Gendering the enterprising self: Subjectification Programs and Gender Differences in Guides to Success

Critical Analysis

There exists ongoing societal pressure to become an enterprising self, and this is evidenced by the presence of tools for self-help and self-development. The author argues that “whoever turns to them for advice is convinced that they have something to say to him or her” (9), and that this indicates a feeling of personal discontent. Being an entrepreneurial self is a goal, not a state, and a focus can be placed on the interpellation—forces—playing on a person as an entrepreneurial subject in focus. The forces serve as reminders and as “accusation of guilt,” of not being enough, where a subject never has enough “competence, motivation, self-esteem” (10), and so must always be urged to do more to fix these deficiencies. Self-help and self-development resources are part of a genealogy of subjectification, constituting one part of a larger set of forces that drive self-governing.

The author presents an enterprising self as someone who is constantly working to optimize their own place in the world, someone who “above all [is] a being who unceasingly makes decisions, a Homo oeconomicus, who is occupied in every expression of life with the allocation of scarce means to the question towards competing goals” (11). Everything, it is argued, is a decision of cost-benefit tradeoff, and a selection between one path and another. Path selection is largely irrelevant; what is important is the need to continually make these important decisions. The end goal is not attainable, as there is no purely optimized self, and so this self in making needs to continually educate themselves on how to behave in the face of innovation and change. Interpellation continues, and so “one is not an enterprising self, but is rather becoming one” (12) continually and forever, receiving forces of subjugation.

There are qualities of someone on the way to an enterprising self, and deviance is one of these qualities—“nonconformism is to be cultivated because, economically seen, it procures a unique selling point” (13). Similarly, always being in motion is another feature of “mobilizing” oneself, always driving towards innovation and distinction. These qualities must be managed, but because they are ongoing and forever, a “self-optimization imperative implies being compelled to permanently achieve more” (15). There is a necessary sense of fearlessness needed to engage with these forces, as “anyone who is not prepared to ‘fling themselves into the fray’, according to the maxim of the entrepreneurial self, has already lost” (16).

The manner of flinging is well-defined. The author describes that “on the one side, the enterprising self should be a calculating accountant of one’s own life, who is a computing administrator of the costs as well as the benefits of one’s own life, and on the other side, a genius of motivation, who relentless strives for new achievements of the highest kind, and who shoots off an ongoing firework display of creative ideas” (22).