A Diminished Self: Entrepreneurial and Therapeutic Ethos Operating with a Common Aim

This article focuses on the aim of creating a flexible and self-centred self by means of entrepreneurial and therapeutic education. It is an analysis that uses documents from project-based educational programmes as well as interviews with young adults and the people who work with them in these programmes. The data are examined using a Foucauldian and feminist analysis of discursive power and subjectivity. The author argues that entrepreneurial and therapeutic forms of education related to young adults lead to a particular kind of ideal self which she refers to as diminished.