ABSTRACT
Introduct ion Neoliberalism has been defi ned as the dramatic expansion of the free market and according to Basil Bernstein, “market relevance” has become its key orienting criterion (1996, p. 86). Cindi Katz and her colleagues have described the formation of the “neoliberal subject” as characterized by “the devolution of more and more choice to a seemingly ever more autonomous individual who must rationally calculate the benefi ts and costs of all aspects of life” (Mitchell, Marston, and Katz, 2003, pp. 417-418).1 More specifi cally, Michael Apple recently argued that neoliberalism demands, “the constant production of evidence that one is in fact making an enterprise of oneself” (2001, p. 416), and can demonstrate what the biological anthropologist Emily Martin refers to as “earnable competence” (2000, p. 140). Although social scientists achieve a deeper understanding of the drivers and eff ects of neoliberalism and its attendant “enterprise culture” (Olssen, 1996; Rose, 1992; Torres, 2002), the processes through which “neoliberal subjects” are formed, and the range of identity characteristics they take on, remain unclear. Accordingly, this project set out to understand how youth in a center of “fast capitalism” see the future, and how they are equipping themselves for it.
