Further Education, Leadership and Ethical action: Thinking with Hannah Arendt

The purpose of this paper is to develop and elaborate upon the concept of ‘ethical action’ and what it might imply for the future of further education, ethics and leadership. The analysis is grounded in Hannah Arendt’s... [ view full abstract ]

The purpose of this paper is to develop and elaborate upon the concept of ‘ethical action’ and what it might imply for the future of further education, ethics and leadership. The analysis is grounded in Hannah Arendt’s seminal tripartite distinction between labour, work and action, the cornerstone of her political anthropology in The Human Condition (Arendt 1958). These three categories are introduced to make sense of data generated as part of an eighteen-month leadership and ethics research project. They enabled the research team to complicate what might have otherwise been reduced to a simplistic binary between ethical/unethical approaches to leadership. 

Using phenomenological enquiry, we deployed questionnaires, interviews and observations to develop 10 case studies. It was not our intention to elaborate upon ethical leadership as a construct. Instead, we are concerned with how leaders in FE frame the ethical challenges they face.  

The paper works from the premise that since the 1980s the sector has been in the grip of a managerial ethos, an ethos which equates educational leadership to a technical-rational enterprise in which questions of educational purpose and value are subsumed beneath the drive for greater efficiency. The cumulative outcome of successive policy changes has taken its toll, leaving further education in an ethically impoverished state in which the role of the leader is reduced to the strategic implementation of policies decided elsewhere. Instead of asking ‘What is ethical leadership’, we explored: How do FE leaders define and respond to the ethical compromises implied by austerity. It is the nature of this tension which we explore, aiming at a conceptual contribution.   

Three narrative strands were identified in our data. We used Arendt's distinction between labour, work and action, as a conceptual frame to ground the storied accounts. We conceptualised - ethical labour and ethical work – as two pervasive but nonetheless constraining modes of ethical deliberation. A third construct, ethical action enabled us to envision a more expansive mode of ethical reasoning. Our conclusion suggests a way out of what we view as the ethical impoverishment of FE. A more secure ethical future for FE colleges is possible when leaders engage in expansive modes of ethical deliberation, ones that appreciate ‘plurality and natality’ (Arendt, 1958): what we have in common and what makes each of us unique. In such spaces staff, students and interested others make meaning of their work together, developing shared commitments to educational flourishing.