Dimensions of Psychological Capital in a U.S. Suburb and High School: Identities for Neoliberal Times

Abstract

In this article, we describe the identities of U.S. suburban high school students as they attempt to ensure their "market relevance" in a neoliberal era. The data are drawn from a four-year ethnographic study of the construction of educational advantage conducted by a diverse five-person research team. These identities were characterized by strong agentic beliefs, predispositions to exert control, deeply held attachments to individual success, highly developed self-advocacy skills, precociously circumscribed aspirations, keen awareness of new forms of cultural capital, self-consciously cultivated work ethics, and habituation to stress and fatigue. The study uncovered gender and racial differences in the acquisition of specific components of these identities, which are attributed in part to larger contextual factors, such as the subordination of the school's efforts to meet the needs of minority students to its broader goals of remaining competitive. Overall, we interpret these identity characteristics as components of psychological capital that these young people developed to manage risks: in particular, their ability to achieve "success" in a future characterized by acute competition, declining social support, and uncertainty.

Ethnographies of “A Lesson in Racism”: Class, Ethnicity, and the Supremacy of the Psychological Discourse

“…These are creating (“neutral”) categories such as “bad boy” (Ferguson ), groups populated primarily by subjects from specific races, talking about cultural taste (music and clothing, for example) instead of about race (Dolby ), and using code words (such as “English‐language learners” and “poverty”) as markers of race and ethnicity (see Castagno as well as Lewis ). These in fact relate to race and ethnicity, to psychological talk that promotes personal attributions and dissociation from structural‐collective attributions (ethnicity and race; Demerath et al ). The last practice suggests that actors in schools speak through specific discourses that are constructed as nonpolitical, such as psychological discourse and meritocratic discourse (Lewis ), which in turn maintain “the invisible weight of whiteness” (Bonilla‐Silva ).…”

“…The various social actors in the schools express this ideology, inter alia , through disregard, passive silence, or active silencing. This ideology is also maintained in broader discussions, such as neoliberal and psychological discourses (Demerath et al ), which promote dissociating from ethnic and racial identities and prefer the attributes of solipsism (Kraus et al ).…”

Contours of neoliberalism in US empirical educational research

“…This challenge was clearly illustrated by the handful of researchers in the articles we reviewed who did attempt to provide a more nuanced definition of what counted as neoliberal in their analysis of the data. For example, in their ethnographic study, Demereth, Lynch, and Davidson (2008) followed four high-achieving high school students over four years to explore what they labelled the "construction of advantage" in the United States. The researchers were particularly interested in understanding how students constructed their identities in relation to the demands and stresses of education and employment "markets" shaped by neoliberalism.…”

“Then I Learned about Positive Thinking”: The Genre Structuring of Narratives of Self‐Transformation

“…The self becomes a set of skills and attributes that can be consciously added to, reshaped, and improved in response to market or other pressures (Demerath et al. ; Gershon ; Urciuoli ). As Foucault () notes, this involves the acquisition not only of new skills, but also new attitudes.…”

“…Modern institutions from schools to talk shows train individuals into this type of reflexive, self‐managing, agentive self (Demerath et al. ; Matza , ). Such institutions are heavily imbued with what Foucault (:18) has called “… technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.”…”