Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- One Introduction: Getting in and Getting on in the UK’s Youth Labour Market
- Two Employability in the North East
- Three Enterprise on the South Coast
- Four Internships in London
- Five Volunteering in Glasgow, Scotland
- Six Conclusion: Inequality, Liminality and Risk
- References
- Index
Three - Enterprise on the South Coast
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 March 2021
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- One Introduction: Getting in and Getting on in the UK’s Youth Labour Market
- Two Employability in the North East
- Three Enterprise on the South Coast
- Four Internships in London
- Five Volunteering in Glasgow, Scotland
- Six Conclusion: Inequality, Liminality and Risk
- References
- Index
Summary
Introduction
This chapter explores the discourses of enterprise, uncovering the investment in this notion at EU, national and local levels of policy as a solution to youth unemployment. We present two different interventions on the South Coast that aim to increase youth enterprise. These schemes articulate resonating, but significantly different, discourses of enterprise and entrepreneurs. Risk and failure are closely embedded in both discourses of enterprise, but the two interventions have a very different understanding of the value of these in relation to their interpretation of the ‘type’ of young person they cater for. At South East University (SEU), a university-organized bootcamp aimed at students and graduates likely to work in fields that commonly employ freelancers, we found that failure is seen as a normal and important part of learning, and something that participants should embrace. In contrast, at Enterprising Youth, a third sector scheme aimed at the long-term unemployed, failure is viewed almost wholly negatively, and the training puts emphasis on ensuring that participants understand the risks and ‘realities’ of enterprise.
Using Foucault's notion of governmentality to consider how these young people are envisaged and constructed as entrepreneurs through notions of risk and failure, we argue that these different understandings of the young people rest on the fact that the focus of the training utilizes different technologies of governance. Foucault defined four different technologies:
(1) technologies of production, which permit us to produce, transform, or manipulate things; (2) technologies of sign systems, which permit us to use signs, meanings, symbols, or signification; (3) technologies of power, which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination, an objectivizing of the subject; (4) technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being. (Foucault, 1988: 18, cited in Deetz, 1998: 152)
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Getting In and Getting On in the Youth Labour MarketGoverning Young People's Employability in Regional Context, pp. 55 - 82Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2019