aim of this paper is to discuss a cosmopolitan and communicative alternative to managerial traditions of educational leadership introduced in education over the last two or three decades. The first part of the paper is mainly inspired by cosmopolitan sociology (Fine, 2007, Kendall et al 2009), and I argue that changed conditions for national education should be understood and analyzed in multidimensional rather than one-dimensional terms. Ulrich Beck’s (2006, 2009) concept of cosmopolitanization captures not only globalization and social change under economic descriptions; rather, it captures changes in society and education in multi-dimensional terms including cultural, economic, social, political and moral dimensions. I conclude that national education is challenged by processes of cosmopolitanization, and that the multidimensional analysis of changes in education and society calls for an alternative to managerial traditions of leadership.

In the second part, I discuss how assumptions of rationalization, action-coordination and conditions of success built into NPM can shape educational leadership and communication in highly problematic ways (Eriksen, 2001). I argue that the primacy of economic norms can shape communication processes in such a way that they bypass aspects one can count as essential to education and to citizenship education in particular, such as learning, cooperation, democracy, autonomy and motivation based on reasons rather than sanctions. This is particularly problematic if education should take cosmopolitan conditions seriously. In the final part, I discuss how and why a communicative leadership based on communicative rather than instrumental rationality (Davidson, 2001, Habermas, 1998) can offer a fruitful alternative to managerial leadership in education. Such a leadership is essentially dialogical and it takes seriously rather than bypass crucial aspects of education, as well as the challenges increased cosmopolitanization constitutes to national education.

Author

• Niclas Ronnstrom, Stockholm University