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Transcript
InterCultural
Futures
Young People and the
Coming of the 3rd
Industrial Revolution:
Challenges for Education,
Training and Work in the
Asian Century
Peter Kelly
Working Paper No. 1
InterCultural Futures 1
InterCultural Futures
Centre for Education, Training and Work in the Asian Century
Working Paper Series
Series Editors
Barbara Chancellor
Michael Crowhurst
Philip Doecke
Annette Gough
Richard Johnson
Peter Kelly
Jude Ocean
Rachel Patrick
Marg Sellers
Geoff Shacklock
The Centre for Education, Training and Work
in the Asian Century aims to provide a
sophisticated and critical engagement with
debates about what the development of an
Asian century means for key dimensions of
education, training and work.
Understandings of education, training and
work, of childhood, youth and young
adulthood, of transitions, relationships and
family structures, of culture, politics and the
economy, of development, migration and
strategic relations, are being remade in the
context of the Asian century. Not only in Asia,
but globally. Research, scholarship and
teaching in the Centre is vitally concerned
with exploring and contributing to debates
about how the experience of these
developments by children and young people,
by adults and communities in various parts of
the globe, is marked by growth, development
and opportunities, and by crisis,
marginalisation, and exploitation.
The Working Paper Series has a number of aims:
o To provide opportunities for publishing the results and findings of
research, commentary and critique on significant issues related to the
work of the Centre, along with explorations of innovative and significant
theoretical and methodological developments;
o To provide a timely means to publish provocative and initial accounts of
work that may be further developed and published elsewhere as it
develops;
o To provide opportunities for exceptional undergraduate and postgraduate
work to be published and circulated to wider audiences;
o To provide opportunities for a variety of work to published –
experimental, innovative, imaginative, critical, progressive, more
mainstream, but always scholarly.
2
InterCultural Futures
Abstract
Recent commentary has extolled the virtues of a so-called Third Industrial
Revolution (TIR). The First Industrial Revolution emerged in England at the
end of the 18th century and was powered by steam; the Second Industrial
Revolution emerged in the US at the start of the 20th century and was
powered by electricity (the First and Second revolutions are machined based
and fueled by carbon); the Third Industrial Revolution emerges globally, will
be digital, bio-genetic and post-carbon. The paper suggests that the
digitisation of manufacturing processes (in ways that mimic the digitisation of
other sectors of the economy); the emergence of large scale 3D
printing/additive manufacturing technologies using new materials (carbonfibre composites) and bio-genetic and nano-technologies; and a profound upscaling of labour-replacing automation technologies in other sectors of the
economy, will pose numerous challenges and opportunities for young
people’s education, training and work in the coming decades.
The paper argues that a concern with a ‘lost generation’ in the wake of the
2008-2009 GFC, while challenging and profound, should be ‘augmented’ with
a longer-term view of the futures that we make and leave to young people.
Futures, if made in the image of a rapacious capitalism, will be concerned
mainly with costs/efficiencies/profits and the commodification of everything,
fuelled by the Internet of Things, and digitally and bio-genetically energised.
Keywords
Young People; Third Industrial Revolution; Education and Training;
Work; The Self as Enterprise
InterCultural Futures 3
Young People and the
Coming of the 3rd
Industrial Revolution
Utopian or Dystopian Futures?
Utopia
u·to·pi·a
yo͞ oˈtōpēə/
noun: utopia; plural noun: utopias
An imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect. The word
was first used in the book Utopia (1516) by Sir Thomas More.
Dystopia
dys·to·pi·a
disˈtōpēə/
noun: dystopia; plural noun: dystopias
An imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically
a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one.1
The Economist magazine ran a special feature in 2012 in which it extolled the
virtues of a so-called Third Industrial Revolution (TIR). For the want of more
space the TIR can be made knowable along these lines: the First Industrial
Revolution emerged in England at the end of the 18th century and was
powered by steam; the Second Industrial Revolution emerged in the US at
the start of the 20th century and was powered by electricity (the First and
Second revolutions are machined based and fueled by carbon); the Third
Industrial Revolution emerges globally, will be digital, bio-genetic and postcarbon (or so its prophets [profits] claim). Briefly, the various writers in The
Economist imagine the TIR as being about the further digitisation of
manufacturing processes (in ways that mimic the digitisation of other sectors
of the economy); the emergence of large scale 3D printing/additive
manufacturing technologies using new materials (carbon-fibre composites)
and bio-genetic and nano-technologies; and a profound up-scaling of labourreplacing automation technologies in other sectors of the economy. In one of
1BothdefinitionsfromGoogle,whereagraphicalrepresentationindicatesamassive
th
expansionin‘mentions’/usageofbothtermsfromthelasthalfofthe20 century.
4
InterCultural Futures
these articles Paul Markillie (2012) references the ‘productivity’ gains at
Nissan’s UK factory without any sense of the human consequences of the
labour redundancies embedded in these ‘efficiencies’: ‘Nissan’s British
factory in Sunderland, opened in 1986, is now one of the most productive in
Europe. In 1999 it built 271,157 cars with 4,594 people. Last year it made
480,485 vehicles—more than any other car factory in Britain, ever—with just
5,462 people’.
Jeremy Rifkin, of The End of Work (1995) fame, has been very successful in
positioning himself as a key advisor to the European Commission (EC), and
to individual European leaders (he claims to have the ear of Germany’s
Angela Merkel and François Hollande of France, among others) on ‘issues
related to the economy, climate change, and energy security’ – all of which
are framed by his working of the idea of the TIR, and its Five Pillars:
(1) ‘shifting to renewable energy;
(2) transforming the building stock of every continent into green micro–power
plants to collect renewable energies on-site;
(3) deploying hydrogen and other storage technologies in every building and
throughout the infrastructure to store intermittent energies;
(4) using Internet technology to transform the power grid of every continent
into an energy internet that acts just like the Internet;
(5) transitioning the transport fleet to electric plug-in and fuel cell vehicles that
can buy and sell green electricity on a smart, continental, interactive power
grid’ (Rifkin 2015).
For Rifkin (2015) the five pillars of the TIR ‘will create thousands of
businesses and millions of jobs, and usher in a fundamental reordering of
human relationships, from hierarchical to lateral power, that will impact the
way we conduct business, govern society, educate our children, and engage
in civic life’. This digital re-ordering and re-engineering of the social, the
cultural, the economic and the political and is imagined as being facilitated by
the Internet of Things (IoT). The IoT ‘will connect everyone and everything in
a seamless network. People, machines, natural resources, production lines,
logistics networks, consumption habits, recycling flows, and virtually every
other aspect of economic and social life will be connected via sensors and
software to the TIR platform’ (Rifkin 2015). When the IoT meets Big Data,
automated systems and advanced algorithmic analytics then the TIR will
‘dramatically increase productivity, and reduce the marginal cost of producing
and delivering a full range of goods and services to near zero across the
entire economy’.
In early 2015 respected English novelist, essayist and commentator John
Lanchester published a long review of The Second Machine Age: Work,
Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik
Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (2014), and Tyler Cowen’s (2014) Average
Is Over: Powering America beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation, in the
London Review of Books. In a wide-ranging essay Lanchester (2015) is much
more skeptical and wary of some of the claims made for the TIR, or the
Second Machine Age – particularly in terms of the future of work and the
labour market possibilities of these emergent possibilities: ‘The kind of work
done in most factories, and anywhere else that requires repetitive manual
labour, is going, going, and about to be gone.’ Most starkly, Lanchester
InterCultural Futures 5
(2015) references suggestions that the automation processes promised by
robotics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and bio-genetic and nano-technologies
means that ‘the labour being done by these robots is work that will never
again be done by people’. He cites Wassily Leontief, a Nobel laureate in
economics, who 20 years ago claimed that ‘the role of humans as the most
important factor of production is bound to diminish in the same way that the
role of horses in agricultural production was first diminished and then
eliminated by the introduction of tractors.’ Significantly, Lanchester (2015)
indicates that it is not just manual labour that is at risk in these processes: he
cites, for example, a press release from Associated Press (AP) about Apple’s
multi-billion dollar quarterly results for the end of 2014 – that was not written
by humans, but produced by software owned by a company called
Automated Insights. For Lanchester (2015) the emergent possibilities of the
TIR evoke ‘a longstanding vein of thinking concerning “technological
unemployment”’, a concept first articulated by J M Keynes to describe the
‘means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we
can find new uses for labour’. For Lanchester (2015) this is a form of
progress that ‘makes jobs go away through the sheer speed of its impact’.
Technology, its development, deployment and uses, is never neutral. Much of
Lanchester’s essay points to the ways in which social, cultural, economic and
political histories and trajectories shape and are shaped by these
emergences: capitalism historically seeks to replace labour to drive
efficiencies and reduce costs; low-skilled, low paid workers are always
vulnerable; the working and middle classes of the First and Second Industrial
revolution may indeed be ‘zombies’ (Beck 1992, 2000); and the future has to
be made/colonised (but by whom, with what purposes, and what
consequences?).
There are significant challenges for youth studies in these emergent
possibilities – related to the consequences for coming generations of young
people of the family, education, training, work, and cultural dimensions of a
so-called TIR. Challenges and opportunities for thinking that may not
necessarily be productively engaged through the sort of political economy of
the distribution and reproduction of youth disadvantage as outlined by James
Côté (2014). In the Self as Enterprise (Kelly 2013), for example, I referenced
Nigel Thrift’s (2005) Knowing Capitalism and his framing of a new political
economy, a political economy that tries to come to grips with some of the
transformations that have reshaped the character of capitalism in the last 30
years, and which may emerge in the TIR. We can identify three key elements
of this political economy, including:
(1) the discursive power of the cultural circuits of capitalism, in which
capitalism endlessly commodifies the deconstruction and reassembling of
capitalism’s own failings, successes and dysfunctions – and feeds it to itself;
(2) the changing form of the commodity, a change possibly best exemplified
by the monetisation of the electronic traces we leave as we ‘freely’ roam the
web – in ways that make the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world multi-billionaires;
(3) and the ways in which time and space are reconfigured as a productive
grid of resources, so that, for example, we can work, shop and play 24/7 –
in/from the office, our bedroom, the bus stop – and we and others (such as
our managers) resent it when we don’t, or can’t.
6
InterCultural Futures
So, what to make of these possible futures? Futures are always waiting to be
colonised (Giddens 1990). From where we currently stand some possible
futures are more probable than others. Given that youth studies takes young
people as its object, their pasts and presents, but fundamentally their futures,
then we should have at least a wary eye to what is being discussed, what is
happening in what might be called future studies.2 Are these futures -possible
and/or probable - Utopian? Dystopian? More importantly, for the discussion I
want to develop here, are the ‘financial crisis’, the ‘crisis’ of sovereign debt,
austerity and the great recession – the OECD/EU’s ‘lost decade’ - masking
long run processes that are hinted at, made explicit by the idea of the TIR?
Young People, the GFC and the Great Recession
In this, the second decade of the 21st century, many young people in the
OECD/EU economies appear to be carrying a particularly heavy burden for
many of the downstream effects of the GFC. The unfolding/echoing effects of
the Great Recession in Europe and the US, and the emergence of sovereign
debt crises and significant austerity programs in many EU/OECD economies
represents a largely successful framing of responses to the downstream
effects of the GFC as being principally about State debt levels. In this
discourse those that depend most on State provided services, payments and
programs are the ones carrying the greatest burden of government austerity
measures. It is in this sense that I have suggested that today’s young people
and young adults, and the generations who will follow and grow up in the
unfolding aftermath of the GFC, will carry a particularly heavy burden in terms
of changed education and employment circumstances and opportunities;
consequences for physical and mental health and well-being; consumption,
housing, relationship and parenting aspirations; and a sense of self in relation
to the possibilities for participation in the liberal democracies (Kelly, 2016).
In the European Union, for example, over 5 million young people (under 25)
were unemployed in the EU-28 area in the second quarter of 2014 (an
unemployment rate of 21.7% [23.2% in the euro area] – a rate twice as high
as the adult unemployment rate of 9.0%). In addition, 7.5 million young
Europeans between 15 and 24 are classified, problematically, as neither in
employment, nor in education or training (NEETs). Variations in these rates
across the EU are extreme. There is a gap of nearly 50 percentage points
between the EU country with the lowest rate of youth unemployment
(Germany at 7.8% in July 2014) and the EU country with the highest rate,
Spain (53.8% in July 2014) (European Commission 2015). As many have
suggested these sorts of aggregate figures don’t reveal the ways in which
different groups and communities and different localities are differently
impacted, how different labour markets offer more or less opportunities for
particular populations of young people, or what combinations of social class,
gender, ethnicity and geography shape the exclusion and marginalisation of
young people from education, from work, from housing, from consumption,
from the possibilities of family relationships. For example, a recent Australian
study by the Brotherhood of St Laurence (a faith based non-government
agency) suggested that data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics
indicated that in early 2014 the youth unemployment rate (for 15 to 24 year
2SeethislinktoanumberofJournalsinthefieldoffutures:
http://www.wfsf.org/resources/futures-publications-journals
InterCultural Futures 7
olds) was 12.2%. Importantly, this rate was much higher in certain
towns/cities/regions: 21% in West and North West Tasmania, including
Burnie and Devonport; 20.5% in Cairns (Queensland); 19.7% in northern
Adelaide, including Elizabeth and Gawler (SA); 17.5% in Hume (Victoria),
including Goulburn Valley, Wodonga and Wangaratta; 17.3% in Mandurah
(WA); and 16.8% in Parramatta (NSW) (Brotherhood of St Laurence 2014).
These gross and regionally segmented unemployment figures also don’t tell
us much about the types of work, the sorts of jobs that are available to many
people, young and old. As I wrote in the Self as Enterprise (Kelly 2013) work
can be ‘better than sex’, or ‘toil and drudgery’, and can say much about the
sorts of choices that the self as enterprise can or cannot make, and how
these choices echo through much of a life.
In addition, in many OECD and EU economies governments have, for the last
few decades, been shifting the burden for the cost of higher education to
students. In this context high levels of youth unemployment and precarious
employment, student debt accompanying increased costs for higher
education, housing costs that lock many out of home ownership, and the
challenges for young people’s physical and mental health and well-being are
re-shaping young people’s sense of self and of their chances for meaningful
participation in relationships and settings that traditionally identified someone
as an adult, as a citizen.
The Self as Enterprise: Neo-Liberalism’s Ideal Subject?
In this section I want to situate this discussion in a brief account of why it is
productive to think about the self as an enterprise, and the ways in which
neo-Liberalism, as an art of government (Foucault 1991), seeks to make the
individual responsible for the choices, outcomes and consequences of
managing this enterprise. In The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of
Capitalism Max Weber (2002) explored the particular virtues that should be
seen as attaching to work, and the particular influence that certain Protestant
sects had on articulating these virtues. Weber’s (2002, pp.9-11) concern was
with investigating the relationship between a Puritan/Calvinist view that hard
work, done well, was its own reward, and a so-called spirit of capitalism – the
essence of which was seen, by Weber, to be captured in the home-spun
philosophy of Benjamin Franklin. Weber makes no claims for the
representativeness, even truthfulness of Franklin’s incitements and advice.
Yet, for Weber (2002, p.11) there is little doubt that what is found in Franklin’s
advice, a ‘philosophy of avarice’, is the idea of ‘the duty of the individual to
work toward the increase of his wealth, which is assumed to be an end in
itself’. This spirit has, for Franklin, ‘the character of an ethically slanted maxim
for the conduct of life [Lebensführung]. This is the specific sense in which we
propose to use the concept of the “spirit of capitalism”’.
Weber saw in the Protestant Ethic only one of the motive forces for the
emergence of rationalised capitalism. A Protestant ethic promised heavenly
salvation, and an earth bound redemption as the outcome of the pursuit of
the individual’s calling. I have suggested that 21st century, flexible capitalism
is energised by a spirit that sees in the cultivation of the self - as an ongoing,
never ending enterprise - an ethically slanted maxim for the conduct of a life.
This spirit is identifiable as an institutionally structured, individualised
8
InterCultural Futures
entrepreneurialism: a structured series of incitements, suggestions,
imperatives to manage the lifecourse, the biography as an entrepreneurial
DIY project (Kelly 2013).
Michel Foucault’s (1985, 1986, 1991) later work on the care of the self; the
central part played by an analysis of the relationships between
knowledge/power/subjects in this work; the focus on the ways in which forms
of management and regulation, and practices of the self interact to shape the
ways in which we practise our freedom in neo-Liberal spaces; and a refusal
to ground this analytic in a theory of the Subject provides a powerful
framework for thinking about the self as enterprise and the processes of
individualisation and responsibilisation at play in the conduct of this
enterprise. Foucault’s work throws into relief questions about the ways in
which we practise our freedom, and are managed and regulated as Subjects
who are free to choose, and who must carry the consequences of the choices
we make (Rose 1999a). An extensive literature that draws on Foucault’s work
argues that neo-Liberal governmentalities produce understandings of the self
as an autonomous, self governing enterprise that should, ideally, be capable
of identifying, navigating and managing the opportunities and risks of 21st
century capitalism. The idea of the self as enterprise opens up for analysis
our willing participation in globalised, precarious labour markets (Bunting
2004). To practise one’s freedom is to develop certain dispositions,
behaviours, capacities and commitments – in settings and systems of
interaction in which others seek to manage or encourage particular
behaviours and dispositions. It is in the compulsion to choose, to make
appropriate choices from a range of culturally and historically specific options
that we, not only, practise our freedom, but also carry the responsibilities and
obligations, or reap the rewards that flow from practising our freedom in these
ways (Kelly 2013).
This form of personhood has to be produced in a variety of settings,
relationships and practices at different times during a life. In an Introduction
to Foucault’s work on governmentality Colin Gordon (1991, pp. 43-44) argues
that homo economicus, as the subject of neo-Liberalism, is both a
‘reactivation and a radical inversion’ of the subject of Scottish Enlightenment
Liberalism. This reactivation centres on imagining human behaviours and
dispositions in terms of rational, choice making man. For early Liberalism this
male pronoun was an entirely appropriate way of constructing the subject as
a ‘rational, interest-motivated economic ego’, engaged in private, individual,
‘atomistic, egoistic’ exchange relations that emerge from a particular ‘natural
and historical milieu’ (Burchell 1996, p. 24). In this sense, argues Burchell
(1996, p. 23), Liberal rationalities of government must take as their object,
‘the natural private-interest-motivated conduct of free, market exchanging
individuals’, in so far as the behaviours and dispositions of such individuals
are the foundation which enables various markets to operate ‘optimally’ in
relation to their very essence. The radical inversion of this principle of Liberal
rationalities of government takes a number of forms. Gordon (1991, pp. 4344) argues that the subject of Liberalism originally signified a subject whose
motivations and desires must ‘remain forever untouchable by government’.
For neo-Liberalism however, ‘homo economicus is manipulable man’, a
subject who is ‘perpetually responsive’ to environmental cues, opportunities,
incitements and risks. Within this way of thinking about the self, ‘economic
InterCultural Futures 9
government joins hands with behaviourism’. This articulation works to
construct a view of the subject as an ‘individual producer-consumer’ who, in
certain quite fundamentally new ways is ‘not just an enterprise, but the
entrepreneur of himself or herself’.
Where the meanings of life are transformed into meanings that are structured
by the market form, then the subjects of neo-Liberal rationalities of
government emerge, argues Burchell (1996, pp. 22-23), as ‘free’,
‘entrepreneurial’, competitive and economically rational individuals. However,
within these governmentalities this form of selfhood is not so much a ‘given of
human nature as a consciously contrived style of conduct’. That is, this
subject has to be made up – encouraged, incited, directed, educated, trained
- via the mobilisation of diverse techniques, as the active, autonomous,
responsible entrepreneur of her or his own DIY project of the self. Rose
(1996, p. 57) argues that the self, in this sense, is conceived as an active,
self-creating individual seeking to enterprise themselves. Individual
biographical projects are the result, within this rationality, of the maximisation
of the chances for a good life through acts of choice – through the practise of
freedom. Life is accorded ‘meaning and value to the extent that it can be
rationalized as the outcome of choices made or choices to be made’.
In this sense an ethic of enterprise is a fluid, shifting, generalised, and at the
same time contingent and contextual body of thoughts, ideas, recipes, forms
of advice, injunctions and suggestions for how it is that we should know
ourselves and act on ourselves. This ethic emerges from and gives shape to
an array of always limited fields of possibility in which we are encouraged to
imagine ourselves, our options, our choices, our aspirations in particular
ways if we want to participate, on an on-going basis, in precarious labour
markets. Participation that will provide, it is hoped, the forms of salvation even purpose and meaning - that paid work promises (Kelly 2013).
Despite the ambitions of neo-Liberal governmentalities the self as enterprise
cannot be ‘willed’ into existence. The regulation of the conduct of oneself and
others is, in many respects, a failing exercise, an incomplete project, a more
or less successful enterprise. The costs and benefits associated with this
enterprise, the responsibilities for managing the consequences, the outcomes
of this enterprise (intended or otherwise), and the capacities to identify and
manage the risks and opportunities that confront this enterprise are, within
neo-Liberal mentalities of rule, imagined as residing in and with the individual.
As individuals we are imagined as being responsible for the choices we
make, for the outcomes of choices made (and not), for managing the material
ambiguities (Bauman 2001) and emotional costs of globalised, precarious
labour markets (Elliott and Lemert 2006).
Young People’s Futures: Supernumerary, Unneeded, of No Use?
And, so, has the ‘crisis’ diverted our focus from longer run processes that are
now being popularised through the language of the Third Industrial
Revolution, the Second Machine Age? Zygmunt Bauman (2004), the
influential sociologist of liquid modernity, would likely say yes. In Wasted
Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts, he argues that at the start of the 21st
century large numbers of people around the globe – hundreds of millions, in
10
InterCultural Futures
fact – are surplus to requirements, are, indeed, redundant. Bauman (2004,
pp.5-6) argues that this redundancy is a consequence of the global spread
and triumph of modernisation processes. These modernisation processes
can, largely, be understood in terms of the colonisation of all aspects of life,
of all spaces and places by market forces, practices and processes under
regimes of capital accumulation. As processes of modernisation have
become truly globalised, as the ‘totality of human production and
consumption has become money and market mediated, and the processes of
the commodification, commercialization and monetarization of human
livelihoods have penetrated every nook and cranny of the globe’, then the
‘crisis of the human waste disposal industry’ has become more acute.
Being surplus to requirements, being redundant means that individuals are
confronted with a life that does not provide the means to secure a livelihood.
The idea of redundancy, the reality that you, or I, or we might be in-excess, is
a powerful and disturbing concept and reality. In the first instance the concept
of redundancy says something, means something, different to the concept of
unemployment. Importantly, for Bauman (2004, pp.11-12), redundancy
‘whispers permanence and hints at the ordinariness of the condition.’
Redundancy, the sense that you, or I, or we are of limited or no use particularly in social, cultural and commercial environments in which
usefulness not only brings material rewards, but also gives purpose and
meaning to a life - can have profound consequences for a sense of self. As
Bauman (2004, p.12) suggests: ‘To be ‘redundant’ means to be
supernumerary, unneeded, of no use – whatever the needs and uses are that
set the standard of usefulness and indispensability. The others do not need
you; they can do as well, and better, without you’. What is more, to be
redundant suggests that there is no ‘self evident reason for your being
around and no obvious justification for your claim to have the right to stay
around. To be declared redundant means to have been disposed of because
of being disposable – just like the empty and non-refundable plastic bottle or
once-used syringe, an unattractive commodity with no buyers...’
For Bauman (2004, p.12) redundancy, as a concept (but also, significantly,
as a state of being) shares its ‘semantic space with ‘rejects’, ‘wastrels’,
‘garbage’, ‘refuse’ – with waste’. To be redundant or surplus to requirements
holds out different possibilities or prospects to being unemployed: ‘The
destination of the unemployed, of the ‘reserve army of labour’, was to be
called back into active service. The destination of waste is the waste yard,
the rubbish heap’.
The arguments and provocations that I have sketched here suggest that the
immediacy of a concern with a ‘lost generation’ in the wake of the GFC, while
challenging and profound, should be ‘augmented’ with a longer-term view of
the futures that we make and leave to young people. Futures, if made in the
image of a rapacious capitalism, will be concerned mainly with
costs/efficiencies/profits and the commodification of everything, fuelled by the
Internet of Things, and digitally and bio-genetically energised. In such times,
under such circumstances, to imagine the self as enterprise will offer little by
way of comfort to large populations of young people confronted with the
possibility that they are supernumerary, unneeded, of no use.
InterCultural Futures 11
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