Enterprising career education: the power of self-management

Abstract

This article provides an account of how people’s career management is given prominence in contemporary European policy documents pertaining to career education for entrepreneurship in higher education and in vocational education and training. This study concerns the ways in which policy discourses of career management and governmental practices invoke individuals to understand themselves as entrepreneurial. Proceeding from post-Foucauldian theorizing of the concept of governmentality, the analysis draws attention to technologies and procedures designed to foster career self-management. Focus is also directed to the practices of self-knowledge, self-actualization and self-control as part of the formation of the subjectivity. It is argued that the governance of self-management operates in two interrelated ways: as a practice of inducing individuals to shape an entrepreneurial relation towards their needs and desires, and as a power to enterprise career education. In relation to this, the analysis elucidates how the discourse of competence acts upon individuals to capitalize themselves and engage in a permanent self-assessment of their needs.

Keywords:

• career education
• entrepreneurship
• governmentality
• self-management
• competence
• subjectivity
• Europe

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Ulf Olsson, Associate Professor, Department of Education, Stockholm University for useful discussions and comments.

Notes

1. The method of What’s the problem represented to be? (Bacchi, 2009) provides a set of questions, which can be reformulated for a specific study: (1) What is the ‘problem’ represented to be in a specific policy? (2) What presuppositions or assumptions underlie this representation of the ‘problem’? (3) How has this representation of the ‘problem’ come about? (4) What is left unproblematic in this problem representation? Where are the silences? Can the ‘problem’ be thought of differently? (5) What effects are produced by this representation of the ‘problem’? (6) How/where has this representation of the ‘problem’ been produced, disseminated and defended? How could it be questioned, disrupted and replaced?

2. Hall introduced the term protean career already in 1976, but it was not until his book The Career is Dead—Long Live the Career, published in 1996 that it gained popularity.

3. The ‘protean career’ alludes to the Greek god Proteus, who could transform himself at will.

4. The website of HEInnivate is https://heinnovate.eu/intranet/main/index.php.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anki Bengtsson

Anki Bengtsson, PhD Student, Department of Education, Stockholm University, SE 106 91 Stockholm, Sweden.