The power of economics textbooks: Shaping meaning and identity

By conducting a discourse analysis (SKAD) in the field of academic economics textbooks, this chapter aims at reconstructing frames and identity options offered to undergraduate students relating to the questions ‘Why study economics?’ and ‘Who do I become by studying economics?’. The analysis showed three major frames and respective identity offerings, all of which are contextualized theoretically. While a first frame promises students to learn ‘eternal truths’, thereby becoming ‘specialized knowers’, a second frame encourages students to capitalize their education as self-entrepreneurs. A third frame combines the ‘Why?’ of economic education directly with identity options by granting students insights in their ‘real’ and ‘true’ inner state. Taken together, economics textbooks appear as a “total structure of actions brought to bear upon possible action” (Foucault), therefore, as a genuine example of Foucauldian power structures.