Career coaching and the making of the neoliberal subject in Türkiye: Bringing docility back in

Abstract

Debates on neoliberal subjectivity have largely been premised on a rupture between the disciplinary power that produces docility and the governmental technologies that cultivate the ‘entrepreneurial self’. Contesting the prevalent dismissal of docility as an archaic technology of subjectivity in the Foucauldian literature, I argue that it has not been abandoned, but reconfigured. Drawing on a critical discourse analysis of career coaching in Türkiye, I develop the concept of the ‘docile mindset’ – a form of disciplinary power that operates through the colonisation of minds rather than the regulation of bodies. I show that the docile mindset naturalises the working conditions of corporations and neoliberal competitiveness as immutable realities and positions individual adaptation as the only viable response. Furthermore, given that the majority of coachees are women, I argue that career coaching functions as a gendered site for reproducing patriarchal power relations within the neoliberal corporate world. Finally, by shifting the analytical focus to the under-researched context of authoritarian neoliberalism and centring the neglected experiences of coachees, I outline the complex nature of actually existing neoliberal subjectivities. The empirical basis of this article is interviews with Turkish coaches and coachees and an examination of Turkish coaches’ blogs and websites.