Paper short abstract:

What should persons be like in contemporary neoliberal Britain? This paper draws on research with a gap year provider, a UK based charity that claims its programmes facilitate the personal development of its volunteers. I describe and analyse the practices and processes of this organisation to explore how it works to produce a particular kind of person.

Paper long abstract:

This paper uses research from an organisational ethnography and presents an iterative interrogation of neoliberalism and personhood. Endeavour is a British charity that runs gap year programmes to take young people abroad to work on international development and conservation projects. It deploys a range of techniques to help its volunteers develop themselves into positive, dynamic and flexible persons. How does this help them to become successful employees, citizens and community members? This paper connects these traits to contemporary British society, using Endeavour as a lens to explore the expectations and demands on persons and who they should become.

Taking neoliberalism as simultaneously an ideology and a means of describing particular practices I consider how market principles are coming to shape what and how persons are. I explore both pervasive aspects of neoliberal ideology and the ways in which my participants creatively adapt and negotiate ideas to achieve their own goals. Rather than treating neoliberalism as an implicit, taken-for-granted package of policies, practices and discourse, this paper seeks to "examine the actual configurations" of neoliberalism within a specific ethnographic context (Hoffman et al. 2006: 10) and how this concept can reveal underlying assumptions about personhood. The analysis of personhood therefore describes both the ideas and ideologies that contribute to participants understanding of what persons should be like and details the practices by which persons are brought into being.