Growing up in the great recession: Revisiting the restructuring of gender, schooling and work

ln this chapter, we revisit our earlier work on many of the globalizing material and discursive forces that were restructuring local and global labor markets during the 1990s and that were changing the nature of work (Kelly and Kenway, 2001; Kenway and Kelly, 2000). We also revisit the forms of vocational education and training (VET) deemed capable of preparing young people to transition into these tabor markets, and the gendered dimensions of these processes of restructuring and transition. A return to these concerns enables us to consider that in the precarious, globalized labor markets of the early twenty-first century, the self, if it wants Io be employable, must think about, act on, and perform itself as an enterprise (Kelly, 2013). This "ethically slanted maxim for the conduct of a life" (Weber, 2002) has particular consequences for the ways in which the youthful self, often narrowly imagined as being in transition, can know itself, both in being, and in becoming. We will illustrate the limits and possibilities of the self as enterprise, and the work that the self must do on the self to secure that enterprise via reference to the social enterprise- based VET programs that the U.K. celebrity chef Jamie Oliver deployed in sometimes successful, often times unsuccessful, attempts to transfonn the lives of the young people most marginalized from, and by, education and training systems and labor markets (Kelly and Harrison, 2009). We conclude with a preliminary discussion of what it means for the self as enterprise to grow up, to be, and to become somebody, in the context of the Great Recession and an Age of Austerity in the aftermath of the 2008-09 global financial crisis (GFC).