Career development and neoliberalism

This is not really my gig, but I thought I should at least attempt to feel my way through the political aspects of work that we career practitioners tend to shy away from. From my reading, it seems to me that the technocratic strand of neoliberal politics emphasises social efficiency, "instrumental control", and expert knowledge to manage populations and economies (Hooley et al., 2018, p. 14). A neoliberal approach seems to view complex social and political issues as neutral, technical problems which can be solved/resolved by rational management, as opposed to having democratic or philosophical debate (Hooley et al., 2018). It is all about management. We just need to MANAGE our society better, not think about the underlying issues we are dealing with.

And so we patch, patch, patch. Or, as an early US pundit said, "put lipstick on a pig". 

Key features of the neoliberalist technocratic strand appear to be (Hooley et al., 2018): 

• Social efficiency and human capital: where we ensure a 'smooth' relationship between the supply and demand of skills to benefit the market. Education drives the grist to the mill of the capitalist machine: it is not for personal development. We are "human capital" (p. 64), simply resources or 'goods' to be matched to the needs of the labour market. Ouch
• Apolitical stance: Technocratic policy recommendations are often phrased in "common-sense" apolitical ways (p. 100). Because of this, power relations hide in plain sight, using the "truth-claims of experts" (p. 256) as objective and impartial. Inequality and social justice is masked, and because of that... 
• Depoliticising morality: the "technocratic consciousness" (p. 66) transforms moral-political questions into technical ones, suppressing our social "emancipatory interests". Ideas about freedom and political critique get forgotten (or a lone voice in the wilderness, so to speak, owned by 'cranks')
• In the national interest: workers may be treated as "means rather than an end" (p. 17). Policy is designed to better align workers with national or economic goals, like channelling enrolees down needed vocational tracks which are beneficial to the national economic interest. No funding for the arts, but plenty for business
• New Public Management (NPM): technocratic neoliberalism is operationalised through NPM (p. 143), where the public sector adopts market principles, and we become "consumers" and "clients" in a measurable, micro-managed system with "total quality assurance" (p. 7). Taxpayer funded public services—including career guidance—are all about efficiency, and not about seeing need and meeting it
• Expert-led inclusion: Under neoliberal governance, social inclusion becomes a task for "experts of inclusion" (such as teachers or career practitioners) who apparently treat exclusion as a temporary individual deficit to be corrected through advice and skills training. Of course, this type of blame approach - you need more training - just reinforces that individuals need to "fit in" and "cope" with existing systems rather than challenging structures of inequality. 

Bloody hell, this is exactly what has happened in Aotearoa New Zealand. We have been strongly influenced by the technocracy of neoliberal politics (Sultana, 2014), where everything is 'for profit'. We get a degree so we profit. We train our staff, so we profit. We pay taxes so society profits. It is all about return on investment.

But is it the kind of 'return' we want?

Sam

Reference:

Hooley, T., Sultana, R., & Thomsen, R. (Eds.). (2018). Career Guidance for Social Justice: Contesting Neoliberalism. Routledge.

 * NotebookLM was used to create much of the image accompanying this post