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Abstract
Since the 2000s, successive governments in the United Kingdom and elsewhere have embraced the idea of ‘raising aspiration’ among young people as a solution to persisting educational and socio-economic inequalities. Previous analyses have argued that these policies tend to individualise structural disadvantage and promote a ‘deficit’ view of working-class youth. This paper adopts a novel approach to analysing aspiration discourses combining Michel Foucault’s four dimensions of ‘ethics’ and Mitchell Dean’s notion of ‘formation of identities’. Applying Foucault’s and Dean’s work in this way provides a new lens that enables an examination of how policy encourages particular forms of subjectivation, and, therefore, seeks to govern individuals. The findings presented in the paper complicate previous research by showing that raising aspiration strategies portray disadvantaged youth both in terms of ‘deficit’ and ‘potential’, resulting in a requirement for inner transformation and mobility through attitudinal change. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for the identity formation of young people and for conceptualising contemporary forms of governmentality.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the anonymous referees for their generous and constructive feedback. Many thanks also to Mike Coldwell, Donald Gillies, Robert Hattam, Colin McCaig and Ian Stronach for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.
Notes
1. The origin of the term ‘poverty of aspiration’ is attributed to Aneurin Bevan, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party in the late 1950s (Butler and Hamnett Citation2011). It was brought back into the debate by Tony Blair, and used by Gordon Brown in his first speech to the Labour Party conference as Party Leader (Brown Citation2007).
2. This is reflected in the publication of a Social Mobility Strategy in 2011 (Cabinet Office Citation2011a) and the repeated call by the then Prime Minister and Cabinet members for Britain to become an ‘aspiration nation’ (see Cameron Citation2012; Richardson Citation2010). While the current Prime Minister Theresa May has set out structural reforms of the English education system that diverge from her predecessors, she has continued to employ the rhetoric of opportunity and ambition, now couched in the goal of making Britain a ‘great meritocracy’ (DfE Citation2016a).
3. Foucault’s work is often criticised for implying a deterministic notion of official discourses as impacting top-down on individual subjectivities and leaving little room for acting otherwise (Hoy Citation1986; McNay Citation1994). While Foucault’s earlier work can be interpreted as privileging discourse over individuals and their agency, he also emphasised the possibility of resistance and counter discourse. As previous research has demonstrated, young people are not fully ‘captured’ by dominant discourse (Trowler Citation2001), but make sense in relation to and within the boundaries of these discourses (Mendick, Allen, and Harvey Citation2015). Attention to questions of agency became more pronounced in Foucault’s later work in which he elaborated on ideas such as ethics and technologies of the self, which we draw upon in this paper.