‘Anyone can make it, but there can only be one winner’: modelling neoliberal learning and work on reality television

Abstract

This article investigates how reality television talent-quest formats model the normative neoliberal worker and learner – roles which are increasingly drawn together. In the age of ‘life-long learning’ and shifting employment demands, new models of the supple, adaptable and willing learner are increasingly important both to meeting neoliberal economic demands and to legitimating them. As they appear in reality television, these models stand as ideological exemplars for the management of disappointment, the cultivation of hope and the maintenance of belief in meritocracy. Compliance, effort, just desserts and luck are emphasised in programs that offer viewers self-narratives that allow them to account for both their own circumstances and wider inequalities. As a vehicle of public pedagogy, reality television plays a central role in defining the place of learning in neoliberal self-actualisation. This is tied to well-established narratives of nationalism, which offer a depoliticised and demobilised sense of community.

Keywords:

• educational inequality
• legitimation
• life-long learning
• neoliberal
• public pedagogy