‘In the end you adapt to anything’: Responses to narratives of resilience and entrepreneurship in post-recession Spain

Introduction

After the fall of Lehman Brothers in 2008 and the subsequent financial collapse, what is known as the Great Recession spread around most Western countries. The economic crisis was particularly severe in Spain, where its effects lasted for years, with a rise in unemployment from 8.57 percent in 2007 up to a peak of 25.73 percent in 2013, along with alarming numbers of home evictions and increasing poverty and inequality (Angulo Egea, 2018). The working class in particular experienced higher unemployment rates and income losses (Martínez, 2014).

After 2010, the Spanish government began to implement austerity measures and legislative reforms to increase the job market’s ‘flexibility’ (Fernández Rodríguez and Martínez Lucio, 2013; López Andreu, 2017). After the 2012 bailout, these policies were further tightened with pressure from European institutions (Mateos and Penadés 2013). These measures were legitimized by a deepening of neoliberal discourses, which depicted austerity as the only sensible policy, arguing ‘that you cannot spend more than you earn’, an idea repeated 93 times in the speeches by Mariano Rajoy (Spain’s prime minister from 2011 to 2018) (Borriello, 2017: 248). Moreover, Spain was included in the acronym PIGS (Portugal, Italy/Ireland, Greece and Spain), which was connected with a ‘narrative [that] suggests that the origins of the Eurozone crisis are to be found in the fiscal profligacy of PIGS countries, particularly southern European ones, which are accustomed to live beyond their means and work less than other Europeans’ (Ntampoudi, 2014: 6). From this vantage point, the crisis is framed as a moral corrective that should facilitate the creation of entrepreneurial, autonomous citizens.

In this context, resilience is presented as a fundamental value when coping with (and taking advantage of) the precariousness and uncertainty in post-recessionary Western societies. As Barudy (2016) claims, resilience ‘is a fashionable word. Politicians, athletes and self-help gurus use it’. In a broad array of spheres, from popular culture to politics, the idea that hardship is an opportunity to grow and better oneself has flourished and merged with other core neoliberal values, such as entrepreneurship, flexibility and self-improvement.

This article examines how citizens in post-recession Spain, where the crisis is officially over although its consequences are still palpable, ¹ respond to the discourses and representations which have populated the Spanish media, promoting the value of resilience, change and adaptability. Although there has been a surge in studies on how the recession and austerity culture have been represented in the media across different national contexts in recent years, how audiences respond to these narratives remains understudied.

The imaginaries of the economic crisis

As international scholarship has highlighted, popular culture has played an important role in portraying and legitimizing austerity imaginaries and neoliberal values. The economic crisis has been framed via metaphors such as natural catastrophe or accident (Bickes et al., 2014), ‘eliminating any responsibility’ and ‘instilling fear and resignation in the face of what is depicted as inevitable and universal’ (Cortés de los Ríos, 2010: 85). Recent post-apocalyptic narratives (Pérez-Latorre et al., 2019; Boyle and Mrozowsky, 2014; Sugg, 2015) also draw from these metaphors, while advocating individualized solutions and somewhat romanticizing austerity. This romanticization of austerity can also be found in ‘retreatist’ narratives (Negra and Tasker, 2014). Although these imaginaries can be seen as avowals of anti-consumer values, claiming that there is more to life than material wealth (Bramall, 2013), they are often used to ‘reify [. . .] the new normal of deteriorated working conditions’ (Kidder, 2016: 316) and morally justify austerity policies. Popular culture encourages individuals to ‘absorb greater risk and take up positions of heightened precarity’ (Negra and McIntyre, 2020: 76) and to become entrepreneurial and independent individuals who scrimp and save (Allen et al., 2015).

In Spain, popular culture during the years of the crisis consists of an amalgam of national and international (mostly Anglo-American) fiction and non-fiction contents, as well as local adaptations of international TV formats. Thus, it shares traits with what has been identified in international scholarship while having its own particularities.

The crisis was portrayed as an equalizer, a catastrophe that affected everyone equally, hiding the increasing inequality; this is evidenced in comedies such as the TV series La que se avecina and Con el culo al aire and Aída; the films La chispa de la vida and 5 metros cuadrados (Allbritton, 2014; Ruiz-Muñoz, 2015); narratives of ‘broke celebrities’ (Oliva and Pérez-Latorre, 2020); and Anglo-American and Spanish post-apocalyptic stories (TV series such as The Walking Dead and El barco and video games such as The Last of Us). Moreover, these narratives fostered the idea that you have to do ‘whatever it takes’ to survive (such as take any job without complaining) (Pérez-Latorre, 2019, Oliva and Pérez-Latorre, 2020).

The consequences of the crisis were also depicted in the press through the life stories of three figures: the unemployed, the evicted and the precarious young adult forced to emigrate to the prosperous North (Angulo Egea, 2018, 2020; Labrador Méndez, 2012). These stories, which highlighted the dramatic consequences of crisis on Spanish citizens, were countered with advertisements that romanticized them, urging Spaniards to adapt to the precarious reality and discover the value of the ‘little things’ (Ruiz Collantes and Sanchez-Sanchez, 2019).

Similarly, during the crisis years, contestation against welfare cuts (Castells, 2012) appeared alongside media texts that introduced neoliberal imaginaries which fostered individualized ways of coping with the precarious context: from individual entrepreneurship to charity and solidarity among Spaniards. Entrepreneurship as a value was not introduced in the Spanish imaginary until a few years before the crisis started. From 2006 to 2010, successful local adaptations of international reality TV formats such as Supernanny or Soy lo que como (Honey, We’re Killing the Kids) (Oliva, 2012) promoted the creation of autonomous, entrepreneurial and self-governing citizens, legitimizing a neoliberal ‘reinvention of government’ that began in the United Kingdom and the United States in the mid-1990s (Biressi and Nunn, 2008; Ouellette and Hay, 2008). In Spain, where the welfare state was traditionally legitimized (García, 2010), these formats introduced new imaginaries that further developed after 2008.

During the crisis, the figure of the young (male) entrepreneur is openly praised in Spanish news, factual entertainment and reality TV (Código Emprende) as a virtuous citizen: ‘if there are no jobs available, they invent them’. Also, local adaptations of Anglo-American talent shows such as La voz (The Voice) and Master Chef and popular TV series reinforced these values. For example, the series Velvet and El tiempo entre costuras portrayed entrepreneurial women who achieved upward social mobility thanks to their ‘talent [. . .] and, especially, to [their] self-sacrificing ability for work’ (Gómez et al., 2018). In contrast, the working class was blamed for their own vulnerable situation through the stereotyped figure of the choni, which became popular in TV series (Aida) and reality TV (Princesas de Barrio), presenting young working-class women as irresponsible, tasteless, uncultured and work-shy (Oliva, 2014, 2018).

Finally, charity and solidarity among Spaniards were presented as ways to deal with the consequences of the crisis. They are seen in local adaptations of Anglo-American formats such as Esta casa era una ruina (Extreme Makeover: Home Edition), El jefe infiltrado (Undercover Boss) and Millonario anónimo (Secret Millionaire), as well as in the Spanish show Entre todos (TVE1 2013–2014), in which people facing difficulties asked other Spaniards for help. Solidarity was also highlighted in advertising campaigns such as Ikea’s ‘Where two fit, three also fit’. These programs and ads concealed the causes of inequality and the role of the state in addressing it (Ruiz-Muñoz, 2015: 1132; see also Ruiz Collantes and Sanchez-Sanchez, 2019).

On resilience

Resilience – the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties – has been a key concept in the discourses about the economic crisis, especially in relation to the ways of coping with it. Resilience ‘implies the ability to withstand setbacks or even the capacity for individuals to use their problems as an impetus for positive change’, such that it is often presented positively since ‘it is dynamic and suggests agency’ (Harrison, 2013: 99). Over time, resilience has come to be accepted as a quality prescribed to citizens in somewhat broad terms (Schoon, 2006), creating ‘an expectation that people should “bounce back”’ (Harrison, 2013: 99). Different authors have pointed out that in analyses of individuals’ capacity for resilience, its costs tend to be ignored and institutions are not blamed for the need to limit inequalities, instead expecting that the most vulnerable citizens will take on this role by caring for themselves (Gill and Orgad, 2018; Harrison, 2013; Jensen, 2016).

Since the 1990s, resilience has gradually been incorporated into neoliberal discourses concurrently with the enshrinement of values such as ‘adaptability’, ‘capacity to change’ and ‘flexibility’ in business management jargon (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005). In this context, the pressure to boost competitiveness has mainly been transferred from companies to workers, which has meant more precarious working conditions, often labeled as ‘job flexibility’ (Standing, 2011). As an example of the close relationship between these concepts and resilience, since the 1990s the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have explicitly incorporated ‘resilience’ strategies into their logistics of crisis management, financial (de)regulation and development economics (Evans and Reid, 2014: 31).

This discourse has only magnified since the economic crisis, as it has been expanded and idealized in very diverse fields such as politics, psychology, education, celebrity culture and creative labor (Barudy, 2016; Conor, 2014; Gill and Orgad, 2018; Gorin and Dubied, 2011). In the United Kingdom, scholars have highlighted how within the context of austerity policies, which have had a heavy impact on the more vulnerable echelons of society, citizens are being asked to respond to these difficulties through resilience in government initiatives and documents (Jensen, 2016). Similarly, in popular texts such as self-help guides, women’s magazines and apps, difficulties (such as losing your job) are portrayed as an opportunity for reinvention, growth and self-learning (e.g. finding the job that is your true passion), linking resilience with ‘intense self-management strategies and positive mental attitude’ (Gill and Orgad, 2018: 2; see also McRobbie, 2020: 61). Resilience has thus gone from being seen as an ‘inherent’ trait of the working class to being linked to neoliberal notions of self-entrepreneurship. McRobbie (2020) views resilience in contemporary popular culture as a model of ‘self-governance’ (p. 46) connected to the withdrawal of social care and as a way to help citizens ‘tolerate disappointment’ and ‘not to expect too much’ (McRobbie, 2020: 55) while disavowing ideas of political transformation and anger.

In Spain, we can also find instances of this neoliberal rhetoric of resilience. Not only is entrepreneurship portrayed as a way to respond to the crisis, as we have seen in the previous section, but the crisis (and the more precarious environment) is also framed as an opportunity to help Spaniards to become more entrepreneurial and thus reinvent themselves. For example, reality TV formats such as Código Emprende or Master Chef (see above) featured unemployed contestants portraying their situation as an opportunity to become entrepreneurs or find their true passion. Nevertheless, this topic is still understudied in Spain, and this article seeks to make a contribution by exploring how audiences respond to popular media texts that convey neoliberal definitions of resilience.

Methodology

This article presents the results of a research project whose objective is to identify the values conveyed by popular culture during the years of the economic crisis in Spain and to see how citizens respond to these values and representations. Our aim is to provide new insights into how citizens’ perceptions connect to and interweave with media discourses in the context of austerity and economic crisis in Spain, thus filling a gap in the existing literature on this topic, which mainly focuses on textual analyses. To this end, focus groups were held with a total of 62 participants. These groups were held in late 2017, a period when, as stated above, the economic crisis was over but its social and job effects were still obvious in Spain. In this way, the goal was to collect perceptions and opinions in a context where connections could easily be drawn between the values found in media texts and the social and economic situation of the crisis as experienced by the participants.

The choice of focus groups as the research technique reflects a desire to examine citizens’ discourse from a qualitative viewpoint, that is, without the goal of representativeness, as which other techniques can provide, yet with the possibility of detecting significant differences among social groups and obtaining elaborate discourses (Bryman, 2008). Focus groups enable us to observe and evaluate how positions are constructed and negotiated based on a kind of ‘common sense’, that is, based on shared values that are unchallenged, taken for granted, and considered inevitable and indisputable (Cairns, 2015). Finally, focus groups allow us to observe how meanings are constructed based on peer interaction, and therefore they shed light on how certain ideas, opinions and values are socially imposed (Acocella, 2012).

The variables of gender and professional and educational levels were considered key when assembling the focus groups, with the premise that these social groups may formulate significantly different discourses since they had been affected by the economic crisis in different ways. In this sense, educational and professional levels were chosen as segmentation variables as an indirect way of evaluating the participants’ social class. Each group with the same profile was duplicated to ensure a degree of saturation (Krueger and Casey, 2015). Therefore, eight focus groups were assembled with four different social groups: (a) middle-class women (MCW 1 and 2): university graduates, BC1; (b) working-class women (WCW 1 and 2): vocational education, C2D; (c) middle-class men (MCM 1 and 2): university graduates, BC1; and (d) working-class men (WCM 1 and 2): vocational education, C2D. The participants were selected by an external research company, but the focus groups were conducted by the members of the research project.

The topics posed during the focus groups emerged from a previous two-level study: a literature review and an analysis of popular media texts. ² In both cases, we studied how neoliberalism and its associated values (resilience, austerity, entrepreneurship, self-discipline, meritocracy, individualism, flexibility, adaptation to change) have contributed to generating a predominant narrative about the crisis and how this narrative has also permeated popular culture texts (as explained in previous sections). Based on this work, we created four written short stories that encapsulated the main features of the narratives previously studied.

These four stories portrayed characters dealing with situations of sudden or desired changes. The first one, entitled ‘The Cowboy After Midnight’, presented a male character after a natural catastrophe that leaves the world in ruins who becomes a mistrustful, self-assured bounty hunter who seeks resources for his daughter and a group of friends with whom they share their shelter. This story contains the idea of the crisis as a catastrophe with no one to blame that affects everyone equally (like in The Last of Us, Aída and La que se avecina). It also points to the need to do whatever it takes to survive (which connects to the narratives of broke celebrities and to El Barco or The Walking Dead). Finally, it contains neoliberal values such as individualism and the idea of the crisis as an opportunity (found in Master Chef, El tiempo entre costuras and Águila Roja).

The second story (‘Realistic Rebel’) recounted Samuel’s struggle against an authoritarian, dictatorial regime which plundered from its people. Once the regime has been beaten, Samuel becomes the leader of the community, but over time some of his peers accuse him of reproducing the same authoritarian behaviors as the previous regime and instating a social model based on productivity. In this story, we find values such as resistance and the need for good managerial skills, which appear in video games such as Assassin’s Creed III and The Last of Us and series such as Velvet and Cuéntame cómo pasó.

The third story (‘Resisting on Elm Street’) presented the character of María, a wealthy woman who is forced to take refuge in her servant’s home when a revolution breaks out. María feels very uncomfortable living with poor people, with whom she has nothing in common, and she is incapable of helping them with their household chores. Her only hope is for the war to end and for everything to go back to the way it used to be. This story connects with the idea of waiting and resisting until the crisis ends, a narrative found in advertisement campaigns analyzed. It also depicts conflicts between social classes as portrayed in Cuéntame cómo pasó, Chiringuito de Pepe and Velvet, and shows downward mobility, like the Spanish broke celebrities have experienced.

Finally, the fourth story (‘Back to the Origin’) tells the story of Nadia, a professional in a multinational who is sent to live with the nomadic people of Mongolia in the quest for a new product. Nadia likes the simple, natural life of the Mongols, and when one of the women in the community dies, she decides to care for her son and stay to live with them. This story conveys values such as retreatism, austerity and solidarity (found in TV advertisements by Campofrío and video games such as Fallout 4). Also, the story of a woman who abandons her successful professional career and embraces family can be found in TV series such as Cuéntame cómo pasó and Chiringuito de Pepe.

These four written stories were presented during the focus groups so that the participants could discuss them. ³ Afterwards, the participants’ discourse in the focus groups was analyzed using thematic coding with the NVivo program.

‘We all have to bring out the best in ourselves in order to deal with difficult situations’: the discourse of resilience

The majority of the participants praised the capacity of the main characters of the four short written stories to adapt to ever-changing (and hostile) environments. Following a logic similar to neoliberal notions of self-help (Ouellette and Hay, 2008; Rose, 1998), difficulties were presented as a learning opportunity to get to know yourself better and maximize your personal potential (Gill and Orgad, 2018: 4):

P3: I think that taking it to the extreme, we all have to bring out the best in ourselves . . . in order to deal with difficult situations. If you’re put in extreme situations, in the end you’ll find another self, one you didn’t even know about. (WCW 1)

P4: I think that you, shall we say, discover skills you didn’t even know you had, and capacities you wouldn’t have known about if you hadn’t been thrust into this situation. (MCW 2)

Hardship is also presented by some participants (both middle and working class) as a chance to reconsider your life course, thus evoking the neoliberal ideal of the reflective worker who has the capacity to forge their own path (Atkinson, 2010):

P4: I mean, I’ve seen human beings adapt to any adversity or change. And then oftentimes this new way of life or adaptation leads you to reflect, to assess whether what you had before or what you have now is really better, kind of taking stock of what truly makes you happy. (MCW 2)

In these discourses, the participants merged the ideas of survival (which would connect with more reactive, short-term responses without any capacity for planning; Arnold and Bongiovi, 2013) with personal reinvention and improvement (which underscore the individual’s agency and evoke neoliberal imaginaries of flexibility, choice, and autonomy), combining concepts such as ‘survival’, ‘adaptation’, ‘change’ and ‘self-improvement’. Conversely, failure to change or adapt to changes has negative connotations, framed as a kind of ‘complacency’, a word that appeared in all the focus groups. Thus, the idea of holding out, of waiting for the bad patch to end, is not viewed as positive.

The fact that these discourses appeared in all the focus groups suggests that they have become common sense or are perceived as ‘accepted’ discourses that should be defended. Nevertheless, if we look closely at the discussions, we can also identify some differences in how participants of different social groups talked about change, resilience and adaptation.

First of all, there was a significant difference in the vocabulary used in the working-class and middle-class groups: while the former tended to use the term ‘adaptation’, the use of the word ‘change’ clearly predominated in the latter. Thus, the working-class group, who were less enthusiastic about the discourse of change and flexibility, highlighted several times that the characters (as well as real people) were forced to change (‘circumstances change your life, whether you like it or not’, ‘you just gotta keep going, ’cos if not . . .’), and these comments seem to resonate with their personal experiences. In the discourses of the working-class participants, the world changes, but it does so beyond people’s control:

The participants assume that the environment cannot be changed by either the characters in the stories or the citizens in society today. This metaphor of the failure to adapt as the cause of the ‘disappearance of dinosaurs’ is related to a broader issue in the focus groups: the acceptance of the environment from a naturalistic-fatalistic viewpoint. In this sense, while discussing some of the topics in the stories, the participants refer to natural catastrophes as well as other similar metaphors: changes in the environment as ‘diseases’ and similar to ‘aging’ (the inevitable passage of time and the physical changes that come with it):

P3: It’s like when you have a disease and you have to overcome it and suddenly you become another person, because that’s the way it is. (WCW 1)

P5: There are people who [. . .] don’t adapt in real life. The same thing happens with age, right? I mean, if you don’t adapt, like, people who don’t accept that their body is changing. (WCW 2)

This cognitive frame privileges individual adaptation, coping and resilience as ‘sensible’ responses to these harsh environments and unwanted changes. Moreover, the values of adaptability and resilience spark a higher degree of personal resonance among the members of the working-class group, who explicitly associate the stories with experiences of resilience in their own personal and/or family past:

P6: [the story] reminds me of myself because [. . .] it’s about having to overcome many hardships, having to go through difficulties and stuff, and I mean I’ve also gone through a fairly long period of. . . I had a pretty rough time. (WCM 2)

P6: you know, my father had a few sheep and then he started working in a factory. So imagine my father there, and I’m like ‘What on earth?’ I guess like everyone he came to the city from a village. [. . .] It was a huge difference. (WCW 2)

This personal resonance in the working-class groups leads us to posit that these participants feel close to the value of resilience or that it is part of their story (Schoon, 2006). The working-class participants’ emphasis on adaptation to (unwanted) change can be seen as a veiled complaint about their situation. However, their defense of resilience and adaptation makes it difficult for them to complain about these changes (meaning the loss of rights, stability and protection) and to demand ‘social transformation’.

Middle-class male participants were the staunchest defenders of flexibility and active change, connecting and repeating commonplaces of contemporary neoliberal rhetoric (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005). They expressed concern about the fact that not everyone is capable of being flexible (meaning seeking change actively), and this is seen as a ‘cultural problem’ that should be addressed:

In this context, being flexible and open to change becomes a moral obligation, while the quest for stability and security is viewed as a cultural problem that has to be fought, given that it turns citizens into passive subjects. This debate echoes a feeling of ‘national shame’ as a response to the PIGS discourse and the image of Spaniards as ‘lazy’ and ‘irresponsible’ and Spain as a ‘backward’ country (Quiroga, 2017).

It is also worth noting how in this dialogue concepts such as flexibility are merged with other concepts such as adaptation and resilience (reinforcing the neoliberal resignification of this concept). This discourse connects with (and legitimizes) the demands for greater flexibility from business owners and the Spanish government during the years of the crisis, contrasting flexibility with the supposed ‘rigidity’ of the job market (Fernández Rodríguez and Martínez Lucio, 2013: 314). This flexibility (which has led to an increase in job precariousness) has been presented as a way of creating active, reflective workers who are constantly reinventing themselves (close to the neoliberal ideal of the ‘entrepreneur of the self’; Rose, 1998). This stands in contrast to the worker who is ‘complacent’ due to the ‘privileges’ they have gotten from the existing job protections, which is based on the imaginary of ‘Spanish workers as immobile, slow, and left behind by progress’ (Fernández Rodríguez and Martínez Lucio, 2013: 326).

In an exchange in the focus group with middle-class men, one participant ended up establishing a dichotomy between the ‘ideal citizen’, who is characterized by flexibility, reflectiveness, individuality and the capacity to forge their own way, and the Spanish education system, which was viewed as ‘dictatorial’ because it is homogenizing, static and rigid:

P1: Actually, television series, movies, they all show people who overcome hardships, who have problems, who move forward. [. . .] I don’t think that’s bad if under it all is a plan to change society towards us being willing to make more changes, not being so static. Maybe that should be taught at school, I don’t know. The school we had was very, very dictatorial: ‘This is the topic, this is what you have to know’. (MCM 1)

Thus, difficulties and hostile environments – such as the economic crisis – are seen as opportunities to change the attitudes of Spanish citizens and to modernize and transform the country, while situations of prosperity are viewed negatively, relating ‘comfort’ to ‘complacency’.

‘You’d like a bit of stability’: feeling guilty

Several participants from different groups expressed a feeling of guilt for not being able to live up to the ideal that they uphold, creating a gap between their own life experiences and their adherence to an ideological discourse which defends the values of change, flexibility and resilience: ‘Even though you’d like a bit of stability, you know? Let’s just admit it’ (P2, MCM 2).

In the two focus groups with middle-class women, this debate is motivated by the Back to the Origin short story, in which Nadia decides to make a radical change and stay in Mongolia to live:

P2: Here, if we have to live away from our parents or something, you say, ‘man, how am I supposed to go away wherever and not see them in three months’ [. . .]. Not carrying around this family baggage might be positive, too, you know? Because it allows you to change your life or do things that we wouldn’t do, for example, because of the way we think: ‘Oh my gosh, I have to go live in Andalusia’ and you think there’s no way, and maybe I’m missing out on opportunities which we don’t take because of our behaviors, but maybe those people are freer. (MCW 1)

Having a family is viewed as a burden when undertaking radical life changes, associating it with the importance of the family within Spanish culture. Thus, the participants show some dismay that they do not think they are capable of making such a radical change as the main character in the story, who in most focus groups is viewed as a ‘brave’ person because she freely chose to make a life change.

The inability to change or adapt to new environments is also associated with notions of materialism. The idealization of adaptability is particularly magnified through certain self-blaming interpretations from the participants as members of the ‘first world’, which they associate with excess comfort and technological dependence:

P5: I should also say that we, Western society, create dependencies, now, I mean you don’t bloody know where to go without your mobile phone. I was on vacation awhile back and there was no TV remote control because they didn’t have it and can you imagine the drama of not having the remote control? (MCM 2)

These comments evoke discourses in favor of austerity and crisis as an opportunity to learn how to ‘appreciate the little things’, as found in media texts such as advertisements (Ruiz Collantes and Sanchez-Sanchez, 2019) and ‘retreatist’ fiction (Negra and Tasker, 2014). This is a good example of how austerity enfolds different meanings which question dominant values such as consumerism and materialism, but ‘in such a way that they are assembled with the neoliberal discourse of the political and economic elites’ (Ruiz Collantes and Sanchez-Sanchez, 2019; see too Bramall, 2013) instead of being projected toward any kind of utopia of collective social transformation. Appeals to austerity have also been used to define the crisis as the consequence of years of irresponsibility and excess spending (both public and private). This idea is encapsulated in the discourse of ‘living beyond one’s means’ (Oliva and Pérez-Latorre, 2020; Free and Scully, 2018), which has been wielded to blame citizens for the crisis (especially in southern European countries), suggesting a moral interpretation of it (as a chance to change former habits and values).

As stated before, the participants in the focus groups with working-class men were the most critical regarding the values of change and adaptability, arguing that change is not always positive. However, one of the participants felt compelled to justify himself because after years of being unemployed, he wanted to keep what he had now managed to attain, while he associated the capacity to be resilient and flexible with youth:

P6: [. . .] right now I’m 50 years old, I spent almost 3 years out of work, I took jobs that paid me 5 euros an hour and miserable things, and now I’ve got a somewhat stable job working 40 hours a week and if they said ‘sign here until the day you retire’ I’d sign. Right now I don’t aspire to more. Maybe I’m complacent or whatever. That depends on the person. When I was 25 I wasn’t, I didn’t think this way, but now I do . . . (WCM 2)

This comment is particularly significant because it casts light on not only the consequences of the crisis (unemployment) but also the limits of resilience (the emotional and personal costs which often remain unmentioned in the discourse that celebrate resilience; Harrison, 2013) and how the discourse of flexibility and adaptability often conceals situations of job precariousness which not all social groups can cope with on a level playing field due to the unequal configurations of economic, cultural, and social capital (López Andreu, 2017: 410).

‘Not all changes are for the better’: the limits of resilience

Although in general terms the majority of the participants agreed that change and adaptability were positive (with different degrees of enthusiasm, as seen above), there were also some open criticisms of these attitudes and values in favor of change. The main argument that the participants use to challenge this discourse is that change is not necessarily always for the better (especially if it is unwanted). These arguments mostly appeared in the working-class groups, especially among male participants:

P8: I believe that a change is not always positive, sometimes changes . . . it’s good to have changes, but . . . a change isn’t necessarily good (WCM1)

P3: well, but that’s life, I mean, nobody wants . . . not to have or stop having what you have, if I lose my job and I have to work in a job that I don't like, I will always be wanting to get what I had again, and that’s how we all are, I think. (WCM1)

But the most direct criticism of the ideal of change and flexibility occurred in one of the groups of working-class women. When discussing one of the workers in El Jefe Infiltrado depicted as not wanting to ‘reinvent himself’ and change to improve his position within the company, the participant claimed that he has every right not to want to change and adapt to the employers’ demands: ‘I have to give my life to a company that is going to kick me out after I turn 40, they’re going to kick me out if I get pregnant . . .’ (P1, WCW 1). This participant shows a very disillusioned view of the work world, and she criticizes a system that exploits workers and blames them convincing themselves that they should always aspire to be better and give their very best, when in reality these attitudes are not valued or rewarded by employers. Therefore, she is critical of how in Spain ‘institutions and organizations are increasingly transferring responsibility to individuals, without providing them with sufficient support and resources’ (López Andreu, 2017: 410).

‘The reality we’re living’: the economic crisis as a backdrop

The economic crisis was relatively absent from the conversations in the focus groups, especially in those with middle-class participants: they mention the crisis fleetingly, without identifying it as a major theme. The crisis was brought up most often in the working-class groups, where the participants stated that the short stories presented portrayed ‘very real’ situations:

P8: It is a real fact, I mean, something that really happens in life. People who may have everything and then suddenly, because of circumstances, they have nothing and I mean even their personality can change, the . . . everything, their way of life. And, I mean, you adapt to everything. (WCW 1)

This difference may come from the fact that the two social groups in Spain have been affected by the crisis differently, with the working class having suffered more from the effects, which has led to an increase in social inequalities (Marti and Fernandez, 2015).

Regardless, in all the focus groups there were veiled references to the crisis, related to the idea of sudden changes or the changing environment. The contemporary context is depicted as characterized by extreme volatility, in which the threat of downward social mobility is ever-present, so one must be ready:

P4: you also have to know how to adapt to different situations . . . socioeconomic or economic and such, that life – you know? – that life . . . brings, right? Now you may have a Ferrari, and two days later you may . . . you know? (MCM 2)

In some cases, this volatility is explicitly related to the economic crisis, reinforcing the discourse of ‘living beyond one’s means’, a discourse that cuts through different social groups but is particularly prominent in the focus groups with working-class men and women:

This excerpt is telling in that it shows how the working-class participants have internalized a discourse which has been particularly targeted toward their own social group, blaming citizens for the economic crisis. However, this discourse is not always accepted. In one of the focus groups with working-class women, there was a long debate between two participants who refused to accept the discourse of ‘living beyond our means’, speaking about their own experience, and two participants who vehemently defended this discourse, associating it with austerity as a moral principle:

The strong emotions that characterized this lengthy debate show how the participants feel pressured to have to justify their own life decisions and show total adherence to the dominant discourses as a way of avoiding being labeled and identified as ‘bad citizens’.

At another point in this focus group, we find ambivalence regarding how the changes that citizens – and the participants themselves – have had to deal with in the context of the crisis are explained and framed:

Participants mixed the appeal to resilience and austerity as a life principle (which connects to traditional Spanish working-class values; Alonso et al., 2011) with a discourse that originated in the business world and frames precariousness and reactive survival decisions (such as going to live with other family members or looking for informal gigs, like taking in sewing at home) in terms of personal ‘reinvention’ and entrepreneurship.

Conclusion

During the recession and post-recession years, popular culture in Spain has conveyed narratives from the epic of adaptability, merging concepts such as resilience, flexibility, self-reinvention, entrepreneurship and a romanticization of austerity. This article explored how Spanish audiences respond to the austerity imaginaries that have populated the media during this past decade.

In our focus groups, although not all participants enthusiastically embraced this discourse, the consensus tended to lean toward acceptance of the virtues of change, adaptability and resilience, while critiques were somewhat tentative. Thus, our research shows how the neoliberal discourses of resilience have carved a place for themselves in the Spanish imaginary, and even though they were not universally accepted, they seem to be perceived as ‘acceptable’ and as ‘the right thing to say’.

We detected interesting differences between the working-class and middle-class groups. Middle-class participants showed a greater adherence to the notion of change associated with the ideal of the entrepreneurial subject, highlighting that Spanish society as a whole needed to change and become more entrepreneurial and modern (echoing the discourses of ‘national shame’; Quiroga, 2017).

Working-class participants were less accepting of these discourses while defending the ability to adapt to difficult situations as an important virtue. The concepts of austerity and resilience particularly appealed to the working-class participants. As Alonso et al. (2011) point out, before austerity was appropriated by the neoliberal discourse in Spain; there was an ‘ethic of austerity in the working class’. Since we also found some instances where working-class participants mixed notions of survival, adaptation and resilience with a more direct appeal to entrepreneurship, we should ask whether neoliberalism’s appropriation of austerity and resilience has given it an additional capacity to connect with this social group.

Therefore, although not blindly accepted by the participants, we can argue that neoliberal discourses of resilience, flexibility, and austerity are becoming a legitimized discourse in Spain. In participants’ discourses, the positive figure of the resilient hero is joined by ‘the complacent citizen’ as a model of the ‘bad citizen’: someone who seeks security and refuses to adapt to the precarious context. In their extensive analysis of the neoliberal cooptation of the concept of resilience, Evans and Reid (2014) conclude that ‘resistance is, after all, a pedagogy of relative subjugation’ (p. 6) because ‘adaptation in the face of the catastrophic is not the same as political transformation’ (p. 119). In the same way, the complacent citizen connects to discourses that delegitimize fighting in favor of labor rights and against job instability.

Several Anglo-American authors have tied the contemporary focus on resilience to the withdrawal of welfare and the promotion of self-entrepreneurship (Jensen, 2016; McRobbie, 2020). Nevertheless, we did not find clear traces of an ‘anti-welfare commonsense’ in our focus groups, as found in other national contexts such as the United Kingdom (Jensen and Tyler, 2015: 472). Welfare and benefits were not mentioned at all, which could point either to a fatalistic view in which the weakening of the welfare state is seen as inevitable (as part of the general impoverishment of the country) or to the exoneration of the state’s responsibility to take care of Spanish citizens.

Dovetailing with the COVID-19 crisis, there has been a discursive explosion regarding resilience in Spain: not only have citizens been urged to be resilient and entrepreneurial, but the new left-wing Spanish government has even designed a new ‘Plan for the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience of Spanish Economy’. In public discourses, this new crisis is again framed as an opportunity to reinvent and modernize the country’s economy (which is heavily based on tourism and the service sector). Nevertheless, these discourses coexist with a defense of welfare and public benefits and a harsh criticism of the consequences of past austerity policies, which shows the complexities of this concept and the need to further research it.