New Zealand’s neoliberal generation: tracing discourses of economic (ir)rationality

Abstract

Young New Zealanders currently in transition to post‐school lives have grown up during a period of intensive neoliberal reform, the speed and scope of which was unprecedented in Western economies. The authors explore how New Zealand’s neoliberal generation craft their identities in the transition years, making sense of their educational and employment experiences and choices in the context of neoliberal discourses. The transition talk of these young people is imbued with neoliberal rationality, mediated through two key discourses in particular: those of the knowledge economy and the cultural economy. It is argued that these individuals are not passive recipients of neoliberal rationality but are involved in actively crafting their identities, making use of the resources that neoliberal and other discourses provide, within the discursive and material constraints that their environments allow.

Acknowledgements

The research reported here was funded by the Royal Society of New Zealand’s Marsden Fund. The authors would also like to acknowledge the helpful comments of two anonymous referees whose insights prompted further development of the arguments in this paper.

Notes

1. Pakeha is the Maori term for white New Zealanders although this is contested. We use the term as a mark of respect for the right of the indigenous people to name those who came after them.

2. This coupling of ‘knowledge’ and ‘economy’ exemplifies the neoliberal intrusion of economic discourses into social fields such as education, previously understood in terms of social provision and national entitlement. Thus, the New Zealand Treasury’s briefing papers to the incoming government in 1987 contain an extensive section on education, described by Dale (1994, p. 71), as ‘one of the most complete and sophisticated statements of a neoliberal perspective on education’.

3. All names are code names and key details have been appropriately modified to protect participants’ anonymity.

4. Polytechnic is another name for Technical Colleges/Schools in New Zealand where apprentices, nurses and other professional groups are trained.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Karen Nairn

Karen Nairn is a Senior Lecturer in the Otago University College of Education, New Zealand. She is a Co‐Investigator (with Jane Higgins) on a three‐year project entitled ‘In transition’: How the children of the economic reforms articulate identities at the child/adult border. More broadly, her research focuses on processes of exclusion in education shaped by gender, sexuality and race.

Jane Higgins

Jane Higgins is a Senior Research Fellow at Lincoln University, New Zealand. Her research explores the experience of young people in transition between school and post‐school worlds. She has a particular interest in the dynamics of the youth labour market and youth (un)employment.