Learning to succeed: Entrepreneurial subjects of development

Stories abound celebrating the triumph of modern democracy and free markets as the pathways to the socioeconomic development of the third world.  In place of modernization projects rectifying the “backward” ways of the poorest, an apparently more self-sustaining mode of development has gained credence, which in giving agency to the underdeveloped renders them (everyone!) responsible for their own social, political, and economic transformations.  Although ostensibly the more ethical and respectful way, this developmental ethos obscures the dynamics of a neoliberal governmentality whose strategy entails bringing more and more people into an entrepreneurial middle-class, leaving the externalities of poverty to the charitable few.

Instead of being given the gift, we are given the dream.  If only we fashion ourselves the right way, a world of opportunities awaits us.  Yet, how exactly are people in out-of-the-way places being trained to prosper in a global marketplace and succeed as cosmopolitan citizens?

In this paper, I grapple with these questions by investigating the booming industry of learning/teaching English – the claimed currency of global trade, media, technology, and so forth.  Specifically, I explore the complex dimensions of civic and entrepreneurial training at private English-language centers in Rio de Janeiro, designed to prepare cosmopolitans-in-training to compete in “glocal” economies.  As one of Brasil’s biggest businesses, addressing alleged gaps in the transition from authoritarian regimes to modern-democracy-and-free-markets, these centers have come to occupy various positions with respect to (i)establishing credentializations and work ethic; (ii)nurturing corporate/social responsibility and volunteerism; and (iii)teaching self-improvement, leadership, and managerialism.  These everyday training-grounds of a knowledge-based economy elucidate the cultural politics of middle-classification that captures the spirit of the new (Lula) way to develop Brasil. What is at stake in training vast numbers of people into the tastes, dispositions, and expectations of a cosmopolitan entrepreneurial middle-class as the pathway to socioeconomic development?