The Choice Is Yours! Discourses of Leadership in Neoliberal Times

• In Event: Leadership Education in Practice: Transcending the Self to Consider the Process

Short Description

This paper performs a critical discourse analysis on several best-selling leadership texts to examine the neoliberal discourses and self-making practices embedded within, and produced by, mainstream leadership studies. By promoting self-reliance and personal responsibility, the presenter will argue that current leadership discourse disconnects leadership from collective politics and social justice.

Detailed Abstract

Self-development — informed by psychology and other “sciences of the individual” (Foucault, 1977, p. 191) — has become a central focus of mainstream leadership studies. For instance, while the authors of Discovering the Leader in You assert that “that self-awareness is critical to leadership development” (King, Altman, and Lee, 2011, p. 16), Kouzes and Posner (2007) in their bestselling book The Leadership Challenge similarly declare that “In the end, we realize that leadership development is self-development” (p. 7). Promising individuals that by discovering and/or creating their “true” or “best” self they will in turn become better leaders, many leadership development texts and models now resemble covert forms of self-help with diagnostic tools, reflective journaling, storytelling, and relatable content. Accordingly, the current push in leadership development proposes that with the proper training, skill acquisition, and self-knowledge, anyone and everyone can be a leader.

Although self-development is not an inherently problematic pursuit — scholars of critical pedagogy have encouraged the use of self-reflection as a radical act of resistance for some time (see Freire, 2003) — the concept of developing one’s self is not necessarily a value-neutral process either. Rather, this conflation of self-development and leadership development has a socio-historical and political importance resulting from the neoliberal context under which it has spread. In this presentation, I propose that mainstream leadership texts and models participate in creating a particular kind of self in the neoliberal moment: a responsibilized self. A concept developed by Tina Besley and Michael A. Peters (2007) in their book Subjectivity and Truth, the responsibilized self describes the individualizing processes of neoliberalism and how self-governance, self-reliance, and being responsible for oneself has become central within contemporary U.S. culture, and for this paper’s purposes, leadership ideology as well. In other words, in an effort to decrease a “culture of dependency” based on social welfare programs, neoliberalism (and as I argue leadership as a tool of it) seeks to create a self that is responsibilized, thus moving that responsibility off the state and onto the individual (Besley & Peters, 2007, p. 155). Thus, while it is a seemingly progressive approach to suggest everyone can be a leader, I propose that this current push is indicative of false meritocratic narratives that the US wishes to project, consequently shifting responsibility away from the state, the barriers of racism and sexism, and inevitably onto the individual.

In relation to the conference theme, shifting such dependency off the state is often performed through the discourses of risk and insurance, and the responsibilized self is that which is obligated to make choices with respects to such things (Besley & Peters, 2007). As Besley and Peters (2007) discuss, the responsibilized self “learns the fiduciary art of restyling the self through various forms of personal investment and insurance in a range of welfare fields . . . that are necessary both as a safeguard against risk but also as the preconditions for participation in the competitive society” (p. 142). In the turbulent times that ILA describes, the rhetoric of risk and choice are central, however as this presentation will argue, the individual is not free to necessarily make any choice but instead the responsible self is to make the right life choices, as “the modern self thus enters a network of obligations” (Besley & Peters, 2007, p. 56). Choice becomes an illusion, as predetermined paths are already outlined as correct, smart, or responsible. To handle the various economic and emotional insecurities of the neoliberal landscape “individuals have been advised not only to work longer and harder but to also invest in themselves, manage themselves, and continually improve themselves” (McGee, 2005, p. 12). As Micki McGee (2005) argues, in such unstable economic times it is not enough to be employed, rather individuals are obligated to remain consistently employable and marketable. Thus, in neoliberal times, the self becomes a commodity and to ‘work’ on one’s self becomes the solution to ensure success both personally and professionally. Leadership, especially leadership development, is framed as one of these smart choices in order to protect oneself from the instability that turbulent times engenders.

Drawing from the work of Michel Foucault (1977), Tina Besley and Michael Peters (2007), and Jodi Melamed (2011), this presentation uses critical discourse analysis to analyze some of the best-selling leadership books as a way to identify and analyze the discourses and self-making practices imbedded within and produced by mainstream Leadership Studies. Some of the texts examined include: Strengths Based Leadership (2008) by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie, The Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations (2007) by James Kouzes and Barry Posner, and The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You (1998) by John Maxwell, with some additional research drawn from examining The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (1989) by Stephen Covey and Discovering the Leader in You: How to Realize Your Leadership Potential (2011) by Sara King, David Altman, and Robert Lee. It is important to note that these texts were specifically chosen for their popularity, as it is assumed that their high selling status is indicative of what many people find to be attractive, believable, and respectable for a book on leadership. Moreover, many of these books, and the various theories or practices that inform them, inevitably become the base, structure, and contents of many leadership programs and thus warrant critical examination.

This presentation concludes by briefly discussing the potential consequences of continuing to have leadership programs and philosophies remain unquestioned, especially for educators and critical scholars. Through a constant focus on individual development, and through numerous texts explicitly stating that all one should worry about is themselves, contemporary leadership erases opportunities for community building. Thus, this presentation concludes that in order to make the leader position a more equitable and inclusive space, contemporary, and supposedly normal or commonsensical ideals of leadership, need to be critically examined.

Participant

• Nicole Capriel Ferry, Washington State University