Competence Framework for Life and Work As Technological Ensemble in Neoliberal Governmentality

The competence framework has become an extended technological ensemble from north to south, working as a key to lifelong learning in contemporary neoliberal governmentality (Foucault). It is present in the European Union EntreComp, the ILO Core Skills for life and work in the 21st Century, the World Bank Skills Towards Employability and Productivity (STEP) measurement program, and in the official pedagogic discourses of the continuous educational reforms in Latin America.

A fundamental attribute of the competence model is its necessary focus on assessable and effective performance in real contexts. While aiming to regulate knowledge transmission and acquisition forms, these technological ensembles create forms of behaviour, shape desires, and modulate subjectivities. In contemporary discursive and non-discursive practices, in addition to the meanings and the conduction of conducts they try to bring into play, there is a compulsion to evaluate the performance of individuals, teaching activity, and the effectiveness of institutions and the education systems. The discrete delimitation of effective and competent performances allows for evaluation, comparability, measurement, and the definition of a 'league table', which operates as a ruler of conduction of how subjects must modify themselves.

In the context of neoliberal governmentality, the competency technology embraced the entrepreneurial self as a subjectivation regime, by which the boundaries of life and work, private and public, are blurred and through social control technologies and technologies of the self produce subordinate subjectivities that are in constant failure to reach introjected standards. Subjects are compelled to constant training, a capacity of trainability, that through lifelong learning legitimates Totally Pedagogised Societies (Bernstein).

To understand this process, we study the transmission of knowledge related to life and work constructed as common to both spheres at the level of Official Pedagogic Discourse and local pedagogic practices in educational and work contexts.