The ‘soft power’ of marketisation: the administrative assembling of Irish youth justice work

This chapter is based on the premise that marketisation extends beyond strategies such as privatisation or monetisation, but encroaches into our life-worlds more subtly. Based on the analysis of recent Irish youth justice policy reforms, it is suggested that softer aspects of marketisation become visible in the way that ‘problems’ or ‘solutions to problems’ are written and talked about. Importantly, this chapter traces how dominant discourses ‘travel’ from sites of administrative governance into the imaginations of front-line workers engaging with young people. It is further argued that the introduction of administrative governance is emblematic of neo-liberalism’s distinct mode of reason with the problematic effect of constructing young people and their families as responsible for their own self-improvement and self-realisation. Through its anti-political nature, administrative governance eschews important considerations relating to the wider contexts of youthful ‘offending’ and the professional field of ‘youth justice work’.