Individual Autonomy or Social Engagement? Adult Learners in Neoliberal Times
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Numerous scholars have documented and critiqued the predominance of neoliberal policies and rationalities shaping adult and continuing education around the world. Contemporary sociologists have argued that neoliberal citizens are characterized by hyperindividuality and a strong sense of personal autonomy. Self-help reading is widely viewed as one of the most neoliberal forms of adult learning. In this article, we challenge recent claims about the autonomy of the neoliberal subject through reporting results of qualitative research undertaken with 134 readers of self-help books. Using an innovative approach to explore people’s self-characterizations, we argue that contemporary patterns of subjectivity may be more complex and socially engaged than those implied by prevailing accounts of our neoliberal times. Our findings are important for those seeking to understand the changing nature of adult learners, and for those seeking to understand the complex interplay of discourse and subjectivity in the contemporary field of adult education.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".