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.