Over the last twenty years there has been increasing interest in the work of Michel Foucault in the social sciences and in particular with relation to education. This, the first book to draw on his work to consider lifelong learning, explores the significance of policies and practices of lifelong learning to the wider societies of which they are a part.

1. Mobilizing Foucault in studies of lifelong learning Katherine Nicoll and Andreas Fejes Section 1: Governing policy subjects 2. Actively seeking subjects? Richard Edwards 3. Understanding the mechanisms of neoliberal control: lifelong learning flexibility and knowledge capitalism Mark Olssen 4. Our 'will to learn' and the assemblage of a learning apparatus Maarten Simons and Jan Masschelein 5. The operation of knowledge and construction of the lifelong learning subject Ulf Olsson and Kenneth Petersson 6. The reason of reason: cosmopolitanism, social exclusion and lifelong learning Thomas S. Popkewitz 7. Historicizing the lifelong learner: governmentality and neoliberal rule Andreas Fejes Section 2: Governing pedagogical subjects 8. Self-governance in the job search: regulative guidelines in job seeking Marinette Fogde 9. Adult learner identities under construction Katarina Sipos Zackrisson and Liselott Assarsson 10. Recognition of prior learning as a technique of governing Per Andersson 11. Pathologizing and medicalizing lifelong learning: a deconstruction Gun Berglund 12. Motivation theory as power in disguise Helene Ahl 13. Discipline and e-learning Katherine Nicoll 14. Academic work and adult education: a site of multiple subjects Nicky Solomon Section 3: Governing subjects 15. Encountering Foucault in lifelong learning Gert Biesta