'Don't be a smart arse': Young workers, individualization, and an ethic of enterprise in Jamie's Kitchen

In Jamie’s Kitchen the high profile celebrity chef Jamie Oliver set out to transform a group of unemployed young Londoners into the enterprising, ideal worker of 21st century flexible capitalism. The paper will argue that this reality TV series provides a means to explore key features of new work regimes. We will analyse particular aspects of the increasingly powerful individualising and normalising processes shaping the lifeworlds of young workers in a globalising risk society. Processes that require those who wish to be positively identified as entrepreneurial to do particular sorts of work on themselves; or suffer the consequences.
Drawing on Foucault’s later work on the care of the self, and the  individualization theses of the reflexive modernization literature, we identify and analyse the forms of personhood that various institutions, organisations and individuals seek to encourage in young workers; and the ways in which institutionalised risk environments increasingly individualise the risks and uncertainties associated with labour market participation. The paper argues that our understandings of what it means to be a worker of the world, are being rearticulated around the idea that we are free to choose. And we must exercise this freedom – reap its rewards, carry its obligations – as individuals.

Video reflection and the formation of teacher identity in a team of pre-service and experienced teachers

This paper discusses a project in which a team of pre-service and experienced teachers, following a teaching development model devised by the authors, reflected on videos of the pre-service teachers teaching literacy. Using a discourse analytic approach, the paper focuses on how teachers' joint reflection contributes to student teacher identity formation. Analysis suggests that reflection, at least in the talk of this team, is a language practice with a distinctive generic structure. Using this structure, participants jointly construct professional teacher identities for themselves and others through the key devices of representation, categorization, evaluation, individualization and inclusion.

New work ethics? The corporate athlete's back end index and organisational performance

Drawing on Michel Foucault’s later genealogies of the Self the paper will illustrate particular dimensions of the increasingly powerful individualizing and normalizing processes shaping the lifeworlds of worker-citizens in a globalizing risk society. Processes that require those who wish to be positively identified as professional, entrepreneurial, resilient, effective, athletic to do particular sorts of work on themselves. Here the paper argues that we can identify the emergence of what we call New Work Ethics. We illustrate this more general argument via an analysis of the ways in which a large Information Technology (IT) organization seeks to produce—via a workplace health and fitness program—employees who imagine themselves as embodying the behaviours and dispositions that mark the person as a corporate athlete. Knowledge of the Self in these terms can, it is promised, enhance the performance of the Self, and the organization.

Images of embodied old age in contemporary Japan

Since the late 1980s, representations of Japanese national identity and Japanese old age have been deconstructed. Images of the resilience of traditional cultural and social institutions are shown to have over-emphasized social and cultural homogeneity, elided social differentiation and inequality and minimized the significance of historical transformation. Key institutions of the postwar modernization project, including the patriarchal seniority system and household structure, are being transformed through globalization and feminization. This thesis focuses on the problem of representing individual and collective ageing in Japan in the context of modernization. Research is focussed on the contradictions, within essentialist representations of Japanese collective and individual identity, between socially constructed policy forms of old age and collective identities. Contemporary trends towards individualization and diversification of identities, and discourses on the ageing/information society, indicate cultural distance between an instrumentally rational administration and the life world of old people. Research explores the concept of embodiment through its significance in debates on postmodernization of the lifecourse in accordance with the structural shifts towards a postindustrial structure. This study examines representations of old age in broader social and cultural processes. Images of the social and cultural trajectory of the lifecourse draw attention to the embodiment of individual identities and ultimately generational cultures in contemporary social and cultural spaces. This research is the result of analyses of old age, which have been informed by postmodern theory. It in turn informs sociological theorizations of cultural representations of old age in contemporary societies.

Disturbing the dream of the autonomous subject

This concept-empirical inquiry investigated tensions between practitioners and their clients' significant-others. At its root, this difficulty was found to reflect embedded ideological, professional and organizational factors aligned with the process of individualization, a disposition which renders significant-other relationships as, at best, irrelevant to the professionals' understanding of their project.

Whose hometown? Reception of Bruce Springsteen as an index of Australian national identities

Focusing on the cultural landscape of the mid-1980s, this paper explores the Australian experience of Bruce Springsteen. Australian author Peter Carey’s short story collection, The Fat Man in History, anticipates two phases of Australia’s relationship to the United States, phases expressed by responses to Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. (1984) and the 1986 blockbuster Crocodile Dundee. Springsteen’s album was received by an Australian audience who wanted to be like Americans; Crocodile Dundee, on the other hand, provided a representation of what Australians thought Americans wanted Australians to be. This paper argues that the first phase was driven by emergent technologies, in particular the Walkman, which allowed for personal and private listening practices. However, technological changes in the 1990s facilitated a more marked shift in listening space towards individualization, a change reflected in Springsteen’s lyrics.

Creativity: transgression or higher purpose

Modernity is characterized by the fragmentation of our social world, desacralization of institutional life and the relativisation and individualization of our moral perspectives. Such processes undermine and destabilize our sense of shared common values in a society.

An evaluation of group work in first-year engineering design education

It is argued that ‘design' is an essential characteristic of engineering practice, and hence, an essential theme of engineering education. It is suggested that first-year design courses enhance commencing student motivation and retention, and introduce engineering application content and basic design experience early in the curriculum. The research literature indicates that engineering design practice is a deeply social process, with collaboration and group interactions required at almost every stage. This chapter documents the evaluation of the initial and subsequent second offerings of a first-year engineering design unit at Griffith University in Australia. The unit 1006ENG Design and Professional Skills aims to provide an introduction to engineering design and professional practice through a project-based approach to problem solving. The unit learning design incorporates student group work, and uses self-and-peer-assessment to incorporate aspects of the design process into the unit assessment and to provide a mechanism for individualization of student marks.