Niesche, Richard. “Educational Leadership as a (Consumer) Culture Industry.” In Educational Leadership and Critical Theory: What Can School Leaders Learn from the Critical Theorists, edited by Charles L. Lowery , Chetanath Gautam , Robert White and Michael E. Hess , 57–74. Educational Leadership: Innovative, Critical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024. pp. 57-74.
http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350353459.ch-003
EXTRACT
This chapter brings together into conversation the work of Theodor Adorno, Bernard Stiegler, and Michel Foucault to examine how educational leadership as a field has been seduced by a consumer capitalist industry in the pursuit of “best practice” approaches and “what works” discourses as answers to educational problems and issues. Specifically I explore the notion of the culture industry (Adorno 1991; Horkheimer and Adorno 1979) as an important precursor to what Bernard Stiegler more recently terms a hyper-capitalist consumer industry (Stiegler 2011, 2014), and think how this work can understand and interrogate many current approaches to educational leadership. In addition, I also draw on the ideas of Foucault in concert with Stiegler through the notions of biopower (Foucault 1976) and psychopower (Stiegler 2010). In particular, I argue that there has been a consistent flow of writing in educational leadership that is increasingly designed for ongoing consumption, badged for the purposes of solving many problems in education around the world—with “leadership” as a key driver of such reforms and changes. Thomson et al. (2013) have previously referred to these kinds of discourses as a Transnational Leadership Package (TLP). I argue that these discourses have manifested largely through school effectiveness and improvement research that can also be linked to the rise of gurus, experts, and edupreneurs to form what Kellerman calls a “leadership industry” (2012) but in education….
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