The Entrepreneurial Self and ‘Youth at-risk’: Exploring the Horizons of Identity in the Twenty-first Century

Abstract

This paper argues that a particular form of Selfhood has come to dominate the horizons of identity in the Western democracies at this time—I refer to this form of personhood as the entrepreneurial Self. The paper argues that the figure (population) of ‘Youth at-risk’, in its negativity, illuminates the positivity that is the entrepreneurial Self. That is, the discourses that construct Youth at-risk reveal the truths about whom we should, as adults, become. The paper engages with Foucault's theories of government, of (Neo)Liberalism as a problematisation of the practise of Liberal welfare government, and of the ways in which certain psychological discourses articulate with (Neo)Liberal views of enterprise to produce a view of the Self as the entrepreneurial Self.