Purposed-leadership: neoliberal subjectivity and India’s education social entrepreneurs

The Indian Education Reform Movement (Ball 2016a) is a multi-sited network of non-government organisations (NGOs) aiming to ensure the provision of quality schooling across India. The Movement weaves together diverse spiritual, political and cultural discourses – from neoliberal meritocracy, management leadership theory, neo-Buddhism, and Gandhian sewa (service) – to produce a narrative in which the individual is the trope through which social change occurs.

At the forefront of the Movement are university-educated middle-class individuals who launch ‘start-up’ social enterprises to counter specific ‘problems’ with universal education provision. This thesis explores the founders and entrepreneurially-minded employees of these new Delhi-based education NGOs. I explore how a focus on self – self-awareness, self-discipline, self-management – becomes central to how these educators envision school reform. Here, the self is the locus of social change, leadership is the disposition to value, and education interventions must direct charges to develop their leadership ‘skills’. Leadership is equated with self-discipline, self-confidence, and self-belief, and is important for two reasons: (1) leaders are not beneficiaries: if every child is a leader, they will lead themselves out of their own social or economic deprivation; (2) only leaders have the self-discipline to practise self-reflection and discover their purpose within. Educators and children must locate a personalised purpose and develop the ‘skill’ of leadership to realise this purpose.

Hence, I introduce the term purposed-leadership as the central organising concept through which I explore the emotional lifeworlds and professional interventions of Delhi’s start-up NGO educationalists. As liberalisation’s (grand)children, middle-class graduates join education NGOs, learn to value purposed-leadership, and discover social entrepreneurship as the method by which they can both practise purposed-leadership and develop a self-image in which they are impactfully educating the nation.

I explore how this preoccupation with purposed-leadership produces a specific type of neoliberal subject who is caught between the desire to manifest an authentic, inner self, and the pressure to succeed in the free market world of grants, funding, and sponsorship which ‘start-up’ NGOs require. The affective tension felt by these entrepreneurial educationalists becomes a relation of cruel optimism: their desire for sovereignty and autonomy (purposed-leadership) pulls against their desire for community, solidarity, i.e. their authentic relational self. Concomitantly, I explore how a focus on self-reflection and self-management leaves educators blind to the historical and social structures which continue to reproduce inequality in India.