Personality as technology of self: MBTI and English language learning in South Korea

Abstract

This paper considers how a particular understanding of personality, as manifest in the way discourses about personality types are circulated and employed, may serve as a foundation for rationalizing the logic of human capital and its concomitant inequalities. Focusing on the recent popularity of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) in South Korea and the way it is adopted in online content offering advice on English language learning, this paper suggests that a conceptualization of personality as simultaneously enduring and inherent, on the one hand, and standardized and technologized, on the other, allows personality testing and personality type to serve as moral technologies of self that conceal the contradictions underlying the promotion of English language learning as a key to developing one’s human capital in neoliberal Korean society.