Career Guidance and Neoliberal Rationality in Italian Schools

This chapter provides a critical analysis of a set of guidance practices observed through an ethnographic study conducted in two schools located in an urban area characterised by various dimensions of educational and social disadvantage. The guidance activities observed respond to government guidelines and, more broadly, to a mainstream European policy discourse calling for enhancing ‘formative’ guidance in a lifelong perspective. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of technology of the self and on Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital, this chapter shows (1) that the guidance practices observed construct and activate students as ‘entrepreneurial subjects’, capable of investing their human capital within the educational market; and (2) that mainstream approaches to career guidance constitute a technology of the self that systematically conceal the socio-structural underpinnings of educational and life trajectories, leaving undebated and unquestioned the processes that allow inequalities to be produced and reproduced within, and through, the educational system.