Critical performativity in leadership learning: Curating the critical and normative in a government senior leader apprenticeship

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.