The new business studies and the transformation of the business curriculum: some observations on ideology, enterprise culture and the production of vocational identities

Abstract

This article presents a study of business education in schools in England and Wales. Its aim is to show three things. First, how, as business education in schools was reconstituted in the 1980s and 1990s, it became imbued with discourses through which syllabus content, teacher perspectives and teacher-student interactions were structured and channelled in particular ways so as to attempt to produce certain kinds of vocational identities congruent with and supportive of an emerging culture of enterprise. Secondly, the article then makes visible through a detailed account of a business studies lesson how this process inverted students' lived relations with the adult world through a problem-solving exercise on ‘Retailing and Security’ that situated them as business decision-makers. Last, we show that the effects of this process re-defined students' lived connections with the outside world and reproduced a particular kind of identity. In this respect, the ethnography attempts to show how processes of ideological reproduction and identity formation were constituted in the ongoing activities of teachers and students, organised under particular circumstances and, in particular ways, as business education within the 14-18 secondary curriculum.