Individualization and Individualism: Facets and Turning Points of the Entrepreneurial Self among Young People in Italy

Abstract

The aim of this article is to show how young people in Italy deal with the structural injunction to become individuals. While there is a substantial number of works on how institutions converge in promoting individualization and an ‘entrepreneurial self’, in this article we investigate how young people give shape and meaning to social relations in the framework of the injunction to become autonomous entrepreneurs of themselves. The research presented here was conducted in Milan, from 2017 to 2019. We carried out 40 in-depth interviews with young people in order to explore (1) how individualization as a structural historical process becomes an ongoing accomplishment, a part of the ‘common sense’ that people use to interpret their everyday experience; and (2) the extent to which individualization and individualism intertwine and conflict with each other.