The new prudentialism in education: actuarial rationality and the entrepreneurial self

Educational Theory

Volumn 55, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 123-137

  Peters, Michael A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 38149071464     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.0013-2004.2005.00002.x     Document Type: Article

References (40)

1. Graham Burchell, "Liberal Government and Techniques of the Self," Economy and Society 22, no. 3 (1993): 267-282.
2. This heightened urgency is evident in the growth of risk management and risk-management education programs, especially since public institutions (such as schools) have come to be seen as increasingly vulnerable. For example, some schools in the united States have introduced security systems based on the latest iris-recognition technology.
3. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992), 21, 183.
4. See Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 1990); and Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self Identity (Cambridge: Polity, 1991).
5. I am grateful to the editor for raising this point.
6. National Commission on the Excellence of Education, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, 1983), http://www.ed.gov/pubs/ NatAtRisk/risk.html.
7. Ibid.
8. William Bennett et al., "A Nation Still at Risk," Policy Review 90 (July-August 1998), http://www. policyreview.org/jul98/nation.html (italics in original). This report is based on the proceedings of the Nation Still At Risk Conference, Washington, DC, April 1998, an event sponsored by the Heritage Foundation, Empower America, the Center for Education Reform, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.
9. Ibid.
10. Michel Foucault, "Governmentality," in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, eds. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 87-104.
11. Ibid., 89.
12. Ibid., 92.
13. For more on this notion of the political economy as "science," see Deborah Redman, The Rise of Political Economy as a Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997).
14. Pat O'Malley, "Neo-liberalism, Advanced-liberalism and Neo-conservatism: Problems of Genealogy and Rationalisation in Governmentality" (paper presented at the University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand, 1998).
15. Boris Frankel, "Confronting Neoliberal Regimes: The Post-Marxist Embrace of Popularism and Realpolitik," New Left Review, 226 (1997): 57-92.
16. For more on his connection to this critical tradition, see Foucault's autobiographical entry, "Foucault," in Dictionnaire des Philosophes, eds. Encyclopaedia Universalis and Albin Michel (Paris: PUF, 1998). He published this under the pseudonym Maurice Florence. See also Paul Rabinow, "The History of Systems of Thought," in Michel Foucault: The Essential Works, vol. 1, Ethics, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Allen Lane and Penguin Press, 1997), xl-xlii.
17. I have addressed the importance of this approach specifically in relation to understanding the neoliberal paradigm of education and social policy elsewhere. See Michael A. Peters, "Education, Enterprise Culture and the Entrepreneurial Self," Journal of Educational Enquiry 2, no. 2 (2001): 58-71.
18. David Burchell, '"Liberalism' and Government: Political Philosophy and the Liberal Art of Rule," in Foucault: The Legacy, ed. Clare O'Farrell (Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology, 1997), 375.
19. See Arnold I. Davidson, "Structures and Strategies of Discourse: Remarks Towards a History of Fou-cault's Philosophy of Language," in Foucault and His Interlocutors, ed. Arnold I. Davidson (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 1-17. In this essay Davidson reports upon and translates a fragment from a lecture Foucault gave in Japan in 1978 (roughly the point at which he was developing his notion of " governmentality"). In this lecture Foucault made the following comment regarding Anglo-American philosophy: "For Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy it is a question of making a critical analysis of thought on the basis of the way in which one says things. I think one could imagine, in the same way, a philosophy that would have as its task to analyze what happens every day in relations of power, a philosophy that would try to show what they are about, what are the forms, the stakes, the objectives of these relations of power. A philosophy, accordingly, that would bear rather on relations of power than on language games, a philosophy that would bear on all these relations that traverse the social body rather than the effects of language that traverse and underlie thought. One could imagine, one should imagine something like an analytico-political philosophy" (p. 3).
20. Michel Foucault, "The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom," in Michel Foucault: The Essential Works,vol. 1, Ethics, ed. Rabinow, 300.
21. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose, eds., Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism and Rationalities of Government (London: University College London Press, 1996), 8.
22. Elsewhere I have dealt explicitly with Foucault's notion of governmentality, especially in relation to education. See Michael A. Peters, "Foucault, Discourse and Education: Neoliberal Governmentality," in Poststructuralism, Politics and Education (Westport, Connecticut, and London: Bergin and Garvey, 1996), 79-92.
23. Barry et al., eds., Foucault and Political Reason.
24. Ibid., 23.
25. Ibid.
26. Pat O'Malley, "Risk and Responsibility," in Foucault and Political Reason, eds. Barry et al., 189-208. I would like to note here that I do not describe myself as an Anglo- or neo-Foucauldian. While I hold that the problematic developed out of his governmentality paper and related interviews holds theoretical promise, I think it is a mistake to base a problematic on such slender pickings. I would rather (1) take Foucault's corpus as a whole and work on the relations between governmentality and his wider "project"; or (2) view Foucault as part of a movement in contemporary French thought that has become homogenized as "poststructuralism," but that has historical relations to a range of thinkers (including Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Max Weber) and connections to many of Foucault's "teachers" and contemporaries (including Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Louis Althusser, and Gilles Deleuze).
27. See http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/social-security/.
28. Economic and Social Research Council, "Executive Summary," in Cultures of Consumption Research Programme: Phase II Specification, http://www.consume.bbk.ac.uk/about.html (select the "Revised Specification" link to download this document).
29. U.K. Department of Trade and Industry, Modern Markets: Confident Consumers (London: Department of Trade and Industry, 1999), http://www.dti.gov.uk/consumer/whitepaper/overview.htm.
30. The examples cited here were suggested by an anonymous reviewer of this paper.
31. Frank Trentmann, "Beyond Consumerism: New Historical Perspectives on Consumption" (London: ESRC-AHRB Research Programme, 2002), http://www.consume.bbk.ac.uk/publications.html. This work will be cited as BC in the text for all subsequent references.
32. This section draws on Peters, "Education, Enterprise Culture and the Entrepreneurial Self."
33. Self-capitalization refers to decisions to invest in the self, especially in cases where paying off the investment will take several years (for example, in pursuing an advanced degree). Self-presentation refers to the new emphasis on symbolic goods and to the ways in which the ethos of self-presentation prevails in a symbolic economy (for example, personal grooming, personal style, dress, body shape, body language, verbal presentation, and increasingly the ability to change one's overall appearance to suit different situations). Self-branding refers to identifying the self with a product line (as in proclaiming "I'm a Levi's person"). And a good example of self-virtualization is creating a personal Web page.
34. See Peters, "Education, Enterprise Culture and the Entrepreneurial Self."
35. Daniel Leighton, "Happy Days? Freedom and Security in a Consumer Society," Renewal: A Journal of Labor Politics 11, no. 2 (2003), http://www.renewal.org.uk/issues/2003-Volume-11/ Summer%202003%20Volume-11-2/ Editorial.htm.
36. For the full text of this speech, see Tony Blair, "Prime Minister's Speech on Public Service Reform," Guardian (London), October 16, 2001, http://society.guardian.co.uk/futureforpublicservices/story/0,8150,575220, 00.html.
37. Catherine Needham, "Citizen-Consumers: New Labour's Marketplace Democracy" (London: Fabian Society, 2003), http://www.catalystforum.org.uk/ pubs/pub10a.html.
38. Ibid.
39. The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy, prods. Daniel Yergin and William Cran, WGBH-Public Broadcasting System, 2002, videocassette/DVD. The complete text of Yergin's interview with Gordon Brown is available at http://www.pbs.org/wbgh/commandingheights/lo/resources/pdf-idex. html. See also Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw's book, The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998).
40. Brown's desire was reportedly not only to eliminate poverty at home but also to double the amount of aid to the Third World. In his capacity as chairman of the IMF policy-making committee, he aims to improve the mechanisms of international financial institutions for crisis prevention," including implementing better early warning systems.