Abstract—The emergence of person-centred discourse based around notions of ‘personal development planning’ and ‘work-life balance’ has taken hold in education and the workplace in recent years. This paper examines this discourse with regard to recent developments in higher education as well as the inter-related issue of work-life balance in occupational careers. In both cases there have been national and trans-national policy initiatives directed towards improving both personal opportunities and competitive advantage in a global knowledge-based economy. However, despite an increasing concern with looking outward at this globalised educational and employment marketplace, there is something of a paradox in encouraging people to look inward at themselves in order to become more self-determined. This apparent paradox is considered from a discourse analytic perspective in terms of the ideological effects of an increasing concern with the personal world. Specifically, it is argued that there are tensions that emerge from a concern with an inner- directed process of self-reflection that dissolve any engagement with wider political issues that impact upon educational and career development. Keywords—Personal development planning, higher education, work-life balance, career. I. INTRODUCTION HIS paper considers the ideological effects of recent person-centred discourse concerning personal development planning (PDP) and work-life balance (WLB). Two inter-related areas are examined as key sites of this discourse: student participation in higher education and the notion of work-life balance in pursuing a professional career. Whilst on the face of it this discourse may seem personally liberating there are a number of problematic issues that follow on from this inward focus on personal reflection. The root of this is the inherent voluntarism in such a focus and the concomitant dissolving of wider political matters that impact upon the individual into a private world of thoughts and feelings. The two major discourses selected for scrutiny and critique have emerged over the past decade or so and are now entrenched in policy initiatives at national and trans-national level. Thus in the world of higher education there is an increasing emphasis on encouraging students to engage in PDP, both in an academic and vocational sense. This is taken Manuscript received April 30, 2008. This work was supported in part by the U.K. Higher Education Academy Centre for Sociology, Anthropology & Politics under Grant 40/S/06. James Moir is with the University of Abertay Dundee, Scotland, U.K. (phone: +44 1382 308752; fax: +44 01382 308749; e-mail: j.moir@ abertay.ac.uk). as developing independence in students so that they can become more autonomous learners and career planners [1], [2]. Meanwhile in the world of work there has been a raft of ‘family-friendly’ policy initiatives that encourage people to attain a degree of WLB. The intention here is to afford employees the opportunity to achieve a degree of balance between their personal and professional lives, especially given the increasing emphasis on flexible working patterns [3], [4]. This paper therefore addresses these discourses in terms of the tensions that arise when educational and career matters are viewed as being related to individual reflection and choice. The first section considers recent developments in PDP in the U.K. and how this has led to a concern with instrumental approach to learning rather than one based on viewing knowledge as provisional and open to critique. The second section considers WLB and the way in which a gender-neutral terminology leaves matters up to individuals and obscures the issue of how this is addressed and targeted more towards women than men in the workplace. The argument advanced here is again related to the tensions inherent in this individualizing discourse that dissolves away any sense of the political backdrop to these matters. II. PDP IN HIGHER EDUCATION:LESSONS FROM THE U.K. It has been just over ten years since PDP was proposed by the National Commission into Higher Education in the U.K. [5]. The discussion of PDP advanced in the report stresses a structured and supported process designed to help the individual student to reflect upon their own learning and to plan for their personal, educational and career development, has become a central feature of higher education. The basic principles of PDP are action-orientated and cyclical and include the following dimensions: (i) goal setting and action planning; (ii) doing (learning through the experience of doing with greater awareness); (iii) recording (thoughts, ideas, experiences, evidence of learning); (iv) reviewing (reflections on what has happened, making sense of it all), and (v) evaluating (making judgements about self and own work and determining what needs to be done to develop, improve, and move on). However, whilst these principles are readily accepted, their translation into curricular developments and relationship with subject provision is less clear. This is a significant issue as the first ever mapping and synthesis review of PDP processes found that most, “adopted a prescriptive approach to PDP implementation in order to achieve course-specific outcomes” [6]. The danger with such prescriptive approaches is that PDP Developing the Personal, Dissolving the Political James Moir T World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology International Journal of Educational and Pedagogical Sciences Vol:2, No:5, 2008 460 International Scholarly and Scientific Research & Innovation 2(5) 2008 scholar.waset.org/1307-6892/5390 International Science Index, Educational and Pedagogical Sciences Vol:2, No:5, 2008 waset.org/Publication/5390