Emotional Dimensions of Educational Administration and Leadership

Eugenie A. Samier, Michèle Schmidt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781135203153
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Emotional Dimensions of Educational Administration and Leadership explores foundational theories for emotional dimensions of educational administration and leadership as they influence our understanding, analysis and practice in the field. It covers a broad range of topics, such as ethics, authority, personality, social justice, gender discrimination, organisational culture, decision-making, accountability and marketisation.

The first section, 'Theoretical Foundations', includes discussion of the early modern romantic philosophy that produced the heroic notion of leadership, the idealist philosophy of Hegel, existential concerns through Kierkegaard, the contributions of psychoanalysis, and Habermasian critical theory. The second section, 'Types of Emotional Analysis', includes examinations of the material culture, emotional economies, the politics of emotion, and the relationship between emotion and rationality. The last section, 'Critical and Contemporary Issues', includes critiques of the fear arising from accountability regimes, the political economy of the market model, a feminist critique of ideologies reflecting emotional investments, narrative expressions for the emotional context of teamwork, the problem of narcissism, and the emotional dimensions of role engagement.

This volume explores an area that is only just re-emergent in the last few years. The collection demonstrates the relevance to practical issues and problems internationally, both within the organisational context and extra-organisationally with a focus on the application of emotional factors as they affect our understanding of, and practice in, educational organisations. The emotions of education affect the implementation of political values and culture within organisations.

Part I

Theoretical foundations

1 The romantic philosophy of mind

The elevation of emotion to the (anti-)heroic ideal

Eugenie A. Samier

One of the predecessors to psychological and socio-cultural approaches to emotion is the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century philosophical movement of Romanticism that emphasised individual uniqueness and intuition, elevating emotional experience to an importance as great as that of reason. It is a philosophy of being predicated upon a pursuit of freedom and equality achieved through self-realisation and a transcendent process uniting imagination, reason, and conscious and unconscious emotion. It laid a foundation for many later intellectual movements of social and political critique, particularly those connecting individuals’ inner worlds and the socio-historical context, including that of educational experience: the dialectic idealism of Hegel, historicism, existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, and the artistic movements of decadence, expressionism, absurdism, surrealism, and DaDaism. To Berlin, romanticism was the greatest single shift affecting life and thought in the West (1999: 1–2).

For the Romantic, the self and one’s life were to be a work of art, embodying principles of totality, unity, and individuality: a holistic view of the individual whose highest form was a full and unique development of human characteristics. And to the Romanticist, this required delving into the ‘dark and unconscious forces which move within’, in order to bring them to light and confront them (Berlin 1999: 98). In administrative and leadership terms, this means identifying and overcoming one’s character and personality flaws, a misplaced desire for power and authority, and a scientised sensibility.

Romanticism plays virtually no role theoretically in educational administration and leadership even though many of its strong influences originated in the Romantic movement. Historically, Romanticism served a critical and formational role in the development of the Humboldt university model (see Clark 2006: 210–15, 226–30, 443–9) that established worldwide fundamental teaching and scholarship criteria for the modern research university. It is upon this foundation that many notions of higher education administration and leadership were built.

The elevation of emotion

German Romanticism arose from the confluence of philosophy, literature, art, and politics: inspired by Kant’s notion of freedom, Fichte’s lectures on individual freedom, Lessing’s critique of art, and the French Revolution, early Romanticists promoted a view of the self guided by imagination, rather than rules or conventions, leading to an exploration of the self, emotions, and sensuality, and their expression in socio-cultural forms, often in ironic juxtaposition (Pinkard 2001: 99–100). Even though the early Romantic movement (or Frühromantik) had a very short duration, from 1797 to 1802, and whose meetings were informally held in literary salons, mostly in Jena and Berlin, its legacy extends through to the present day. Its proponents include some of the most important and renowned philosophical and literary figures: Schiller, Herder, Wieland, Goethe, Wilhelm von Humboldt (through the Humboldt university model), Schlegel, Novalis, Schleiermacher, and Hölderlin.

The Romanticists had a much stronger influence on the development of the modern university than is often thought. Ziolkowski (1990) outlines in some detail the chaotic and shallow nature of universities in the eighteenth century, which were so dysfunctional that there were calls to close down this medieval organisation for good. The Romantics, notably, Schiller, Goethe, Fichte, and Schelling, brought about a renaissance of learning at Jena, inspired also by their intellectual compatriots. Transformed were a unified curriculum, a truly scholarly professorial practice, and a set of regulations circumscribing errant student behaviour. While the Jena experiment was shortlived, partly due to the Jena—Auerstaedt battle in the Napoleonic wars, it provided a model for other universities and eventually the celebrated Humboldt model of the University of Berlin, the international archetype for the modern research university. One of the key documents was a proposal submitted by Schleiermacher defining a hermeneutical and dialectical relationship between the university and the state in a unified whole including the role of all other levels of education, particularly the Gymnasium, as well as the central role of faculty in university structure and governance, as well as academic freedom for faculty and students. It fell to Wilhelm von Humboldt, who had studied at Jena in the midst of the leading Romanticists, to implement this ideal, along with the Weimar notion of Bildung, in 1810 in Berlin.

Although a somewhat diverse and idiosyncratic movement, the Romantics subscribed to four related ideals: a unity of knowledge achieved through experience and imagination rather than logic; ‘subjective inwardness’ (Innerlichkeit) assuming an irreducibility and primacy of subjective experience while accepting a realist view of the external world; a re-enchantment of nature without returning to tradition or orthodox religion; and the primacy of imagination over intellect (Pinkard 2001: 101). Their common stylistic characteristics included eclecticism, the fantastic in the imaginative combining of materials, imitation in the sense of reproducing the fullness of life in its historical period, and sentimentality in the sense of ‘revealing the spirit of love’ (Beiser 2003: 12–13). In this way, emotion is a requisite capacity for creative imagination that is able to reveal deeper levels of reality and achieve a transcendent view (Richards 2002: 2). To Romanticists, all activity in life should be viewed as part of a creative and artistic process infused with morality, including politics and science, and especially the educational process of Bildung. To romanticise the world means to reintroduce ‘meaning, magic and mystery’ in modernised, technologised society (Beiser 2003: 19–20).

Hölderlin and Novalis argued for a primacy of Being as a foundation for subjectivity and as an existent that eludes introspection. For Hölderlin, Being consists in ‘the all-desiring, all-subjugating dangerous side of man as well as the highest and most beautiful condition he can achieve’ (in Larmore 2000: 145) and contains the problems of self-consciousness, an elusive pursuit with implications for the exercise of freedom. For Novalis, access to one’s being, in even limited form, requires the development of intellectual intuition and reflection grounded in feeling, which themselves are grounded in Being (Larmore 2000: 153–4). The essence of Romanticism lay in the quality of poetic language to suggest more than it explicitly says in evoking this Absolute. In other words, the essence of knowledge and truth for Novalis are carried in implicit language: ‘To the extent that I give to the lowly a high meaning, to the ordinary a mysterious air, and to the well-known the dignity of the unknown, I am romanticizing it’ (in Larmore 2000: 155).

It is here in their exploration of Being that many seeds of phenomenology are sown, influencing Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, a not insignificant perspective from which administrative and leadership experience is explored. It also laid the foundation for an exploration of the unconscious, providing important sources for Freud’s creation of psychoanalysis. While there were some significant differences between Romanticism and psychoanalysis (the latter emphasising subjectivity less and childhood experience more) (Kirschner 1996: 179–80), both regarded self-formation as a developmental spiral characterised by a ‘trajectory of unity, rupture and division into contraries, higher unity’ and interaction with the world that includes suffering producing individuation (Kirschner 1996: 180–3). The aim of both is authenticity and creativity, borne from the oftentimes painful range of experiences inherent to self-formation, producing the transformation of social and political experience as an art.

It is in the basic ideas of Romantic ethics and politics that a view of the proper place of emotion is found. Ethics was informed by a conception of aesthetic excellence in personal development, consisting of a totality of humanness, a unity of these powers into an organic whole, and individuality or uniqueness (Beiser 2005: 39). Their conception of ethics contrasted with their understanding of utilitarianism as consumer passivity and the ethics of duty as simply adhering to moral principles through a bifurcation of the human being into reason and sensibility. Instead, they followed an ethic of love allowing one to see oneself in others (Beiser 2005: 40). Their early conception of politics was that of the organic republican state (instead of the absolute monarchies with which they were familiar), consisting of the right to participate in public affairs, the right to equal protection of property and freedom of speech and the press, and the duty of the state to provide education for the development of its citizens (Beiser 2005: 41). Uniting all of this is a synthesis of reason and a sensibility grounded in emotion.

Many Romantic concepts were carried through Hegel’s early philosophy, concepts upon which many notions of the state, authority, and political rights provide a foundation for administration and leadership, including ‘Hegel’s absolute idealism, his organic conception of nature, his critique of liberalism, his communitarian ideals, his vitalized Spinozism, his concept of dialectic, his attempt to synthesize communitarianism and liberalism’ (Beiser 2005: 35). Drawn in part from Novalis’ notion of the mystical state—individual informing all social structures, Hegel’s conception of social institutions is a ‘Spirit of the Times’ that animates the state for which the

Volksgeist, or national genius … concretely manifested, expresses every aspect of its consciousness and will — the whole cycle of its realization. Its religion, its polity, its ethics, its legislation, and even its science, art, and mechanical skill, all bear its stamp.

(Hegel 1956: 63–4)

Romanticism is also a reaction to societal modernisation which causes many divisions in human experience, from hiving off emotion for rationalisation to the division of labour and its attendant specialisations. They were confronted at that time with a mechanistic view of reality and society promoted by scientism ushered in by Descartes, and in full force by the late eighteenth century. For the Romanticists, only an organic and poetical transformation of the self and artistic modes of representation serving knowledge were possible antidotes. The malaise of modernity for them consisted of alienation, estrangement, division, separation, and reflection (Beiser 2003: 31). One inheritor of Romanticism is Weber, whose critique of bureaucratisation is reminiscent of Schiller’s:

Always chained to a single little fragment of the whole, man himself develops into only a fragment; always in his ear the monotonous sound of the wheel that he turns, he never develops the harmony of his being; and instead of putting the stamp of humanity upon his nature he becomes nothing more than the imprint of his business or science.

(Schiller in Beiser 2005: 47)

Schiller’s echo is clear in one of Weber’s most celebrated comments on bureaucratisation:

A lifeless machine is the materialization of mind. This fact alone gives it the power to force men into its service and to determine so coercively their everyday life in the factory … Also a materialization of mind is that living machine which bureaucratic organization represents, with its trained, specialized labor, its delimitation of areas of competence, its regulations and its hierarchically stratified relations of obedience. In union with the dead machine, it is laboring to produce the cage of that bondage of the future to which one day powerless men will be forced to submit like the fellaheen of ancient Egypt. This will certainly be true if a purely technically good (i.e., rational) bureaucratic administration and welfare system is the ultimate and unique value, which is to decide the way their affairs are run … a bureaucracy that has reached this advanced state [is among] the most difficult social creations to destroy.

(Weber in Mommsen 1984: 166–7)

This type of rationalisation overcame even the university. Weber compared the relative fates of a world peopled by a rationalised professoriate with that of ‘little cogs’ of bureaucrats (1956: 127). Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship describes the fate of these ‘cogs’:

The middle class can acquire merit and, if driven to extremes, develop the mind; but in so doing it loses its personality … the burgher must labor and create, developing some of his capabilities in order to be useful, but without it ever being assumed that there is or ever can be a harmonious interplay of qualities in him, because in order to make himself useful in one direction, he has to disregard everything else.

(1989: 174–5)

From this perspective, education itself has become a technological site, so convincingly rationalised that self-awareness has been compromised. It is not a far step from there to the current conditions of corporatisation and commercialisation producing the market-model university.

The ills of modernity are overcome by pursuing the ideal of the beautiful soul, of community, the organic state, and an organic conception of nature. The Romantics’ position was not ‘post-modern’, but advanced a reintegration and synthesis of Enlightenment values of reason, freedoms of civil society, and history. Their challenge was how to preserve individuality, critical rationality, and freedom while embracing feelings and desires that are necessary ‘to inspire the people, to touch their hearts and to arouse their imaginations, to get them to live by higher ideals’ (Beiser 2003: 32, 94). And, as argued by Schiller in Aesthetic Education, it is art produced through this synthesis of reason and feeling and cultivation of the senses that can move people to higher moral and political ideals (1967: 17–23, Fourth Letter). Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister represented for the Romantics ‘an account of the self-formation of a man of genius — of how a man can take himself in hand and by the free exercise of his noble and unrestrained will make himself into something’ (Berlin 1999: 111).

In Schlegel one finds a key conception of Romanticism for leadership resembling a closer proximity to Burns’ complex and dynamic model ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Editors’ introduction
• Part I Theoretical foundations
• Part II Types of emotional analysis
• Part III Critical and contemporary issues
• Index