Abstract
This study provides an example of critical performative practice in business school leadership learning. Through qualitative research with an academic team and leadership learners, we offer novel insights into critical performativity; where a critical approach becomes performative through various tactics aimed to disrupt the normative, while engaging with practitioners, practice and the normative. We articulate how we facilitate a critical pedagogy and deliver a normative UK Government Senior Leader Apprenticeship with leadership practitioner learners. Using the metaphor of ‘educators as curators’, we theorise our critical performative tactics through a relational pedagogic process of ‘Elegant Curation’. This illustrates how we practically engage in ‘progressive pragmatism’ aiming to impact on leadership practice by simultaneously combining and switching between critical pedagogy and offering alternatives to normative leadership, while delivering normative apprenticeship knowledge, skills and behaviours. We extend understandings of critical performative practice and how critical leadership learning can practically respond to contemporary society and organisational contexts by highlighting how critical performative tactics can both disrupt the normative and ‘deliver’ a Senior Leader Apprenticeship.
Keywords
Introduction
The study draws on a critical performative lens to make sense of how an academic team in a UK business school delivers a normative Government level 7 Senior Leadership Apprenticeship (SLA) programme through a critical leadership pedagogy. There are continuing questions about a lack of practical impact from Critical Management Studies (CMS) and Critical Leadership Studies (CLS) (e.g. Spicer and Alvesson, 2025). This is partly explained by ‘criticizing antagonistically’ what managers and leaders do rather than engaging constructively to impact on practice (Wickert & Schaefer, 2015: 107). Critical performativity is proposed as one way forward (Alvesson and Spicer, 2012; Spicer and Alvesson, 2025; Spicer et al., 2009, 2016). Critical performativity continues critique of power relations and domination in management and leadership, while adding the political – so that critical approaches are no longer anti-performative but become performative – through critical and ‘active and subversive intervention into managerial discourses and practices’ using various tactics, including a normative orientation (Spicer et al., 2009: 538) and micro-transformations (Spicer et al., 2016). There are ongoing definitional arguments about ‘performativity’ and whether critical performativity should or can be achieved (e.g. Alvesson and Spicer, 2012; Butler et al., 2018; Cabantous et al., 2016; Spicer and Alvesson, 2025; Spicer et al., 2009, 2016; Wickert and Schaefer, 2015). We do not intervene in these theoretical debates; rather, we draw on a critical performative lens to aid our sensemaking as academics working with the critical and normative in leadership learning. For us, critical performativity is a critical approach which retains some anti-performativity, in challenging ‘forms of knowledge exclusively serving economic efficiency’ (Cabantous et al., 2016: 200) and which becomes performative when directly engaging with normative frameworks and constructively with leadership practitioners and practice, in ways explicitly aimed to influence and impact on social change by reframing leadership through progressive alternatives (Spicer et al., 2009; Wickert and Schaefer, 2015).
As a normative framework, Government apprenticeships receive little research attention and are curiously absent from Management Learning, despite now being a daily reality for many academics in UK university business schools. The UK Government ramped up apprenticeship education in 2014–2015 (Crawford-Lee, 2016), with Higher Education (HE) apprenticeships supporting apprentices to gain professional registration, licence to practice and to achieve an undergraduate or postgraduate degree while employed. 1 Funding for apprenticeships comes from a financial levy paid to the Government by large organisations with payrolls exceeding £3 million and incentives for smaller organisations (Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), 2016). This policy provides a financially attractive route for organisations to access university leadership development, producing a highly competitive (Bradley et al., 2019) and exponential rise in HE management and leadership apprenticeship programmes. Business, administration and law degree apprenticeships accounted for 47 percent of all UK level 6 and 7 apprentices (2022/2023), with 17,490 apprentices enrolled in level 7 programmes (Chartered Association of Business Schools, 2025) 2 and 71 university ‘training providers’ deliver the Senior Leader Apprenticeship (SLA) programme (UK Government, 2024).
UK apprenticeships are positioned as a ‘significant financial investment in skills and training to build a bigger pool of more highly-skilled labour’ (Fabian et al., 2022: 1398). Apprenticeships prescribe ‘the’ knowledge, skills, and behaviours (KSBs) ‘required for an individual to “be” competent in a particular occupation’ (Crawford-Lee, 2016: 325), that is, leadership. Business school academics are accustomed to designing and delivering curricula to meet professional body and accreditation standards (e.g. Rodgers et al., 2016) and critical scholars may “have” to do the normative as part of their compromise for working in an organisation (Butler et al., 2018). However, learning from how critical scholars “do” the critical and normative is rarely shared (Butler et al., 2018; King, 2015; Spicer et al., 2016) and there are few examples of experimenting with critical performative tactics (which combine the critical and normative) in leadership learning. Our study aims to address this lack.
We set out to make sense of and articulate our own pedagogic practice when delivering a normative SLA through critical leadership pedagogy, undertaking a qualitative study comprising semi-structured interviews with the academic team and analysis of Senior Leader apprentices’ (learners’) reflexive summaries of leadership learning. Our original objective was not to experiment with or ‘test out’ critical performativity in practice, rather we came to the literature through the iterative process of analysing our combination of the critical and normative. Guided by the research question, what can we learn about critical performative tactics when facilitating a critical pedagogy and delivering a normative Government SLA? we make three central contributions. First, we offer novel insights into critical performativity in leadership learning, providing an example of a ‘critical performative approach’ (Alvesson and Spicer, 2012: 368) which engages leadership practitioners as allies in critical theories (Wickert and Schaefer, 2015) and with potential for impact on practice. Second, following Lund Dean and Forray (2020: 527), we use ‘educators as curators’ as a metaphorical tool to express our agency as academics and theorise our critical performative tactics through a relational pedagogic process of ‘Elegant Curation’. This process expresses the intricacies of how academics simultaneously combine and switch between critical pedagogy, offering progressive alternatives to normative leadership while delivering normative apprenticeship KSBs and responding to multiple stakeholders. We theorise the role of academics as curators, how we collaboratively curate critical performative tactics, and engage in curating when facilitating learning, live-in-the-moment. Third, we theorise how critical performative tactics can both disrupt the normative and ‘deliver’ an SLA. This ‘progressive pragmatism’ in asking leadership practitioners how the critical is feasible and relevant in practice (Spicer et al., 2009: 545) advances how critical leadership learning can practically respond to contemporary society and organisational contexts (Reynolds and Vince, 2020) and responds to calls for research into apprenticeships (e.g. Billet, 2016; Mulkeen et al., 2019). Next, we discuss critical pedagogy, UK apprenticeships and how critical performativity engages with the critical and normative.
Critical leadership pedagogy
Critical pedagogy incorporates an emancipatory approach (Freire, 1998) related, for example, to gender, class and race, and interrogates power dynamics impacting on practice. Critical pedagogy is translated in university business studies as critical management and leadership education (e.g. Dehler, 2009; Reynolds, 1999; Reynolds and Vince, 2004), which contests normative understandings and practice, for example, challenging leader-centrism based on ‘largely white, male, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied and neurotypical senior executives’ (Knights et al., 2024: 2) and considering power dynamics, inequalities and oppression (Perriton and Reynolds, 2018). Critical leadership pedagogy is disruptive in refuting approaches that ‘reify leadership by treating it as a thing that can be pinned down and measured’ (Alvesson & Spicer, 2012: 371), are based on heroic models of powerful individuals (Collinson and Tourish, 2015) and leader–follower relationships (Butler et al., 2018), and which teach future leaders to ‘play’ with models and numbers (Geppert, 2010). A critical pedagogy appears in opposition to the UK Government SLA which prescribes the employer-designed KSBs for individuals to achieve, become professionally legitimated, meet skills gaps and benefit the economy (Rowe et al., 2016). From a critical perspective, the SLA legitimates and widens (individual) leaders’ power and domination (Tomlinson et al., 2013; Vince and Pedler, 2018).
After Reynolds (1999) and Perriton and Reynolds (2018), the critical leadership pedagogy designed and facilitated by the academic team questions taken-for-granted assumptions in theory and practice, focuses on power and ideology, recognises subjective and socially constructed multiple realities, and considers privilege, difference, exclusion and discrimination. This takes a social and relational perspective on leadership, recognising learning and leadership as embodied and emotional, and develops reflexive approaches to question assumptions (Reynolds and Vince, 2004). The focus is learning as a ‘reflexive dialogical practice’ (Corlett 2013: 454) where learners and academics together ‘question and surface taken-for-granted aspects of everyday experience’ (p. 456). The pedagogy aims to disrupt understandings of ‘reality, agency, and ways of being and relating’, to recognise how our social relations and practice co-construct realities and how we have ability to change these (Cunliffe and Jun, 2005: 230). This approach to critical leadership learning is grounded in subjectivity, centring on what people do ‘in an everyday sense, and the organisational conditions that people work in’ (Taylor and Ford, 2016: 126).
The critical pedagogy aims to disrupt normative leadership learning by reframing leadership as practice, based on a collaborative agency mobilised through engaged social interaction (Raelin, 2016), and focus on how leadership ‘emerges and unfolds through day-to-day experiences, not as the physical or mental capacity of any one individual’ (Raelin, 2016: 134). Thus, leadership as practice is constructed as situated, relational, co-constructed and a process of ‘becoming’ (Cunliffe, 2009) where emotion, anxiety and desire, power, and critical and creative views are important (Edwards et al., 2013). The pedagogy reconceptualises vulnerability as strength (Corlett et al., 2019), within “safe enough” spaces (Corlett et al., 2021) to support learning, where learners are asked to identify, be reflexive about and challenge normative leadership convention.
The normative senior leader apprenticeship
Apprenticeships drive rapid vocational curriculum design and redesign, disrupting established ways of ‘educating’ through diverse delivery mode types and validation speed (Martin et al., 2020). As such, apprenticeships are particularly troubling to research-intensive UK universities, focused on research-led, full-time, face-to-face delivery of undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. In the University where the study takes place, apprenticeships were first launched in engineering (level 7), computing (level 7) and business (level 7). Apprenticeships are positioned internally as ‘proto-type investment processes’, integrating world-leading research with new sector growth, for example, battery power, digital. In business, rather than retrofit apprenticeship standards to an existing Postgraduate degree (the norm), the academic team designed a critical pedagogy which supports learners to complete new programmes; a level 7 Senior Leader Apprenticeship and/or an MSc in Strategic Leadership.
The Government level 7 SLA is a prescriptive set of 20 knowledge, 21 skills and 5 behaviours mapped to 12 ‘Occupational Duties’, where participants are identified as ‘apprentices’ and expected to complete individual on and off-the-job training. University providers of the SLA often offer further professional body accreditation (e.g. the Chartered Management Institute [CMI]), providing an additional professional pathway to Chartered Manager or Chartered Fellow Status. Apprentices complete on-programme ‘training’ to meet the KSBs outlined in the occupational standard for a minimum of 12 months; undertake 20 percent off-the-job training; and are expected to complete the End Point Assessment (EPA) (a strategic business proposal demonstrating the KSBs and a professional discussion [viva] underpinned by a portfolio of evidence of achieving the KSBs) (Institute for Apprenticeships & Technical Education, 2023).
For academics delivering UK apprenticeships, there are multiple and complex stakeholders beyond normal everyday business school academic practice which exert significant pressure. Academics are accountable to the university and several Government bodies (e.g. the Office for Students, the Education and Skills Funding Agency, and the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills [Ofsted]), the accreditation body (here CMI) and to individual learners, apprentices, and their employers. In this study, the apprentices (learners) are already practitioners in leadership, employed in diverse-sector organisations which draw down the Government levy to pay for employees to enrol onto the part-time, blended apprenticeship as executive leadership development. The University’s status as a ‘training provider’ and its accountability to the CMI and Government (audit, Ofsted inspection and apprenticeship funding) are premised on learners’ timely successful achievement of the prescribed normative standards – this is non-negotiable. These conditions provide substantial demands and constraints. However, there is some flexibility in design and delivery, evident in the ‘different interpretations in apprenticeship curriculum designs’ (Martin et al., 2020: 529) across university providers. Here, the academic team designed and delivered the SLA through a critical pedagogy.
Critical performativity
In combining the normative SLA with a critical pedagogy we turn to the critical performativity literature. Alvesson and Spicer (2012: 375) contend that while critical approaches ‘assume leadership is associated with mainly ‘bad’ things . . . it is also necessary to recognize some of the potential within the concept of leadership’, through ‘a critical performative approach’ that simultaneously considers the ‘potentially negative consequence of leadership’ as well as its ‘potentially positive value’ (p. 368). Critical performativity is when the central task of a critical approach becomes more performative, with a clear asserted aim to pragmatically critique and influence specific debates and discourses (here leadership) towards more progressive forms, aiming for social change through pragmatic and political interventions (Spicer et al., 2009).
In the literature, critical scholars from different tribes are proponents or critics of critical performativity’s meaning and practical application (e.g. Butler et al., 2018; King, 2015; Spicer et al., 2016). This polarised debate is based on whether critical scholars should be for or against engagement with practice and producing performative knowledge (King, 2015). The debate partly rests on critical performativity’s inherent contradiction; rather than challenging dominant discourses, such an approach can extol the critical academic as performing ‘heroic-transformational leadership’ (Butler et al., 2018: 442), based on the ‘right approach . . . which if worked out in advance, will produce positive intervention and transformation’ (King, 2015: 263). Significantly, for this study, we did not start with critical performativity and then seek to operationalise it (we did not work this out beforehand). As academics committed to a critical leadership pedagogy, we came to critical performativity as a lens to help make sense of and theorise our ongoing experiences of (already) combining the critical and normative in leadership learning.
The literature outlines guidelines for critical performativity but offers few examples of operationalising these in practice (Spicer et al., 2009, 2016). Following Spicer et al. (2016), critical performativity involves direct engagement with normative frameworks and practitioners; takes seriously practitioners’ contexts and constraints (Spicer et al., 2009, 2016); is focused on an issue of public interest; engages with a wider public; and involves challenge to underlying social assumptions. A crucial premise for critical performativity is ‘progressive pragmatism in asking questions about what works, what is feasible and what those [in leadership] perceive as relevant’ (Spicer et al., 2009: 545). In doing so, critical performativity considers power as dynamic and unstable, and critiques active discourses, aiming for change (Spicer et al., 2009). Further considerations include an appropriate context, mobilisation, and forums or processes of deliberation, providing space for critique and challenge (Spicer et al., 2009, 2016); (re)framing that appeals to deeply held beliefs and connects with immediate experiences of leadership; and elimination of bad ideas from broader debates (reducing bullshit) through engagement in progressive alternatives (Spicer et al., 2009, 2016). These interventions are to be supported by consistent micro-mobilisations involving specific focused attempts to create spaces of autonomy and micro-transformations of aspects of everyday life (Spicer et al., 2016).
Critical performativity in practice therefore requires ‘detailed and situationally specific engagement with leadership in action . . . combining and switching between performative positions (which largely accept present conditions and constraints) and critical positions (which question existing conditions and emphasize independent thinking)’ (Alvesson and Spicer, 2012: 360). In “doing” critical performativity, we therefore aim to ‘reflect the messy, argumentative, complex nature of reality where multiple subjectivities and viewpoints can be understood, negotiated and reconciled’ (Sutherland and Kelly, 2024: 286) and where various alternatives to leadership domination and exploitation can emerge (Spicer et al., 2009). As noted, there are limited examples of critical performative practice or of engaging with multiple practitioners and/or a normative framework, and the examples highlight complexity, tensions and contradictions in operationalising the approach (Butler et al., 2018; King, 2015).
The study
We construct the Government-levied and controlled SLA, to develop people against defined national leadership standards, as a form of social engineering and ripe for critical performative experimentation; an ‘issue of broader public concern that can be investigated reflexively’ and where, in university education, students are our most vital public (Spicer et al., 2016: 244). As academics in a UK research-intensive business school, we developed a critical leadership pedagogy explicitly aimed to challenge and change leadership assumptions and practice, while engaging directly with the normative SLA framework and leadership learners. The part-time level 7 SLA and MSc in Strategic Leadership were designed, validated, and launched fully online (due to Covid-19) in 2020 and transferred to blended learning in 2021. Learners from both programmes form a single cohort per academic year (five intakes to date), where apprentices exit at the SLA (with a University Post Graduate Diploma) or complete both the SLA and MSc. The programmes are facilitated through an explicit blended learning experience based on the flipped classroom (Bishop and Verleger, 2013), where learners make sense of directed material online, and social learning (Bandura and Walters, 1977) happens in-person and in online spaces, each facilitated by two members of the academic team. The virtual learning environment (VLE) anchors learners through an architecture designed to combine and support the critical pedagogy and the apprenticeship KSBs. Materials are designed, selected and digitised by semester and stage to support learners through this structured architecture. Each module has a weekly topic, where MSc learners and apprentices challenge themselves and their personal and/or organisational practice and apply their learning via directed learning activities which, while based on the critical pedagogy, provide opportunities for apprentices to develop evidence of their changing practice against the normative KSBs.
Learners are expected to engage together in social learning across the blended approach, including online scheduled, online directed (e.g. Discussion Boards), monthly on-campus in-person facilitated learning, online action learning sets, and extra-curricular collaborative space events. This social learning, reflecting situated, relational, co-constructed processes of becoming (Cunliffe, 2009), facilitates co-creation of experiences through process-led, dialogic sensemaking; learners make sense of theory in practice in their personal contexts and learn from each other. Specific support for apprentices comes from the Degree Programme Director (DPD) and the University Apprenticeship Hub which provides skills coaches and liaises with the apprentices’ work-place mentors and employers.
Research approach
We draw upon data from programme materials, interviews with the academic team and learner reflexive summaries of their leadership learning (completed as part of the summative assessment of the capstone module). We follow a social constructionist, relational approach (Cunliffe and Eriksen, 2011) to understand experience and practice. The research was motivated by a desire to make our tacit knowledge explicit and articulate “what we do”. As a team we embedded processes of academic reflexivity in the critical pedagogy and turned inwards towards ourselves to think seriously about our practices (Corlett and Mavin, 2018). As researchers and participants, we share a view of ‘research as a dialogic process of learning’ (Corlett, 2013: 457), engaging in interrelated and emergent processes of making meaning through reflexivity (Corlett, 2013). One academic, who facilitates the programme but was not involved in the design, conducted semi-structured interviews with five academics responsible for the original design and development of the critical pedagogy and programmes, with second and third follow-up interviews with the DPD (for both programmes and involved in the original design). To enable academic participants to ‘engage in dialogue with themselves as they engage with their own experiences’ (Mills, 2001: 286) and to support sensemaking, in individual interviews they were asked to discuss the pedagogy, how and why they designed the critical pedagogy, how they operationalise it, and how they organise to meet the level 7 SLA standards. The interviews, of approximately 2 hours duration, took place online, producing interview transcripts.
Data were analysed by the researcher through literal and interpretative readings and initial and focused coding (Charmaz, 2000) across the data, focusing on key critical concepts. Next, a comparative analysis (Glaser and Strauss, 1967) across participants was completed, categorising codes to develop common meanings (Creswell, 2012). This analysis was presented to participants in individual interpretive discussions and collective reflexive discussions with the team for further refinement. Collective reflexivity focuses a group into reflexivity with some speed (Leggatt-Cook et al., 2011) and is a dynamic relational and dialogic process where individuals, in a safe space with others, work together with collective motivation on a shared issue to produce data. This supported the team to step back and critically question the taken-for-granted, suspend ‘the obvious’, listen to alternative framings, and make sense of multiple perspectives (Gergen, 1999). In particular, collective reflexivity surfaced the team’s struggles in their complex and messy work context, subject to power dynamics and Othered as ‘trainers’ of leaders and recognised the team’s search for valued identities.
By to-ing and fro-ing between data and CLS and critical performativity literature, the team agreed the key elements of their critical pedagogy, articulated the learning architecture and made sense of how they were engaging with critical performativity and its tactics when combining and switching between the critical and normative. As part of this interpretive process, provoked by data from Academic B who explained the positioning of the critical pedagogy with the apprenticeship as ‘an elegant curation, where the pedagogy is the mechanism for learners to make sense of and develop their practice’, the researcher and two members of the academic team, holistically reconsidered the data. Informed by Lund Dean and Forray’s (2020) use of educators as curators as a metaphorical approach, we articulated how we curate the normative framework and critical pedagogy in ways that are aligned with our values (Lund Dean and Forray, 2020) and how the team operationalises critical performative tactics. When presenting the study, we refer to excerpts from the academics’ interviews as ‘power quotes’, selecting what we see as compelling data (Pratt, 2009: 860) to illustrate patterns and understandings across the data.
To include voices of leadership practitioners and provide resonance, we analysed 10 learners’ written reflexive learning summaries taken from the assessment of the MSc capstone module and completed by the first graduating cohort. The learners successfully completed the Senior Leader Apprenticeship (achieving the KSBs and Endpoint assessment) and the MSc. Three team members analysed the reflexive summaries individually and, together in interpretive discussions, agreed key themes evident across the summaries. We then chose illustrative excerpts from six learners. We first discuss the academic team’s complex and messy realities, then our sensemaking of critical performativity in practice using the metaphor of educators as curators, followed by themes from the learners’ reflexive summaries.
Complex and messy realities
From a critical perspective, those in organisational leadership are assumed to hold power and privilege which must be kept at a distance and negatively critiqued (Spicer and Alvesson, 2025). Through a critical performative lens, we view power as unstable, located within socially constructed contexts and constraints (Spicer et al., 2009, 2016); where those with organisational power can also suffer oppression. We illustrate this through the academic team’s situated complex and messy realities. As academics in an “elite” research-intensive business school, we are assumed to hold power. Yet we are mainly academics on Teaching and Scholarship employment contracts and committed to working with leadership practitioners – both of which question our legitimacy in this context. Organisational power lies with academic “stars” on Teaching and Research contracts who, in general, commit to critical approaches and rejection of engagement with leadership and leadership practitioners. Responsible for facilitating learning with leadership practitioners, we experience the discourse of (and regularly hear) “we don’t do leadership here”, “we don’t train leaders”. This ironically constructs the power dynamics and oppression that critical approaches seek to destroy.
At the start of the study, the University viewed the business school as disconnected from business, with an imperative to demonstrate ‘lifelong learning’, deliver UK Government apprenticeship policy and broaden engagement with industry (Basit et al., 2015). Viewed as ‘unfit for purpose . . . present[ing] leadership as a clear set of positive, individual skills and competencies’ (Vince & Pedler, 2018: 859), the apprenticeship vehicle rails against organisational power dynamics and stands in opposition to critical approaches . Engaging with University “management”, Government policy and developing an SLA with leadership practitioners, positions us outside organisational norms, as “trainers” (not “even” Teaching and Scholarship academics). Critical principles firmly fit our personal values, bringing us closer to organisational norms. We chose to combine the SLA with a critical pedagogy; considering situated contexts (Taylor and Ford, 2016) and socially constructed power dynamics, emotions, privilege and difference (Perriton and Reynolds, 2018; Reynolds and Vince, 2004) with material effects. However, critical principles are perplexing for our pedagogic work, due to negativity about leadership, reticent engagement with practitioners (Spicer et al., 2009), and learners find the language difficult to relate to (Grey and Sinclair, 2006).
The power-laden tensions and constraints in our academic context cause us ongoing cognitive dissonance. We construct our experiences as Cinderella workers, performing the (often free labour and under-stairs) academic student housework and the under-valued engagement with leadership practice. Our messy daily realities are of continually combining and switching between the critical and normative. This is exhausting, provoking feelings of being Othered and a lack of belonging and professional value. This messiness is present when researching how we deliver a normative SLA through critical leadership pedagogy. This is challenging to theorise through “credible” academic theory; not theoretically developed enough, too normative and descriptive, or too critical for the normative elements under study. Critical performativity, engaging with both and resonating with our complex realities, provides an interesting lens (Spicer et al., 2009, 2016).
Critical performativity: curators, curation and curating
Through a critical performative lens, the critical pedagogy we designed becomes performative (Spicer et al., 2009) when combined with the normative SLA engaging with leadership learners (already practitioners) and aimed to open up new ways of understanding with desire to change leadership practice (Alvesson and Spicer, 2012). We articulate how we do this by drawing on theoretical critical performative guidelines (Spicer et al., 2009, 2016) and a metaphor of educators as curators to explore critical performative tactics in leadership learning.
Curators of the critical and normative in leadership learning
We begin with the academic curators, to explore how we create critical performative conditions to reduce leadership bullshit, ‘offer progressive alternatives’, and ‘creat[e] forums or processes of deliberation’ for leadership learners to safely ‘question broader social assumptions . . . around these issues’ (Spicer et al., 2016: 244) in combination with the normative Government SLA. As collaborative curators, we assemble, organise and present the critical and normative to leadership practitioners through (what we now understand as) a set of critical performative tactics comprising procedural skills, collaborative activities and ways of producing intellectual knowledge (Fernández, 2011).
At the design stage, while the SLA informed the thinking, the apprenticeship standards ‘definitely did not drive the pedagogy’ (Academic D). We wanted to engage with leadership practitioners and the normative standards through our shared values and critical understandings of leadership, and to disrupt discourses of leadership: We started with what we believed those in leadership would need to consider for the future of the work. . . So, we haven’t done the cookie cutter thing . . . the individual heroic leader, we’ve inverted it. (Academic B)
The explicit aim in delivering the SLA was that the pedagogy should address the critical and disturb established ways of thinking, ‘identify flaws, problems and limitations in current understandings’ (Knights et al., 2024: 1), recognise moments of embodied and emotional everyday experience in messy organisational contexts (Reynolds and Vince, 2020) and confront claims of rationality and objectivity (Reynolds, 1999). We recognised tensions between the critical and normative, in how the team’s social constructionist understandings of leadership and organisations and underpinning expertise (e.g. psychodynamics, gender, critical leadership learning, identity, coaching, and entrepreneurship), including shared commitment to inclusion and diversity, stands in contradiction to developing leaders against a predefined model (Ford and Harding, 2007) – ‘the cookie cutter thing’ – and in direct opposition to the ‘masculine, aggressive and individualistic’ model of leadership (Edwards et al., 2013: 6). However, this had to be pragmatically connected to learners’ experiences and practice, through certain processes which support critical deliberation (Spicer et al., 2009): [Through] three things, critical reflexivity, experiential and relational, and with post experience learners, the whole focus on their experiences, but what’s important are the processes that support the making sense of those experiences. . . . Recognising the moment of experience, the embodied experience, you know, in terms of emotions, being struck, making sense of them, challenging them in terms of alternative practices. (Academic D)
While apprenticeship KSBs prescribe normative expectations of what individual leaders “should” be, our pedagogical interventions conceptualise leadership ‘as practice, focusing on, you know, the collectiveness, the concurrency, collaboration, and compassion’ (Academic B), positioned as relationally distributed practice. Leadership learning is understood as values-led, multidisciplinary, co-created, post-heroic, dialogic and reflexive, as well as ‘social, emergent, processual, embodied, contextual and power laden’ (Academic C). This approach recognises potential in leadership and offers progressive alternatives, while engaging leadership practitioners in their contexts (Alvesson and Spicer, 2012; Spicer et al., 2009). Academic C clarifies how learners’ contexts and engagement in social learning are integral to the pedagogic process: We assume that learners are completely immersed in complex, complicated, workplace contexts. We expect reciprocity from learners in sharing these diverse contexts with each other as part of social learning. We contextualise their learning through exploring leadership practice within these work contexts. (Academic C)
Consistency in and repetition of the team’s mobilising of constructions of leadership as practice and focus on the situated lived realities of what people do in social relations and contexts aim to provoke learners to recognise agency in negotiating ambiguity.
Engaging leadership practitioners in the critical and normative, with the aim of influencing progressive change, provides imperative for the team to work cohesively and reflexively at a programme level, to continually develop the specific VLE learning architecture, and curate the ongoing design of the critical pedagogy and normative standards. As curators, the team works on multifaceted activities, beyond their subject, to develop pragmatic coherence for learners. This is achieved by providing consistent combination (across and within VLE module ‘content’ and social learning spaces) of the normative, through opportunities to develop practice evidence to meet apprenticeship KSBs and the critical, where we provide progressive alternatives: We designed a pedagogy and curriculum which speaks to those KSBs. We map each of the KSBs to a particular module and highlight each week in each module, where we are foregrounding those KSBs. Their role as an apprentice is to develop evidence to demonstrate their progress against these. It doesn’t matter which KSBs they are making progress against at any one time, but they must provide evidence every four weeks. You’ve got at least one ‘challenge-apply’ activity in each module per week so you could potentially have eight pieces of evidence. (Academic D)
The road maps for learners at programme and module levels explicitly identify opportunities to develop evidence for specific SLA KSBs and scaffold the critical pedagogy. A curated programme-level architecture aims to develop a forum providing space for critique and demonstration of normative standards which connects with practical experiences of leadership (Spicer et al., 2009, 2016).
To curate the critical and normative, the team is continually foregrounding and backgrounding their critical principles. Regardless of discipline, epistemologies and academic hierarchy, sometimes the SLA standards must be the priority. This involves ongoing ‘combining and switching between performative and critical positions’ (Alvesson and Spicer, 2012: 360), and for consistency the team curates collaboratively: Together we think very carefully about what we include. . . It’s not just an ability to design, it’s the ongoing redesign, the delivery and continually having that ability to curate through the conversations collaboratively. Absolutely, it has to be collaborative and not seen as an event but as an ongoing process, so that the academic team, even if that morphs and changes, still grows with the pedagogy. (Academic B)
Aware that the approach asks leadership learners immersed in normative organisational contexts to engage with the critical, the academics find value in the normative SLA: It makes everything quite complicated in terms of our Masters quality assurance, all of the [apprenticeship] accreditation. The CMI which we align to as our endpoint assessor, then you’ve got Ofsted, the Institute of apprenticeships and training office and then internally we’ve got the new apprenticeship hub. (Academic B)
As curators, the team develops detailed ‘and situationally specific engagement with leadership in action’ (Alvesson and Spicer, 2012: 360) through knowledge of the SLA and KSBs (some are now CMI members) to engage with the normative, meet apprenticeship legal, financial and quality requirements, and Ofsted inspections.
Engaging in curation (selection, organisation and storytelling)
The academic team engages in the curation (selection, organisation, and storytelling) of material and learning processes aimed to eliminate what we see as bad ideas from leadership debates (bullshit reduction) and emphasise progressive alternatives for practice (Spicer et al., 2009, 2016). Following a flipped classroom approach, the team curates content for the VLE through a critical lens and selects research and analytical frameworks, including practice, policy and case studies which scaffold both the critical approach and normative KSBs. In contrast to normative theories where justice, equality, power, and politics are ignored (Rhodes, 2022), this curation considers the intersectional identification of authors, origin geographies beyond the West, and visible and invisible diversity by combining critical content and online video interviews with practitioners. Topics such as meta-discourses, trans-awareness, neurodiversity and gender and race equity are firmly embedded. Learners respond to this critical performative tactic as ‘both critics and defenders’ (Bowman et al., 2024: 1367) in how this prompts reflexivity and changes perspectives, as well as push backs about why certain “traditional” leadership theories are missing (e.g. leadership styles, leader–follower studies, Great Man theory). Aware of the power of a pedagogy with potential to activate certain valued discourses, there is overt, collaborative discussion among the team, and significantly with learners, of what learning content materials are selected and why: Learners have said why did you pick that paper. I can’t imagine you would usually get those types of questions, whereas here it’s quite frequent. We know why we have selected one over others and I reflexively explain how dominant and invisible voices carry different knowledge. (Academic C)
Academic curation as a critical performative tactic questions assumptions and aims to encourage resistance to the normative all-powerful rational and objective individual leader (with followers). Yet ‘with ambition to have some effects on practice’ (Alvesson and Spicer, 2012: 376), the team’s curation must engage with the normative (e.g. diverse apprenticeship stakeholders, learners and their organisations), constructing new understandings applicable to learners’ working lives and practical leadership work. To simultaneously connect the critical to learners’ deeply held beliefs and immediate experiences of leadership (Spicer et al., 2009, 2016), the team shares the view that We are not creating carbon copy strategic leaders. We have purposefully designed and developed learning processes where learners make sense of and value their own uniqueness in social relations, feel that they belong and understand the challenges, power and privilege and of leadership in the future of work. Especially online, how we organise what we provide in terms of learning structure at a programme, module, week, topic level, that’s so deep. We have to get into learners’ mindsets to consider how they think, feel and how they understand this. It’s got to tell a story without us being there, without us being able to prompt, because the content is anchored in that online space. (Academic B)
The team’s role in curation is to ‘find, critically evaluate, and foster meaningful connections among different “pieces”’ in the collection (Lund Dean and Forray, 2020: 528), deciding on what and how we choose to present ‘knowledge’ to learners. This team curation supports the consistent programme and module-level architecture of ‘explore (content)-challenge (content and practice)-apply (in practice)’ on the VLE and is replicated when facilitating in social learning spaces. This architecture scaffolds opportunities to meet SLA expectations and ‘supports learners to provide evidence of their developing practice’ (Academic E). The ongoing cycle of “explore-challenge-apply” is a critical performative tactic of progressive pragmatism and micro-mobilisation (Spicer et al., 2009, 2016). Learners are asked to engage with critical approaches, be reflexive about their practice, for example, in online Discussion Boards and directed learning exercises, discuss together in social learning spaces, and develop evidence of changed leadership practice to meet normative KSBs. As such, This “explore-challenge-apply” goes through levels of complexity of learning and each of us every week designs a structured guided learning experience that meets all of those expectations. (Academic C)
The curation is organised and communicated through ‘thoughtful [planning], by week, by module, across and within modules . . . there aren’t any accidents’ (Academic B). Consistent curation (of learning objectives, ‘challenge and apply’ exercises, Discussion Board tasks, social learning plans, and assessments) provides coherent and sequential opportunities for apprentices to achieve normative apprenticeship KSBs – as ‘at the end of the day, their employer is also expecting them to become an accredited Senior leadership apprentice’ (Academic D). There is careful curation of this normative with the critical through every learning intervention and its placement, so that learners graduate: Understanding their leadership identity in relation to others, what it means to be globally responsible for the future of work and knowing who they are, their values, ability to be reflexive and inclusive, and the strategic leadership lens they bring to organisations. They also graduate with the ability to demonstrate their progress against the apprenticeship standards. (Academic A)
Table 1 provides detailed examples of the team’s micro-mobilisations, as specific focused attempts to create spaces of autonomy (Spicer et al., 2016) in modules entitled Critical Leadership Perspectives, Strategic Leadership in Complex Systems, Leadership for the Future of Work and Exploring Theory in Practice. Aware that a critical pedagogy and critical performativity risk making the critical ‘normative’ and transforming critical scholars into ‘saviours’ through a “telling” of how to do leadership differently, we are careful not to provide blueprints for practice (Butler et al., 2018; King, 2015). Reflecting progressive pragmatism (Spicer et al., 2009), leadership learners are asked to reflexively consider critical alternatives in relation to their own dilemmas in specific contexts, to consider relevance and feasibility, and how they might translate alternatives into practice, as: We wanted to really foreground socially constructed, emergent learning, focus on language and conversations and be disruptive about dominant discourses. We focus on exploring and challenging the everyday practices, the mundane everyday conversations. The decisions you might make at work. But if you can’t take what you’ve explored and what has ‘unsettled’ you back into practice – then what’s the point? For us, developing something that was really practice-based and . . . especially you know the design of explore-challenge-apply, that speaks to the SLA . . . but the key – the core focus on reflexivity, so that learners understand themselves in relation to others personally, professionally. (Academic B)
Illustrations of critical performative micro-mobilisations (combining the critical & the normative).
The normative reflects the Senior Leader Master’s Degree Apprenticeship (SLMDA) standards.
The team’s curation, which combines the twin and seemingly diametrically opposed critical pedagogy and normative SLA, relies on academic relational skills and commitment, and is time- and work-intensive.
Curating (live, in-the-moment, during social learning)
To facilitate the critical pedagogy and deliver the SLA, the academic team engages in curating, a practice and method of generating, mediating and reflecting experience and knowledge (Fernández, 2011). Curating is the work the academics ‘do’ with learners drawing on different learning perspectives and tools when facilitating in social learning spaces to combine and switch between the critical and normative; the live, in-the-moment, connecting and building on experiences within and between different academics, leadership learners, their contexts, the apprenticeship, and critical theories. This relational dialogic work is a critical performative tactic which relies on the team’s abilities to collaborate with one another and with learners, to facilitate ideas and discussions aligned to critical principles and to co-create learning experiences that have immediate practice utility for work-based learners: I just think the ongoing curating, particularly it’s the ability to curate across different learning environments . . . in terms of the online space, synchronous or asynchronous, then you’ve got the in-person space, you’ve got to have that ability, that ability has to be there. Sometimes being vulnerable in the moment and making the connections. (Academic B)
The academic team shares and embeds a relational and intersubjective understanding of the social world as ‘a way of thinking about who leaders are in relation to others within the complexity of experience’ which is socially mediated (Cunliffe and Eriksen, 2011: 1434). This involves the team being part of, not separate to, the learning process and requires a level of vulnerability where ‘relational interaction is front and centre here’ (Sutherland and Kelly, 2024: 287). As an example, Academic E uses their own life story, values, social identities and personal experiences of Othering during an exercise on power and privilege: I’m prepared to make myself vulnerable and share information about me. For example, using the Privilege Walk questions in the classroom – I stay silent while the learners look at me and answer the questions. I then share the answers and parts of my story using photographs of various life and political events and geographical places – the aim is to illustrate how we are socialised into our values and how our social identities impact on our experiences and how assumed power and privilege are unstable. (Academic E)
This way of connecting with leadership learners is: ‘relational but also social, so it’s about appreciating the wealth of experiences within the collective and the processes through which individuals make sense of those experiences’ (Academic D). Academics are not just communicators of knowledge and learners are not passively receiving information. Both academics and learners are ‘(re)-negotiating their own subject positions and taking an active role, with their sensemaking coming under the microscope’ (Sutherland and Kelly, 2024: 288). Rather than a normative leadership learning atmosphere of ‘objective, rationale presenteeism’, we encourage emotional and embodied learning and recognise vulnerability as strength (Corlett et al., 2019) for learners and academics. At times this means being vulnerable as academic co-constructor and at others this curating involves holding, noticing and knowing learners: [We] engage learners in ways that they’re responding in an emotional and embodied way to the material, not just a common cognitive way, so that they’re all in. (Academic A)
Together, the team and learners make considerable investment in developing psychological “safe enough” learning spaces (Corlett et al., 2021) and embedding understandings and practical operation of inclusion and belonging (e.g. Shore et al., 2018). Learners and academics learn to drop the rational mask of invulnerability (Corlett et al., 2019) and become more comfortable with feeling uncomfortable through a shared, connected and personal learning process. As such, academic curating in social learning spaces involves becoming vulnerable, recognising and acknowledging difference, speaking openly of power, reflexivity, criticality, practice and providing opportunities for sensemaking: We facilitate and support sensemaking and co-creation through social learning. It’s the glue, in holding the learners and their contexts in relation to one another and in their learning. We develop a psychologically ‘safe enough’ developmental cohort, where learners’ uniqueness is valued, and they engage in social learning where they make sense of their experiences. (Academic A)
These “safe enough” forums for social learning are based on being always in relation to each other, subjectively constructing different and shared realities (Cunliffe and Eriksen, 2011). As a critical performative tactic, curating initiates the conditions where we can develop a sensibility to how we each understand the normative and critical differently (Bowman et al., 2024), co-constructing ‘productive conversations’ (Sutherland and Kelly, 2024: 280) which change our views and create something new (Bowman et al., 2024).
Curating is a process of facilitating social learning in-the-moment, grounded in critical content, normative standards, and academics’ and learners’ subjective experiences, which are meaningful to the varied cohort and to each leadership learner’s context and learning, that is, apprentices and KSBs and diverse organisational sectors and sizes. Curating each social learning session is different because the learners’ and academics’ experiences are different. This collaborative curating demands emotion work from academics and time for reflexively debriefing the facilitation of in-person and online social learning. What happens in one social learning space facilitated by two academics may inform and change what happens in the next social learning space with different academics. This curating is “high stakes”, requires “pivot[ing] in-the-moment” and can be intimidating for academics: You have to have the ability to do it in-the-moment and build on connecting work-based learners’ experiences and, beyond facilitation, it’s co-creation in-the-moment. We have to pivot in-the-moment, responding to what’s happening in the room, in the social exchanges between learners and with us. It’s the responsiveness in the room. We have to be able to make sense and relate any issue to each learner’s work-based context, how this can be applied to their learning, whether they are apprentices or MSc learners. It’s high stakes social learning where we are part of that and it’s different to full-time teaching because you won’t see them again next week. One face-to-face session is a quarter of their (face-to-face) learning on a module. (Academic B)
Curating the critical and normative is challenging and requires intense, often embodied and emotional, relational work with other academics and in-the-moment with learners. This type of facilitation is not for everyone: There is a tension, as beyond the academic team who designed the critical pedagogy, we do not get to choose who we want to join the team. It’s important that you’ve got people in this space that really want to do this and feel equipped to do this, because it’s a different ask. (Academic A)
Academic curating in-the-moment combines the critical and normative in ways which have resonant practice application, contextually sensitised to learners’ particular environments. However, this involves intuitively ‘picking our battles’ in-the-moment with learners, as some defend the normative, while others embrace the critical at various times and in different ways so that we are holding the ‘disparate and conflicting opinions . . . from students’ (Lund Dean and Forray, 2020: 531). When curating, we have to find the skill and intuition to support leadership learners to ‘navigat[e] among different roles and positions from which to experience the collection’ (Lund Dean and Forray, 2020: 530). In effect, academics and learners ‘exist’ in both the normative and the critical at the same time, as well as developing capacity to switch in between the two. This is a liminal space, mirroring our own academic context and leadership learners’ complex and messy realities, where we ‘switch from one to the other . . ., oscillating between “in” and “out”, “same” and “other”’ (Ybema et al., 2011: 21). Curating therefore demands that academics collaborate with learners and each other in ways which require a different way of being. While complex and involving emotion work, this has potential to create fertile ground where more progressive leadership learning can emerge and where learners can develop a sensibility to critical approaches which can have practical application.
Learner reflexive summaries
Here we turn to the learners’ reflexive summaries and discuss learners’ engagement with our critical performative micro-mobilisations and explore potential for micro-transformations (Spicer et al., 2009, 2016). The learners graduated from the first cohort and engaged in the critical pedagogy and successfully completed the SLA (meeting all normative requirements and KSBs). We begin with how critical performative tactics can support learners to recognise potential in both the critical and normative (Sutherland and Kelly, 2024), illustrated by how they express a combination of the critical pedagogy and SLA normative standards in their writing. For example, From the first module as I started to understand the many facets of leadership and started to question my assumptions on what was required or expected of a leader within these areas, I started to recognise I had significantly more knowledge and skills than I had given myself credit for, particularly within collaborative relationships and relational leadership. This low self-awareness was also affecting my confidence and credibility with other stakeholders. . . . The increased awareness and knowledge regarding social responsibility has increased my involvement in ED&I and social value projects. (Participant A, woman)
The learner conveys capacity to question normative assumptions (‘what was expected’) while simultaneously recognising ‘knowledge and skills’. They express increased awareness to alternative views of leadership and how learning provokes social change through new motivation for ‘ED&I and social value projects’. The reflexive summaries demonstrate learners’ growing critical awareness, with the following excerpt illustrating recognition of how power dynamics impact on ‘ideal’ organisational transparency and how these dynamics may shape future leadership practice: As I started analysing the research findings, I was struck hearing how public sector officers were not able to be transparent as it would not satisfy leaders or politicians. This clear affront to SDG 16 to build sustainable, effective and transparent institutions shook me. Deep-down, I think I knew this might be the case, but to hear it so explicitly created a dissonance that I found hard to process and like at no other point on the course. . . . Already, I feel a responsibility to shape X’s approach as it evolves. However, seeing how other senior colleagues have appeared to resign to the will of their organisations, I feel like I may have limited ability to influence a decision, in which case I’m not sure how comfortable I would be to continue to support the organisation’s approach. Until then, I will attempt to lead by example, focusing on how I can demonstrate transparency through my own practice, and through the work of my team, particularly when sharing data internally in a politically safe environment. (Participant B, man)
The learner conveys how, when engaging with the critical, those in leadership can take on ‘responsibility to shape’ practice and then feel shaken, experiencing cognitive dissonance when the critical and normative cannot be reconciled. They illustrate the tension of how, while raised awareness can bring new understandings of messy realities, this leaves them unsure of ‘how comfortable’ they are in continuing to support the organisation. Learners also articulate conscious awareness of power and privilege, inequalities and exclusion in organisations. In the next excerpt, this has an impact on the learners’ self-awareness in relation to others: [I received] critical feedback related to how outspoken I can be and how this might impact others. Though my initial thought was that I would need to speak up less, once I reflected on it using Gibbs Reflective Cycle and discussing it with my mentor, I realised this was not necessarily the case. We questioned between us whether this was connected to me being a woman and pondered whether a man would ever receive such feedback. (Participant D, woman)
Through raised awareness to gendered power dynamics and relational practice (‘questioned between us’), the learner illustrates new understandings that help make sense of their realities. Engaging learners with the critical, combined with the normative, constructs different ways of seeing which cannot then be ‘unseen’ and, as the following excerpt illustrates, this can also change learners’ motivations for leadership practice: Until I started this [programme], I had not heard of the term microaggression and started to seek out more reading. This increased my awareness, and I began to observe microaggressions at all levels. Examples that stand out are during online meetings where men are selected to talk first, even if they weren’t first to raise a hand, and an incident in which I witnessed a member of staff being called [a Western name] because it was easier to say than her African name. This made me frustrated, as someone who felt very aware of the equality agenda . . . I realised I had changed position. My knowledge had grown, I felt frustrated that microaggressions happen and I wanted to create change. (Participant F, woman)
The three learner excerpts illustrate simultaneous emotionality (cognitive dissonance, wondering if they should become someone else, and frustration) associated with combining the critical and normative, and indications of micro-transformation in their everyday practice (Spicer et al., 2016), ‘question[ing] existing conditions and emphasiz[ing] independent thinking’ (Alvesson and Spicer, 2012: 360). Learners convey developing critical awareness with potential for translation into leadership practice, for example, taking an alternative approach to the normative, recognising leadership as collective practice (Raelin, 2016) and using ‘position power’ on behalf of others: Gaining a deeper understanding of myself, of power and privilege, intergenerational differences, leaderful practice, strategy as practice and entrepreneurial thinking have all changed the way I work. This knowledge has given me greater confidence and a framework to apply my values in my leadership, particularly in situations where I am able to use my positional power and influence to amplify the voices of others. (Participant C, woman)
The reflexive summaries surface how critical performative tactics in leadership learning have potential to question taken-for-granted assumptions, disrupt power dynamics and encourage awareness to the ‘emancipatory potential of leadership’ (Alvesson and Spicer, 2012: 369). For example, raising awareness to ‘promote diversity and inclusion’, ‘shape inclusivity’ and ‘create belonging . . . [and] equality’: I learnt to acknowledge my power and privilege, this has been an important part of my journey to fully understand diversity, equity, and inclusion. Previously, I had felt confident that I recruited and managed a diverse workforce. Learning helped me understand the importance of leadership to promote diversity and inclusion within my organisation. Shore et al. (2018) led me to understand the difference between diversity and inclusion and how leadership practices shape the inclusivity of the workforce and create a uniqueness and belongingness for individuals. I applied my learning to the team and developed my knowledge regarding Muslim religious celebration and beliefs; I restructured the rotas to give a Muslim colleague evenings off during Ramadan, to breakfast with their family. Once I understood their perspective, I shared this knowledge with the rest of the team . . . this created a belongingness and open acceptance of different cultures within the business. Once Ramadan was over the colleague approached me with the idea to create a Tik Tok business account and to approach Muslim community groups to visit our venue. Reflexively, learning to understand and create equality within the team created the trust and confidence from the employee to bring innovative ideas forward, and help the business grow. This supported my learning and demonstrated the positive effects of inclusive culture for innovation and change. (Participant E, man)
The excerpt conveys how, in “safe enough” conditions and with space to deliberate the critical and normative, learners can engage with a progressive reflexive, collaborative and inclusive reframing of leadership (Spicer et al., 2009, 2016). Considered holistically, the learner excerpts express how, when curating the critical and normative, critical performative tactics have potential to raise awareness to subjective social relations and unpredictable relational, situated leadership practice grounded in power dynamics (Vince and Pedler, 2018), as well as our ability to change these (Cunliffe and Jun, 2005) – while simultaneously developing evidence of learners’ progress against normative KSBs in practice. In terms of overall normative outcomes, three SLA cohorts have graduated to date, with apprentices achieving a 100 percent success rate, and 68 percent awarded distinctions.
Critical performativity: an elegant curation?
In articulating how we facilitate a critical pedagogy and deliver an SLA, the study provides an example of critical performative practice and extends research exploring UK Government apprenticeship programmes. First, we contribute new insights into critical performativity in leadership learning and highlight possibilities for progressive impact on leadership practice. Our practical “doing” of critical performativity is not the same as inserting a critical module or critical elements into an existing normative programme or retrofitting professional body requirements. Nor do we claim to be ‘“heroic change makers” . . . single-handedly able to stimulate critical reflection among practitioners and provoke radical change in organizations’ (Butler et al., 2018: 428). Rather, we are continually juggling how we value, negotiate with and combine the critical and normative at programme level and across modules, with no guarantees or predictable consequences (Spicer et al., 2016). Critical performativity does, however, support us to reflexively make sense of and articulate how we teach and to question why and what we teach, as we aim to reframe opposing leadership concepts, theories and practice ‘with the hope of having an impact on practice more widely’ (Sutherland and Kelly, 2024: 292).
Informed by theoretical guidelines for critical performativity (Spicer et al., 2009, 2016), we theorise a normative Government SLA as a critical performative issue of public concern and leadership learners and their organisations as our public. With an explicit aim to “lead” with a critical pedagogy, we conceptualise a learning infrastructure and learning spaces as performative micro-mobilisations (Spicer et al., 2016), where we combine and switch between the critical and normative, so that they ‘dance together in the same arena’ (Sutherland and Kelly, 2024: 281). We theorise how we insert progressive alternatives with possibilities to disrupt normative leadership discourses and practice, while simultaneously meeting normative standards. This includes organised emphasis on the socially constructed, emotional and political and how multiple subjectivities, intersections and power dynamics ‘exist, interact, quarrel and play’ in leadership practice (Sutherland and Kelly, 2024: 287).
Our micro-mobilisations create spaces of potential autonomy (Spicer et al., 2009), bringing together leadership practitioners from different organisations to talk ‘about issues that trouble them’, engage in active critique of practice and consider progressive alternatives (Spicer et al., 2016: 242), within the consistent ‘explore-challenge-apply’ architecture. This architecture is a critical performative tactic firmly grounded in practitioners’ contexts. Other tactics for combining the critical and normative are; academics working collaboratively and consistently at programme and module levels; investing time and emotion with learners to develop “safe enough” spaces for critique; committing to social learning for learners’ sensemaking of theory in practice and learning from each other; and explaining our choices and being prepared to have these criticised by learners. Learner excerpts illustrate how the critical performative tactics hold possibility to produce learning dynamics where meaning making ‘not only resides in the tutor-as gatekeeper of knowledge but as something that any student is capable of’ (Sutherland and Kelly, 2024: 288). Learners express constructions of new progressive understandings to help navigate ambiguity, increase agency in developing criticality (Sutherland and Kelly, 2024), and convey potential for micro-transformations (Spicer et al., 2016), through conscious awareness of power and privilege and inequalities and exclusion; developing different ways of seeing that cannot be unseen; changing motivations; taking up responsibility for change; and translating learning into leadership practice.
As insights about critical performativity in leadership learning are largely missing from the critical performative practice debate (Alvesson and Spicer, 2012; Butler et al., 2018; King, 2015; Spicer and Alvesson, 2025; Spicer et al., 2009, 2016) our second contribution, using the metaphor of ‘educators as curators’ (Lund Dean and Forray, 2020: 527), is theorising how we operationalise critical performative tactics through a relational pedagogic process of “Elegant Curation”. As the verb ‘curate’ derives from the Latin curare, ‘to care’, ‘it is not that we care, but how we care [as an academic team] that offers new ways of thinking about teaching and learning practices’ in a values-based process (Lund Dean and Forray, 2020: 528, italics original). Elegant Curation provides language for and theorises the intricacies of how academics collaboratively curate critical performative tactics and engage in curating when combining the critical and normative. We contribute curating, live in-the moment, as a critical performative tactic with utility beyond leadership learning. As ‘critical ideas don’t become performative on their own’ (Spicer et al., 2016: 239), relational curating connects with learners’ immediate experiences of leadership. For facilitators, this requires oscillation between the normative and the critical simultaneously (Ybema et al., 2011); foregrounding and backgrounding the critical in relation to the normative; engaging in emotion work and becoming vulnerable with practitioners, while holding practitioners in “safe enough” spaces; and, engaging relationally, co-constructing a sensibility to understand differently the critical and normative (Bowman et al., 2024) by facilitating ‘productive conversations between the two’ (Sutherland and Kelly, 2024: 280).
As a process, Elegant Curation conveys how social realities are dynamic, not static, and helps us catch reality in flight (Pettigrew, 1998); it accounts for and explains the what, why and how of our critical and normative combinations, and links between leadership context, learning processes and outcomes, and theorises what we do as academics ‘to mobilise others in a system of interrelationships, and to visualise our tactics’ (Thomas and Thomas, 2011: 531).
Critical performative practice through Elegant Curation has potential for social change but takes time, energy and effort. We extend understandings of the negotiations, tensions and compromises that critical scholars can experience when engaging with critical performativity and practitioners. As a subjective process of becoming, “elegance” is only achieved through coherence, clarity and concise communication, reliant upon an academic team with continued commitment to the critical and normative combination, and engagement in emotion work. This can be complex, messy and precarious; easily disrupted by new arrivals to the team, changes in our individual motivations, and learners who resist the process.
We have not (yet) felt the need to moderate our critical ethos for leadership practitioners (as identified by Butler et al., 2018) and, following King (2015), have reconciled engagement with the normative. While we may be accused of doing ‘very soft politics of benign [leadership] rather than . . . politics of emancipation’ (Cabantous et al., 2016: 202), we are at least doing something, experimenting in practice and aiming for social change. Significantly, critical performativity has a positive impact for the academic team, moving us away from theoretical and (our) organisational binaries of good-bad (Sutherland and Kelly, 2024). It supports agency to theorise how both critical and normative perspectives have ‘potential value and can be presented in dialogue’ (Sutherland & Kelly, 2024: 285), so that engaging with the normative SLA through critical pedagogy is no longer an Othered compromise (Bowman et al., 2024).
Third, we contribute how critical performative tactics can both disrupt the normative and “deliver” an SLA, advancing knowledge of how critical leadership learning can practically engage with contemporary society and organisational contexts (Reynolds and Vince, 2020) and respond to calls for research into curriculum design, pedagogies and epistemologies in university apprenticeships (Billet, 2016; Mulkeen et al., 2019). All training providers of SLAs must support apprentices to meet the same normative Government standards. What differentiates “training” providers is how they do this. We mobilised a new programme-long critical pedagogy across all learning activities and made explicit our critical aim to disrupt apprentices’ established ways of thinking and emphasise reflexive, collaborative and inclusive leadership practice and, in spending organisations’ mandatory apprenticeship levies, to support practitioners to meet normative leadership standards. Our pragmatic progressive approach (Spicer et al., 2009, 2016) directs learners to explore and critically question taken-for-granted assumptions, challenge and work to reduce power dynamics, and construct and apply relational and emancipatory leadership practice, while responding to normative contexts and imperatives. This approach, where academics and learners exist in the normative and critical, combining and switching between the two, both disrupts the normative and ‘delivers’ the SLA, evidenced by learners’ increasing criticality in their excerpts and their success rate in meeting normative apprenticeship standards. The study thus provides new insights which advance innovative approaches to delivering UK Government apprenticeships.
Tricky bits
Critical performativity ‘involves developing insights that are adapted to context and can inspire action under current conditions and constraints’ (Alvesson and Spicer, 2012: 379) and, in effect, this is what the team does in its own organisational context. Subject to power dynamics and expected to contribute to University strategy and deliver an SLA (additional income and postgraduate students), we now realise how we had carefully decided ‘what kind of performativity we want[ed]’ (Spicer et al., 2009: 554) and took progressive action in oppressive circumstances, as a way to ‘live with’ and ‘transform . . . power relations’ (King, 2015: 263). However, combining the critical and normative in university leadership learning is not easy and comes with some bruising and scars for the team and leadership learners. Our context is Othering, demanding political sensitivity, and emotion work which continues when engaging in critical performative practice with leadership learners which brings identity threats for both them and us. Critical performativity can risk the critical becoming ‘the hero-saviour’ (Butler et al., 2018: 442). This risk comes starkly into frame when learners experience cognitive dissonance when the critical and normative are irreconcilable and/or embrace the critical to such an extent they no longer want to work for their organisations – yet for learners to complete the programme and for the University to receive the fees, then learners must remain employed.
There are various learner pushbacks and frustrations and, as an academic team, we can struggle and become frustrated, which is tricky. While learners have not (yet) pushed for critical blueprints or quick fix solutions (Butler et al., 2018; King, 2015), they push for some normative leadership theory and psychometrics (not provided), and challenge critical alternatives, for example, for being out of date – anything prior to 2023 is “years ago”. Also, each cohort raises how they are spending too much or not enough time on the normative apprenticeship. Getting ‘right’ the combination of critical and normative is difficult. Now in cohort five we recognise a programme rhythm, where generally, in the first year, learners embrace the critical and, in the second year, focus on the apprenticeship; we are continually holding and rebalancing their focus. For the academic team, delivering the SLA through a critical pedagogy works against University norms, requiring (to some extent) commitment to “free labour” outside normative workload models, as every administrative procedure and process is at odds with established ways of “doing education” and ‘the career path for those interested in student-centric and innovative pedagogy is not an optimal one’ (Bowman et al., 2024: 1364).
Future research
The study opens up new research terrain for leadership learning and, we hope, encourages others to engage in critical performative experimentation. Future research into operationalising critical performativity in learning contexts would deepen understandings of the motivations and challenges for academics and learners. As Government-driven education apprenticeships operate globally, for example, Australia, Brazil, Denmark, Egypt, England, Finland, Germany, India, Malaysia and South Africa (Chankseliani and Anuar, 2019), future exploration into creative, research-led approaches would be useful to develop knowledge and innovation. Future research avenues also include the identities ascribed to academics who facilitate university apprenticeships, and how apprenticeship programmes are valued and supported (or not). Exploring academics’ reflexive experiences of facilitating apprenticeships would be illuminating future research.
To conclude, we contribute novel insights from critical performativity in leadership learning when facilitating a critical pedagogy and delivering a normative Government SLA. While we appreciate, and as shown in the literature (e.g. Butler et al., 2018; King, 2015), that critical scholars may resist any combination of the critical with the normative, we hope to have made a persuasive argument that, despite the SLA “training” of individual leaders against national standards, there is value and potential, through combination with a critical pedagogy, for critical performative impact on leadership practice.
