Session Information
26 SES 07 A, Policy, Values, and Ethical Leadership – Diversity, Covariation, or Conflict
Symposium
Contribution
What happens when an organization’s “fairness technologies” fail? When no matter the structures, policies, and procedures instituted, organizational fair play is undermined and the status quo reproduced? When management co-opts these structures and policies to maintain uneven relationships with employees? When management foments and exploits employee angst and insecurity to frustrate the collective pursuit of conditions conducive to well-being. This paper draws on experiences of scholar-administrators preparing educational leaders to “manage”—to facilitate work through the adoption and implementation of organizational policies and procedures, norms and practices—in an educational field re-formed through neoliberal policies and the politics of austerity. Through our programs, we seek to engender knowledge, skills, and dispositions allowing aspiring leaders to navigate pressures created by the “coercive laws of competition” (Marx, 1976) in ways that allow for individual and collective thriving. In our focus on management-employee relations, we incorporate insights from Capital brought forward in recent work by Lyng (1990; 2004; 2014), Sjoberg (1989; 1998; 2004), Mattei (2022), Chibber (2022; 2022) which offer insights into conditions of austerity and precarity, alienation and resignation, compliance and control. Centering material accounts and informed by insights from the cultural turn, these scholars enrich our understanding of how the politics of austerity impinge on social relations and the interplay of class, race, gender, etc. The academic literature on “edgework” is often referenced to Stephen Lyng’s (1990) theorization of individual risk-taking in response to experiences of alienation in late capitalism. Here, we incorporate Sjoberg’s formulation of “intellectual edgework” to consider corporate risk-shifting to individuals. We discuss “edgework as praxis” to: 1) Understand how conditions of precarity and austerity contribute to employee alienation and resignation expressed in workplace aggression, “quiet quitting,” “quiet firing”, etc. 2) Consider the possibilities and limits of managerial responses through the adoption and implementation of organizational policies and procedures, norms and practices. 3) Reconsider leadership as strategic engagement within intensely contradictory spaces that demand radical empathy. Edgework praxis is highlighted in the interrogation of fairness technologies encountered through our work with refugee communities in the U.S., program development in Uganda; and as administrators in a community-engaged urban university. We reflect on implications for ethical leadership and the preparation of ethical leaders within the academy, primary and secondary schools, and organizations generally. In this way, we seek to prepare the sort of ethical managers we would like to work for and hope to be.
References
Chibber, V. (2022). The class matrix: Social theory after the cultural turn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chibber, V. (2022). Confronting capitalism: How the world works and how to change it. New York, NY: Verso. Lyng, S. (1990). Edgework: A social psychological anlaysis of voluntary risk taking. American Journal of Sociology, 95(4), 851-886. Lyng, S. (2004). Edgework: The sociology of risk-taking. New York, NY: Routledge. Lyng, S. (2014). Action and edgework: Risk taking and reflexivity in late modernity. European Journal of Social Theory, 17(4), 443-460. Marx, K. (1976). Capital: A critique of political economy. New York, NY: Penguin. Mattei, C. (2022). The capital order: How economists invented austerity and paved the way to fascism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Sjoberg, G. (1989). Notes on the life of a tortured optimist. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 25(4), 471-485. Sjoberg, G. (1998). Democracy, science, and institutionalized dissent: Toward a social justification for academic tenure. Sociological Perspectives, 41(4), 697-721. Sjoberg, G. (2004). Intellectual risk taking, organizations, and academic freedom and tenure. In S. Lyng (ed.), Edgework: The sociology of risk-taking. New York, NY: Routledge.
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