Cum ne guvernăm singuri: analiza instituțiilor implicate în procesul de construcție a subiecților neoliberali în România

• Published in: Sociologie românească Vol. 17; no. 1; pp. 114 - 132
• Main Author: Trifan, Elena
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English; Romanian, Moldovan
• Published: Eikon Publishing House 01.12.2019; Editura Eikon; Expert Projects
• Subjects: education; governmentality; market-economy; media; neoliberalism; personal development; Social development; marketeconomy; personal development; neoliberalism; education; media; governmentality
• ISSN: 1220-5389; 2668-1455
• DOI: 10.33788/sr.17.6

In this article I will present who the main actors involved in the process of construction of neoliberal subjects in Romania are. The process of restructuring the economic model of Romania, during the 90s, has brought about many social changes, such as the fl exibility of labour relationships, the growth of the service sector or the commodifi cation of education and health. Concomitantly with the global transformations – globalization and automation – by the end of 2000s, it determined the emergence of a new type of activity in the socio-economic environment that is personal development. This analysis aims to present a practical application of the concept of governmentality developed by Michel Foucault, drawing from the prerequisite that the practice of personal development becomes a tool for the construction of subjects, the direction of the construction being given by the type of social and economic context of the study period, which in the article I call neoliberalism. Thus, I will describe how this practice has come to be embraced by many neoliberal actors involved in citizens’ forming process – education, the media, the church and the non-governmental sector. The article is the result of an ethnographic approach, in which I used interviews, discourse analysis and content analysis, conducted between 2011 and 2016, mostly in Bucharest.