Whose success counts? Children’s lifeworlds and the moral–economic politics of educational achievement

Abstract

Educational success is commonly defined through measurable performance within globalised assessment regimes, where comparative metrics and high stakes testing shape policy discourse and public understandings of achievement. Such frameworks privilege quantifiable attainment and narrow success to institutional performance. While extensive scholarship examines structural determinants of academic outcomes, considerably less attention has been given to how children themselves construct the meaning of success when invited to imagine their futures. Drawing on qualitative learning dialogue data from Year 4 students in Melbourne, generated within a multi-site research project examining children’s lifeworlds across three global cities (Melbourne, Hong Kong and Singapore), this article analyses children’s responses to a career aspiration prompt. Framed through lifeworld and scholarly habitus perspectives, aspirations are interpreted not as predictors of occupational outcomes but as forms of future-oriented identity work. Findings demonstrate that children construct success through hybrid moral–economic logics in which care, financial security, curiosity, challenge, recognition and mobility are negotiated simultaneously. Rather than reproducing singular cultural scripts or internalising institutional metrics, children synthesise relational and economic narratives of adulthood circulating within transnational educational fields. The analysis demonstrates that dominant separations between moral and economic framings of achievement obscure how children themselves understand success as moral–economic future identity work shaped through situated lifeworlds.

Introduction

Educational success occupies a powerful yet unstable position within contemporary global discourse. Across high-stakes testing regimes, international comparisons, and performance-driven policy reforms, success is frequently operationalised as measurable academic attainment. Comparative assessments such as Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) circulate rankings that shape national reputations and institutional priorities, reinforcing outcome-oriented definitions of achievement (Mullis et al., 2020). Within such frameworks, success becomes quantifiable, competitive, and hierarchically ordered.

However, this institutional narrowing obscures an important analytic question: how do children themselves understand success when asked to imagine their futures? While substantial scholarship has examined the structural determinants of academic performance, less attention has been paid to children’s own constructions of achievement as future-oriented meaning-making. Research on global assessment cultures often focuses on systems, policies, and parental strategies; yet children are not merely positioned within these structures, they actively interpret and negotiate them.

Career aspiration research has typically approached children’s ambitions as indicators of socioeconomic mobility, cultural capital transmission, or parental expectation (Bandura et al., 2001; Chen et al., 2022). In such accounts, aspirations are frequently read as outcomes of structural positioning. Although these influences are significant, they risk rendering children’s passive conduits of adult-defined success narratives. Particularly within multicultural and diasporic contexts, aspirations are often interpreted through binary framings collectivist versus individualist, intrinsic versus instrumental, moral versus economic. These analytic separations may oversimplify the complexity of children’s meaning-making.

This article does not claim that career aspirations fully represent children’s understandings of success. Rather, it treats children’s imagined adult futures as one site through which success is narratively constructed. The analysis therefore focuses specifically on future-oriented constructions of success as articulated through aspirations. At the same time, it acknowledges that children’s present lifeworlds may define success in other ways, including through friendship, care, inclusion, play, and everyday participation. The focus on aspiration is thus an analytic lens rather than an exhaustive account of how success is experienced in childhood.

This article proposes a different approach. Drawing on qualitative learning dialogue data from Year 4 students in Melbourne, generated within an Australian Research Council project examining children’s lifeworlds across three global cities, the analysis reframes career aspirations as sites of future-oriented identity work. Rather than treating aspirations as predictors of occupational outcomes, the article examines how children narrate success through layered rationales that combine care, financial security, challenge, curiosity, recognition, mobility, and continuity with present interests.

Framed through lifeworld and scholarly habitus perspectives (Waghorn, 2025; Waghorn et al., 2023; Habermas, 1987; Husserl, 1970), the study foregrounds children situated meaning-making within globalised assessment cultures. Lifeworlds direct analytic attention to the socially and culturally embedded contexts through which children interpret experience, while scholarly habitus illuminates how educational dispositions are embodied across home, school, and community environments. Together, these frameworks enable examination of how children’s aspirations reflect both structural positioning and interpretive agency.

Although the present analysis foregrounds the Melbourne cohort, these aspirations cannot be understood as locally bounded preferences. The professional categories most frequently invoked, doctor, lawyer, pilot, professional athlete, creative professional, circulate transnationally as globally recognisable archetypes of legitimacy, expertise, mobility, and prestige. They are embedded within symbolic economies that extend beyond national education systems, shaped by global labour markets, media representation, migration histories, and international assessment cultures. Children encounter these figures not only through school curricula or parental expectation, but through everyday exposure to globalised narratives of success that attach moral worth to economic competence.

Within multicultural metropolitan contexts such as Melbourne, these symbolic forms are further refracted through diasporic networks and intergenerational mobility narratives. Professional success may be associated simultaneously with family continuity, economic security, intellectual authority, and contribution to community wellbeing. As such, aspirations are situated within overlapping local and transnational fields of meaning. They are not merely individual preferences, nor straightforward reflections of socioeconomic positioning, but responses to globally circulating imaginaries of adulthood.

Attending to this transnational dimension reframes the analytic task. Rather than asking whether children reproduce culturally specific aspiration patterns, the question becomes how children negotiate globally shared prestige hierarchies within their own lifeworlds. The significance of children naming “doctor” or “pilot” lies not only in occupational selection, but in the symbolic work these roles perform as condensed representations of security, expertise, recognition, and mobility. In this sense, career aspirations operate as sites through which children participate in global future-making practices, translating transnational narratives of success into situated identity projects.

The findings demonstrate that children do not reproduce singular definitions of success. Instead, they synthesise moral and economic narratives of adulthood circulating within globalised educational fields. Aspirations such as becoming a doctor, lawyer, pilot, professional athlete, or creative professional are not framed solely in terms of income or status, nor exclusively as expressions of altruism or passion. Rather, children frequently combine these rationales, constructing success as hybrid moral–economic future identity work.

This intervention challenges the analytic separation between ethical and economic framings of achievement that underpins much global education discourse. By foregrounding children’s own articulations of imagined adulthood, the article contributes to global childhood scholarship in three ways. First, it reconceptualises success as narrative practice rather than measurable outcome. Second, it complicates binary cultural explanations by illustrating hybridity within individual responses. Third, it positions children as active agents who negotiate, rather than merely internalise, dominant narratives of achievement.

In doing so, the article invites reconsideration of how success is conceptualised within research and policy contexts. If children understand success through intersecting moral and economic logics, then narrowly institutional definitions risk misrepresenting how achievement is experienced and imagined in contemporary childhoods. Attending to children’s constructions of adulthood therefore expands debates about educational success beyond performance metrics toward the relational and aspirational dimensions through which futures are formed.

Literature review

Globalised assessment cultures and the narrowing of success

Educational success is increasingly produced within globalised assessment cultures. International comparative frameworks such as TIMSS and PISA generate performance data that influence policy reform, public discourse, and institutional priorities (Mullis et al., 2020). Within these regimes, achievement is operationalised primarily through measurable outcomes in mathematics, science, and literacy, with rankings frequently serving as proxies for educational quality. Success becomes quantifiable, competitive, and internationally comparable.

Scholars have argued that such assessment cultures privilege epistemological assumptions about what counts as knowledge and achievement, foregrounding cognitive performance while marginalising relational, affective, and contextual dimensions of learning (Rappleye and Komatsu, 2020; Waghorn et al., 2023). In this sense, global performance regimes do more than measure success; they shape the discursive conditions under which success is defined. Economic competitiveness, productivity, and human capital development become central organising principles.

Yet this narrowing of success to measurable attainment raises a conceptual tension. While policy discourse frames achievement as economic performance, educational rhetoric simultaneously invokes moral language resilience, contribution, citizenship, wellbeing. The economic and the ethical circulate together but are often analysed separately. This separation structures much contemporary debate about what education is for.

Cultural narratives of aspiration: Moral or economic?

Research examining cross-cultural achievement frequently interprets children’s aspirations through structural determinants such as parental expectation, aspirational capital, or socioeconomic positioning (Chen et al., 2022; Ho, 2020). In studies of East Asian and diasporic communities, professional aspirations are often linked to financial security, prestige, and family mobility. Such analyses foreground economic rationality and intergenerational strategy.

At the same time, other strands of research emphasise intrinsic motivation, personal passion, or moral purpose as drivers of aspiration (Bandura et al., 2001). These accounts frame children’s ambitions as expressions of identity, interest, and self-efficacy. The field thus tends to oscillate between economic and ethical explanations: aspirations are interpreted either as instrumental pathways to mobility or as authentic expressions of self.

This analytic separation risks oversimplifying children’s meaning-making. Particularly in multicultural and globalised contexts, children encounter overlapping narratives of prestige, care, creativity, security, and recognition that do not align neatly with singular motivational categories. Scholarship on bicultural identity integration demonstrates that individuals frequently negotiate hybridised orientations in which personal interests, familial expectations, and structural demands are held together rather than experienced as mutually exclusive (Benet-Martínez and Haritatos, 2005). Such work highlights the capacity to synthesise multiple value systems within a coherent sense of self. However, even within this literature, the analytic emphasis often remains on explaining patterns of adjustment or aspiration rather than interrogating how children themselves articulate the meaning of success within these overlapping symbolic fields.

Lifeworlds, dispositions, and situated meaning-making

The concept of lifeworlds offers a reorientation away from outcome-driven explanation toward situated meaning-making. Rooted in phenomenological and critical traditions (Habermas, 1987; Husserl, 1970), lifeworlds refer to the socially and culturally embedded contexts through which individuals experience and interpret the world. Within childhood research, lifeworlds encompass school participation, family routines, peer relationships, extracurricular engagements, and everyday encounters (Waghorn and Yelland, 2024).

A lifeworld lens directs analytic attention to how children interpret success within the environments they inhabit. It does not deny structural influence, but foregrounds children’s interpretive agency. Rather than asking which variables predict aspiration, this approach examines how children narrate futures using the symbolic resources available to them.

Building on this, the concept of scholarly habitus extends Bourdieu’s notion of habitus to educational contexts, highlighting how dispositions toward learning, achievement, and aspiration are embodied across home and school environments (Waghorn, 2025; Waghorn et al., 2023). These dispositions are not purely cognitive; they are formed through repeated practices, expectations, and cultural narratives. Importantly, habitus does not determine action but shapes the field of possible meanings within which children operate.

Together, lifeworlds and scholarly habitus provide a framework for analysing how children’s aspirations reflect both structural positioning and active negotiation. They enable examination of how moral and economic narratives of success are encountered, embodied, and reworked in everyday life.

Identified gap: Beyond the moral–economic divide

Despite extensive scholarship on global assessment regimes and cross-cultural aspiration patterns, limited attention has been given to how children themselves articulate success when asked to imagine adulthood. Existing research often explains aspirations through structural variables or cultural scripts, but less frequently interrogates how children synthesise multiple narratives of achievement.

This article addresses that gap by analysing children stated career aspirations as sites of moral–economic future identity work. Rather than presuming a divide between instrumental and intrinsic motivations, the analysis examines how children combine care, financial reasoning, challenge, recognition, and mobility within individual responses. In doing so, it challenges the analytic separation between ethical and economic framings of achievement that underpins much global education discourse.

To move beyond the analytic divide between instrumental and intrinsic motivation, I conceptualise children’s constructions of success as operating within a moral–economic field. This framing does not treat economic reasoning and ethical purpose as separate motivational categories that coexist within individual responses. Rather, it understands them as co-constitutive dimensions of legitimacy within contemporary globalised educational contexts.

In global policy discourse, economic productivity and moral formation are frequently positioned as parallel, and at times competing, purposes of schooling. Education is justified as preparation for labour market participation, innovation, and competitiveness, while simultaneously framed as cultivation of citizenship, resilience, and wellbeing. These rationales circulate together in institutional rhetoric, yet scholarly analysis often isolates them. Aspirations are interpreted either as economically instrumental or as expressions of intrinsic interest and moral purpose.

The children’s accounts analysed here suggest that this separation may misrepresent lived meaning-making. When children describe becoming a doctor because they can “help people” and “earn a lot of money,” or frame law as both “a great challenge” and a respected profession, they are not toggling between distinct domains of value. They are articulating forms of adult legitimacy in which care, security, recognition, challenge, and mobility are mutually reinforcing. Economic competence is morally charged; moral contribution is economically situated.

Conceptualising success as moral–economic hybridity therefore reframes aspiration as participation in a field of symbolic legitimacy structured by globalised narratives of profession and achievement. Within this field, economic and ethical dimensions are inseparable not because children lack conceptual clarity, but because contemporary constructions of adulthood entwine productivity, contribution, expertise, and prestige. The analytic task, then, is not to categorise aspirations as either moral or economic, but to examine how children synthesise these dimensions in narrating possible futures.

This framing does not propose a psychological account of mixed motives, nor a cultural account of dual orientation. Rather, it conceptualises aspiration as legitimacy formation within globalised symbolic economies in which economic competence and moral contribution are co-constitutive dimensions of recognised adulthood.

Methodology

Research design

This article presents a focused qualitative analysis nested within a broader Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project examining Year 4 children’s lifeworlds across three global cities: Melbourne, Singapore, and Hong Kong. The wider project investigated how children’s everyday schooling experiences intersect with assessment cultures, educational structures, and imagined futures within globalised educational fields.

The present study isolates children’s responses to a specific learning dialogue prompt concerning future occupations. While the broader ARC dataset spans three sites, this article foregrounds the Melbourne cohort to examine in contextual depth how children construct success within a multicultural metropolitan lifeworld shaped by transnational professional imaginaries.

Where earlier publications emerging from the project have examined system-level educational structures and the formation of scholarly habitus (Waghorn, 2025; Waghorn et al., 2023), and elaborated the methodological foundations of the lifeworld case study design (Waghorn and Yelland, 2024), this article narrows its analytic lens. It investigates how children narratively articulate success through career aspirations, interpreting these responses as forms of future-oriented identity work rather than as predictive indicators of occupational attainment.

Theoretical positioning

The methodological framing is grounded in lifeworld theory (Habermas, 1987; Husserl, 1970) and scholarly habitus (Waghorn, 2025; Waghorn et al., 2023; Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990). Lifeworlds direct attention to the socially and culturally situated contexts through which children interpret their experiences. Scholarly habitus extends Bourdieu’s theorisation of habitus into educational domains, illuminating how dispositions toward legitimacy, achievement, and aspiration are embodied through everyday schooling practices.

This positioning shaped both data generation and interpretation. Children’s aspirations are approached not as isolated preferences, but as narratively constructed projections of embodied educational dispositions operating within globally structured fields of professional legitimacy.

Context and participants

Data were generated in 2021 with Year 4 students (aged 9–10 years) at a metropolitan government primary school in Melbourne (pseudonym: Wattle Tree Primary School). The school enrolled approximately 650 students from Foundation to Year 6 and had an Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA) score of 1150, indicating relative socio-educational advantage.

At the time of data collection, the school had four Year 4 classes comprising approximately 100 students in total. Learning dialogues were administered across the Year 4 cohort. The school community included a substantial proportion of children from East and South Asian diasporic backgrounds, alongside Anglo-Australian and other cultural backgrounds.

Children were invited to provide demographic information including date of birth, gender, and cultural background. Categories included Indigenous Australian, European Australian, Chinese Australian, Indian Australian, Sri Lankan Australian, and Other. Demographic information was collected to enable contextual sensitivity in interpretation rather than subgroup comparison.

Demographic descriptors are included in the presentation of excerpts to situate children’s responses within a multicultural lifeworld rather than to attribute fixed meanings to particular groups or to enable subgroup comparison. These identifiers are used cautiously as contextual markers, recognising that identity positions are complex and non-deterministic. Their inclusion supports attention to how children’s aspirations may be shaped through diasporic, familial, and cultural narratives, while avoiding essentialised interpretations of cultural difference.

This local context is analytically significant. Melbourne is a multicultural metropolitan setting in which children’s everyday lifeworlds are shaped by diverse cultural backgrounds, migration histories, and transnational family networks. Within this environment, globally circulating narratives of professional success are encountered alongside localised expectations of schooling, achievement, and social participation. The school context, characterised by relative socio-educational advantage and cultural diversity, provides a setting in which aspirations are not formed in isolation but through ongoing negotiation between local experiences and global imaginaries of adulthood. Attending to this context is therefore critical for understanding how children’s constructions of success emerge as situated, rather than abstract, forms of meaning-making.

While the broader ARC project includes data from Singapore and Hong Kong, this article focuses on the Melbourne cohort to examine how children construct success within a culturally diverse Australian context embedded in global symbolic economies of profession and mobility.

Data generation: Learning dialogues

Data were generated using learning dialogues, a child-centred qualitative method developed within the Global Childhoods research program (Yelland and Bartholomaeus, 2021). Learning dialogues were designed to elicit children’s reflections on their schooling experiences and imagined futures beyond the constraints of survey instruments and high-stakes assessment frameworks.

Students responded in written and/or drawn form to structured prompts administered within regular classroom time. The prompt examined in this article was:

What job do you want to do when you leave school? Why?

The inclusion of “why” was deliberate, enabling children to articulate justificatory reasoning and attach meaning to occupational categories.

Responses were completed on A4 templates. Children were encouraged to use drawing and/or writing as they wished. Although many responses were concise, brevity does not reduce interpretive significance. At this stage of childhood, aspirations operate as symbolic condensations—compressed articulations of recognition, security, curiosity, contribution, and mobility. The analytic interest lies in how children assemble these narrative elements, rather than in predicting future trajectories.

Learning dialogues were implemented during the penultimate week of Term 4 in 2021, taking into account school scheduling constraints following pandemic disruptions. Participation was voluntary. Plain language statements were provided to teachers and parents, and written parental consent and child assent were obtained prior to participation.

Analytical approach

Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006). Analysis proceeded iteratively between close reading of children’s responses and theoretically informed interpretation guided by lifeworld and scholarly habitus frameworks.

Initial coding identified recurrent justificatory logics including financial security, relational contribution, intellectual curiosity, challenge, recognition, mobility, and familial modelling. Rather than categorising aspirations as either moral or economic, analysis examined how these dimensions were synthesised within individual responses.

Comparative awareness of patterns across the broader project informed interpretation. However, analytic depth was prioritised over cross-site comparison in order to illuminate how moral–economic hybridity operates within a multicultural metropolitan lifeworld embedded in globalised educational fields.

Ethical considerations

Ethical approval for the broader ARC project was granted by the Human Research Ethics Committee of The University of Melbourne (Approval No. 1853465.2). Written parental consent and child assent were obtained prior to participation. Children were informed of their right to withdraw at any time without consequence.

All data were de-identified. Pseudonyms are used for school sites and participants to protect anonymity.

Particular care was taken in working with child-generated data, recognising the vulnerability of participants and the importance of respectful representation. Responses were treated as expressions of children’s perspectives rather than evaluative measures of ability or aspiration. All excerpts were selected and presented in ways that preserve anonymity while maintaining the integrity of children’s voices.

Findings

Narrating success as moral–economic future identity work

Children’s responses to the prompt, “What job do you want to do when you leave school? Why?”, do not simply list occupational ambitions. They reveal how success is constructed as future-oriented identity work in which moral and economic logics are negotiated simultaneously. Rather than separating care from income, passion from prestige, or recognition from security, children frequently combine these rationales within single narratives. Success emerges not as a singular institutional endpoint, but as a hybrid moral–economic project through which children imagine legitimate, meaningful, and secure adult selves.

Across the dataset, children rarely framed aspirations solely in terms of academic attainment or school-based performance. Instead, they projected themselves into adulthood using layered justifications: helping others while earning money; pursuing challenging work that also brings recognition; extending current interests into professional futures; combining familial inheritance with personal invention. These overlapping rationales suggest that children do not internalise dominant achievement discourses in fragmented ways. Rather, they synthesise relational and economic narratives circulating within globalised educational fields.

The sections that follow illustrate how this moral–economic hybridity operates across children’s accounts of care, financial security, challenge, mobility, talent, and continuity with present interests.

Success as economic security, curiosity, and professional legitimacy

Alongside relational narratives, financial reasoning appeared explicitly in several responses. One child wrote, “I want to be a doctor because they make a lot of money,” but in the same sentence also described the work as “fun” because he could “see insight people’s brain” (Male, Chinese Australian). Similarly, another child wanted to become a dentist because “they earn a lot of money” and because she could “see what is actually in someone’s body/mouth. . . It might be disgusting but it sounds fun” (Male, Chinese Australian).

This articulation does not position financial reward as separate from intrinsic interest. Rather, the child frames economic security and intellectual curiosity as mutually reinforcing, suggesting that professional legitimacy is constructed through both material and experiential value. The capacity to access specialised knowledge (“see inside people’s brain”) is narrated as both enjoyable and economically valuable, indicating a synthesis rather than a trade-off between these domains.

This reinforces the broader pattern across the dataset in which economic and moral rationales are not separated but integrated within children’s constructions of success.

Success as difficulty and accomplishment

For some children, success was framed through challenge. One child expressed a desire to become a lawyer because it would be “a great challenge. . . to experience a hard accomplishment” (Boy, Chinese Australian). This articulation positions difficulty not as an obstacle but as a defining feature of success. The emphasis on “hard accomplishment” suggests that value is attached to effort, endurance, and the capacity to engage with intellectually demanding work. Rather than seeking ease or immediate reward, the child constructs success as something that must be worked toward and earned through sustained effort. Challenge here operates as a marker of legitimacy, where the difficulty of the profession enhances its perceived worth. In this sense, success is not only about outcome or status, but about the process of striving itself, reflecting a moral valuation of effort alongside recognition of professional prestige.

This reinforces the broader pattern across the dataset in which success is constructed through the integration of moral and economic logics, rather than through singular or simplified motivations.

Success as mobility and expansion

Spatial imagination also shaped aspirations. A child wanting to be a pilot explained, “I think it is very cool and I like to be in the sky” (Girl, Chinese Australian). Another elaborated: “When I graduate, my dream is to become a pilot. I really like planes and I also like travel. I am a real hero in geography. . .” (Boy, Chinese Australian). In these accounts, success involves movement, travel, and expansion beyond immediate environments. Present competence (“hero in geography”) is projected forward into future identity. The imagined adult self is mobile and expansive.

Mobility here is not only spatial but symbolic, representing expansion beyond the immediate lifeworld. The ability to travel and move is associated with freedom, exploration, and global participation, suggesting that success is imagined as both movement and possibility. This framing links personal interest in travel with broader imaginaries of global mobility and professional legitimacy.

Success as plurality, talent, and inherited pathways

Some children resisted singular futures. One wrote, “I have multiple yet I can’t choose. Scientist, so I can invent things. Doctor since my mum was one” (Boy, Chinese Australian). This response brings together innovation (“invent things”) with familial modelling (“since my mum was one”), indicating that aspirations are shaped through both personal imagination and relational inheritance. Rather than committing to a single trajectory, the child holds multiple possible futures in tension, suggesting that success is not fixed but open and exploratory.

Another child combined medicine with music, explaining he would like to be “a doctor or a pianist” because he is “interested in looking at veins, muscles” but also because “people think I’m talented. . . I also like MUSIC!” (Male, Chinese Australian). Here, recognition of talent, enjoyment, and professional legitimacy are not positioned as competing domains. Instead, they are integrated within a broader field of possibility in which multiple identities can be imagined simultaneously without the need for immediate resolution. The coexistence of medicine and music, or invention and familial continuity, indicates that aspirations are not narrowed to a single domain of value but instead draw together personal interest, perceived ability, and relational influence.

In this sense, success is constructed as a flexible and plural field of possibility rather than a predetermined endpoint. This reinforces the broader pattern across the dataset in which children synthesise moral, relational, and aspirational dimensions of success, rather than aligning with singular or fixed pathways.

Success as continuity with present passion

Other responses grounded success in existing interests and embodied competence. A child who wanted to be a professional cricket player explained this was because he “really like[s] to play cricket” (Male, Indian Australia). Another wanted to be a race car driver because he “know[s] a lot about cars and. . . don’t get sick when I go fast” (Boy, Indian Australia). A third stated simply, “I want to be a tennis player because I play tennis” (Boy, Indian Australia). Similarly, one child wished to be “a dog day care person. . . because I love dogs and will properly learn more about them” (Girl, Australian).

In these accounts, success is imagined as continuity rather than transformation. The future is not constructed as a departure from the present, but as an extension of existing interests, competencies, and embodied practices. Children draw on what they already know, enjoy, and feel capable of, projecting these experiences forward into imagined adult identities. This suggests that aspirations are grounded not only in abstract notions of prestige or opportunity, but in lived familiarity and personal engagement. The alignment between present activity and future occupation also indicates that legitimacy is partially derived from perceived competence, where “being good at” or “liking” something provides a foundation for imagining it as a viable and meaningful future. In this sense, success is constructed through continuity of self, where current identity is amplified rather than replaced. This reinforces the broader pattern across the dataset in which children synthesise experiential, moral, and aspirational dimensions of success, integrating present-oriented identity with future-oriented projections.

Synthesis

Across the dataset, success is not constructed through a single dominant script but through layered and intersecting rationales that operate simultaneously within individual accounts. Care and relational contribution are intertwined with financial security and professional legitimacy; intellectual curiosity sits alongside economic reasoning; challenge and accomplishment coexist with recognition of talent and familial modelling. Aspirations are rarely justified through one domain of value alone. Instead, children articulate futures that integrate security with enjoyment, prestige with passion, inheritance with invention, and mobility with belonging. These configurations are not random combinations of motives, but patterned syntheses shaped through children’s situated lifeworlds and exposure to globally circulating narratives of adulthood.

Importantly, hybridity does not manifest as internal contradiction. Children do not present economic ambition as a rejection of moral purpose, nor relational care as an alternative to security or status. Rather, these dimensions appear mutually reinforcing. Financial competence enhances legitimacy; challenge confirms worth; passion provides continuity; recognition affirms identity. Success, therefore, emerges as a negotiated moral–economic project in which multiple forms of value are held together within a coherent imagined adult self.

Crucially, these logics frequently coexist within individual responses. A child may refer simultaneously to money and enjoyment, challenge and recognition, inheritance and invention. Success, therefore, is not narrated as a fixed cultural category or as a uniform aspiration toward status. It emerges as layered, negotiated, and future-oriented—shaped by imagination, relational context, perceived ability, and exposure to broader narratives of what adulthood might hold.

Discussion

Moral–economic hybridity and the reconfiguration of success

The analysis demonstrates that children’s constructions of success cannot be adequately understood through analytic separations between instrumental and intrinsic motivation, economic aspiration and moral purpose, or structural positioning and individual agency. Rather than aligning with one domain, children frequently synthesise these logics within single narratives. Becoming a doctor is justified through both income and care; dentistry is linked to money and fascination; law is framed as financial legitimacy and “hard accomplishment.” These responses do not indicate confusion or contradiction. They reveal hybridity.

This hybridity matters because global education discourse often treats moral and economic rationales as competing orientations. Achievement is framed either as preparation for labour market competitiveness or as cultivation of ethical citizenship and personal fulfilment. Policy language invokes both, but scholarship frequently analyses them separately. The findings suggest that children themselves do not maintain this divide. Instead, they construct success as moral–economic future identity work in which security, legitimacy, care, challenge, recognition, and mobility are mutually reinforcing rather than oppositional.

In this sense, children are not merely internalising institutional metrics of achievement, nor are they simply resisting them. They are reworking them. Financial security is rarely narrated as detached accumulation; it appears alongside enjoyment, fascination, or relational contribution. Care-oriented professions are not described as morally pure alternatives to economic success; they are imagined as legitimate and skilled work that may also carry prestige and income. The analytic binary between economic rationality and ethical aspiration collapses in the face of children’s accounts.

This reframing complicates dominant explanations of aspiration in multicultural contexts. Scholarship often interprets high-status professional ambitions as products of parental expectation, aspirational capital, or cultural emphasis on mobility. While structural influences remain significant, such interpretations risk reducing children’s aspirations to reflections of adult strategy. The data here suggest something more dynamic. Children draw from familial modelling, school discourse, peer interests, media imaginaries, and global professional narratives, but they do not reproduce these scripts wholesale. They hybridise them, combining invention with inheritance, talent with legitimacy, challenge with security.

Importantly, this hybridity is not random. It reflects children’s situated lifeworlds. Within globalised educational fields, professional success circulates as both economic security and moral worth. Doctors, lawyers, pilots, and creative professionals are symbolically charged figures who embody competence, contribution, and mobility. Children’s aspirations suggest that they recognise these symbolic associations and mobilise them in constructing future selves. Scholarly habitus, in this context, is not simply a set of internalised dispositions toward achievement; it becomes a framework through which moral and economic narratives of legitimacy are embodied and reconfigured.

From this perspective, moral–economic hybridity can be understood as the narrative projection of scholarly habitus into imagined adulthood. The professions children name are not neutral occupational categories but hierarchically organised symbolic forms within global prestige economies. Through everyday schooling practices, children encounter and internalise distinctions of competence, recognition, and legitimacy. When they articulate aspirations, they are not merely expressing preference; they are projecting embodied dispositions into globally structured fields of adulthood. Moral–economic synthesis therefore reflects not motivational confusion, but the operation of scholarly habitus within transnational symbolic economies.

Yet the circulation of these professional archetypes cannot be understood solely within local institutional contexts. Professions such as doctor, lawyer, pilot, or creative specialist operate within global symbolic economies in which expertise, mobility, and legitimacy are internationally recognisable forms of value. These roles are not simply occupational categories; they function as condensed representations of competence, authority, contribution, and security across national contexts. Their prestige is sustained through transnational labour markets, migration narratives, international media, and global assessment discourses that position certain forms of knowledge as universally valuable.

Children’s aspirations therefore reflect participation in transnational fields of future-making. In multicultural urban settings such as Melbourne, many children inhabit lifeworlds shaped by migration histories, diasporic community expectations, and globally circulating narratives of upward mobility. Professional success may signify not only personal interest or economic stability, but intergenerational continuity, global mobility, and recognition beyond local contexts. When a child links becoming a pilot with travel, or medicine with intellectual fascination and financial security, these associations are embedded within wider imaginaries of movement, expertise, and legitimacy that exceed the immediate school environment.

Conceptualising aspirations in this way reframes children not as passive recipients of achievement discourse, but as active interpreters of globally shared prestige hierarchies. They encounter professional archetypes as moralised economic forms—figures who embody care and competence, security and contribution, authority and expertise. Through their narratives, children translate these globally circulating symbols into situated identity projects. The future becomes a site where local lifeworlds intersect with transnational imaginaries.

This perspective complicates explanations that reduce aspiration patterns to cultural determinism or parental strategy. While structural positioning and familial influence remain significant, children’s accounts demonstrate interpretive synthesis rather than simple reproduction. They do not merely mirror global hierarchies of prestige; they embed them within relational reasoning, curiosity, passion, and challenge. Success, in this sense, operates within a global moral–economic field structured by symbolic economies of profession, yet continually reconfigured through children’s narrative labour.

Understanding children’s aspirations as participation in global symbolic economies thus expands the analytic horizon of childhood studies. It situates future-oriented identity work within transnational fields of value, where legitimacy, security, mobility, and moral contribution are intertwined. Children’s narratives reveal how globalised constructions of adulthood are encountered, interpreted, and hybridised in everyday life.

This interpretation shifts how success is conceptualised within childhood studies. Rather than treating success as a measurable endpoint or culturally predetermined ambition, the findings position it as narrative practice—an ongoing process through which children negotiate legitimacy within overlapping moral and economic fields. Success is not simply attained; it is imagined, justified, and narrated.

The implications extend beyond this dataset. In educational systems increasingly shaped by global comparison and economic competitiveness, children’s meaning-making demonstrates that institutional metrics do not fully define the horizon of aspiration. Children’s imagined futures are not reducible to test performance or credential acquisition. They are moral–economic projects in which belonging, contribution, mobility, and security are held together.

This does not negate structural inequality. Nor does it suggest that aspirations are free from material constraint. Rather, it highlights that children actively interpret and synthesise the discourses available to them. In doing so, they reveal that success operates as a hybrid field in which ethical and economic dimensions are inseparable.

Understanding success in this way challenges the analytic frameworks that isolate intrinsic from instrumental motivation, collectivist from individualist aspiration, or moral purpose from market logic. Children’s narratives suggest that these distinctions may reflect analytic categorisation more than lived experience. Reframing success as moral–economic future identity work therefore reorients debates about achievement within global childhood research away from dichotomies and toward the hybridised realities children articulate.

Conclusion

Rethinking success through moral–economic futures

This article has examined how children narrate “success” through their responses to a career aspiration prompt within the learning dialogues dataset. Rather than equating success with measurable academic attainment, the analysis demonstrates that children construct success as moral–economic future identity work shaped through relational care, financial reasoning, curiosity, challenge, mobility, recognition, family inheritance, and continuity with present interests. These rationales do not operate independently; they are assembled within individual narratives. Success emerges not as a singular institutional endpoint, but as a hybrid projection of legitimate, meaningful, and secure adult selves.

In foregrounding this hybridity, the article challenges analytic separations that have structured global education discourse. Success is frequently framed either as economic competitiveness within knowledge economies or as moral formation oriented toward wellbeing and contribution. Children’s narratives suggest that such distinctions may reflect scholarly categorisation more than lived experience. Financial security does not negate care; prestige does not exclude passion; challenge does not displace belonging. Moral and economic dimensions of achievement are co-constitutive within children’s imagined futures.

This reframing does not deny structural inequality or the material constraints shaping opportunity. Nor does it assume that articulated aspirations translate directly into realised futures. Rather, it demonstrates that children actively interpret and synthesise the achievement narratives circulating within their lifeworlds. Success operates as a narrative practice through which children negotiate legitimacy within transnational symbolic economies structured by both moral and economic logics.

Recognising success as moral–economic future identity work carries implications for research and educational discourse. If children understand achievement as inseparable from care, recognition, security, and mobility, policy frameworks that reduce success to performance metrics risk misrepresenting how futures are imagined and justified. Attending to children’s constructions of adulthood does not replace structural analysis; it reveals how structural conditions are encountered, embodied, and reconfigured through everyday meaning-making.

Within global childhood scholarship, this perspective extends existing debates by reframing aspiration not as motivational orientation or cultural disposition, but as participation in globally stratified fields of legitimacy. Dichotomies between instrumental and intrinsic motivation, collectivist and individualist aspiration, or market logic and moral purpose become analytically unstable when viewed through children’s accounts. These distinctions are not absent, but porous.

While this analysis foregrounds future-oriented constructions of success, it does not capture the full range of children’s present-oriented experiences of success within their everyday lifeworlds, including those grounded in friendship, care, inclusion, and play.

By centring children’s own articulations of imagined adulthood, this article positions success not as a static outcome but as an evolving moral–economic field in which children actively participate. Understanding achievement in this way expands contemporary debates about what counts as success and foregrounds the imaginative labour through which futures are narratively assembled within globalised educational worlds.

AI-assisted technology

AI-assisted technologies were used for structural refinement and language editing. The author takes full responsibility for the content, interpretation, and originality of the manuscript.