Cultivating national leaders in an elite school: Deploying the transnational in the national interest

Abstract

This paper explores the leadership cultivation practices of one elite school in Singapore. We point to the links between the habitus of the Singapore state and that of the school showing how different components of the school’s leadership curriculum deploy the transnational in order to produce leaders for the nation. In essence, we argue that the school is involved in a form of tactical globalisation which matches neatly that of the state itself. We situate this study in the sociology of elite education with a view to contributing to two new lines of inquiry: the first about elite schools in Asia and the second about elite schools and globalisation. In so doing, we deploy a Bourdieusian perspective while also asking how successfully his concepts travel to the Singaporean context. The paper draws on a larger multinational, multi-sited ethnographic study of elite schools and globalisation.