Capitalism as our Truth Regime : Understanding the truth regime for students of business and economics

• Main Authors: Karlsson, Linda, Lindkvist, Kristoffer, Blenner, Christian
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Växjö universitet, Ekonomihögskolan, EHV 2009
• Subjects: Regime of truth; discourse analysis; capitalism; interviews; students; individualism; socialism; Swedish model; Business and economics; Ekonomi
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:vxu:diva-5571

Introduction People want to believe that they make their own choices and have freedom of thought even if social constructionists say that the self is created by power relations and discourses which are also created by power. The regime of truth serves power interest and pervades discourses.  Since our thoughts are managed by discourse, the regime of truth is ascribing us our life goals. It is pronounced that capitalism is our current regime of truth and thus permeates our society in all kinds of areas. Since it is taken-for-granted people is unaware of it; it is normalized to the further most possible extent.  We want to increase understandings of how Swedish students of business and economics are influenced by capitalism as the current regime of truth. Theory Base of the thesis is the concept of regime of truth, its control of discourses and the inseparable relation of power and knowledge. We define capitalism trough classical writers as Milton Friedman and John Maynard Keynes. We follow up with a presentation of the Swedish model and education in order to get the socialistic background of Sweden together with the impact of education system. Method As starting point we use social constructionism when conducting a discourse analysis on the accounts gathered from fourteen interviews of business students from Växjö University, Sweden. Result When taking our findings into account, the complex mixture of discourses dominated by capitalism, together with the importance of income, revenue and costs in all kinds of areas in our civilization, we must pronounce that capitalism, perhaps together with individualism and socialism, are permeating our society to that extent that we perhaps speak of it as a regime of truth.