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ISSN 0144-333X
Volume 27 Number 9/10 2007
International Journal of
Sociology and Social Policy New modes of governance in activation policies: 2 Guest Editors: Dr Rik van Berkel and Professor Vando Borghi
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International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy
ISSN 0144-333X Volume 27 Number 9/10 2007
New modes of governance in activation policies: 2 Guest Editors Dr Rik van Berkel and Professor Vando Borghi
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Editorial advisory board __________________________
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EDITORIAL Contextualising new modes of governance in activation policies Vando Borghi and Rik van Berkel _________________________________
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The ‘‘double dynamics’’ of activation: institutions, citizens and the remaking of welfare governance Janet Newman_________________________________________________
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The government of activation policies by EU institutions Amparo Serrano Pascual and Eduardo Crespo Sua´rez ________________
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Governing the activation of older workers in the European Union: the construction of the ‘‘activated retiree’’ Emma Carmel, Kate Hamblin and Theo Papadopoulos ________________
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CONTENTS
CONTENTS continued
The impact of contractualism in social policies: the case of active labour market policies in Switzerland Jean-Michel Bonvin and Eric Moachon _____________________________
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Individualised service provision in an era of activation and new governance Vando Borghi and Rik van Berkel _________________________________
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EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD
Benjamin P. Bowser Professor of Sociology and Social Services, California State University, East Bay, USA
Professor Enzo Mingione Professor of Sociology and Dean of Faculty of Sociology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy
Professor Timothy Dowd Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Emory University, USA
Professor Zdravko Mlinar Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Professor John E.T. Eldridge Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Applied Social Sciences, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
Professor Else Øyen Scientific Director of Comparative Research Programme on Poverty (CROP), Norway
Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao Executive Director, Center for Asia-Pacific Area Studies (CAPAS), Taiwan Professor Ron Jacobs Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Sociology, Arts and Sciences, State University of New York, USA Dr Lisa A. Keister Department of Sociology, Ohio State University, USA Professor Enrico Marcelli Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Boston, UK
International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy Vol. 27 No. 9/10, 2007 p. 352 # Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0144-333X
Professor Dr Birgit Pfau-Effinger Institut fu¨r Soziologie, University of Hamburg, Germany Professor Gianfranco Poggi Universita` di Trento, Italy Dr John Round School of Geographical Sciences, University of Birmingham, UK Dr Jan Windebank Department of French, University of Sheffield, UK Dr Richard White Faculty of Development and Society, Sheffield Hallam University, UK
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/0144-333X.htm
EDITORIAL
Contextualising new modes of governance in activation policies Vando Borghi
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University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy, and
Rik van Berkel University of Utrecht, Ultrecht, The Netherlands Abstract Purpose – The first part of the paper aimed to interpret the changes addressed by the concepts of governance and activation in their context, in order to grasp the larger picture of the societal transformation underlying them: the starting point is the assumption that new modes of governance in activation policies are a fruitful entry point for effectively understanding deep waves of change of contemporary society. The second part aims to briefly introduce the papers included in this issue. Design/methodology/approach – The paper insists on a perspective according to which there are two main dimension characterising the context of addressed transformations: the paradoxical torsion of the historical process of individualisation in the new spirit of capitalism; the profound redesign of the institutional programme, implying a new horizon for the instances of publicness. Findings – Different and contradictory trends are pointed out in the actual pursuing of objectives of governance and activation, as far as the process of individualisation and the redesign of publicness are concerned. The impossibility of finding an abstract and universal evaluation of these transformations and the necessity of situated empirical inquiries are stressed. Originality/value – The paper demonstrates the relevance of deepening the normative underlying dimensions (with regard to individualisation and publicness) of social processes for a better understanding of concrete transformations (specifically: operational and substantive changes introduced by new modes of governance in activation policies). Keywords Governance, Social structures, Employee participation, Interpersonal relations Paper type General review
This is the second issue of the International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy dedicated to the discussion and analysis of the introduction of new modes of governance in activation or reintegration policies. While the introduction of the previous issue focused on the concepts of “governance” and “activation”, their multiple meanings and their complex and ambiguous interweaving, here we will attempt to interpret the changes addressed by those concepts in their context, in order to grasp the larger picture of the societal transformation underlying them. In other words, our starting point is the assumption that new modes of governance in activation policies are a fruitful entry point for effectively understanding deep waves of change of contemporary society. The horizon of change: individualisation, contemporary welfare capitalism and its paradoxes The following considerations aim at a rather simple conceptual objective: to show in which sense the changes in the welfare state systems we are talking about reflect a
International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy Vol. 27 No. 9/10, 2007 pp. 353-363 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0144-333X DOI 10.1108/01443330710822057
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paradoxical development of contemporary welfare capitalism. First of all a more precise clarification of the meaning of the concept “paradox” in our context is needed. A paradox is a specific form of contradiction, according to which the concrete social pursue of an (original) intention paradoxically diminishes the effective probability of its realisation: “a contradiction is paradoxical when, precisely through the attempt to realize such an intention, the probability of realizing it is decreased” (Hartmann and Honneth, 2006, p. 47). It is clear that at the basis of the application of the concept of paradox to the analysis of the transformations of welfare capitalism there is a theoretical perspective: the normative dimensions have a crucial role, framing the different regimes of social action in which actors are engaged and giving them a socially legitimised vocabulary for making sense of their own experience (social norms of fairness; beliefs about appropriate ways of doing, organising, exchanging; models of evaluation). In other words, social action cannot be explained as a mere effect of self-interest or as a totally forced behaviour: observing situated actions, “where situations are always in need of interpretation”, we need to analyse “the registers of justification and evaluation, which are mobilized in the situation but transcend it” (Wagner, 1999, p. 344; Thevenot, 2007). As Boltanski and Chiapello’s (2005) analysis of the “new spirit of capitalism” – that resumes one of the most authoritative roots of sociological thought, the Weberian one – pointed out, the reproduction of the capitalist regimes of action needs motivational resources that are not merely reducible to the capitalist practices in themselves. Social actors actively interpret and make sense of situated contexts of action through orders of justification, whose relative stability goes beyond the specific situation itself[1]. As social scientists, we cannot understand our specific research subjects, whatever they be, without taking into account this normative side of social life and its situated interpretations in daily social practices. More in particular, it is in this perspective that we can properly grasp the way some of the main normative axes of the capitalist regimes of action are currently characterised by a paradoxical contradiction. Individualisation and capitalist economy are strictly linked to each other. In a very schematic way, we can summarise the modern conception of the relationship between individuals and society as a double process of de-traditionalisation (Heelas et al., 1996). On the one side, this departure from tradition has been related to the passage from a holistic societal representation based on the idea of a hierarchical conception of the social order in which the relationship between man and man is emphasized mainly, to an individualistic and egalitarian societal representation, which mainly insists on the relationship between man and things (Dumont, 1977). On the other side, this de-traditionalisation is a result of a long historical process of construction of the concrete social bases of the individual citizen: the anthropological passage from the holistic to the individualist conception of the social world requested, indeed, that the building of the “social property” (social protection, education, health, etc.) on which the realisation of the project of the individual’s active participation in society is concretely based, extended to the entire society and not only to those persons privileged by their inherited “individual property” (Castel and Haroche, 2001). The project of the modern individual actor, the homo aequalis no longer submitted to the yoke of personal links and subordinated to social totality, has been rising as a project of emancipation to be pursued through the inscription of individuals in collective systems of regulation – mainly entered via participation in the labour market - that promoted and enlarged individual autonomy.
It is exactly in this context that the concept of individualisation – one of the normative pillars of modernity and of welfare capitalist regimes – can currently be seen as a terrain of (normative) tension, a space in which a paradoxical contradiction (in the sense mentioned above) can be observed. While being more and more explicitly emphasised in the realms of welfare (against the emphasis on the collective nature of that social property) and the economy, individualisation is characterised by many different (and virtually conflicting) meanings (see Borghi and Van Berkel in this issue) and undergoes a strong “torsion”[2] of its (original) meaning. In the case of individualisation, this is the process in which (according to Honneth, 2004) a project of qualitative self-emancipation (the original meaning of individualisation) has been twisted in a systemic pre-requisite. The generally supported objective to redesign welfare structures and practices in the light of the principle of activation has to be observed as an element of a bigger picture. One of the most recurrent arguments in favour of active welfare states is, indeed, that activation is the way to effectively respond to the rising requests to individualise services and policies. In other words, individualisation is invoked as one of the most relevant historical pressures underlying the “activation turn” in social and labour market services. This “activation turn” has to be interpreted and analysed as part of a broader transformation process. Whereas the individualisation project, as we said, is not new in itself, what is really new is a structural convergence of both public and private agencies and organisations in realising a common aim: to produce an individuality herself independently capable of action and driven by her internal motivations (Ehrenberg, 1998, pp. 311-12). This change goes far beyond the recent cultural political (neoliberal) trends[3] and is an element of the general restructuring of social relationships specifically marking the governing of the “advanced” liberal democracies. According to Rose (2006, pp. 159-60): . . . the ethical a priori of the active citizenship in an active society, this respecification of the ethics of the personhood, is perhaps the most fundamental, and most generalizable, characteristic of these new rationalities of government [. . .], which underpins mentalities of government from all parts of the political spectrum, and which justifies the designation of all these new attempts to “re-invent government” as “advanced liberal”.
The new regime of self does not have an intrinsically inscribed one-sided and univocal fate: it is closely linked to an always open history of political, social and cultural controversies and conflicts. The current regime of self represents a new stage of this historical process, in which old issues and conflicting perspectives are reformulated and the relationship actor-society is reconfigured in a new social horizon: both ties and opportunities are reconfigured, but the results are not fixed. These social changes emerge simultaneously with some other significant shifts which seem to characterise the governing techniques of “advanced” liberal democracies (Rose, 2006). Beyond the new specification of the subject of government, which we tried to sketch above, two other shifts affecting the rationalities and the organisational practices of government can be identified. Without going into detail, we can point firstly at a new relation between expertise and politics: the political salience of experts is reconfigured through a rising devolution of regulatory power to the “grey sciences” (such as budget disciplines, accountancy and audit), based on the know-how of calculating, evaluating, monitoring, etcetera, which are supposed to be applicable to an extremely large range of different issues and
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problems. In this context, audit becomes the key mechanism that permits the management of the plurality of experts and their conflicts of visions and recommendations and that transforms the different agencies of social reproduction (firms, schools and so forth) to which the different aspects of our quality of life are devolved, into “auditable” entities (Power, 1997). A second discontinuity can be identified in terms of a new pluralisation of social technologies[4] resulting from a double movement of “de-governmentalisation of the State” and of “de-statisation of government”: “shaped and programmed by political authorities, new mechanisms are utilized to link the calculations and actions of a heterogeneous array of organizations into political objectives, governing them ‘at a distance’ through the instrumentalization of a regulated autonomy” (Rose, 2006, p. 157). In this new social and governmental landscape, the transformation we are emphasising – the paradoxical torsion of the individualisation principle – is particularly evident when we look at the most relevant changes affecting capitalist regimes of action: what has been called “network capitalism”. The most important criterion for describing this new capitalism [. . .] is the readiness to self-responsibly bring one’s own abilities and emotional resources to bear in the services of individualized projects. In this way, the worker becomes an “entreployee” or himself an entrepreneur; no longer induced to participate in capitalist practices by external compulsion or incentives, he is in a sense self-motivated (Hartmann and Honneth, 2006, p. 45).
So, in this new spirit of capitalism, the individualisation process takes on a new social meaning as well. Individualisation remains one of the key features of the current capitalist regime of action; but whereas it was part of an emancipatory project of qualitative individual self-realisation originally, it now turns in a systemic pre-requisite of individual performance, producing rising levels of mental and psychological sufferings (with concrete, clinically observable, effects; Ehrenberg, 1993). With the institutional transformations Western capitalism has undergone in the past twenty years, the ideal of a self-realization pursued throughout the course of a life has developed into an ideology and productive force of an economic system that is being deregulated: the expectations individuals had formed before they began to interpret their own lives as being an experimental process of self-discovery now recoil on them as demands issuing from without, so that they are explicitly or implicitly urged to keep their options regarding their own decisions and goals open at all times (Honneth, 2004, p. 474).
The mainstream concept of employability – and its discursive corollary based on human capital and flexibility discourses – as one of the guidelines of EU policy integration, represents the concrete manifestation of this underground redefinition of individualisation (Strath, 2000; Wagner, 2000; Garsten and Jacobsson, 2004; also see Serrano Pascual and Crespo Sua´rez in this issue). On that concept are founded not only the strategy of reforming European labour market policy, but more in general the effort of modernising national systems of welfare. Here the change in the meaning of individualisation emerges in terms of a shift from the protection of labour to the promotion of work (irrespective of any consideration about its quality and social sense; Salais, 2003; Van Berkel et al., 2002), a shift which is grounded on a “rebalancing of individual and collective responsibility that asks employees to make themselves the entrepreneurs of their becoming” (Zimmerman, 2006, p. 468).
New modes of governance and issues of publicness The “social property” we recalled above has been the specific terrain of action of an “institutional programme” (Dubet, 2003) according to which the object of realising an autonomous individual has always been constitutively pursued through his socialisation. The transformation of many relevant aspects – the project of individualisation, as we have seen; the nature of socialisation, where the “social” itself is a historical product undergoing deep changes; the social property, that is experiencing a profound restructuring of its symbolic and material status – implies a consequent metamorphosis of the institutional programme itself. In other words, the changes we have been observing in the last decades such as the blurring boundaries between state and market and the development of a welfare mix, the proliferation of “quangos” in public administration, the (horizontal and vertical) multiplication of the actors involved in the governance of welfare systems, together with the above summarised changes of its object itself (individualisation), produced a profound redesign (according to some observers, even the dismantlement) of that institutional programme. Of course, these changes are not exclusively correlated with the rising emphasis on the principle of activation: they are the result of many and different pressures. Nevertheless, activation policies are closely linked to them, as they are one of the principal devices through which institutional, organisational and social shifts have been introduced. Our following object of discussion will be the effects these pressures have on publicness. Whereas the classical liberal vision of publicness usually identified it with the state’s organisational space, the changes described here make such a straightforward substantive definition of publicness impossible. We here assume that publicness depends much more on the properties characterising the actions of a plurality of (public and private) agencies and on the qualities and the aims of their relationships than on the a priori supposed nature of the agencies in themselves. This perspective, in which publicness has to do with the process of treating a matter rather than with the actors involved, is rooted in a specific conception of the public sphere, of the public good and of public social services. The public sphere has, indeed, to be considered not only as a set of mechanisms linking society to the political system, based on specific institutions (connected with law enforcement, public opinion formation, public administration, etc.); but also as a general social horizon of experience through which matters relevant for all members of society take form and are integrated (Negt and Kluge, 1993; Fraser, 1990; Krause, 2005). The public sphere has a structural power, being “the site where the capacities of individuals to participate in public life are produced and where the production of the public’s horizon of experience or the ‘limits of the possible’ are produced” (Davis, 2005, p. 137). In this perspective, there is a strong relationship between the public sphere and the identification of the public good. Far from being a specialists’ or experts’ matter, the public good cannot be described as the mere aggregation of the private interests of many individuals. Instead, it has to be conceived of as a “social and cultural project of the public sphere”, produced in and through a public process and not ascertainable independently of it (Calhoun, 1998, p. 32). In this perspective, the public sphere is not – as it is often conceived – only a space in which information plays a relevant role and in which decisions are taken. It is also “an arena of reflexive modification of the people who enter it, of their ideas, and of its own modes of discourse”, in which our debate on the public good – what is good for us – is
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always, as well, a discourse about our identity: who we want to be (Calhoun, 1998, p. 33). In this frame public institutions (e.g. providers of social services) have a specific, pivotal role, as they should[5] consciously recognise themselves as a “formative context” (Unger, 1987) and assume this nature of formative context as an explicit terrain of action: intervening in the social realm with the awareness that social services are relationships that reproduce relationships, identifies the specificity of public institutions with the space “where questions of technical efficacy (‘what works’) can be integrated with value questions” and with the role – among others – of sometimes taking on “impossible tasks” (Hoggett, 2006, pp. 13-14). Publicness may therefore arise when four properties are fulfilled (Bifulco and de Leonardis, 2005; de Leonardis, 2006). First of all a boundary can be fixed between what is public and what is private, based on the quality of visibility: public processes are exposed to public visibility, whereas the secret is a quality of the private. A second property is about the claim of universalistic validity that publicness assumes as a constitutive element – whereas the private usually refers to particularistic interests and points of view – submitting practices and decisions to specific procedures aiming at generalising them. Third, opposite to the exclusiveness that characterises the private (e.g. private property), publicness designs what is “in-common”: goods are recognised and treated as commons and they constitute that social property (education, social protection, health, etc.) in which the effective access to citizenship of all people is concretely rooted. Finally, publicness has to be conceived as a space through which society reflexively recognises itself as a collective agency needing regulative (vertical) devices, that go beyond the self-regulation of (horizontal) one-to-one exchanges and agreements: so, the fourth property of becoming public has to do with practices of institution building (of which the Law is the most formal version). What can be observed, concluding our notes on the issues of publicness raised by the new modes of governance linked to activation policies, is that all these four prerequisites are more or less reconfigured by organisational and institutional changes produced partly by these new modes of governance (Borghi and Van Berkel, 2007; Bifulco and Vitale, 2006). We can briefly mention some of them here, in order to sketch a tentative overview of the issues and dilemmas they bring about. Decentralisation is one of the processes usually associated with new modes of governance. We know that decentralisation can mean very different things dependent on the national institutional framework; but, in general, the range of possible (intended and unintended) consequences, as far as issues of publicness are concerned, can vary from increased visibility (e.g. decision making processes are closer to the citizens), to a gradual weakening of the universalistic claim of publicness and an intensification of the territorial fragmentation of rights. A second example is the rising contractualisation the new modes of governance promote, both at the level of reconfiguring “purchaser-provider” relationships in the process of producing and delivering social services, and of redefining relationships between “services-consumers”, i.e. between institutions and citizens. Justified by the intentions to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of services and to empower citizens by giving them a right to choose, it can very often diminish the visibility of the process (e.g. due to the increasing role of private organisations in the production of welfare provisions, or to the dilution of the responsibility for the quality of services along the purchaser-provider-consumer chain; Farnsworth, 2004; Freedland, 2001; Crouch, 2004). A final element characterising these
new modes of governance is a change in organisational logics and rationales. The crisis of the old paternalist welfare system is interpreted as a crisis of its organisational paradigm, based on a top-down, engineeristic and mechanical planning rationality. Activation policies represent, in this sense, a terrain of introducing innovative organisational approaches, inspired by the network systems’ mode of relationship: a more interactive relationship among different actors and different levels involved in the production, delivery and use of welfare services. In other words, new organisational practices and devices tend to be less centred on respecting formal procedures and more on realising specified objectives. This implies a shift of paradigm – or, more realistically, a combination of paradigms – which opens a new range of possible concrete scenarios, which may include “democratic experimentalism” (Sabel, 2001; Sheuerman, 2004), participative and deliberative approaches insisting on the importance of intensifying the capability for voice of welfare recipients, and more managerialist, elitist, post-democratic[6] versions of new public management. Which one of these different paths prevails in different national contexts, is as always a question of empirical research, although the available evidence does not permit us to be unambiguously optimistic. The articles In the final section of this introduction, we will briefly present the main topics discussed in the articles of this special issue. The first article, by Janet Newman, is an analytical effort to grasp the different lines of transformation and fields of tensions usually conflated in simplistic approaches to activation. As we stated above, the introduction of new modes of governance of activation policies can be observed as a specific field in which new conceptions of “governmentality” are concretely employed. Newman’s article explicitly challenges that governmentality perspective in which managerial approaches are considered to have similar effects on institutions and persons, and states that the actual consequences of modes of welfare management can be effectively understood only when attention is paid to the context. Apparently similar concepts – contractualisation, individuation, personalisation – and their area of application are inquired. Beyond tensions related to different conceptions of activation’s governance and their consequent reconfigurations of power, tensions between notions of active, activist and activation conceptions of citizenship are explored as well: as we tried to clarify above, changes in the normative elements of social action and devices of collective coordination, have powerful effects on the project of citizenship indeed. The second article, by Amparo Serrano Pascual and Eduardo Crespo Sua´rez, points out the asymmetrical power relations characterising the multiple actors involved in the EU multilevel governance project, according to which EU institutional legitimacy (with particular regard to the Lisbon strategy) should be enhanced through the involvement in the decision making processes of a range of different voices: from actors of the scientific communities to representatives of civil society. Analysing the documents related to the recent reform of the EU guidelines, the EES and particularly their focus on activation, the authors show the hegemonic impact that two approaches have on these procedures: economy and psychology. Two processes, moreover, seem to be immediately connected to this discursive hegemony: on the one hand, an effect of depoliticisation of economic issues concerning employment, unemployment and social
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reforms; on the other, a repoliticisation of individuals, where (as we stressed in many passages of this introduction) the emergence of a new regime of self regulation (not only in the area of social policy) is one of the most salient fields of the exercise of new modes of governance. The authors point at the risk that this multi-level governance process might in this way result into a project of “multi-level governance without political government”. The following article – by Emma Carmel, Kate Hamblin and Theo Papadopoulos – focuses on similar transformations of the EU governance of social subjects, paying particular attention to a specific sphere of activation policy, i.e. the activation of older workers. The authors argue that a new social subject is instituted, due to the fact that the EU’s activation policies blur the former boundaries between employment and retirement, resulting in the “activated retiree”. In order to illustrate this transformation, the EU’s “active ageing” strategy is inquired taking into account two dimensions of governance. On the one hand, operational policy (policy means) is explored, pointing out how shifts in the distribution of social responsibility between the EU, member states, social partners, and individuals are connected with contradictions and tensions within and between employment, pensions and social inclusion policies. On the other, formal policy (policy aims) is analysed. In addition, the inequalities resulting from the employment of older workers – due to the different meaning employment can have for different groups of older workers – are highlighted. Based on an in-depth empirical investigation (more than 50 interviews with field actors) conducted in Switzerland into issues related to active labour market policies, the article by Jean-Michel Bonvin and Eric Moachon addresses two aspects of the reconfiguration of the public realm we repeatedly discussed in former sections of this introduction: the recent evolution of the relationships between individuals and institutions, on the one hand; and the reconfiguration of the design and implementation of public action according to contractual or market-like operational modes on the other. Simultaneously focussing on substantial and organisational aspects of the policy process, the authors state that the emergence of new modes of governance coincides, at least in the Swiss case, with the promotion of market solutions to unemployment, that means: . the hegemony of a conception of the public realm and institutions as subordinated to labour market requirements; . the redefinition of the relationship between individuals and local employment services, in which a “work-first” approach prevails; . a strong limitation of the autonomy of local services, constrained to strictly pursuing centrally predefined administrative objects; and . a reduction of the individualisation principle to a mere emphasis on promoting active behaviour with regard to the labour market. This special issue is closed by an article by Vando Borghi and Rik van Berkel. The authors try to analyse the meaning of the individualisation trend in the provision of social services, taking into account two aspects that play a crucial role in this respect: the different interpretations of the concept of individualisation, and the different models of governance and of coordinating public and private agencies that can be identified. The perspective the authors adopt takes as a starting point that it is useful
to study processes of individualising service provision at the interface of public sector and social policy reforms. After having explored the consequences of different concepts of individualisation for the practical meaning of individualised services, they proceed with a comparison of how these issues are dealt with in the context of some national case studies on activation policies (the UK, The Netherlands and Finland). This comparison takes place against the background of a typology of models of governance, which distinguishes three governance models that are different with respect to, among others, the form of responsibility of public administration, the meaning of the concepts of individualisation and participation, the roles of the State and private agencies, etcera. Notes 1. There is some promising convergence on this theoretical perspective of (otherwise different) research programmes ranging from the French pragmatist analysis of justifiable action engagement regimes (Boltanski and The´venot, 2006; Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005; Thevenot, 2007) to the German researches on the paradoxes of capitalism linked to the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research (Hartmann and Honneth, 2006; Honneth, 2004), the sociological and qualitative reinterpretation of Sen’s capability conceptual architecture (Zimmerman, 2006) or the “economics of conventions” approach to socio-economic life (Salais and Storper, 1997; Borghi and Vitale, 2007). 2. Torsion is the process of which a paradoxical contradiction is the result. The original meaning of a normative dimension is reconfigured in such a way (that is, undergoes a torsion) that its current pursuing actually reduces the possibility of realising its original meaning. 3. If one wants to seriously take the neoliberal project as a project in which contemporary governmentality is rooted, attention has to be directed to the origins of liberalism as the general context of the “biopolitics” of the eighteenth century (Foucault, 2004), rather than on the more recent developments of what has been called “anarchic capitalism”. 4. The changed nature of the “social” – from a univocal collective body inscribed in national borders and its singular embodiment, the citizen, to the rising emphasis on the responsible individual and on self-governing communities – produced the need of new regulatory technologies and norms, more centred on networks and competitiveness than on hierarchy and procedural control. 5. The conditional mode of the verb again underlines that this recognition cannot be considered a mechanical property intrinsically associated with the substantive nature of public institutions in themselves, but is eventually a result of a social process, in the terms we discussed above. 6. The post-democratic paradigm is based on a combination of different sources: elitist political theories; reductionist (atomistic, economicist) social approaches; everyday political pragmatics inspired by the famous slogan “The society doesn’t exist”, etcetera (Crouch, 2004; Mastropaolo, 2001). References Bifulco, L. and de Leonardis, O. (2005), “Sulle tracce dell’azione pubblica”, in Bifulco, L. (Ed.), Le politiche sociali, Carocci, Rome. Bifulco, L. and Vitale, T. (2006), “Contracting for welfare services in Italy”, Journal of Social Policy, Vol. 35 No. 3, pp. 1-19.
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Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, E. (2005), The New Spirit of Capitalism, Verso, London/New York, NY. Boltanski, L. and The´venot, L. (2006), On Justification, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Borghi, V. and Van Berkel, R. (2007), “New modes of governance in Italy and The Netherlands: the case of activation policies”, Public Administration, Vol. 85 No. 1, pp. 83-101.
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Borghi, V. and Vitale, T. (Eds) (2007), Le convenzioni del lavoro, il lavoro delle convenzioni, Angeli, Milano. Calhoun, C. (1998), “The public good as a social and cultural project”, in Powell, W.W. and Clemens, E.S. (Eds), Private Action and the Public Good, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT/London. Castel, R. and Haroche, C. (2001), Proprie´te´ prive´e, proprie´te´ sociale, proprie´te´ de soi, Fayard, Paris. Crouch, C. (2004), Post Democracy (Themes for the 21st Century), Polity Press, Cambridge. Davis, M. (2005), “The public spheres of unprotected workers”, Global Society, Vol. 19 No. 2, pp. 131-54. de Leonardis, O. (2006), “L’onda lunga della soggettivazione: una sfida per il welfare pubblico”, Rivista delle Politiche Sociali, No. 2, pp. 13-38. Dubet, F. (2003), Le de´clin de l’institution, Seuil, Paris. Dumont, L. (1977), Homo aequalis. Gene`se et e´panouissment de l’ide´ologie e´conomique, Gallimard, Paris. Ehrenberg, E. (1998), La fatigue d’eˆtre soi, Edile Jacob, Paris. Farnsworth, K. (2004), Corporate Power and Social Policy in a Global Economy, Policy Press, Bristol. Foucault, M. (2004), Naissance de la biopolitique. Corse au Colle´ge de France 1978-1979, Seuil/Galimard, Paris. Fraser, N. (1990), “Talking about needs: interpretive contexts as political conflicts in welfare-states societies”, in Sustein, C. (Ed.), Feminism and Political Theory, Chicago University Press, Chicago, IL. Freedland, M. (2001), “The marketization of public services”, in Crouch, C., Eder, K. and Tambini, D. (Eds), Citizenship, Markets, and the State, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Garsten, C. and Jacobsson, K. (Eds) (2004), Learning to be Employable, Palgrave, London. Hartmann, M. and Honneth, A. (2006), “Paradoxes of capitalism”, Constellations, Vol. 13 No. 1, pp. 41-58. Heelas, P., Lash, S. and Morris, P. (1996), Detraditionalization: Critical Reflections on Authority and Identity, Blackwell, Cambridge. Hoggett, P. (2006), “Conflict, ambivalence, and the contested purpose of public organizations”, Human Relations, Vol. 59 No. 2, pp. 175-94. Honneth, A. (2004), “Organized self-realization. Some paradoxes of individualization”, European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 7 No. 4, pp. 463-78. Krause, M. (2005), “The production of counter-publics and counter-publics of production. An interview with Oskar Negt”, European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 9 No. 1, pp. 119-28. Mastropaolo, A. (2001), “Democrazia, neodemocrazia, postdemocrazia: tre paradigmi a confronto”, Diritto pubblico comparato ed europeo, No. 4, pp. 1612-35.
Negt, O. and Kluge, A. (1993), “Public sphere and experience: toward an analysis of the bourgeois and proletarian public sphere”, Theory and History of Literature,Vol. 85, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN/London. Power, M. (1997), The Audit Society. Rituals of Verification, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Rose, N. (2006), “Governing ‘advanced’ liberal democracies”, in Sharma, A. and Gupta, A. (Eds), The Anthropology of the State, Blackwell, London, pp. 144-62. Sabel, C. (2001), “A quiet revolution of democratic governance: towards democratic experimentalism”, Governance in the 21st Century, OECD, Paris. Salais, R. (2003), “Work and welfare: toward capability approach”, in Zeitlin, J. and Trubeck, D. (Eds), Governing Work and Welfare in a New Economy: European and American Experiments, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Salais, R. and Storper, R. (1997), Worlds of Production. The Action Frameworks of the Economy, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Sheuerman, W. (2004), “Democratic experimentalism or capitalist synchronization? Critical reflexions on directly-deliberative polyarchy”, The Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence, Vol. 17 No. 1, pp. 101-27. Strath, B. (2000), “After full employment and the breakdown of conventions of social reponsibility”, in Strath, B. (Ed.), After Full Employment. European Discourses on Work and Flexibility, P.I.E-Peter Lang, Brussels. Thevenot, L. (2007), “The plurality of cognitive formats and engagements: moving between the familiar and the public”, European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 10 No. 3. Unger, R.M. (1987), False Necessity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Van Berkel, R., Hornemann Møller, I. and Williams, C. (2002), “The concept of exclusion/inclusion and the concept of work”, in Van Berkel, R. and Hornemann Møller, I. (Eds), Active Social Policies in the EU. Inclusion through Participation?, Policy Press, Bristol. Wagner, P. (1999), “After justification. Registers of evaluation and the sociology of modernity”, European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 2 No. 3, pp. 341-57. Wagner, P. (2000), “The exit from organised modernity: ‘flexibility’ in social thought and in historical perspective”, in Strath, B. (Ed.), After Full Employment. European Discourses on Work and Flexibility, P.I.E-Peter Lang, Brussels. Zimmerman, B. (2006), “Pragmatism and the capability approach. Challenges in social theory and empirical research”, European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 9 No. 4, pp. 467-84. About the authors Vando Borghi is Professor at the Department of Sociology of the University of Bologna in Italy, where he works at the Faculty of Political Sciences, teaching and researching on organisational issues. Rik van Berkel is lecturer at the Department of Interdisciplinary Social Science, and participant in the research programme Social Policy, Interventions and Solidarity of the Faculty of Social Sciences, Utrecht University, The Netherlands. Rik van Berkel is the corresponding author and can be contacted at:
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The “double dynamics” of activation Institutions, citizens and the remaking of welfare governance Janet Newman The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK Abstract Purpose – This paper aims to explore activation policy as a condensate for new forms of governance in respect of welfare institutions and in relation to welfare subjects. It asks how far apparently similar concepts – contractualisation, individuation, personalisation – can be applied to the governance of institutions and the governance of persons. Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on a model of different governance regimes to trace different dynamics at stake in the shift to activation policy. Findings – Tensions in the dynamics of the transformation of welfare governance around notions of activation are highlighted. It is also argued that different reconfigurations of power are at stake in the governance of institutions and the governance of persons. Finally tensions between notions of active, activist and activation conceptions of citizenship are traced. Research limitations/implications – The paper challenges a govermentality perspective in which managerial discourses are assumed to have similar consequences for institutions and for persons, so drawing attention to the importance of context. Practical implications – Limited value Originality/value – This paper makes an original contribution to the field by tracing a number of different dynamics at stake in activation policy rather than assuming a coherent shift from earlier forms of welfare regime. Keywords Governance, Organizational change, Intergroup relations, Social welfare organizations, Labour market Paper type Research paper
International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy Vol. 27 No. 9/10, 2007 pp. 364-375 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0144-333X DOI 10.1108/01443330710822066
Introduction My focus in this paper is on labour market activation as a condensate for a number of discussions about new configurations of power and authority. These reconfigurations involve a double dynamic: what Bonvin and Moachon (2006) term a “two fold transformation”, involving on the one hand new relationships between individuals and institutions, and on the other the extension of contractual, market and network relationships between institutions in a plural state. As such, activation forms a condensate through which contemporary governance trends can be analysed, and the literature has highlighted the importance of processes of decentralisation, individualisation, personalisation, contractualisation, marketisation, together with the emergence of network based and collaborative forms of governance. However the problem of viewing activation as a condensate – a single lens through which different trends and tendencies can be brought into view – is that this may collapse important differences in the forms of power and authority that are deployed, and mask potential tensions arising from their dynamic interaction in specific sites.
In this article I open up “governance” to critical analysis in order to approach such questions. In the first section I ask how far apparently similar concepts can be applied both to institutional change and to changing relationships between service organisations and their clients. The second section highlights activation policy as a site of tensions between different forms and relations of governance. The third section explores ways in which different notions of citizenship collide as activation policies interact with other modernisation goals, especially in relation to gender; and argues that “activation” may be in tension with “active” and “activist” forms of citizenship. As such the article addresses three sets of dynamics rather than a single double dynamic: the dynamic relationship between policy and governance; the dynamic tension between different regimes of governance; and the dynamic relationship between active, activated and activist forms of citizenship. Overlaid on these is a theoretical tension between structural and post structural accounts of change. Activation as a condensate for understanding new forms of governance Labour market activation represents a fundamental shift in mature European welfare states, and there is now a burgeoning research literature investigating how such policies are being translated in different national contexts and enacted in processes of policy development and delivery. Rather than debating the relationship between policy and delivery I want to highlight ways in which discourses of welfare are deeply entangled with discourses of governance in discussions of activation. This entanglement is rarely unpicked, and the relationship between policy and governance has, until recently, remained on the fringes of the literature on activation. Yet as Van Berkel (2006) argues, not only do activation policies have consequences for the mode of governance (here taken to mean how social policy programmes are administered and managed), but the mode of governance is likely to have consequences for policy. The governance literature has helped open up the “black box” of the policy process, highlighting the way in which policy does not arrive fully formed to be “implemented” in local settings; policy is made as it is shaped, understood, enacted and experienced in plurality of sites by a plurality of actors in a dispersed field of power (Rhodes, 1997). This goes beyond the idea of the “street level bureaucrat” applying discretion in local offices, and opens up the idea of policy as an unfinished, dynamic domain. A second contribution of the governance literature is the attention paid to the forms of power associated with changing regimes of welfare governance. It is here that activation forms a condensate for a range of concepts associated with both the transformation of welfare states and the rise of the new public management: privatisation, marketisation, contractualisation, personalisation, collaboration decentralisation, individualisation and so on. Each of these are rather slippery concepts, and I want to argue that their application to both the content of policy and to the process by which it is made and delivered has tended to obscure important issues. That is, the collapse of questions of governance and of welfare policy that takes place in the course of using an apparently equivalent concept may be suggestive of general trends, but may also be counterproductive. I want to do so by taking specific concepts – privatisation, individualisation and contractualisation – and unpacking them a little. Privatisation State and market stand for one representation of public and private, providing a way of understanding the process of state modernisation as a shift towards the privatisation
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of public goods. However the state versus market distinctions tends to omit familial and gender relationships from the analysis (Daly, 2000; Daly and Rake, 2003; Lewis, 1992, 2002; Sainsbury, 1999). It also obscures very distinct meanings of the private. One refers to a private sector of markets, governed according to the principles of demands and coordinated through the principles of impersonal exchange. Another refers to the private realms of family, household or community. A third meaning of the private is the personal – a sense of identity, values, and relationships that are now being subjected to new forms of governmental power that attempt to install new subject positions of the active, worker citizen. The privatisation of social risks associated with welfare reform both strengthens processes of informalisation and familialisation of welfare (Van Berkel, 2006) and also represents new forms of governmental power in which the personal becomes both an object (of new strategies) and a resource (to be mobilised in the process of constituting new forms of self governing welfare subjects). Individuation The personal in discussions of activation policy tends to be conflated with notions of the individual and individuation. I want to suggest that we need to hold these two concepts apart. The individual and individualisation denote strategies and practices for delivering welfare services, often associated with a decentralisation of powers to municipalities and other local agencies who can exercise discretion rather than deliver standardised services. The idea here is that services need to be flexible, responsive and “tailor made” to an individual’s circumstances. Individuals no longer, in principle, belong to categories that can be treated as a group in terms of benefit entitlements, and thus be subject to bureaucratic processes of matching entitlement rules to category of welfare recipient; individuals are now, it seems, to be clients and consumers of new forms of service delivered in new ways. Of course how far this ideal can be realised is constrained by processes of targeting particular categories for activation measures and by constraints on the service relationship produced by standards, targets and other centralising pressures. But my point here is that individualisation as an ideal of service delivery differs in subtle ways from personalisation as a governmental strategy. Here activation measures can be understood as opening up more of the person to governmental power, requiring them to collaborate in the development of new subjective orientations to the worlds of work and welfare. This has been described in a number of ways: the redefinition of citizenship from Marshallian notions of social citizenship to new conceptions of the worker citizen, the inculcation of responsible citizenship, and so on (Dwyer, 2000; Clarke and Newman, 2004). Individuation and personalisation may be mutually reinforcing: individual relationships between client and worker allow the possibility of new forms of governmentality[1] associated with the installation of new subject positions and normative orientations. However they cannot be conflated. Individuation may be as much about applying coercive “labourist” measures as about the inculcation of reflexive, responsible subjects. Contractualisation Rather different arguments can be made about the different inflections of the meaning of “contracts” in the activation literature, and the tendency to conflate the extension of institutional contracts between purchasers and providers with the development of individualised contracts between services and citizens (for example in the form of action plans or job seeker contracts). Again the literature has highlighted difficulties in the
translation of such ideals into practice: for example Bonvin and Moachon (2006, p. 8) suggest that “the tendency towards contractualism encompasses a great variety of situations in which the logic of contract between equally accountable and informed partners is very unequally implemented. In the worst case, so called client contracts, contractualism mostly boils down to rhetoric”. But my argument concerns the conflation of different forms of contract. Bifulco and Vitale (2006, p. 497) draw attention to differences between market type contracts, contracts between gift and market, contract as responsibilisation and contract as policy making agreements between state and market. Andersen (2004) initially draws direct analogies between institutional and what he terms “social” contracts, but goes on to describe the particular characteristics of the latter: . . . the social contract is about mutual empowerment. Only through the making of the citizen into a negotiating partner is it possible for the administration to access the self relation of the citizen and negotiate his or her sexuality, self integration, motherhood, personal development, self responsibility etc . . . . Through its communicative demarcation of obligations it presupposes that the....participants are free to commit themselves and free to translate obligation into commitment (Andersen, 2004, p. 284).
But while the social contract appears to mirror the administrative contract in the fostering of instrumental rationalities based on notions of self – or organisational – interest, it differs from it, I want to argue, in its focus on the personal. That is, it invokes new forms of governmentality that are based on the inculcation of new forms of governable subject, subjects in which the person – his or her “inner will” – becomes a resource enabling the transformation of welfare states through the transformation of obligations into commitments. The use of post Foucauldian approaches to understanding the “social contract” illuminates the subtle distinctions that may be made between the extension of purchaser-provider contracts and agency-citizen contracts, and suggests the difficulties of condensing apparently similar concepts cutting across new strategies of institutional and personal governance. The analysis also highlights the slipperiness of many of the ideas condensed in discussions of activation. For example the greater involvement of citizens in the design and realisation of policies may be associated with the general trend towards a service economy (Borghi, 2007) and its associations with a greater emphasis on consumer rationalities. However it can also be viewed as a new technology of power – including individual action plans and signed agreements – through which citizens are constituted as freely choosing actors rather than as passive welfare subjects. Similarly, Bonvin and Moachon (2006) highlight the ambivalences produced by the exercise of different strategies: those designed to help individuals comply with social norms and expectations, and those that enable individuals to define the content and mode of implementing policies. The former is viewed as a logic in which “institutions are used as disciplining tools, whereas the last one conveys a truly reflexive view of public action” (Bonvin and Moachon, 2006, p. 6). However from a governmentality perspective so called “empowerment” strategies, designed to encourage reflexive, self managing actors, might be viewed as new disciplinary logics of rule in which individuals are constituted as new forms of governable subject (Rose, 1999). Citizens may, then, be implicated in new orders of rule in a number of different ways. They may be “empowered” by the governance shifts in which questions of voice and choice, involvement and personalisation are becoming the currency of modernising reforms. However such discourses imply strategies that open out more of the person to governmental power, for example in the process of “responsibilising”
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citizens, encouraging them to be “active” (but only in certain ways), and engaging them in partnership with the state in finding solutions to the problems of welfare after the welfare state. The question is: are these two different processes that interact differently in different places at different times? Or are they strategies that are differentially targeted to different population groups? Or perhaps they can be understood simply as different perspectives on what is important about new orders of rule, the first normative, the second more critical? None of these propositions is satisfactory as a singular, global explanation: but each must be part of any attempt to develop new insights into governance and activation. And such insights are unlikely to emerge from generalising notions of transnational governance shifts. Governance as a field of tensions As argued in the previous section, discussions of activation condense a number of different governance processes and strategies into a single trajectory of welfare reform. Here I attempt to tease out the implications of understanding governance not as a singular phenomenon – in which networks, collaboration, personalisation and so on are equivalent instantiations of a general shift from government to governance. Rather, the transformation of welfare states involves the reordering of a number of different regimes of power that are overlaid on each other in complex ways, producing tensions, ambivalences and points of disjuncture. Ways of describing these different regimes of power differ across different literatures: while social policy tends to use the language of state, market and civil society or family as domains of welfare provision, the governance literature uses the nomenclature of hierarchy, markets and networks to denote different modes of coordination or regime of power. In Newman (2001) I argued for two developments to this traditional triptych. First, I argued for more emphasis to be placed on “rational management” as a mode of coordination because of the growing salience of targets, goals and other managerial forms of power by the state as a way of delivering central policy goals; and linked this to a top down attempt to open up services to market relationships. Second, I argued for the addition of a fourth mode – self governance. I then mapped these different modes in terms of their placing on a vertical axis of centralisation/uniformity versus decentralisation/differentiation; and a horizontal axis of legitimacy/stability versus delivery/innovation. So, for example, hierarchical governance represents strong legitimacy and stability, and the capacity to deliver uniform services through the exercise of central power. Both markets and networks are linked to weak legitimacy (in terms of accountability); but both offer more dynamic ways of delivering change and innovation. But while markets plus managerialism offer states new ways of exercising central power in efforts to transform welfare regimes, networks open up the possibility of more differentiated, open ended and flexible ways of both developing policy and delivering services. Finally “self governance” – denoting phenomena as varied as individual “responsibility”, community “empowerment” and professional autonomy – tend to be high in terms of differentiation (states find these notoriously difficult to manage in a consistent way, and each expresses the antithesis of hierarchical forms of power); but are also high in terms of legitimacy and stability once in place. How might this framework be used to suggest some of the dynamics involved in the development and delivery of activation policy? Following my argument in the first section, I do not wish to collapse arguments about institutional change with those concerned with new ways of governing and managing the person; so have
distinguished between them in the following notes on the dynamics of welfare reform in relationship to each of my four modes of governance. Hierarchical governance Dominant mode of power – rule based, including legal and bureaucratic power: . Institutions: continued bureaucracy and hierarchy together with emergence of stronger monitoring, audit and evaluation. Use of “evidence based” policy to impose standardised templates of reform and squeeze local innovation. . Persons: continued salience of some citizenship rights; legacies of clientalism associated with bureaucratic power; but also legal measures associated with withdrawal of rights and benefits for particular categories of person. Managerial governance Dominant mode of power – incentives, based on the assumption that both organisations and persons are likely to act instrumentally. . Institutions: contractualisation, marketisation, governance through incentives, goals, objectives. Widening of the reach of managerial power to encompass third sector and civil society organisations drawn in as deliverers of activation policies. . Persons: governance through incentive structures; individual contracts; but also the possibility of stronger consumer power. Network governance Dominant mode of power – relational, based on reciprocity, communication, collaboration, trust. . Institutions: policy networks and advocacy coalitions; partnerships in service delivery; inter-organisational collaboration; public/private partnerships. Often associated with weaker steering roles on the part of the state in order to enable the delivery of policy outcomes in conditions of complexity. . Persons: participative governance, involving client based or community groups in networks; collaborative governance, involving new relationships between case workers and clients. Self governance Dominant mode of power – normative, inviting self regulation and self management. . Institutions: governed by strong values and norms (as in many civil society organisations but also professional associations); high autonomy, weak external constraints, but strong organisational cultures and high degrees of “ownership” of organisational missions. . Persons: new subject positions associated with active citizenship, responsible welfare user, and worker citizen at the centre of the normative dimensions of activation programmes. Having set out the basic framework, it is now possible to map some of the key lines of tension that open up as different governance regimes associated with activation policy are overlaid in specific trajectories of reform. In terms of institutions, the decentralisation of activation services to regions and/or municipalities in many European states is associated
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with a number of different objectives. As Van Berkel (2006) suggests, it makes it possible to adapt policy programmes to local needs and circumstances, enabling the development of flexible and tailor made programmes. It fosters local forms of partnership; and has an “inclusive” potential in its promotion of the involvement of local stakeholders. This involves the strengthening of lateral relationships associated with network governance (Sorenson and Torfing, 2006). But decentralisation is also associated with the separation of national policy from local implementation and thus with the extension of new public management techniques as central governments attempt to regulate and exert control at a distance rather than governing through hierarchy. The tensions produced mean that decentralisation is likely to involve “balancing and rebalancing national and local responsibilities and powers, rather than by straightforward decentralisation” (Van Berkel, 2006, p. 5). But the continued exercise of strong hierarchical (rule based) forms of power on the part of central governments attempting to ensure uniformity and consistency often serves as a barrier to local flexibilities and freedoms. Strong institutional tensions also become evident as “civil society” organisations are drawn into new fields of power or are contracted to take on new roles as service providers. This often requires them to adopt managerial structures and systems that squeeze their capacity to sustain the flexibility and responsiveness associated with their traditional closeness to clients and communities. But this is only one difficulty. The incentive structures associated with contractualisation tend to clash with the normative solidarities of organisations and groups with a tradition of self governance, weakening the very capacities (social entrepreneurship, strong civic values, and the capacity to engage clients as citizens rather than customers) that are among their key assets in terms of building an “active” welfare order. A third set of institutional tensions operates in the dynamic between standardisation (associated with hierarchical governance) and professional or municipal discretion (associated with self governance in a dispersed field of institutional power). I have already hinted some aspects of such dynamics in the comments above on decentralisation. Here I focus on changes to professional power bases, where we can trace a number of apparently contradictory processes of change. It would seem that the processes of marketisation, the formation of partnerships and the inclusion of a range of non-state organisations in the delivery of activation services has significantly weakened the power of the traditional professions such as social work. New occupational groups – trainers, educators, job centre workers and others – are proliferating, and can be understood as operating from a weaker power base than the “old” self regulating professions associated with the unreformed welfare state. At the same time, however, the role of case work – traditionally associated with the social worker- is expanding because of the emphasis, in some aspects of activation work, on individuation and tailor made service packages, and on the involvement of clients in shaping new norms of self management and self development. I want to deal with the governance of persons rather more sketchily because there are substantial literatures on citizenship and activation (Johansson and Hvinden, 2005; Andersen et al., 2005). However I do want to highlight two key dynamics. The first concerns the potential tensions between collaboration and coercion (in my terms, between network and hierarchical forms of power). Larsen (2005, p. 137) distinguishes between “work first” approaches associated with neo-liberal states and the “social investment” approaches emphasised by Scandinavian countries. Although “in practice, however, the opportunity and sanction approach are often combined” in the same
welfare regime, the logics of rule are fundamentally different, the former invoking new forms of self discipline and the latter inviting an instrumental calculus. The second, related line of tension in the governance of persons is between different forms of subject position constituted in different approaches to activation: that is, between inviting citizens to be instrumental actors responding to new incentives; to consider themselves to be consumers of services; to be collaborators and partners with service delivery staff; and/or to adopt new subject positions as active, responsible, worker citizens. Each involves a different form of identification, and such identifications may not be easily reconciled. Citizens are constituted both as partners (asked to collaborate with institutions seeking to “enable” them into job readiness, or to build their capacities for work); as consumers (of marketised services); but also continue to be the object of coercive strategies. How these tensions are played out depends not only on the willingness of service recipients to enter into new forms of voluntary contract with service providers but also on the way in which the discretion of bureaucrats is deployed. It also depends on the fit between activation policies and local labour market conditions. However the shift from notions of the passive, dependent welfare recipient to the active, responsible, self managing “worker citizen” is not the only dimension of citizenship that is being unsettled by new forms and relationships of governing; and in the following section I trace some of the gendered dynamics of governance and the relationship between activated, active and activist citizenship at stake. Work, welfare and citizenship: the dynamics of welfare governance Research on the complex dynamics of welfare reform and the specific trajectories of change in different nation states suggests that we cannot assume that activation policy is sweeping all before it in a general installation of neo-liberal governmentality based on work, rather than welfare, as the foundation of citizenship. Other notions of governance – participative, collaborative and so on – are at stake; and other dimensions of citizenship are invoked as states attempt to promote social inclusion, democratic renewal and community cohesion. Just as there may be tensions between different forms of governance, such as those described in the second section, there may well, then, be tensions between different instantiations of the “active” citizen. For example, Johansson and Hvinden (2005) highlight the complex interleaving of socio-liberal, libertarian and republican forms of citizenship – and the active and passive dimensions of each – implicated in the remaking of welfare governance. Such tensions may be gendered and racialised. Those analysing the gender dynamics of activation policies have focused extensively on the changing relationship between paid and unpaid work, formal and informal care (e.g. Knijn and Kremer, 1997). Pfau-Effinger (2005) explores the relationship between work and care in different welfare regimes, contrasting regimes in which women as citizen workers are supported by the state as carer with those in which parents are both citizen worker and carer. The latter may derive from the resilience of traditional family models of the gender division of labour or be linked to the installation of modernised conceptions of care that incorporate parental choice, parental leave and other provisions. But the content of policies, as argued earlier, has to be understood in the context of modes of governing. Hierarchical governance is associated here with the continued significance of the law in both responding to and shaping “modern” conceptions of how formal and informal care might be (at least in part) reconciled. It is also, however, associated with the exercise of coercive, rather than enabling, activation strategies. Labour market activation policies
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based on sanctions rather than opportunities may constrain the extent to which women may achieve the full citizenship status now associated with paid work. In terms of the framework set out in the second section, this implies a tension between the self governance model, where women can be empowered to make active choices on the basis of new opportunities, and a changed hierarchical model based not on rights (to receive support for care) but on the exercise of coercive strategies requiring particular categories of women to take up what often remains poorly paid work on the margins of the labour force in the face of the withdrawal of state benefits. The other dimensions of the framework are also implicated in mapping the gender dynamics of activation. At stake in the managerial/markets model is the interaction between the reduction of “traditional” markets for women’s labour as the reconfiguration or modernisation of welfare states require organisations to externalise, contract out and downsize jobs in which women have typically gained power and prestige – in the welfare professions, in state bureaucracies – and the expansion of the new service economy. Labour market activation for women, then, is activation into a very different labour market than that which provided new opportunities for their mothers or grandmothers in an expanding welfare state. There are also pulls in some countries to attract migrant labour – often female – to take up jobs in the expanding service economy developing to support the fuller labour market participation of women in the host country. This may produce global care chains in which the care responsibilities of migrant women in their “home” countries are filled by others, who then pass on their own care work to yet others in an ever extending chain of family or community obligations and commercial transactions; chains in which care gaps are likely to open up (Hochschild, 2001). The dynamics of welfare governance can no longer be understood within national frameworks of analysis: state policies in one nation have ripple effects on others, and markets are no respecter of national boundaries. However it would appear that the trans-national market for services is currently more flexible than the trans-national labour market, not least because of the attempts by nation states to constantly reassert and re-inscribe the boundaries of national citizenship and national identity. The existing literature has tended to bypass the implications of network governance for the dynamics of work, care and citizenship. The modernisation of welfare governance has produced a fragmented field of agencies providing care and support across public, private and third sectors. The work of coordinating such provision to ensure joined up care for, say, elderly or disabled people can be considered to be a form of “work” that transcends the categories of paid work and unpaid care. Women may be supported and enabled to relinquish informal care roles in order to take up more sustained paid work. However the responsibility for managing – but not necessarily delivering - care remains highly gendered, whether for women on the “front line” of organisations managing a retreating welfare state with increasingly cash limited resources, or in families and communities trying to stitch together a fragmented array of enabling and support services while holding down paid work and plugging the gaps when support services fail or are found to be deficient (Glucksmann, 2005; Newman, 2005). In terms of self governance, the ideals of fully fledged citizenship for women as worker citizens are materialising just as citizenship itself is transmuting into quasi-communitarian notions of responsibility and self reliance. But this is not the only paradox at stake. The notion of responsibility itself has different inflections, encompassing both responsibility to work in order to enable new freedoms and choices associated with the adult worker model of citizenship, and the responsibility for ensuring the development of active communities. In Britain it is traditionally women
and the fit elderly who have been the main supporters of community activity, charitable organisations and volunteering work. New norms of active citizenship now ask community members to take responsibility for improving the quality of life in deprived communities, for developing self managing and self help services to fill welfare gaps, for taking an active part in children’s schooling, for actively working towards safer communities by playing roles as guardians of public spaces (volunteering to help keep the local library open, participating in the maintenance of the local park, watching out for truanting children in the local shops, and other ways of enhancing the capacity of communities to govern and manage themselves). “Active citizenship” then may be in tension with “activated citizenship”, both in terms of the capacity of women to play multiple roles – as empowered workers and as caring and active community members – and in terms of the structural tensions between the modernisation of welfare services and the support for women taking on such roles. Active, activated and activist The socio-liberal citizenship of welfare states has so far been complemented – but not replaced – by stronger neo-liberal elements (“market citizenship”) and republican elements (“participatory citizenship”) (Hvinden, 2006). Both appear to be in tension with activist conceptions of citizenship. Women, as the primary users of many welfare services on behalf of families, neighbours and communities, have traditionally been at the forefront of social movements calling for less bureaucratic, more flexible, more person centred services in which care, rather than bureaucratic rationality or managerial efficiency, are a primary value. Feminism has informed many of the current transformations of welfare states in both explicit ways (new provisions for parental leave, more legislative provisions and regulations on gender equality) and in terms of implicit values (notions of empowerment, collaboration and participation have flowed from the women’s and disability social movements into mainstream organisational discourse). The question of how – and where – the activism of the future might emerge in a period where the predominant focus is on the inscription of activated and active citizenship is deeply troubling. The role of trades unions in defending labour markets from “activated” entrants who might have an impact on wage levels, or of worker control over labour process in “third sector” or community based projects used to provide opportunities for work experience, is largely missing from the mainstream literature. But this is not only one dimension of activism. Hvinden (2006) suggests that governments remain reluctant to see marginalised groups as worth investing in and listening to. Such organisations and groups can provide valuable feedback on how policies are functioning and being experienced, and can serve as intermediaries between governments and citizens. Elsewhere concern has been expressed about the capacity of third sector and community organisations to pursue advocacy and activist roles as they are drawn into new roles as service providers, and about the more general consequences of communitarian politics for the capacity for groups and individuals to engage in adversarial politics (Newman, 2001). Conclusion This article has argued that the literature on activation often tends to sweep up a number of rather different concepts into a general – and universalising – trajectory of change (from hierarchy to networks, from bureaucracy to markets, from paternalism to
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personalisation, and so on). My aim has been to explore some of the different sets of dynamics at stake in the interaction between policy and governance; between different regimes of governance; and between different conceptions of citizenship. In doing so I have been drawing on concepts of governance that imply much more than policy implementation, denoting rather an “order of rule” (Walters, 2004). Rather than assuming the hegemony of a singular order of “neo-liberal” governance, the frameworks developed here may be suggestive for those attempting to understand emerging formations in specific welfare regimes, and the tensions, risks and opportunities – and indeed potential sources of governance failure – within them. Note 1. “Governmentality” derives from Foucault’s (1991) work on governance as “the conduct of conduct”. It focuses on attempts to shape human behaviour – especially the governance of the self – in order to manage populations more effectively. See Dean (1999); Marston and McDonald (2006). References Andersen, J.G., Clasen, J., Van Oorschot, W. and Halvorsen, K. (2002), Europe’s New State of Welfare: Unemployment, Employment Policies and Citizenship, Policy Press, Bristol. Andersen, J.G., Guillemard, A.-M., Jensen, P.H. and Pfau-Effinger, B. (2005), The Changing Face of Welfare: Consequences and Outcomes from a Citizen Perspective, Policy Press, Bristol. Andersen, N.A. (2004), “The contractualisation of the citizen – on the transformation of obligation into freedom”, Zeitschrift fu¨r Soziologische Theorie, Vol. 10 No. 2, pp. 273-91. Bifulco, L. and Vitale, T. (2006), “Contracting for welfare services in Italy”, Journal of Social Policy, Vol. 35 No. 3, pp. 495-514. Bonvin, J.-M. and Moachon, E. (2006), “Market-like practices in public institutions: the case of activation policies in Switzerland”, paper presented at the EGOS Conference, Organizing the Public Realm, Bergen, July. Borghi, V. (2007), “Do we know where we are going? Active policies and individualisation in the Italian context”, in Van Berkel, R. and Valkenburg, B. (Eds), Making it Personal: Individualising Activation Services in the EU, Policy Press, Bristol. Clarke, J. and Newman, J. (2004), “Governing in the modern world”, in Stienberg, D.L. and Johnson, R. (Eds), Blairism and the War of Persuasion: Labour’s Passive Revolution, CUP, Cambridge, pp. 53-65. Daly, M. (2000), The Gender Division of Welfare, CUP, Cambridge. Daly, M. and Rake, K. (2003), Gender and the Welfare State, Polity Press, Cambridge. Dean, M. (1999), Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society, Sage, London. Dwyer, P. (2000), Welfare Rights and Responsibilities: Contesting Social Citizenship, Policy Press, Bristol. Foucault, M. (1991), “Governmentality”, in Burchell, G., Gordon, C. and Miller, P. (Eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hemstead, pp. 87-104. Glucksmann, M. (2005), “Shifting boundaries and interconnections: extending the ‘total social organisation of labour’”, Sociological Review, Vol. 53 No. 2, pp. 19-36. Hochschild, H. (2001), “Global care chains and emotional surplus value”, in Hutton, W. and Giddens, A. (Eds), On the Edge: Living with Global Capitalism, Vintage, London.
Hvinden, B. (2006), “Nordic project on active citizenship: main results and policy implications”, paper ppresented at the SFI, Copenhagen, June. Johansson, H. and Hvinden, B. (2005), “Welfare governance and the remaking of citizenship”, in Newman, J. (Ed.), Remaking Governance: Peoples, Politics and the Public Sphere, Policy Press, Bristol, pp. 101-19. Knijn, T. and Kremer, M. (1997), “Gender and the caring dimension of welfare states: towards inclusive citizenship”, Social Politics, Vol. 4 No. 3, pp. 328-61. Larsen, J.E. (2005), “The active society and activation policy”, in Andersen, J.G., Guillemard, A.-M., Jensen, P.H. and Pfau-Effinger, B. (Eds), The Changing Face of Welfare: Consequences and Outcomes from a Citizen Perspective, Policy Press, Bristol. Lewis, J. (1992), “Gender and the development of welfare regimes”, Journal of European Social Policy, Vol. 2 No. 3, pp. 159-73. Lewis, J. (2002), “Gender and welfare states”, European Societies, Vol. 4, pp. 331-57. Marston, G. and McDonald, C. (Eds) (2006), Analysing Social Policy: A Governmental Approach, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham. Newman, J. (2001), Modernising Governance: New Labour, Policy and Society, Sage, London. Newman, J. (2005), “Regendering governance”, in Newman, J. (Ed.), Remaking Governance: Peoples, Politics and the Public Sphere, Policy Press, Bristol, pp. 81-101. Pfau-Effinger, B. (2005), “New forms of citizenship and social integration in Europe”, in Andersen, J.G., Guillemard, A.-M., Jensen, P.H. and Pfau-Effinger, B. (Eds), The Changing Face of Welfare: Consequences and Outcomes from a Citizen Perspective, Policy Press, Bristol. Rhodes, R.A.W. (1997), Understanding Governance, Open University Press, Buckingham. Rose, N. (1999), Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought, CUP, Cambridge. Sainsbury, D. (Ed.) (1999), Gender and Welfare State Regimes, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Sorenson, E. and Torfing, J. (Eds) (2006), Theories of Democratic Network Governance, Routledge, London. Van Berkel, R. (2006), “Restructuring the service provision for social assistance recipients: the Dutch case”, paper presented at the EGOS conference, Organizing the Public Realm, Bergen, July. Walters, W. (2004), “Some critical notes on ‘governance’”, Studies in Political Economy, Vol. 73, Spring/Summer, pp. 27-46.
Corresponding author Janet Newman can be contacted at :
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The government of activation policies by EU institutions Amparo Serrano Pascual and Eduardo Crespo Sua´rez Faculty of Political Sciences and Sociology, Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain
376 Abstract
Purpose – This contribution, using EU institutions’ legitimacy-seeking procedures as an analytical framework, aims to discuss the political traps of EU governance processes taking place in EU bodies in pursuit of a new institutionalisation of the Lisbon strategy. Design/methodology/approach – The approach is in the form of a discursive analysis. Findings – The discursive analysis shows the hegemony of two disciplines and approaches: economy and psychology. These will be shown to be interconnected, as they have together contributed to the depoliticisation of responses to current economic demands and social reforms and to the repoliticisation of individuals (contribution to an identity production policy). This “multi-level governance process” which characterises the regulation of the EES by EU institutions might be transformed into a project of multi-level governance without political government. Originality/value – The paper looks at the process of seeking responses to the labour market crisis within Europe. Keywords Governance, European Union, Employment, Organizations Paper type Conceptual paper
International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy Vol. 27 No. 9/10, 2007 pp. 376-386 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0144-333X DOI 10.1108/01443330710822075
Introduction The process of seeking responses to the labour market crisis has been taking on an increasingly European dimension, involving coordination among European, national and regional levels in the context of a common strategy to promote employment and fight exclusion. But this reinforcement of the European project comes up against the diversity of Welfare States. This reinforcement of a supranational regulation of social issues becomes even more complex due to the lack of taken-for-granted legitimacy of EU institutions. In contrast to the institutionalisation process of national social models, the EU lacks a political identity. Historical traditions and social institutions produce collective identities and configure values and social norms, which revive and strengthen the sense of belonging to a geographical community. In the social realm, EU institutions’ situation is rather different. As opposed to the European Union’s economic identity attributes (for example the euro and the European Central Bank), there are few common social identity features. The European Social Model’s ideological position is, therefore, complex, insofar as its construction is taking place in a common cultural vacuum, while one of its aims is the construction of just such a common culture. This situation explains why European institutions are exposed to a strong need for accountability (for a further discussion, see Jepsen and Serrano Pascual, 2006). This article is partly based on previous work by the authors on the regulatory role played by EU institutions.
Supranational governance systems are, therefore, placed in an interesting position. On the one hand, the supranational dimension of social questions needs to be reinforced, but, on the other, EU institutions are characterised by a huge diversity and lack a deep sense of legitimacy. In this context, discussion about European governance and the identification of adequate EU governing structures has become politically important. Traditional modes of governing social and employment issues, such as legal or hard coordination, do not really suit the field of social policy, since it is difficult to agree on common European solutions. This is the political context that explains the emergence and political hegemony of the so-called “open method of coordination” (OMC) as a key government tool to regulate social and employment issues at the supranational level. One concrete example of the way this governance model works in practice in the search for political and scientific legitimacy is relying on a large number of scientific and political experts (“expertocracy”), as well as social actors, pursuant to a government model that has been described as multi-level governance. We intend to discuss the nature and content of this supranational regulatory model with the concrete example of the recent employment guidelines and more precisely their focus on activation. Our main argument is that EU institutions’ complex political status might well encourage a multi-level governance project, in which a range of different voices would take part in devising social responses. However, given the asymmetrical power relations that characterise the multiple actors involved in these proposals, this type of regulation is coming to resemble a governance project without government structured in a twofold process involving, on the one hand, a depoliticisation of employment and, on the other, a repoliticisation process of the worker. We will proceed in three stages. First, we will present some analytical reflections on the main focal points the social contract has been historically based on and, specifically, the processes of constructing employment as a political issue. As the supranational regulation of European bodies appears increasingly as an appropriate level for the settlement of answers in a new economic status quo where neither employment as a norm or the nation as a regulatory entity are, according to the new hegemonic discourse, appropriate to the new rules of the game, we continue to discuss EU institutions’ role in proposing new forms of regulating the social question and their contribution to an identity production policy. EU institutions’ status explains their particular mode of governance and the political terms in which the social contract could be regulated. Finally, we want to discuss this situation with the concrete example of activation policies. The recent relaunching of the Lisbon strategy and the analysis of new employment guidelines could serve as an analytical example of the main trends in activation policies in terms of work governance. The social contract: a symbolic project The “social question” has been shaped historically around a twofold tension: the tension between the processes of naturalisation versus the processes of problematisation and between the processes of risk socialisation versus risk individualisation. The former defines issues where political intervention is possible, while the latter shares out social responsibilities so that several social institutions can find a solution to them. In the first focus, the rhetorical use of “naturalisation” consists of appealing to something given, something specific, which cannot be changed and which conditions
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our lives. It implies appealing to an order that determines us, but whose structure is independent from our interactions with it (Alsop et al., 2002: p. 14). The conventional and contingent become natural and unquestionable, thus making socio-historical and political processes look as if they are governed by an unchanging and eternal nature[1]. Compared with naturalization, problematisation encompasses two issues. On the one hand, it involves highlighting the unfair and, therefore, unjustified nature (unlawful and, therefore, susceptible to review) of a certain social condition/situation. On the other, it involves the moral and political need to be combated. If naturalisation involves depoliticisation, in other words, omitting any connection with issues of power and oppression, problematisation facilitates politicisation (collective regulation) of a certain issue. Problematised issues structure the space of public intervention. The second focus the social question is based on is defined by the way in which responsibilities towards risk and exclusion are shared out among the different social institutions (individuals, state, companies, and family). This twofold analytical focus allows us to understand historical processes of constructing and reconstructing employment and tackling it as a “political issue”[2]. Various historical studies conducted by French-speaking authors (for example, Castel, 1995; Salais et al., 1986; Topalov, 1994) and English-speaking authors (Dean, 1992; Handler, 2006; O’Malley et al., 1997; Walters, 1994) show the central role played by changes in social representations of the meaning of social exclusion during the process of institutionalisation of solidarity that characterised the regulation of industrial societies. Consequently, these new conceptions of the problem served as a strategic resource in the hands of civil society, in particular the trade union movement in its struggle to establish the conditions of the socialisation of risk. In accordance with the liberal dogma of free will and personal responsibility that prevailed in the mid-nineteenth century, socially excluded persons were perceived as free and equal and, as a result, responsible for their condition, insofar as their behaviour was governed by the principle of free will. The failure to be gainfully employed implied, therefore, a moral diagnosis. Political awareness that the market was liable to exhibit shortcomings, confidence in the possibility of political regulation of the market (Giddens, 1990) and the representation of the situation of exclusion from work in terms of a social, rather than an individual problem, fostered political intervention to tackle the problem. These conditions facilitate social “treatment” of the problem. The angle from which the problem is analysed moved from that of the “subject”, the socially excluded person, to that of the “object”, social exclusion, thereby promoting an analytical and political perspective that studies the laws of the phenomenon of unemployment (labour market laws) in order to prevent and seek to rid society of this phenomenon. Subjects excluded from the labour market thus ceased being regarded as at fault and responsible for their poverty, while “occupational accidents” came to be understood in terms of “risk” rather than personal fault or negligence. This entailed a change in the diagnosis of the problem, shifting the question of personal attitudes (personal negligence, lack of foresight concerning the ups-and-downs of life, etc.) into the background and tending to focus instead on establishing the political conditions of social exchange (for example, entitlement to unemployment benefits). This led to a shift away from the individualistic and subjective notion of “failing” to the objective notion of “risk”, by means of the introduction of a specific and new category different from the former (poverty), labelled unemployment. The birth of this category of unemployment
generated a political reformulation of the problem of poverty. Solidarity with the unemployed, and the need to secure decommodified spaces in society, came to be a matter not of charity or generosity, but of justice. The emergence of a concept involved a reformulation of the problem and of the legitimate strategies for tackling it. Ceasing to work and remaining a beneficiary of solidarity was seen as legitimate (inactivity on account of old age, occupational accident, sickness, etc.) and came to be regarded as a right. The welfare state turned this socialisation of solidarity into a reality, providing minimum subsistence for workers in situations of temporary risk and guaranteeing minimum rights for citizens (health, education, control over labour contracts, etc.) and insurance against possible risks (Alonso, 1999; Prieto, 2005). This political regulation of employment fostered the development of legislation to protect workers (legislation dealing with occupational accidents, strikes, etc.). In this frame of reference, the questions regarded as problematic have been transformed. The problem is not individual behaviour or personal volition, but rather how the market operates. The responsibility for the problem does not lie with individuals, but rather with society as a whole. That explains the process of political regulation of work in industrial societies. This set of conditions, as they were structured using the employment/nation binomial, has now been redefined. We will examine one of the factors that can contribute to the deconstruction of employment as a social regulator, namely the spread of a new type of supranational regulation, the OMC. This discursive regulation promoted by the OMC helps to spread an economics-driven discourse that enhances the dilution of a political analysis of the interventions proposed. Markets’ social demands are naturalised (a matter of indisputable fact) and, therefore, rather than reinforcing the political and institutional conditions for the regulation of work and the market, the welfare state’s main aim is to intervene in individuals’ behaviour and motivations. Governance mechanisms and the European “battle of ideas” The “open method of coordination” (OMC) is at the very core of the governance model of the European Employment Strategy (EES). This openness is the key element in the regulation of this strategy, so that European institutions have to coordinate social policies by use of comparison and evaluation, benchmarking and the pressure of peer reviewers, rather than by economic or legal sanction (Jacobsson and Schmid, 2002). The aims or principles (employability, activation, etc.) set in the context of this strategy display a general and ambiguous character that facilitates adaptation to a wide range of labour and economic situations. Consequently, it is a question not of drawing up detailed rules, but rather of introducing general “procedures”, which allow greater flexibility, variation and choice. A certain vocabulary – “life-long learning”, “employability”, “partnership”, “activation”, “active ageing”, “gender mainstreaming”, etc. – has in this way gained currency in national policy discourses. As a result, the OMC’s regulatory nature consists mainly of promoting and popularising a certain diagnosis of the problem (interpretation of the causes of the problem), legitimisation principles, intervention targets and definition of the State’s role (for further discussion, see Serrano Pascual, 2004). As we have stated, it is less a question of regulating by recourse to a legal framework than of setting a defining cognitive framework in accordance with which
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the measures to be adopted will then be devised[3]. The EU plays the role of “persuader” in disseminating a way to deconstruct/construct the social question. One important example is the concept of activation, which EU institutions have helped to disseminate in EU member states. In certain countries at least, EU institutions have contributed to the spread of the activation paradigm (through an increased emphasis on the individualisation of interventions, the condemnation of passive measures, the growing tendency to insist on participation in the labour market as a cure-all, the dissemination of the “activation” concept and ideology, the increasingly personalised nature of intervention, etc.) Due to the important role played by EU institutions as an ideological persuader, the concepts promoted by the EES can serve as political resources in the hands of civil society[4], enabling asymmetrical power relationships to be challenged. Ensuring the political mobilisation of different social groups is a precondition for successful intervention (see, the emphasis on partnership). The EES may well assist in awareness-raising regarding the situation of specific groups in the labour market, causing certain types of issues and situations to be regarded as problematic rather than taken for granted. The EES may act as a catalyst in some areas (gender, life long learning, etc.) and may provide for some civil society groups (trade unions and women’s movements, etc.) strategic tools to promote certain reforms higher up the political agenda. Guidelines on gender mainstreaming, for instance, have been useful in promoting calls for government action in this area. The EES may actually facilitate the setting up of institutions and institutional innovation establishment and the empowerment of certain social groups. This situation partly explains why the European realm might be observed as a place for waging a battle of ideas. The concepts around which European institutions’ proposals are structured could be conceived as political resources in the hands of social and political actors in order to secure a hegemonic vision of the most important priorities. The European arena is, therefore, turned into a space for negotiation and search for new compromises among different social groups (geographical levels, political actors, different DGs within EU institutions and social movements). It thus appears as a new forum in which these social actors are able to reaffirm their hegemonic positions. Accordingly, European institutions ought to be understood as plural structures with multiple centres of power (Goetschy, 2006). In this context, new balances are put into place and negotiated among the various economic and social actors who take the European area as a forum in which to reaffirm their position of hegemony. In this situation, the proposals issued by the EU Commission reveal, to some extent, the rapport de forces among these different economic, social and scientific actors and the important role played by a number of influential lobbies. This is the frame of reference we can use to understand the political nature of the concepts proposed by EU institutions. As a result of this peculiar position adopted by EU institutions, as well as the continuous demand to achieve political compromise among civil-society groups, lobbies and pressure groups, as well as among European countries with differing political philosophy legacies, most of the concepts proposed by EU institutions are highly polysemic and ambiguous in nature (see the example of activation in Serrano Pascual (2004)). The main concepts used in the context of this strategy have thus been borrowed, as a result of broad compromises, from very different ideological and political philosophies. Due to this complex position, European discourse acquires a certain paradoxical character arising as a consequence of the process of intertextuality, whereby discourses
from different ideological spheres (basically social democrat and liberal) and different social welfare traditions come to be conjoined through a process of negotiation and consensus. As a consequence, it is a hybrid discourse, which, as we have seen with the activation concept (Crespo Sua´rez and Serrano Pascual, 2007), uses registers that appeal to the empowerment/development of the subject vis-a`-vis institutions, etcetera, while advocating intervention models that frequently offer no greater decision-making power than respectful submission to the paternalistic demands raised by a unanimous and exclusive belief in the virtues of all-out productivity. It is this paradox that enables the EU discourse to present itself as socially inspired and geared to a concept of the promotion of individuals, while also defining, in purely technocratic terms, a field of possible practices in which politics is reduced to the management of adaptation to situations that are regarded as inevitable and not open to question. This ideological exercise is facilitated by appealing to “experts” from the world of science and academia, as well as from the political arena. This may enhance the extent to which “different voices” are heard and taken into account, but it can also turn political proposals into “technocratic” ones. The concentration on theory and policy-making processes among professional elites hinders the public discussion of controversial social decisions. This appeal to scientific works means that a state of affairs can be presented as the conclusion of a scientific analysis, when, in actual fact, it is the outcome of a process of political decision-making. Moreover, given the asymmetrical power relationship between the actors which participate in this EU project, rather than a “multi-level” governance process, this supranational regulation provided by EU institutions has been reinforcing the “voices” of the productive system. In this appeal to “prophets” of the scientific world, the results of economic research specifically have a central role. As result of the hegemony of an economic Darwinist discourse, the proposals coming from the economic think-tanks and industrial lobbies have been subjected to a process of naturalisation. Furthermore, a large number of concepts has been directly imported from the business world, such as the concept of peer groups, benchmarking, negotiation, etcetera. The interconnection between the scientific and the political world for legitimating purposes is exemplified by the recent review of EES guidelines and their appeal to the Kok (2003, 2004) reports[5]. In another study we have analysed the political content of these expertocracy reports (Serrano Pascual, 2007). We are now interested in analysing the models of government that these proposals put forward. Modes of government of work and unemployment promoted by EU institutions Let us take the concrete example of the recent communications by the Commission, which establish the need for a review of employment guidelines. These communications have a crisis as a backdrop, partly because not much progress has been made with the objectives set in previous proposals (in particular those resulting from the Lisbon Summit), but also partly because of recent failures in the processes aimed at establishing a common political project, such as the recent rejections of the European Constitution by France and the Netherlands and the difficulty coming to an agreement for a common budgetary policy. This backdrop of crisis explains the emphasis in these proposals on mobilising identity resources and the appeal to controlling emotions.
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These communications on the review of employment guidelines are, on the whole, characterised discursively by two aspects: an appeal to a supposed collective identity, an essentialist notion in which an apparent European essence is taken for granted; and the hegemony of an economics-driven discourse in analysing the problems. This discourse is implemented in a context that encompasses a transformation of the rules of the game after the transition to the so-called knowledge society. This ambivalent discourse has a twofold logic: defensive (appeal to threat) and “proactive” (use of empowerment: transforming threats into challenges). In order to encourage social cohesion, a threat is constructed discursively that supposedly characterises us as Europeans. Faced with this situation, which is constructed as threatening, “we cannot stop”[6]. What unites us is not just a supposed “we”, some “same” objectives or projects, but also sharing a same threat. The aim is to consolidate cohesive feelings with this crisis background. This demand for group cohesion is strengthened by the rhetorical mechanisms of passivisation that allow those actors (business corporations, as well as European institutions), which could be held responsible for this above-mentioned economic failure, to shirk their responsibility. The actors and the agency are made to disappear, thus resulting in “power without authority”[7]. In this respect, it is a discourse that challenges European citizens to become aware of their possible strength and which emphasises the European project’s potentialities[8]. It is, therefore, usual to use modernist metaphors (strength, ambition, creating, positive, dynamic, innovative, power, development). A key issue to tackling these threats is, according to this discourse, the assertion of the moral duty of every European to take part in this collective project[9]. Participation in the labour market not only has an emancipatory meaning, but also a moralising one. This economic participation is presented as a necessary condition to relaunch economic growth and come out of the crisis. Therefore, intervention in individual motivations seems crucial, fighting against the psychological snares that would make the individual’s commitment to his moral duty to support Europe’s economic growth difficult. The concept of activation[10] promoted by EU institutions could be understood in this context. The aim of social policies, according to this intervention paradigm, is not so much to guarantee citizenship rights, but rather to promote and design situations where work pays[11]. The explicit concept of a human being would be that of a formally free, autonomous and responsible individual, governed by the principle of autonomy of volition. Participation is valued more than discipline and this participation must be ideological or attitudinal, as well as productive. Personal attitudes are going to come to the foreground, and “social risks” (unemployment, social exclusion) are going to be “individual pitfalls” (lack of employability). The function of these individually accountable discourses is to persuade the person that his attitude can explain his situation, make him believe in his sovereignty. His situation in the labour market ends up being a reflection of himself, of his “ethical” problems. European institutions’ discourse is contributing to the naturalisation of market demands, making proactive adaptation an unquestionable value. In contrast to these technological, economic and social changes, presented as necessary, the “need” for an “active” society is established (structural reforms, more training in new technologies, etc.). Institutional adaptation and modernisation through activation thus appears as the “natural” response to economic change and globalisation. This “naturalisation” of the process makes it appear to be beyond political control. However, this
depoliticisation process in governing work, which European institutions are contributing to and in which an attitude of political powerlessness is disseminated vis-a`-vis the regulation of new commercial demands, is closely associated with a repoliticisation or reappropriation project by the State of spaces considered so far as “private” and, as such, beyond the scope of public intervention. These spaces, such as the “moral” contract with work and performance of the social duty “to be oneself”, have been conceived as spheres of personal sovereignty. As a result, there is a trend towards moralisation of social aid by which public intervention is targeted at encouraging the government of the self. Depoliticisation in the regulation of work thus goes hand in hand with repoliticisation in governing and disciplining workers (production of working individuals). Productive demands are naturalised, and the scope of the problems extends to individual behaviour and personal motivations and emotions. This process is contributing to the increasing discursive hegemony of interpretations that place an emphasis on the role of individual responsibilities. The proposals suggested by European institutions are accompanied by a discursive and ideological transformation process concerning the social question, taking us in the direction of a moral focus for unemployment and social exclusion. Conclusions: multi-level governance without political government? European discourse on policy proposals to tackle social exclusion and the crisis in the labour markets is characterised by the way it converts new economic challenges into laws to which our European societies are compelled to adapt. This naturalisation of new economic demands turns adaptation into an inexorable necessity. The hegemony of economics-driven discourse encourages dilution of any political analysis of the interventions proposed. Furthermore, markets’ social demands are naturalised (i.e. regarded as a matter of indisputable fact). A Darwinist discourse is spreading according to which national and supranational governments seem powerless to modify the rules of the game of international competitiveness. In this context, politics are transformed into policies: managing adaptation to a situation regarded as inevitable and fixed (not open to question). There is a process of remarketisation of society, whereby the market is restored to the dominant regulatory status. The expertocracy process is contributing to this development. However, this process of depoliticisation of the regulation/government of work goes hand in hand with the repoliticisation of individuals: identity production policies. The demands of this new order extend beyond mere labour market regulation. The new demands of this economic status quo extend to the regulation of people’s motivations, requiring them to place themselves at the disposal of new economic realities and to mould their attitudes around them. The activation paradigm, proposed by European institutions in the EES, is emblematic of these new ethical requirements. This paradigm, rather than proposing an appropriate model of intervention to tackle labour market exclusion problems, is contributing to an identity formation policy. The new normative demands entailed by this paradigm are structured around the moral duty incumbent on every citizen, namely to take responsibility for oneself. European institutions are thus contributing to a review of the normative bases on which the paradigm of social cohesion was established in the second half of the twentieth century. The interventions proposed by EU institutions are characterised by a redistribution of responsibilities in the face of social exclusion. This situation implies a reading of the
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social question in individual and moral terms, in contrast with the political interpretation of the problem applicable to the concepts that formed the social question in other stages of capitalism. This individualisation of the social question implies that political problems are turned into matters of personal motivation and volition, while the political nature of social exclusion is not even touched on. Therefore, this form of multi-level governance, which characterises supranational regulation, rather than enhancing “dia-logos” among different social groups, can serve to legitimate influential lobbies’ mono-logical claims. Notes 1. Naturalisation is an important political/discursive device that makes it possible to justify social differences rhetorically. For example, gender differences can be explained by biological laws (female or male behaviour governed by hormones, genes, etc.), social differences by social laws (“there have always been rich and poor people”), political differences and citizenship access by economic laws (such as the globalisation discourse, which allows production transformations to be justified and thus naturalised). Using anthropological universalisms also forms part of naturalisation, which allows certain behaviours to be justified by appealing to a supposed human nature. Economicism and psychologisation contribute to this naturalisation to a large extent. Hormones, history, new economic demands and human nature all seem to be outside the scope of potential political intervention. 2. The symbolic mutation of the concept of work (from work to employment) can be explained as a consequence of a change in the balance of forces between the two sides of this double focus. The concept of work typical of pre-industrial societies included a naturalizing view of market laws, blaming any problems on the behaviour of the worker or candidate. As a result of this perception of the situation, the type of measures to combat it consisted of interventions to amend or discipline the socially excluded in order to change or alleviate their behaviour (charity, hard labour, etc.). In this type of analysis, the responsibilities fell mainly on the shoulders of the person excluded. This conceptual mutation is also going to imply a transformation in the type of issues turned into problems (the way the market operates, which can have faults) and in the way responsibilities are attributed (extension of social, rather than individual and individually accountable explanations of poverty) and, therefore, there is overwhelming evidence for the need for collective regulation (“taming the runaway market”: Alonso, 1999). 3. What Fairclough (2000, p. 61) called “cultural governance”: governing by shaping and changing cultures of public services, claimants and the socially excluded, and the general population. 4. As Fairclough (2000, p. 3) underlines “. . . political struggles have always been partly struggles over the dominant language”. 5. They are presented as independent reviews carried out by a group (“High level group”) of experts in order to contribute to and participate in the definition (or legitimation) of a strategy to relaunch the Lisbon strategy. Yet the composition of the group, a mixture of scientists (economists) and stake holders (social partner representatives), explains the “trapping” effects of this exercise, insofar as it encourages collusion in an ideological project by stakeholders who are drawn, as a matter of course, into its conception. 6. “Unless we reinforce our commitment to meeting them, with a renewed drive and focus, our model for European society, our pensions, our quality of life will rapidly be called into question . . . ” (European Commission, 2005, p. 4).
7. We use this expression to highlight the meaning attributed by Sennet (1998) in his work The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, in which he points out that the supposed disappearance (or the more unpalatable nature) of hierarchies at the workplace makes the worker responsible for labour failures at a time like the present when, paradoxically, the worker has very little capacity to control risks. 8. “Europeans have every reason to be positive about our economic potential. The successes of the second half of the twentieth century have left a strong legacy. After half a century of peace we have one of the most developed economies in the world united together in a unique political Union of stable and democratic Member States . . . Europe is home to dynamic and innovative companies with extraordinary competitive strength. At their best, they are demonstrating a remarkable capacity to renewal. We have made more progress towards sustainable development than any other region of the world” (European Commission, 2005, p. 3). 9. “. . .action should concentrate on the following priorities: attract and retain more people in employment, increase labour supply and modernise social protection systems. . . Raising employment levels is the most effective means of generating economic growth and promoting socially inclusive economies while ensuring a safety net for those unable to work.” (European Council, 2005, p. 24). 10. The activation paradigm goes beyond mere intervention in the labour market in order to help unemployed people into work. It involves a policy of producing individuals and identities that conform more readily to industry’s new rules and as such it also involves a new understanding of citizenship. This activation paradigm redefines “what is normal at work”. It also redefines the representation of citizenship and our understanding of what is fair and justifiable or unfair and unjustifiable, as well as what rights people should be entitled to and the extent to which State intervention should be possible. 11. “Guideline no. 19: Ensure inclusive labour markets, enhance work attractiveness and make work pay for job-seekers, including disadvantaged people and the inactive through: active and preventive labour market measures . . . , continual review of the incentives and disincentives resulting from tax and benefit systems, including the management and conditionality of benefits and a significant reduction in high marginal effective tax rates, notably for those with low incomes, while ensuring adequate levels of social protection . . . ” (European Council, 2005, p. 25). References Alonso, L.E. (1999), Trabajo y ciudadanı´a, Trotta, Madrid. Alsop, R., Fitzsimons, A. and Lennon, K. (2002), Theorizing Gender, Polity Press, Cambridge. Castel, R. (1995), Les me´tamorphoses de la question sociale, Fayard, Paris. Crespo Sua´rez, E. and Serrano Pascual, A. (2007), “The paradoxes of the active subject in the discourse of the EU institutions”, in Van Berkel, R. and Valkenburg, B. (Eds), Making it Personal. Individualising Activation Services in the EU, Policy Press, Bristol. Dean, M. (1992), “A genealogy of the government of poverty”, Economy and Society, Vol. 21 No. 3, pp. 215-51. European Commission (2005), “Working together for growth and jobs. A new start for the Lisbon Strategy”, European Commission, Brussels, Communication to the Spring European Council. European Council (2005), “Council Decision of 12 July 2005 on guidelines for the employment policies of the Member States”, Official Journal of the European Union, European Council. Fairclough, N. (2000), New Labour, New Language?, Routledge, London and New York, NY.
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Giddens, A. (1990), “Las consecuencias de la modernidad”, editorial, Alianza. Goetschy, J. (2006), “Taking stock of social Europe: is there such a thing as a community social model?”, in Jepsen, M. and Serrano Pascual, A. (Eds), Unwrapping the European Social Model, Policy Press, Bristol. Handler, J. (2006), “Activation policies and the European social model”, in Jepsen, M. and Serrano Pascual, A. (Eds), Unwrapping the European Social Model, Policy Press, Bristol, pp. 93-123. Jacobsson, K. and Schmid, H. (2002), “Real integration or just formal adaptation? On the implementation of the National Action Plans for employment”, in de la Porte, C. and Pochet, P. (Eds), Building Social Europe through the Open Method of Co-ordination, PIE Peter Lang, Brussels, pp. 69-97. Jepsen, M. and Serrano Pascual, A. (Eds) (2006), Unwrapping the European Social Model, Policy Press, Bristol. Kok, W. (2003), Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, Creating More Employment in Europe, Report of the Employment Taskforce, chaired by Wim Kok, November 2003. Kok, W. (2004), Facing the Challenge. The Lisbon Strategy for Growth and Employment, Report from the High Level Group, November. O’Malley, P., Weir, L. and Shearing, C. (1997), “Governmentality, criticism, politics”, Economy and Society, Vol. 26 No. 4, pp. 501-17. Prieto, C. (2005), “La de-gradacio´n del empleo en Espan˜a: de la norma de empleo ‘salarial’ a la norma de empleo ‘empresarial’”, in Alonso, L.E. and Lucio, M. (Eds), Relaciones de empleo en el posfordismo, Macmillan, London. Salais, R., Baverez, N. and Reynaud, B. (1986), L’invention du choˆmage. Historie et transformation d’une cate´gorie en France des anne´es 1890 aux anne´es 1980, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris. Sennett, R. (1998), The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, W.W. Norton, New York, NY. Serrano Pascual, A. (Ed.) (2004), Activation Policies for Young People in International Perspective, ETUI, Brussels. Serrano Pascual, A. (2007), “Supranational expertocracy and the politics of production of identities”, in Kuhn, M. (Ed.), The European – A New Global Player?, Peter Lang, New York, NY. Topalov, C. (1994), La naissance du choˆmeur 1880-1910, Albin Michel, Paris. Walters, W. (1994), “The discovery of unemployment”, Economy and Society, Vol. 23, pp. 265-91. Further reading Darmond, I. (2002), “‘Civil dialogue’, ‘governance’ and the role of the social economy in civil society”, in Serrano Pascual, A. (Ed.), Enhancing Employability through Social and Civil Partnership, ETUI, Brussels. Scharpf, F.W. (2002), “Legitimate diversity. The new challenge of European integration”, Cahiers Europe´ens des Sciences, No. 1.
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Governing the activation of older workers in the European Union
Older workers in the European Union
The construction of the “activated retiree” Emma Carmel, Kate Hamblin and Theo Papadopoulos
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European Research Institute, Department of Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath, Bath, UK Abstract Purpose – This paper seeks to evaluate the EU’s “active ageing” agenda as a governance strategy for the activation of older workers, and its impact on the regulation both of those who make, and those who are the objects of, policy. This case study is used to reflect more broadly on the implications of governance strategies for the regulation of social subjects in the European Union (EU). Design/methodology/approach – The paper adopts a model of governance comprising two dimensions, namely formal policy (policy aims) and operational policy (policy means). This model is used to explain how and to what effect, discourses and institutions interact in EU governance to produce particular forms of social subject regulation; in this case, activation. Findings – For the operational dimension, the paper explores how contradictions and tensions within and between employment, pensions and social inclusion policies are reflected in, and the products of, a re-allocation of responsibilities between the EU, member states, social partners, and individuals. For the formal dimension, it explains how employment for older workers is constructed as having a different meaning to the employment of other workers, and how EU discourse on active ageing disguises crucial inequalities between groups of older workers, both pre- and post-retirement. Research implications/limitations – The paper concludes that active ageing policy in the EU institutes a new category of social subject, apparently eliding the former distinction between employment and retirement, namely the “activated retiree”. Originality/value – The paper demonstrates the efficacy of the two-dimensional approach to the empirical analysis of governance strategies and identifies how key tensions in the production of EU social policies directly impact on the regulation of social subject categories in the EU. Keywords European Union, Governance, Ageing, Older workers, Social policy Paper type Research paper
Introduction European citizens aged 50-69 are at once in process of a life-course transition, and subject to a policy-in-transition, one intended to transform the status, possibilities and characterisation of their lives over the next five to 20 years. This paper assesses these policies-in-transition, especially policies intended to activate those known as older workers (50-64 year olds) and those between 65-69 years of age[1]. As the activation of older workers impinges directly on pensions and social exclusion policies, the active ageing agenda takes us to the heart of how the EU is governed, and how it governs through social policy. This is especially important as the EU has recently been developing a specific and expanding role in defining and shaping policy issues which traditionally were at the heart of national welfare states (notably employment, pensions and health). We argue that governing the “activation” of older workers in the EU implicitly institutes, among other things, a new category of social subject in the European Union,
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namely the “activated retiree”. The latter elides the former distinction between employment and retirement, and in doing so, undermines the social rights attached to retirement. We use the term “activated retiree” to describe the newly emerging socio-political regulation of those who (will) find themselves in this age category. The term also points to the reconfiguration of relationships between the actors who are involved in doing the regulation, namely, the “division of labour” between EU, member states, markets and individuals. The “activated retiree” is the product of tensions and contradictions, as well as a core of agreement, between different strands of governance in the EU. It remains to be seen whether it will have any resonance among individual member states, but as we argue below, we believe it will. The first section of the article outlines our analytical perspective on governance; the second section addresses the procedural and organisational aspects of governance in respect of older workers in the EU (what we call the operational dimension of governance); the third section undertakes an analysis of the substantive policy content (what we call the formal dimension of governance) by examining the ways in which the targets of EU active ageing policies are constructed, and the implications of these for the kind of employment and pensions which “older workers” can expect under such policies. The conclusion draws together the analysis from each governance dimension to discuss the contradictory social subject category of the “activated retiree”. On governing social subjects in the EU There have been many studies examining the emergence of the open methods of co-ordination (OMCs) as new policymaking processes for social policy in the EU, and their evolution as a mode of governance (e.g. de la Porte and Pochet, 2002; Jacobsson, 2004). There have been rather fewer, although thorough, evaluations of their impact as a policymaking mechanisms on individual member states (see, especially, Pochet and Zeitlin, 2005 with Magnusson; also Lopez-Santana, 2006), but even the latter studies do not evaluate the content of these policies sui generis. Indeed, the development of the EU’s social policy and employment agenda and its interaction with the practices and overall governance of the OMCs has received even less attention (see O’Connor, 2005; Bruno et al., 2006; Daly, 2006). We contend that EU-level developments in social policy and reforms to the organisational and procedural aspects of policymaking should be assessed jointly to appreciate the significance of changes in both. Our article explicitly brings together an analysis of the policy content with an analysis of how this content is articulated within the practices and procedures for policymaking instituted by the OMCs – including the most recent reforms. We apply at the EU level an analytical perspective on governance developed in earlier work (Carmel and Papadopoulos, 2003). Both the modes of governing (what we call the operational dimension of governance) and the content of what is to be governed (what we call the formal, or substantive, dimension of governance) are analysed in terms of what each individually and jointly contributes to the institution and legitimation of power relationships in any one instance of governing. Thus these two dimensions – the formal and the operational – are mutually constitutive of governance and our approach involves the joint analysis of these distinct but inseparable dimensions. We maintain that, ultimately, governance is a process of socio-politically institutionalising and regulating categories of social subjects. It is a process whereby these categories can be reproduced or altered or new categories created and it
involves “the ‘steering’ of [. . .] subjects’ behavioural practices towards particular social and politico-economic goals via a set of institutions and processes that aim to maintain or change the status quo” (Carmel and Papadopoulos, 2003, p. 32). This means that we assess the generation, authorisation and acceptance of social subject categories not only among those who are the target of policy (e.g. unemployed, pensioners, lone mothers) but also among those who are involved in making and delivering policy (agencies, social “partners”, policy makers). All these categories of subjects, and their relationships – i.e. those to be governed and those to do the governing – are created, reproduced or changed through the interaction of the formal and operational dimensions of governance[2]. In this context, we believe that modes of governing in the EU, in tandem with what and whom they coordinate and to what ends, comprise the emergent forms of socio-political regulation in the EU. In terms of European social policy, this ultimately defines the contours of a European “social”, and what can legitimately be defined as the limits of EU social policy making (Carmel, 2005). Governing the activation of older workers: the operational dimension Tensions in Lisbon agenda and organisational imperatives of active ageing The EU’s active ageing agenda was first articulated in 1999, shortly following the establishment of a legal basis for the EU to deal with employment policies (via the “Employment Title” in the Amsterdam Treaty), and the development of the EU’s Employment Strategy in the late 1990s. Both the active ageing agenda and the Employment Strategy were justified by the need to increase employment levels, particularly in the light of ageing populations, and consequent projected crises in public pension schemes in several EU member states. The central place of the Employment Strategy to the EU’s future development was given further emphasis in the Lisbon Strategy in 2000, where the member states declared their joint intention that the EU should become the “most dynamic knowledge based economy in the world with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion” (CEU, 2000a; CEC, 2000). The imperative of the Lisbon Strategy was the improvement of economic growth in the EU and the pursuit of full employment. The consequent positioning of social policies was, at best, as a subsidiary accompaniment to full employment (Wincott, 2003) or, to be more accurate, full employability (CEC, 2000, p. 13). We have argued elsewhere, however, that despite the aim of social cohesion in the Lisbon Strategy, social policy was to be not (solely) a compensation for market failures, but rather one among several means to pursue economic growth through supply side “activation” measures and structural reform (Carmel, 2005;, e.g. CEC, 2000). The Lisbon Strategy promoted the use of specific policymaking mechanisms (known as the open methods of co-ordination, OMCs) to pursue its policy goals across a range of policy areas. These mechanisms included the setting of targets, and mechanisms to monitor member states’ progress toward meeting these targets. Thus the European Commission and Council would agree on targets to be met, and member states would report on their progress, including reforms adopted to assist in addressing the Lisbon goals. The Commission would then publish a joint report in order to comment member states’ progress and to effect their learning using policy lessons from one another (see, e.g. de la Porte et al., 2001; de la Porte and Pochet, 2002). On current evidence, the impact of particular processes and targets on actual member state policies is at best mixed, and variable by country and policy area (see Pochet and
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Zeitlin with Magnusson, 2005), but it is generally agreed – notably by the EU institutions and member states themselves – not to have produced necessary progress in meeting the Lisbon policy goals, and associated targets. Indeed this was one of the reasons cited for the need for the thorough overhaul of the Strategy’s agenda, targets and organisation which took place in 2005. Up to 2005, there were, led by the directorate for labour and social affairs, OMCs in employment (OMC/empl, 2000), social inclusion (OMC/incl, 2001), putatively in pensions (OMC/pens, 2002 þ ) and health (never really emerged). The OMC/empl came under the leadership of the Employment Committee (EMCO), and the other relevant OMCs were subject to input from the Social Protection Committee (SPC). These committees, comprising two civil servant representatives from each member state, plus Commission representation, have become significant political institutions in the development of the OMCs (see Borra`s and Jacobsson, 2004). They represent both their member state interests, but also the interests and concerns of their ministries of origin (employment/labour ministries in EMCO, and health, pensions and social security specialists in the SPC). While the basic principles behind the OMCs were common across policies, there were considerable variations in practice. For example, the OMC/incl had a deliberately open and inclusive structure and format, and had indicators, but few fixed targets for measuring progress; the nascent pensions OMC had no targets at all; and the OMC/empl had an annually burgeoning number of targets and indicators. While the number of targets did not necessarily induce more effective impact of the OMC/empl, they indicated a concern to prioritise and monitor progress in employment as a key contribution to meeting the Lisbon goals. And central to these were two targets relating to the employment of older workers: first, to attract and retain half of all 55 to 64 year olds in employment by 2010 (2001 Stockholm European Council), and to increase the average de facto retirement age by five years from 59.9 years, over the same time period (2002 Barcelona European Council) (CEC, 2004a, p. 3). In 2005 the major revision to the Lisbon Strategy (now the “New Lisbon Agenda”), was significant for our purposes in its creation of the integrated “Partnership for jobs and growth” (CEC, 2005c). In this Partnership, the targets of the Employment Strategy are now integrated with the (“hard”, numerically specific and measurable) targets for macro and microeconomic management in pursuing economic growth. The reforms thus entail a clear organisational and conceptual separation of employment issues from social protection and social policy, even though the employment aspects are still dealt with by staff from the Employment and Social Affairs directorate (DG V) of the Commission. At the same time, social inclusion, pensions and health were combined in a distinct, but three-part, process, now called the OMC on social protection and social inclusion (OMC/SP-SI) (CEC, 2006a). The latter does not have additional specific targets, and is under the remit of DGV, and the Social Protection Committee (SPC), comprising representatives from member states’ employment, social affairs and health ministries. There are several discursive and institutional indications that the Employment Strategy guidelines, and thus also the active ageing agenda, is, under the New Lisbon Agenda, more than ever governed by the imperatives of supply-side structural reforms in the pursuit of economic growth. These indications include: the close association of economic management and employment indicated by the new name (“Partnership for Jobs and Growth”), which now entirely excludes the social cohesion dimension from the employment guidelines; the institutional and political dominance of the economic
and monetary affairs directorate which deals with the economic policy guidelines into which employment guidelines have been inserted; the telling presence of representatives of finance ministries in EMCO; the reduction in the number of guidelines in the employment strategy to core issues relating to structural labour market reform; the reliance on the key numerical targets of employment rates, including the Stockholm and Barcelona targets; and the emphasis given to productivity, growth and employment in supporting documents in the revised Lisbon programme. Combined, these imply a powerful consensus about the political and policy importance of the EU’s activation agenda for older workers, and also that this agenda, designed to serve the imperatives of economic growth, should be governed by professionals in the economics and labour economics fields. In practice, however, the active ageing agenda is also central to the pensions theme in the OMC/SP-SI. Insofar as this age group is at risk of poverty and marginalisation – and research indicates that many “early retirees” fall into this category – it is also a matter of concern for the social inclusion theme. What is significant in operational policy terms is that the very existence of the OMC/incl testified to a commitment to the social cohesion goal in the Lisbon Strategy. The latter at the least functioned as a political reference point for those in the Employment and Social affairs directorate, and other EU actors, who wish to argue for a more solidaristic or collective vision of the “European social” (Carmel, 2005). This was given an organisational “home” in the OMC/incl – self-consicously more open and inclusive than the professional expert dominated OMC/empl – and an organisational voice in the SPC. Indeed, Daly (2006) argues that the conceptual and institutional separation of employment from the newly coherent, three part, OMC/SP-SI may lead to the establishment of a reinvigorated social agenda in the Employment and Social affairs directorate away from the main economic business of the new Lisbon Programme. Our view is that this is unlikely, given the overriding emphasis in the Programme on the necessity of particular kinds of structural labour market reforms, and on activation, which precludes similar attention to the compensatory and safety-net aspect of social protection (on the contrast between activation and safety-net, see, e.g. Van Berkel and Hornemann Møller, 2002; Torfing, 1999). It is even less likely, given that pensions policies are not merely considered part of a social cohesion agenda, but are also drawn into the discursive, political and organisational orbit of proponents of economic and structural reform. Thus the development of the OMC/pens not only got off to a slow and unsteady start (Amitsis et al., 2003), but from its inception evidenced some tension between the social inclusion agenda of promoting adequate pensions and the economic/employment agenda of maintaining financial sustainability in the face of ageing populations and the assumption of fiscal rectitude (SPC, 2004). Further, the requirement for adequacy of public pension provision pursued in the pensions OMC (and which is maintained in OMC/SP-SI) is considerably more limited than that existing in many member states, where public pensions are subject to a (not always explicit) commitment to maintain living standards – a substantially stronger and financially more demanding commitment than adequacy. Precisely these tensions between adequacy, maintaining standards, and managing sustainability can be identified in reports by the SPC, under whose remit the OMC-SP/SI falls. Yet the aim, attested to in numerous policy documents, to improve social cohesion, can be seen in interventions from actors pursuing this agenda, sometimes with success. The Commission’s proposed SP/SI
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objectives of December 2005, and the (accepted) amendments proposed by the SPC and Economic Policy Committee (SPC, 2006) show clearly that the SPC succeeded in making a case for going beyond a minimalist approach to safeguarding EU citizens against social exclusion. Thus the SPC was able to secure amendments which said that pensions must be reformed in a “socially fair manner”, and also secured removal of the aim to protect only the most marginalised citizen, dealing with extreme forms of inclusion. Instead, the objectives now address social exclusion more generally (CEC, 2005c; SPC, 2006, section 2.1). It seems that the coherence of the new OMC/SP-SI articulates in institutional or operational policy terms, the continuing significance of sharp tensions between the social cohesion goals – which formed the third, and rather weak, leg of the original Lisbon Strategy – and the recently strengthened, more “productivist” logic implied by Lisbon’s activation and economic growth agenda. Dividing up the tasks? Market actors in the governance of older workers So what is the EU’s active ageing agenda and who is rendered politically and socially responsible for it? The Commission (CEC, 2004a), conceptualising the problem of older workers’ employment as one of public pension funding, divided the solution into three key areas: reforming employment and social security systems (including introducing flexible employment forms); engaging social partners’ wider social responsibilities in relation to older workers; changing public opinion. Employers are exhorted to alter their practices to draw, or more often, keep, older individuals into the labour market. In the early justifications for the anti-discrimination directive (which includes age discrimination), tackling discrimination is viewed as beneficial in three ways as it tackles social exclusion, provides a larger pool of labour and “puts the onus on employers to justify their decisions about matters such as recruitment, promotion, access to training and other working conditions” (CEU, 2000b, p. 13). These are all understood to be important for retaining older workers in jobs, so it is possible that the directive might “responsibilise” private employers, by inducing a form of behaviour which has social benefits, especially for lower wage and lower skilled workers. It does not, however, engage their wider social responsibilities, as employers are still assumed to solely act in their private interest. Beyond age discrimination, there are quite strong limit conditions to the definition of employers’ responsibilities, however, as the promotion of longer employment can only be encouraged through information campaigns and exhortation. Because the labour market is to be the object of structural reforms, and thus becoming less regulated and more “flexible”, there are no policy means to insist on the responsibilities of employers to older workers. Employers remain “irresponsible” actors because the “discursive regulatory mechanisms” (Jacobsson, 2004) of the Lisbon Programme and active ageing agendas do not permit the contemplation of employer regulation. The other important market actors featured in active ageing policies are private and occupational pension funds. These play a central role in the EU vision for part-time retirement, and substantial increases to private and voluntary savings. However, in an intervention in the OMC/pens, the SPC (2005) published a rather sceptical report about the capacity of the private pensions sector to respond to the challenges for public schemes, and it was particularly sceptical that private pensions could secure the social goal of pension adequacy. Still, in our view, the context in which the responsibilities of private and occupational pension funds is framed is that of structural reform and
market liberalisation, particularly as the Commission is keen to secure a single market in private pensions. Indeed this contention seems supported by the fact that the relatively strong intervention in the 2005 SPC report was considerably watered down in the 2006 synthesis report presented for the OMC/SP-SI (CEC, 2006a). The EU discourse on how the employment of older workers is to be governed emphasises the increased use of private pensions savings as a means to unburden public pension schemes. Emphasising private pensions savings but without safeguarding minimum investments or regulating to protect consumers is equal to “steering” individuals workers’ behaviour towards greater risk-bearing investments and savings. Simultaneously, treating pension funds as merely private market actors, economises what are socio-political decisions regarding the investment of the vast moneys of pension funds, and privatises (removes to the individual) the risk of pensions savings. Thus, operationally, the configuration of rights and responsibilities between market and state actors articulates a new form of socio-political regulation of pensions and employment. To put it bluntly, and rather provocatively, the clear tendency is for EU and states to become less responsible, households and individuals to become more responsible and markets to become more powerful. Governing the activation of older workers: policy content Who are the “older workers”? What is most striking from even a cursory overview of the policy proposals for older workers in the OMC/empl, pension policies and the active ageing agenda is that this group of 50-64 year olds are treated as if they were homogenous, even in relation to their chronological age – as if retiring at 64 were the same as retiring at 50. The treatment of older workers as a homogenous group blurs the distinctions between these workers. Yet these distinctions would otherwise have quite significant implications for social justice and redistribution: i.e. those between male and female employees; those between more and highly educated/skilled; between rich and poor. Current evidence suggests that those most likely to retire most early are those with low levels of education (OECD, 2006). This was acknowledged in the first Commission document to introduce the “active ageing” agenda (CEC, 1999), but a point mostly ignored in later policy pronouncements. This has implications for the kind of employment which is likely to fill the gap for the active retiree between the ages of 50 and 65 þ . Unusually in the context of the EU, and in marked contrast to the pensions theme in OMC/SP-SI, gender equality receives notably little attention in the active ageing agenda. The male norm biography of full-time employment with substantial, if not always complete, pension contributions is the constant implicit referent in documents. There is very little mention of caring responsibilities among this documentation, and little credit given for those who are indeed forced to retire early due to ill health and/or disability associated with increasing age. Furthermore, although the main target of the reforms are indeed 50-64 year olds, the necessary implication of the policy proposal that “we should work longer”, is, of course, that we work “older”. Thus the group of “older workers” currently constructed as targets for “active retirement” will become ever older. Further, although older workers themselves do not need “activating” (unlike the unemployed), the logic of the active ageing agenda insists that they are at risk of becoming inactive. It seems that the policy burden is to persuade individuals that
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retirement is a risk for them individually, whereas currently it is constructed as a social risk, to be dealt with via the pension system. Accordingly, older workers do not require activating in the conventional sense; rather they need to be persuaded of the risks attached to retirement (inadequate public pension, savings and so on), and continue to pursue economic security through employment (for a problematisation of this idea in the UK context, see Carmel and Papadopoulos, 2003). This leads to the key innovative proposal under the EU’s active ageing agenda: that individuals should be employed in retirement. What kind of employment/what kind of retirement? In governing older workers, the impetus and rationale of the employment strategy is explicitly utilitarian: older workers must work because it is good for everyone else, good for social protection systems and good for the economy (e.g. CEU, 2005; CEC, 1999). Indeed, while those who can no longer work through disability should be permitted to exit the labour market prior to state pension age (CEC, 1999), generally “the use of unemployed benefits schemes as an alternative route to early retirement for older workers should be avoided” (CEC, 2004a, p. 10). The implication is that “Europe’s welfare systems are not so much facing an ‘ageing problem’ but a ‘retirement problem’” (Almunia, 2006, p. 4). A key aspect of this simple phrase is that ageing is of course involuntary; retirement is conceptualised as individual’s choice even though we know that especially those more vulnerable in the labour market often retire “early” under considerably straitened circumstances (Platman, 2004, pp. 184-5). The policy proposals dealing with this “retirement problem” can be grouped into two categories: those that discourage retirement before current statutory retirement ages – what is now “early” retirement – and those which construct current statutory retirement ages as “early retirement”. They are briefly summarised below: (1) Proposals to make people work until the statutory retirement: . increase required contribution years to claim full pension; . permit people to partially retire either at retirement age or shortly before (i.e. combine part time employment with retirement); . reduce early retirement benefits; . abolition of some early retirement schemes; . wage subsidies and insurance contribution reductions to employers for employment of older (esp. unemployed) workers. (2) Proposals for making people work beyond current retirement: . increase statutory retirement age; . introduce longevity-related calculations into public pension schemes; . increase minimum age for claiming occupational/personal pension; . permit people to work beyond the statutory retirement age; . incentives to defer claiming your pension; . permit combining partial pension claim with part time employment; . higher accrual rates for employment beyond statutory retirement age (CEC, 2006b, pp. 34 -7).
There are two important aspects to these proposals: what kind of employment is envisaged in such policies and what kind of retirement can retirees expect. Where attention is paid to the kind of employment envisaged, we witness once again some tension between the economic imperatives and social cohesion agenda of Lisbon, institutionalised in the OMC/empl and OMC/SP-SI respectively. It is suggested that active ageing policies can improve older individuals’ wellbeing (CEU, 2002, p. 5), and that “growth in longevity means that people have greater opportunities to fulfil their potential over a longer life-span”; yet it is also acknowledged that for this to be true, the opportunities to find employment need to be present (CEC, 2004a, p. 5). An integral part of the post-Lisbon role for employment strategy and its attempts to increase de facto retirement ages was the creation of “more and better jobs” (CEC, 2000). It is suggested that without “quality jobs”, increasing employment and decreasing early retirement for the 50 þ age group will continue to be an uphill struggle. Quality employment will also help promote the goal of social inclusion, which could be argued to implicitly acknowledge that some employment can be more exclusionary than benefit receipt (CEC, 2004b, p. 7). Indeed, “unemployment, social exclusion and poverty tend to go hand in hand with a poor education and low skilled, low-paid, non-permanent jobs” (CEC, 2004b, p. 7). It is suggested that job quality is especially important in order to meet these aims, comprising as it does: satisfaction with pay and working conditions; health and safety at the workplace; balance between flexibility and security in contracts; improving the patterns of working hours; work organisation improving access and choice for older workers and a balance between personal and professional life (CEU, 2002, p. 15; CEC, 2005b, p. 3). Nonetheless, this promotion of job quality remains largely directed to the utilitarian promotion of high employment levels. First, it “. . .should make it possible to improve human and social capital” (CEC, 2005a, p. 1), leading to less “waste” in terms of “individual life opportunities and societal potential” (CEC, 2004b, p. 5). Second, it is linked to productivity (CEC, 2004b, p. 7); policies are advocated which allow for breaks in employment and part-time contracts as well as a “lifecycle approach to employment” (CEC, 2004c), “supporting a long-term sustainable working life in which all human resources in society are fully utilised” (CEU, 2002, p. 15).What is not discussed are the implications of such a fragmented and disrupted employment history for the pension of the retiree. Furthermore, the terms of this “quality” employment are not secure or long-term, but rather about employability and engaging individuals’ responsibility for their employment history: “security is about building and preserving people’s ability to remain and progress in the labour market. It is related to decent pay, access to lifelong learning, working conditions, protection against discrimination or unfair dismissal, support in the case of job loss and the right to transfer acquired social rights when moving jobs” (Kok, 2003, p. 28). The issue of job security – central to workers approaching (or in) retirement – is simply not discussed. In concert with the broader activation agenda of the OMC/empl, security in employment is re-interpreted as securing the employability of the individual, rather than protecting the individual from the capriciousness of the labour market. Indeed, the first statement of the active ageing agenda suggested that the service sector would provide the contracts and employment conducive to flexible retirement.
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This ignores the fact that this type of employment tends to be low paid and low skilled and will thus offer poor pension and poor employment prospects (CEC, 1999). As Platman (2004, p. 187) notes: . . . [b]y advocating flexible routes out of the labour market, governments may be encouraging forms of work which exacerbate, rather than alleviate, job insecurity and poverty among older people.
In the UK, Loretto and White (2004) found that this age group, particularly those who are the targets of EU’s active ageing agenda, remain outside the labour market or register as unemployed, as they have caring responsibilities and cannot risk the relative uncertainty of the insecure, low paid and poor quality employment open to them. This research raises a great unspoken issue on which the new strategy’s success depends: that while the social partners are exhorted to discourage early exit (Kok, 2003, p. 9), the employment strategy’s assumptions about freedom of market actors and market flexibility mean that there are few, and weak, policy instruments at member states’ disposal to enforce such behaviour change in market actors. Cross-nationally, despite some imaginative schemes to improve employability and employment rates among 50-64 þ year olds, evidence indicates that employers and employees still often prefer to promote early retirement in response to company restructuring and redundancy (Taylor, 2002). The implied result of the combined employment agenda and proposals for reforming pensions is a fragmented landscape of both employment and retirement experience for (ever) older European workers, retirees and worker-retirees. The insecurities of future employment, with its periods of unemployment, re-training and short-term contracts, combined with the insecurities and risks attached to (private and voluntary) savings for retirement will ever more sharply define the new retirement experience, by sharpening inequalities and insecurity in retirement incomes. Some European retirees will have had the opportunities to save privately in addition to contributing to public pension schemes (which will become relatively less valuable), and therefore be able to retire “early” whether before or at the newly extended retirement age. Others will have no option but to become the “activated retiree”, taking retirement but continuing to undertake employment from financial necessity, whether wishing to or not, and also still bearing the risk of being poor in older age. Conclusion Our article began by noting that older Europeans, aged 50 to 64 and beyond, are at once facing the life course transition from employment to retirement and they are subject to a policy-in-transition regarding both their employment and retirement. We employed an analytical framework that differentiates between formal and operational aspects of governance to explore recent changes in the EU governance relating to older workers and pensioners. These changes reveal both tensions and points of consensus between different visions of what is the European “social” and how is to be governed in relation to older Europeans. The increasing integration of the employment strategy with the economic growth agenda of the revised Lisbon programme, signifies further dissociation of employment from social protection and locates it, operationally, within the realm of governing the “economic”. Social protection is now dealt within the OMC SP-SI, through combining
the politically and economically more significant areas of pension and health with the former OMC/incl that, institutionally, used to be rather weak. This combination of dissociation and strengthening, however, reveals notable existing tensions and even contradictions between different visions. On the one hand, the “active ageing” agenda, promoted under the OMC/empl, articulates a productivist and rather utilitarian vision: the older worker needs to be “activated” for the purpose of economic growth and to avoid a waste of human resources while an individualisation of the responsibilities of the activated older worker is discursively promoted. S/he is expected to be employed for longer in an increasingly insecure labour market and to save for retirement in a rather insecure financial investment market, where s/he will bear the risk of any investment. On the other hand, the social protection agenda promoted under OMC/SP-SI seems rather less determined by productivist terminology and considerations. Though accepting the overall direction of reform, it raises some substantial caveats by, for example, highlighting that any promotion of longer working lives should be accompanied by a concern for pension adequacy. There is also recognition that caring and other activities, not just employment, are socially and individually valuable; that protection of the social dimension of life remains a matter for governments both in social security, especially pension provision, and in the regulation of this provision by private pension funds. In this agenda, retirement at or before statutory retirement age is clearly not inherently delegitimated as culpable behaviour while the implied obverse of the ever-older “older worker” of the future is not the indigent and irresponsible retiree, as is implicit in the productivist vision. These tensions in agendas, pulling in different directions, and resting on different assumptions regarding the legitimate scope of EU governance, produce the contradictory subject position of the “activated retiree”, which in most member states remains an oxymoron. We used this term as an equivalent to an ideal type to capture the institutional reconfiguration of rights and responsibilities between EU, states, markets and individuals currently underway regarding the social risk of old age. We concluded that what is espoused is less responsibility for the state and more responsibility for individuals and households who are called to address this risk in, and through, the market. Governing the “activated retiree” involves steering individual behaviour towards individualised practices which, in our view will further fragment the social experience of the transition to retirement and increase inequalities in terms of gender, income and occupation. For those unable to secure a pension in the market being an “activated retiree” will not be a choice but the only option. Finally, in terms of a wider reflection on European governance, we want to emphasise that both the operational and formal dimensions of governance are necessary to understand and explore the impact and significance of the revised OMC/Lisbon framework and the role of the “active ageing” agenda in it. One question for us must now take centre-stage: that of meta-governance. Namely, how are the OMCs themselves to be governed as a totality, in terms of both their operational aspects, and the tensions in the substantive policy. Despite the 2005 Lisbon strategy reforms it seems to us that the tensions and contradictions between different visions of the European “social” will continue to trouble the governance of policies towards older European workers for the years to come.
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Notes 1. We use the term older workers, as this is the term preferred by the EU. However, that in the discourse on “active ageing”, the entire age group (not just workers) is to be the object of governing. 2. Social subjects do of course also intervene in, resist and alter such characterisations, roles and relationships in order to shape governance patterns and processes (see, e.g. Clarke, 2004; Newman, 2000, 2005); however, discussion of these latter issues are beyond the scope of this article. References Almunia, J. (2006), “Older workers: a European success story?”, speech delivered to the Conference of European Federation for Retirement Provision, Brussels, 20 June. Amitsis, G., Berghman, J., Hemerijck, A., Sakellaropoulos, T., Stergiou, A. and Stevens, Y. (2003), “Connecting welfare diversity within the European Social Model”, paper presented at the International Conference of the Hellenic Presidency of the European Union. Borra`s, S. and Jacobsson, K. (2004), “The open method of co-ordination and new governance patterns in the EU”, Journal of European Public Policy, Vol. 11 No. 2, pp. 185-208. Bruno, I., Jacquot, S. and Mandin, L. (2006), “Europeanization through its instrumentation: benchmarking, mainstreaming and the open method of co-ordination . . . toolbox or Pandora’s box”, Journal of European Public Policy, Vol. 13 No. 4, pp. 519-36. Carmel, E. (2005), “Governance and the constitution of a European social”, in Newman, J. (Ed.), Remaking Governance, Policy Press, Bristol, pp. 39-58. Carmel, E. and Papadopoulos, T. (2003), “The new governance of social security in the UK”, in Millar, J. (Ed.), Understanding Social Security, Policy Press, Bristol, pp. 31-52. Clarke, J. (2004), Changing Welfare, Changing States, Sage, London. Commission of the European Communities (CEC) (1999), Towards a Europe for all Ages – Promoting Prosperity and Intergenerational Solidarity, COM (1999) 221 Final, Commission of the European Communities, Brussels. Commission of the European Communities (CEC) (2000), EU Employment and Social Policy, 1999-2001: Jobs, Cohesion, Productivity, Commission of the European Communities, Brussels. Commission of the European Communities (CEC) (2004a), Increasing the Employment of Older Workers and Delaying the Exit from the Labour Market, Brussels, 3.3.2004, COM (2004) 146 Final, Communication from the Commission to the Council, the European Parliament, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions, Commission of the European Communities, Brussels. Commission of the European Communities (CEC) (2004b), More and Better Jobs for All: The European Employment Strategy, Commission of the European Communities, Brussels. Commission of the European Communities (CEC) (2004c), Report of the High Level Group on the Future of Social Policy in an Enlarged European Union, Commission of the European Communities, Brussels. Commission of the European Communities (CEC) (2005a), Communication from the Commission on the Social Agenda, Brussels, 9.2.2005, COM(2005) 33 Final, Commission of the European Communities, Brussels. Commission of the European Communities (CEC) (2005b), Questions and Answers on the New Social Agenda, MEMO/05/41, Brussels, 9 February 2005, Commission of the European Communities, Brussels.
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Pochet, P., Zeitlin, J. and Magnusson, L. (Eds) (2005), The Open Method of Co-ordination in Action: The European Employment and Social Inclusion Strategies, Peter Lang, Brussels. Social Protection Committee (2004), Promoting Longer Working Lives Through Better Social Protection Systems, February, Social Protection Committee, Brussels. Social Protection Committee (2005), Privately Managed Pension Provision, Social Protection Committee, Brussels, February. Social Protection Committee (2006), Joint Opinion of the SPC and the EPC on the Commission Communication on “Working Together, Working Better: Proposals for a New Framework for the Open Co-ordination of Social Protection and Inclusion Policies”, Social Protection Committee, Brussels. Taylor, P. (2002), New Policies for Older Workers, Policy Press, Bristol. Torfing, J. (1999), “Workfare with welfare: recent reforms of the Danish welfare state”, Journal of European Social Policy, Vol. 9 No. 1, pp. 5-28. Van Berkel, R. and Hornemann Møller, I. (2002), “The concept of activation”, in Van Berkel, R. and Hornemann Møller, I. (Eds), Active Social Policies in the EU, Policy Press, Bristol, pp. 45-72. Wincott, D. (2003), “Beyond social regulation? New instruments and/or a new agenda for social policy at Lisbon?”, Public Administration, Vol. 81 No. 3, pp. 533-53. Corresponding author Emma Carmel can be contacted at:
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Jean-Michel Bonvin HES-SO/E´E´SP, Lausanne, Switzerland, and
Eric Moachon Department of Sociology, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland Abstract Purpose – This article’s purpose is to analyse the current transformations of public action in two main respects: on the one side the relationships between individuals and institutions and their recent evolutions, on the other, the new contractual or market-like ways of designing and implementing public action. This twofold transformation and the extent to which it represents a deep-seated revolution or a more limited recalibration of the public realm are to be investigated against the case of Swiss active labour market policies. Design/methodology/approach – This issue is examined through the design of a theoretical and normative typology, which is then applied to the case of active labour market policies in Switzerland, based on an in-depth empirical investigation (more than 50 interviews with field actors). Findings – The emergence of new modes of governance coincides with the promotion of market solutions to unemployment, thus leading to a conception of welfare and its individual beneficiaries as subordinate to labour market requirements. Research limitations/implications – The empirical part of this paper focuses on one specific case, the Swiss ALMPs. Further research is needed for a more general assessment of the issue. Originality/value – One key element of the approach is the link made between substantial and procedural issues related to recent evolutions in the field of social integration policies. In the authors’ view substantial and organisational aspects of the political process should be studied jointly. Keywords Labour market, Employment contracts, Switzerland, Public sector organizations Paper type Research paper
Introduction Our paper analyses the current transformations of public action in the field of welfare along two main lines of reflection: on one side the changing relationships between individuals and institutions, on the other one the new contractual or market-like ways of designing and implementing public action. This twofold transformation and the extent to which it represents a deep-seated revolution or a more limited recalibration of the welfare state will be investigated more specifically via the case of Switzerland. The first section focuses on two of the main transformations of social integration policies in recent years, namely the moves towards individualisation and contractualisation. Indeed, in the field of welfare, the evolution from government to governance aims at going beyond the pitfalls of bureaucratic government for two main reasons. First, there is a purpose to offer individualised services instead of standardised benefits distributed according to a categorial logic. This move is
International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy Vol. 27 No. 9/10, 2007 pp. 401-412 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0144-333X DOI 10.1108/01443330710822093
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supposed to improve efficiency, since tailor-made programmes provide help better suited to individual specificities. Second, there is an ambition to change the equilibrium between the various actors involved in service delivery. Local actors, including third sector associations and private for-profit firms, need to be given more margin for manoeuvre in order to be able to tackle individual problems. Therefore the balance between central and local, and public and private, is undergoing a deep-seated transformation. This coincides with the emergence of contractualisation practices within the field of social policies, in which provision agreements fix precise targets and timetables and leave local actors a significant margin for manoeuvre for their implementation. This implies a new role for the central public State in charge of monitoring local practices instead of the old “command and control” mode of government. The first section presents a theoretical and normative framework for assessing the scope of these transformations with respect to the two topics mentioned above. The second section focuses on a case study, namely active labour market policies in Switzerland, where new public management has been progressively introduced in the field of the unemployment insurance from the mid-1990s. Special attention is given to the impact of performance indicators and other monitoring tools (such as the introduction of computer programmes aiming at standardising practices at local level, or the setting up of new financing mechanisms such as global budgets or systems of rewards/penalties, etc.) on local agents’ practices as well as on the beneficiaries’ ability to make their preferences, wishes, expectations, etcetera count within the activation policy process. The final section summarises the main findings of the paper and draws some tentative conclusions about these topics. The main transformations in welfare state governance Individualisation and the changing relationship between institutions and beneficiaries In all OECD countries, the welfare state has been built via the setting up and progressive extension of cash redistribution mechanisms combining to different degrees two ideal-typical logics: social insurance on the one hand, social assistance on the other one. In the former logic, if a social problem arises, be it unemployment, disability, maternity, etcetera, the solution lies in the construction of a category of social risk, whose members are entitled to receive social benefits whatever their individual characteristics and behaviours (Ewald, 1997). Once this principle is accepted, the issue is a purely technical one: how much does such or such risk cost for the whole of society, and how can this burden be divided between employers and workers (i.e. which percentage of the payroll has to be paid in order to cover this risk?). In this way, social insurance has to a large extent marginalised the notion of fault and individual responsibility: the matter is not to judge the moral or ethical relevance of a determined behaviour (supposedly leading to unemployment, illness, disability, etc.), but to organise how to financially take in charge the social risks concerned, whatever their individual cause. In the last analysis, society itself is deemed responsible for these risks and no individual can be considered guilty for such events. Individual responsibility is thus kept out of this logic, which also coincides with the emergence of standardised benefits in the place of personalised interventions that could favour moral intrusions on their beneficiaries. By contrast, in the logic of social assistance, needy people are allowed to receive cash resources if and only if they comply with behavioural requirements, in terms of active job-seeking or responsible money-spending. Individual responsibility is then at the very core of this mode of
organising cash redistribution. Thus, in the framework of the cash welfare state, there is a clear duality of the social interventions: on one side social insurance mechanisms guaranteeing social benefits without behavioural requirements, on the other one social assistance with a strong focus on compliance and conformity to prevailing social norms. The individual as such is absent in social insurances (except at initial stages where her eligibility is tested), while she is omnipresent in social assistance mechanisms. In pragmatic terms, the key political question posed to all cash welfare states is then to determine the divide between people allowed to receive social insurance benefits on the one side, and those having to resort to social assistance programmes on the other one. Following the logic of organised modernity (Wagner, 1997), this divide between insurance (with a focus on social responsibility) and assistance (where individual responsibility prevails) is in most countries determined by the degree of compliance with prevailing social norms: those considered to abide by these norms are provided significant entitlements via social insurances, while those denounced as marginal and non-complying individuals are patronised and moralised in order to bring them back in the right track. Social norms are then given a kind of sacredness justifying the requirements of compliance and the stigmas that are to be imposed on social assistance beneficiaries. For instance, welfare state insurances are shaped in accordance with the male breadwinner model and can often be interpreted as a powerful incentive towards compliance with such social regulations, as the gender division of welfare illustrates (Daly, 2000). At the core of the present move towards individualisation of social policies, there is a twofold departure from the previous practices in this field: first, welfare should not focus only on cash redistribution, but also on the restoration of the beneficiaries’ capacity to act and be economically productive; second, the conception of the absent individual, characteristic of social insurance mechanisms, is widely contested. This questioning of the logic of social insurance is however deeply ambivalent, insofar as it relies on two different perceptions of the mechanisms of social insurance: on one side, they are denounced for their technocracy, i.e. their tendency to privilege standardised inappropriate programmes instead of tailor-made measures; on the other side, they are accused of favouring recipients’ laziness and dependence on benefits. Following the former interpretation, what is required is a new relationship between the individual and the institution that would be based on tailor-made empowerment: individuals need individualised policies in order to be adequately helped and to be allowed to flourish independently and autonomously. Indeed, the external State striving to impose its views on individuals (Salais and Storper, 1993) should give way to enabling programmes providing adequate resources in order to promote people’s real freedom and capabilities (Sen, 1999). For the partisans of the second interpretation, the key issue boils down to introducing social assistance practices and mechanisms within social insurance, i.e. to change all social policies into disciplining tools with a view to promoting the ethics of work. Many empirical studies have aptly evidenced the actual impact of such ambivalence: beneficiaries may certainly be helped in a more appropriate way by individualised programmes (since their personal circumstances are better known as well as the context in which they live), but at the same time they may be the object of tighter control and pressure. Despite their far-ranging divergences, both sides asking for the individualisation of welfare programmes sustain that the absent individual of social insurance is responsible for the pitfalls of the welfare state, and require that action be taken to
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reform the individual herself, which cannot be provided via social insurances and their actuarial logic. Hence, in both perspectives though with very contrasted objectives (the enhancement of freedom of choice and capabilities on one side, compliance with social norms and esp. with the ethics of work and productivity on the other one), a new figure of the relationship between the individual and the institution is called to emerge, in which the individual herself, with all her specific features, is directly confronted with the public institution. This new conception implies the necessity to utterly re-think the content and modes of public action in the field of welfare (which does not amount to a simple adaptation or recalibration as advocated by Ferrera et al., 2000). To sum up, the observation of the evolution of social integration policies since the end of the second world war allows the depiction of three ideal-typical modes of conceiving the relationship between individuals and institutions in the field of welfare: (1) The absent individual of social insurances (where the individual is left free, provided however she fulfils the eligibility conditions, i.e. she corresponds to the social norms underlying these requirements). (2) The individual present and submitted to external constraints: this can take the shape either of compelling practices (e. g. in workfare programmes) or of paternalistic and patronising interventions, where the individual is helped and equipped with a view to facilitating her compliance with social expectations and norms. (3) The individual present and genuinely actor of the public policy process, to the extent that she is associated to the definition of the content and mode of implementation of social integration policies and that she is left as free as possible to choose her own way of living. The second of these ideal-types clearly reinforces the logic of social assistance insofar as institutions are used as disciplining tools, whereas the last one conveys a more reflexive view of public action, in which individuals are allowed to express their wishes and expectations and make them count in the policy process. The actual shape taken by individualisation, i.e. the combination between the three ideal-typical situations that will prevail in the end, very much depends on the way public action is organised and especially on the influence of contractualism within the public realm. Indeed, the meaning and scope given to contractualism often coincide with a specific way to conceive the relationship between institutions and individuals, as the next paragraph evidences. Contractualising public action in the field of social integration policies The present focus on contractual practices relies on the idea that the new face-to-face relationship between individuals and institutions ought to take the shape of a contract. This conveys the promise of a passage from technocratic bureaucracy, in which every decision is made in a top-down way, to the more flexible modes of governance of the so-called situated state (Salais and Storper, 1993), in line with a reflexive and more revisable vision of public regulation and law (e.g. Reynaud, 1989; Browne et al., 2005). This promise is in most countries pursued via the resorting to the “New public management” (NPM) principles. NPM has been a driving force in the setting up of contractualisation practices in the public sector. It aims at transposing the managerial rigour supposedly specific to the
private sector to the public services (Osborne and Gaebler, 1993). The postulate is that the implementation of such principles within the public sector will result in a better service delivery for everybody. It has been associated with a variety of trends and it is therefore impossible to distinguish a pure model of NPM. Despite this diversity, most commentators agree to consider the following as the core principles of NPM (e.g. Pollitt, 2001; Emery and Giauque, 2003): . a greater emphasis on outputs and outcomes rather than on inputs and processes; . measurement of performance and quality through indicators and standards; . organisational changes aimed at making the structures leaner, flatter and more autonomous; . introduction of market and market-like mechanisms in the delivery of public services and products (privatisation, contracting out, accent on internal markets, etc.); . restructuring of the boundaries of the public sector through development of private/public partnerships and creation of hybrid organisations. The rise of contractualism is also observed in employment policies, where four regimes of publicly funded employment services can be identified (Sol and Westerveld, 2005). The first one is in line with classical bureaucratic provision of services: policy design and implementation are the responsibility of high administration, and relationships with local actors (administrative antennas and other providers) are regulated by rules. By contrast, the other three models use contracts as steering instruments in the place of bureaucratic tools. The management by objectives model (MBO) is based on the existence of a principal-agent relationship within the public sector itself that is monitored via provision contracts fixing objectives to be reached, timetables, global budgets and performance indicators. This second model strives to mimic the logic of the contract, though the issues of equality between the partners and freedom of choice remain problematic. The last two models set up a re-integration market associating partners from the private for-profit and non-profit sector. In the quasi-market model, competition between the various providers is created via tendering, whereas in the preferred-supplier model, government chooses a procurement system with privileged private providers. Besides, contractualism in public employment services takes place at many levels: between the central administration and local antennas, between administration at central or local level and private providers and, at least it is claimed, between public or private providers and their clients. In this latter case, contractualism may take the shape of vouchers distributed to job-seekers who are then allowed to choose the organisation in which they will be trained or follow another kind of active programme, or via the so-called client contracts presently flourishing in social integration policies (jobseekers’ contracts, individual action plans, etc.). If one considers these four models and all levels at which they may take place, it appears that the tendency towards contractualism encompasses a great variety of situations in which the logic of the contract between equally accountable and informed partners is very unequally implemented.
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All these developments within the field of social integration policies significantly impact on the way to conceive the relationship between the individual and the institution. Indeed, the recent evolution towards NPM can accommodate with many situations insofar as the degree of autonomy and freedom of choice left to both parts of the contract may vary considerably. Drawing on Salais and Storper’s typology of public action, we can distinguish three ideal-typical situations in this respect: (1) The external state not concerned with the individuals’ expectations and desires, where the logic of contractualism is mobilised in order to deny their freedom of choice and push them into compliance with the state’s requirements. In such a case, contractualism features as a refinement of the technocratic logic to the extent that the state seeks to instrumentalise the operational freedom left to the other parts of the contract. (2) The absent state retreating from public action and leaving it to private providers, with two main risks: the fragmentation of the public good on one side, and the arbitrariness of strictly local decision-making on the other. (3) The situated state allowing and even promoting the effective participation of all other partners in the contract. Such a model requires the neutralisation of all inequalities (prestige, wealth, information, etc.; see Bohman, 1998) that may pervert the logic of contractualism based on values such as equality between the partners, accountability, enforceability and freedom of choice. The following section analyses Swiss activation policies against this background. Contractualisation and individualisation in Swiss ALMPs From the 1990s onwards, Swiss public administrations widely opened to the NPM precepts in the hope of improving the efficiency of public service delivery and saving public money. Also, the Swiss jobcentres have been called on to implement these principles in the field of employment policies which are at the same time getting more individualised. The next paragraphs examine the impact of these recent evolutions. Provision agreements and performance indicators First of all, in line with the MBO model described above, contractualisation takes place through the signature of provision agreements between the various actors in charge of implementing the LACI (Swiss law on unemployment insurance), namely between the Confederation and the cantons and between the cantons and the third sector organisations responsible for active labour market programmes. Both these contracts are inegalitarian, since the less powerful actors, i.e. the cantons in the first case and the third sector organisations in the second one, do not have any available exit option since they are dependent on the funding provided by the other partner. There are also strong inequalities in terms of capacity to express one’s point of view. Decision-making processes are confiscated by experts. The technocratic language and procedures used are incomprehensible for profanes, among them the local actors in charge of the implementation. These experts have the power to define the adequate interpretation of the general objectives written in legal provisions, and strive to impose their vision on local civil officers and benefit recipients. Pre-existing asymmetries are not neutralised; on the contrary, the central level seems to interpret its monitoring role as a variant of the old “command and control” model, as will be evidenced by the following.
In the mid 1990s, Switzerland experienced a massive increase of unemployment and the unemployment insurance was reformed in order to include the main features of the activation model. During the first years, the unemployment rate continued to increase and the political level sought means to increase the efficiency of the system and reduce its cost. The consulting firm ATAG was charged in 1998 by the state secretariat of the economy (henceforward seco) to carry out an evaluation of the public employment services. Following this report and after dialogue between the Confederation and the cantons, a “technical” revision of the LACI was designed in 2000. Its implementation in 2001 marked a significant change, which can by no means be qualified as technical. With the passing of the reform, the provision agreement between the cantons and the seco is no more based on the services provided by the jobcentres (input), but on the results obtained (output). The new provision agreement mobilises four criteria to assess jobcentres’ efficiency in terms of professional integration: the duration of the unemployment spell before a job-seeker finds her way back to the labour market (weighing for 50 per cent), the number of entries into long-term unemployment (20 per cent), the number of unemployed ending up their entitlement to benefits (after a two-year period – 20 per cent) and the number of people getting back to unemployment benefits within four months after their return to the labour market (10 per cent). The respective weighting of these indicators clearly sets the speed of the job-seeker’s return to the labour market as the most important target of the LACI. Indeed, the qualitative side of the placement, or its durability, is taken into account only via the least weighted indicator. Clearly, then, quickness of professional re-integration may be privileged at the expense of its quality, especially if the difficult situation of the unemployed (whatever the reason: economic recession, lack of competencies, etc.) results in a seemingly insurmountable trade-off between the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of the placement activity. These four indicators are then merged into one index, the reference value of which is defined to be the national average. Staying close or above that threshold constitutes the main target. All in all, if these indicators were the only objective to be reached, such global performance targets would not represent a serious undermining of local actors’ autonomy. Front line-staff could indeed benefit from this less formalised management (by contrast with bureaucratic ruling), but the operational autonomy which ought to be guaranteed in order to reach these global targets is powerfully counterbalanced by an extensive monitoring of their behaviour and performance. Indeed, there are two main categories of indicators: (1) global indicators focused on societal outcomes, i.e. the four indicators described above; and (2) specific indicators measuring individual administrative outputs (e.g. the number of job-seekers’ files handled by a single advisor or the number of training programmes granted monthly). The implementation of this second set of indicators often results in oppositional behaviours, whereby staff adopt strategies of resistance. Moreover, as Cutler and Waine (2000, pp. 52-3) point out, a too close specification of targets and indicators may prevent innovation and interfere with the development of more democratic ways to manage public administrations. Staff at all levels are oriented towards achieving such targets, or at least try to show a good record on indicators. Ritualism may also occur,
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when employees choose to comply with these indicators at the possible expense of programme aims (Newman, 2001), focusing on administrative outputs rather than on outcomes. Besides, the indicators chosen do not allow one to grasp the real nature of the difficulties experienced by the officer in her every-day task. They are mainly based on the legislative description of the placement activity; due to the difficulty to formalise such tasks, it underestimates the diversity of the situations of the beneficiaries and of the qualitative work to be done. Our fieldwork also evidenced considerable changes in the way to select the organisations providing training programmes for the unemployed. There has been an extensive turn to market mechanisms, on the ground that concurrence between organisers would increase the quality of the programmes. Quality is measured along norms of quality certification (such as ISO, EduQua), which can be obtained through expensive processes of quality engineering. Here again, quantitative indicators struggle to take into account qualitative aspects and face the very obstacles already mentioned. Multiple targets and contradictory injunctions Provisional agreements define the objectives the partners “agree” to attain in order to get a specified amount of financial resources. These targets, expressed in terms of outputs, are added to the broad objectives defined in the law which can be described as outcomes: the first article of the LACI defines unemployment prevention and quick and long-lasting professional integration as its main aims. Beyond these targets (administrative and legislative), local administrations also have to abide by budgetary constraints applied to public services at all levels, such as a linear budget reduction by 5 per cent. All these objectives refer to various potentially conflicting principles of justice, which have to be reconciled at local level. Indeed, working in a public administration under NPM rules requires the ability to reach potentially contradicting objectives: “It is a real challenge to be both more efficient and more effective and to increase organisational performance without increased resources. Political strategies are clearly oriented towards both reductions of budget allocations and quality improvements” (Emery and Giauque, 2003, p. 478). The focus on reducing the production costs of public services leads to accelerate the benefit recipients’ return to the labour market, or if this proves impossible, their radiation from the unemployment dole. This means that, if the economic situation gets worse, the definition of a suitable job will be re-examined downwards in order not to slow down the pace of professional re-integration. Just like in workfare programmes, the unemployed will then be constrained, under the threat of sanctions, to accept precarious and badly remunerated jobs (Lødemel and Trickey, 2001). In a first stage, in line with the so-called roundabout effects, this implied a significant cost transfer to other social insurances (notably disability) or to social assistance programmes. But recent legislative reforms are progressively introducing the activation principle in these competing fields in order to reduce their caseload too. Thus, social assistance beneficiaries are increasingly asked to accept public utility jobs in exchange for higher benefits, and the decommodification level provided by the disability insurance is also reduced, so that its beneficiaries often need to find complementary resources. Another way to save public money consists in reducing administrative costs. Between 2002 and 2003 these evolved from 516 to 470 euros per job-seeker. The result
was a greater workload for the civil officers. In January 2000, there were 2.684 people working in the Swiss jobcentres for a total of 203.228 job-seekers, while in January 2004 they were only 2.501 for 228.245 job-seekers. The ratio evolved from 1 per 76 to 1 per 91. It should be noted that official figures do not take into account absenteeism in jobcentres, which, however, results in a further increase of the caseload due to the high frequency of burnout in these agencies. A consequence is often the creaming of problematic beneficiaries: an overworked advisor will, more probably than another one responsible for fewer jobseekers’ files, forget to invite to their monthly interview jobseekers who are used to complaining a lot or refusing to be helped. Benchmarking and best practices The practice of benchmarking is another widely used market mechanism in Swiss active labour market policies. It aims at identifying and diffusing the best practices with the objective of improving the LACI effectiveness. To this purpose, the seco classifies the cantons and their jobcentres according to their results along the four performance indicators defined above. However, even the most informed actors cannot grasp the reasons of a good or bad position in this classification. Indeed, the link between administrative outputs and societal outcomes cannot be made explicit, due to the strong influence of exogenous factors (highly dependent on the specificities of the local context). In sum, best practices are heavily related to a local context which cannot be replicated everywhere. Apart from the inefficiency in identifying best practices, these mechanisms of benchmarking contribute to put local agencies in competition. To counterbalance this, the official rhetoric insists on the objective of “learning from others”. But at the same time, central authorities choose to increase pressure on the cantons with the lowest performance indicators so that they adapt their practices to those of the “most efficient” cantons. As local agencies try to stay on top of classification (or at least not to appear too close to its end), there are still cases of competition between agencies for the acquisition of vacant slots (which can then be offered to “their” own job-seekers). Hence, the officers prospecting for vacancies inside firms frequently wait a few days before making these slots available to their colleagues from other agencies, in order to give priority to “their” job-seekers. The search for best practices also contains a risk of excessive standardisation of local practices. This is the reason why the logic of control often prevents an effective taking into account of individual circumstances. The use of a single software for all Swiss jobcentres aims at connecting them and making their work more efficient with a view to guaranteeing the same job opportunities to each and every jobseeker. However, it is also a way to promote a uniform application of the law by the local officers. In that respect, it contributes to standardising their work and reducing their room to manoeuvre. Furthermore, such standardised coding of reality reduces the possibilities to offer tailor-made programmes to the unemployed. These examples aptly illustrate the managerialist conception of leadership on which NPM relies. “‘Managers’ are the bearers of ‘real-world’ wisdom of how to be ‘business-like’” (Clarke, 2004, p. 36). Managerialism postulates that the same generic set of management principles and tools (politics of savings, tight financial control, widespread use of audits and performance evaluation) can be translated in every situation, and that improving the organisational efficiency will lead to improved
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outcomes. Such a short-sighted view fails to take into account the importance of the users’ and staff’s profiles, as well as the crucial influence of the socio-economic context. Moreover, in the frame of active labour market policies, NPM managerialist orientation often leads to an exacerbation of individual responsibility since contextual factors are supposedly out of reach.
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Effectiveness of individualisation in such a context Under such circumstances, individualisation of social policies leads to rather disappointing results for job-seekers. Our fieldwork showed that individualised programmes tend to reinforce existing inequalities. For instance, women with very young children are more often than their male counterparts placed in temporary subsidised jobs in order to test their availability for a job (i.e. whether or not they have someone to look after their children). Executives are less often assigned to a job (i.e. compelled to candidate themselves), because for them being explicitly labelled as unemployed in front of a potential employer might be damageable to a future hiring. Training opportunities are also more attractive for people who already own high degrees, while low qualified job-seekers are mostly taught how to candidate themselves in a more efficient way or sent to mass courses like language training sessions, where people with slightly under average writing abilities are mixed with illiterate students. The ability to cope with the administrative logic of the system is also unequally distributed and many job-seekers do not know their rights and duties. Besides, job-seekers are reluctant to go against their officer’s will and to mobilise appeal mechanisms, since the first appeal body is an administrative instance that rejects about 90 per cent of complaints. This does not mean that these appeal mechanisms are partial, but rather that they require a specific language or argumentation that job-seekers barely master. Indeed, appeal bodies can be mobilised more efficiently by better equipped actors such as the administrative authorities. Furthermore, arbitration processes tend to be privileged at the expense of deliberation, and social justice is applied through judicial procedures rather than public discussion, which further reinforces the position of the administrative experts. Conclusion In the Swiss ALMP case, empirical investigation shows that the recent transformations of public action go in a twofold and complementary direction: (1) At the level of individualisation, the model of the constrained individual is prevailing in that local agents of employment services are mainly conceived as promoters (if possible via persuasion, if necessary through constraint and pressure) of the ethics of work among the beneficiaries. For the most qualified beneficiaries, i.e. those closest to the labour market, they may foster more autonomy and freedom of choice vis-a`-vis the labour market (in the sense of enhancing their capabilities), but for the others, i.e. the vast majority of their clientele, their action mostly boils down to checking their behaviour (via requiring active job search while available slots are very scarce) and sanctioning them in case of non-compliance with administrative regulations. In such cases, the paradox of activation consists in imposing a specific behaviour in terms of job-readiness, the efficiency of which depends on the state of the
labour market. Individualisation, then, amounts to constraining or helping the beneficiaries to become attractive commodities on the labour market (in the best cases via qualifying measures, in the most usual situations via an adaptation of their wage or mobility expectations). Thus, in the case of Swiss active labour market policies, there is a clear tendency to move from the absent individual of social insurances to the model of the present and constrained individual. In some very rare instances, pilot programmes striving to promote the model of the individual actor may take place, but these experiments remain exceptional and produce mitigated results. However, these observations do not hold to the same extent for all social insurances, in that other social risks such as ageing or illness enjoy a higher social recognition, and the use of social insurance mechanisms in order to tackle them is less contested. (2) At the level of contractualisation, Swiss ALMPs opt for the management by objectives (MBO) model in the case of local public agencies, and for the preferred supplier model when it comes to sign contracts with private for-profit and non-profit providers. In both cases, however, the objective is to limit as much as possible the margin of manoeuvre of these actors, and to ensure that they act along the lines defined by the central administration. Hence, the room for the setting up of a situated state is limited, and the privileged model in both kinds of relationships is the external state seeking to instrumentalise the action of its partners. This is particularly prominent in the case of local agents and beneficiaries, where the logic of contractualism is used with a view to checking more efficiently their behaviour and enforcing compliance with administratively defined objectives. Then the scope for individualising policies is considerably restricted and, most often, it can be increased only via attitudes of resistance and non-compliance with administrative requirements. This is however much less the case with private providers, who enjoy more freedom in the way they choose to use public subsidies. In this latter case it would be more exact to speak of a combination between the absent state (favouring a market logic) and the external state (striving to use market-like practices at its own service). The introduction of new modes of governance in Swiss social integration policies can by no means be considered as a merely technical adaptation of managing tools towards more efficiency. It entails an extension of the public realm in the sense of including new fields of action (such as the active promotion of the ethics of work) and new actors who are called to commit themselves to the pursuit of public objectives. What appears in the Swiss case, is that the emergence of new modes of governance coincides with the promotion of market solutions to unemployment, thus leading to a conception of the public realm (and its traditional tools such as labour law or social security) as subordinate to the labour market requirements. In this case, then, the observed extension of the public sphere does not lead to the promotion of a more enabling or empowering state, but to a kind of strategic alliance between the state and the market in line with the so-called competitive state (whose primary function is to create the conditions for improving competitiveness on the markets).
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References Bohman, J. (1998), “Deliberative democracy and effective social freedom: capabilities, resources, and opportunities”, in Bohman, J. and Rehg, W. (Eds), Deliberative Democracy, MIT Press, Boston, MA. Browne, J., Deakin, S. and Wilkinson, F. (2005), “Capabilities, social rights and European market integration”, in Salais, R. and Villeneuve, R. (Eds), Europe and the Politics of Capabilities, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 205-22. Clarke, J. (2004), “Dissolving the public realm? The logics and limits of neo-liberalism”, Journal of Social Policy, Vol. 33 No. 1, pp. 27-48. Cutler, T. and Waine, B. (2000), “Managerialism reformed? New Labour and public sector management”, Social Policy and Administration, Vol. 34 No. 3, pp. 318-32. Daly, M. (2000), The Gender Division of Welfare, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Emery, Y. and Giauque, D. (2003), “Emergence of contradictory injunctions in Swiss NPM projects”, International Journal of Public Sector Management, Vol. 16 No. 6, pp. 468-81. Ewald, F. (1997), Histoire de l’Etat-providence, Le Livre de Poche, Paris. Ferrera, M., Hemerijck, A. and Rhodes, M. (2000), The Future of Social Europe: Recasting Work and Welfare in the New Economy, Celta Editora, Oeiras. Lødemel, I. and Trickey, H. (Eds) (2001), “An Offer You Can’t Refuse”. Workfare in International Perspective, Policy Press, Bristol. Newman, J. (2001), Modernising Governance. New Labour, Policy and Society, Sage, London. Osborne, D. and Gaebler, T. (1993), Reinventing Government, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA. Peters, T.J. and Waterman, R.H. (1982), In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-run Companies, Harper & Row, New York, NY. Pollitt, C. (2001), “Comment parvenons-nous a` e´valuer la qualite´ des services publics?”, in Peters, G.B. and Savoie, D.J. (Eds), La gouvernance au XXIe`me sie`cle: Revitaliser la fonction publique, Les Presses de l’Universite´ Laval, Que´bec. Reynaud, J.-D. (1989), Les re`gles du jeu, Colin, Paris. Salais, R. and Storper, M. (1993), Les mondes de production, E´cole des Hautes E´tudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Sen, A. (1999), Development as Freedom, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Sol, E. and Westerveld, M. (Eds) (2005), Contractualism in Employment Services, Kluwer Law International, The Hague. Wagner, P. (1997), Liberte´ et discipline, Me´tailie´, Paris. Corresponding author Jean-Michell Bonvin can be contacted at
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Individualised service provision in an era of activation and new governance Vando Borghi
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Dipartimento di Sociologia, Facolta` di Scienze Politiche, Universita` di Bologna, Bologna, Italy, and
Rik van Berkel Department of Interdisciplinary Social Science (ASW), Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands Abstract Purpose – This article aims to discuss the individualisation trend in the provision of social services, focusing on activation services specifically. Design/methodology/approach – The individualisation trend in the provision of activation services is analysed against the background of public sector as well as social sector as well as social policy reforms: the introduction of new modes of governance and the rise of the active welfare state respectively. Findings – Concrete manifestations of individualised service provision are often based on various interpretations of individualisation and reflect different meanings of citizens’ participation, and refer to different modes – or rather, mixes of different modes – of governance. The general argument of the article is illustrated and elaborated by analysing three national case studies of individualised service provision in the context of activation: the UK, The Netherlands and Finland. Originality/value – The trend that is analysed in the article – individualised service provision – is very clearly present in welfare state reforms, but has thus far not received much attention in academic literature. Keywords Social services, Governance, United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Finland, Social welfare Paper type Research paper
Introduction Debates on activation and the provision of activation services take place on the interface of two discourses. First, the discourse of new governance aims at involving citizens, in their capacity as users of social services, in processes of emancipation and empowerment in their positions vis-a`-vis bureaucracies that are seen as unresponsive, ineffective and inefficient; and vis-a`-vis professionals that are considered to be paternalist – even though the motives underlying these reforms may be managerial and administrative rather than emancipatory. Rendering citizens options for exit, choice or voice forces providers of social services to take citizens’ needs and wishes seriously, to provide tailor-made, individualised services and to be more “client friendly”. The second discourse concerns the activation of “traditional”, protection oriented, welfare states. The general nature of this discourse is well documented by now (e.g. Van Berkel and Hornemann Møller, 2002; Handler, 2004): citizens are increasingly considered to be responsible for their own lives, are expected to invest in their employability, and, when dependent on the welfare state, are granted rights and
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entitlements only on the condition that they fulfil the obligations society imposes on them. Generally speaking, the approach of the citizen in the context of active welfare state reforms is far more enforcing and paternalist than what we generally find in new governance debates (e.g., Van Berkel and Valkenburg, 2007). Put differently, social policy and governance transformations are based on various and conflicting models of citizenship and notions of the active citizen (Newman, 2005). This article will discuss how the new governance discourse and its objective of, in the famous words of Osborne and Gaebler (1993), “putting customers in the driver’s seat” affects the provision of services in the area of activation. In particular, we are interested in the nature and meaning of the concept of “individualised” services and its implications for the role of service users in service provision. Our argument will proceed as follows. The next section briefly explores the concept of individualisation in the context of social policies. Different concepts of individualisation have different consequences for what individualised services actually mean. In the following section, we argue that the concept of new governance is not a clear and consistent blueprint for new modes of public administration, but a collective term for a variety of governance reforms that between themselves are full of tensions, ambiguities, contradictions and conflicts, which affect the content and meaning of individualised social services as well as the roles of citizens-as-service-users in the provision of these services. This is illustrated in a section in which several national case studies of individualised activation services are discussed. There, we try to show how the trend of service individualisation is structured and shaped in different ways in different countries, depending on national social policy and governance configurations. The article concludes with a brief discussion. Individualisation: an ambiguous concept Individualisation, when used in the context of social policies and of social service provision, is a far from self-evident concept. Following Valkenburg (2007), we may at least identify five different discourses of individualisation. According to the first discourse, individualising social services is conceived as a necessary response to the increased differentiation and flexibility of social, cultural and economic life. In a context of growing life-cycle flexibility, working career fragmentation and discontinuities in working life, uniform and collective welfare solutions are perceived as inadequate. The second discourse conceives individualisation as a response to the problems raised by the traditional welfare state itself: paternalistic approaches, bureaucratic rigidities, inadequate standardisations, etcetera. Solving these problems should be realised through an increased role of private agencies and the free market and an enlargement of individual choices. In this case, individualisation coincides largely with the idea of transferring resources from public welfare institutions to the private hands of welfare clients, enabling the latter to decide themselves what services or goods they need to overcome their difficulties. A third meaning of individualisation coincides with a general shift of responsibilities from the public sphere to the private sphere (the realm of individuals and their families) (Clarke, 2004). This shift is quite clear in the promotion of “employability” (Borghi, 2005), where we see a transition from a definition of unemployment as a structural effect of capitalist production and socioeconomic cycles towards one that conceives unemployment as the result of
personal employability deficiencies. This also implies a fundamental metamorphosis of the concept of citizenship from citizenship as “status” (associated with rights, safety nets and benefits) to citizenship as “contract” (the access to rights is conditional on active participation in the labour market) (Vitale, 2005; Handler, 2004). A fourth interpretation of individualisation, at least for Central and Northern European countries, conceives it as an answer to the increasing erosion of the family as an economic unit. The number of one-person, double-earner and reconstituted families is growing, in a context of a general increasing individualisation of life-courses. These changes are often interpreted as pressures towards social policies that address individuals, independently of their position in the family structure. A final perspective on the individualisation of policies insists on the increasing reflexivity of individual and social life. Social policies and institutions should empower and promote policy users’ reflexivity regarding their life projects, instead of offering them predefined and standardised problem definitions and problem solutions. This perspective strongly favours the participation of users in social interventions: as citizens, not merely as consumers or customers. This short discussion makes clear, that the notions of individualised service provision and citizen participation are recursively related. Effective social services require the participation of citizens; participative citizenship asks for individually oriented social policies. However, the concept of participation shares the vagueness characterising the concept of individualisation. In understanding the different perspectives through which participation is debated and applied, it may be helpful to analytically treat it as a process ranging from weaker and more passive to stronger and more active forms (Heikkila¨ and Julkunen, 2007; Vigoda-Gadot and Cohen, 2004). The weakest form is passive participation: citizens are only subjects and have substantially no power, even if they can have formal representatives on official boards. They are recipients of unilateral announcements by public administrations, and their needs are grouped and classified according to predefined categories and targets. They are involved, at most, as informants: knowledge and information interpretation belong exclusively to “external” agents (professionals, experts, administrative hierarchies and management). A more active form involves problem-solving participation: citizens participate to meet pre-determined objectives, partially involving shared decision-making and interaction, but always in the context of projects already designed by external agents. A strong dichotomy is maintained between actors involved in problem-solving and those involved in problem definition, agenda setting and control and monitoring practices. The most active form of participation is problem-setting participation: interpreted as adding problem setting to problem solving activities, participation is perceived as a right, to be addressed through a structural introduction of multiple perspectives in all different steps of service design and delivery. Citizens become actors with a legitimate voice in interactions with policy designers and providers, while the latter are oriented towards promoting users’ capability rather than towards verifying their performance in the light of pre-defined standards (Bonvin and Farvaque, 2007). The “individualisation hype” has not remained uncriticised. Honneth (2004), for example, states that claims for individual self-realisation, rooted in a multiplicity of individualisation processes in Western societies, have currently become a sort of structural requirement and institutional expectation. This results in a shift of the meaning of individualisation: from a social end to a systemic prerequisite. Others have
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made similar critical remarks regarding the concept of participation, which is considered subject to the risk of exaggerating “the role of citizens’ capabilities in meaningfully participating in complex policymaking processes” (Fisher, 2003, p. 208) and of becoming ritualistically institutionalised (as purely consultative or, even worse, manipulative practice) in managerial and political rhetoric without any concrete impact and power redistribution, while at the same time being constantly recalled and underlined in policy building processes. Transforming modes of governance In elaborating how meanings and interpretations of individualisation and participation relate to, and are embedded in, different modes of governance, the following typology of ways in which the state interprets the common good in responding to actors from the social and economic domains offers a starting point: (1) The technocratic “external state”, where the common good refers to collective interests pursued mainly through expert solutions imposed on passive citizens. (2) The “absent state”, where the common good is the result of pursuing selfish individual goals in a context of minimal collective regulation. (3) The facilitative “situated state”, in which the common good is interpreted “as a situation in which actors have autonomy to develop whatever world they find compatible with their frameworks of action” (Storper and Salais, 1997, p. 212). Dean et al. (2005) have elaborated the latter, distinguishing: (3a) the “incentive giving state”, centred on a conception of the individual as a responsible subject who has to improve his or her own human capital and employability using opportunities and incentives provided by welfare schemes; and 3b) the counterfactual “capability state”, in which “the welfare subject may achieve autonomy through a collective politics of capability” (Dean et al., 2005: p. 11), and in which the welfare subject’s capacity for voice is central for the determination of provision of resources and interpretation of outcomes. Based on this typology, three modes of governance of activation may be distinguished (Table I). Participative bureaucratic management and administration represents the counterfactual perspective. The role of the state consists of promoting processes through which institutions “mediate rather than prescribe, and in which jobseekers – whether individually or by means of collective forums – formulate, argue for and realise their life plans” (Dean et al., 2005, p. 11). In the context of this mode of governance, the “organisational regulation” (Giaque, 2003) of public administration and services is characterised by a problem-setting and problem-solving participative approach, based on the introduction of deliberative arenas and practices (Fisher, 2003) and on the involvement of private companies as one among a range of actors in a network through which the common good is concretely pursued by the capability state. Following a logic of “shared administration” (Bifulco and Vitale, 2006), the responsibility of public administration concerns the coordination of the whole process through which citizens are sustained in their capacity for voice and in the realisation of their capability. The traditional bureaucratic management and administration mode of governance represents the “old” mode of governance and coincides with Storper and Salais’ technocratic state: problems and issues are treated with a minimal involvement of citizens, policy making is structured in a top-down way, and private companies and organisations have a residual role. Finally, the liberal bureaucratic management and
External Residual Direct Hierarchy; army-like regulation; based on appropriateness (as compliance with rules) Dual (PA-citizen); coerciveness and delegation Standardised categories; citizens as subjects and voters
From passive to problem-solving participation
Role of the State
Role of privates (companies or non-profit service providers)
Form of responsibility of public administration
Organisational regulation
Public administration – citizens relationship
Individualisation
Participation
Participative and deliberative forms of governance
New Public Management; based on “pro-market, non market” organisational delivery and efficiency
From problem-solving to problem-setting participation
Citizens as validated partners (beyond professionals, experts, bureaucrats, etc.); individualisation as a self-reflexive (endless) process
Sources: Based on our elaboration of different sources: Giaque, 2003; Dean et al., 2005; Baines, 2004; Bifulco and Vitale, 2006; Storper and Salais, 1997; Bonvin and Farvaque, 2007; Honneth, 1995; Bonvin and Thelen, 2003; Clarke, 2004; Freedland, 2001
Citizen as client and customer; individualisation as a systemic pre-requisite and as a means
Triangular (PA, services provider, Network and promoting citizen); marketisation of citizenship “border-lands”
By process
Capability state; “ethical life” promoting state Autonomous links (among others) of a network
Promoting capabilities; life-first approach to work to welfare
“Thick needs” and “politics of needs interpretation”
Participative bureaucratic management and administration
Indirect
Sources of legitimated institutional logics
Absent; “incentive giving state”
Enhancing human capital and employability; work-first approach to welfare to work
Conformist reproduction of social division of labour
Objectives
Individual preferences
Top-down defined needs
Modes of governance Liberal bureaucratic management and administration
Premises
Traditional bureaucratic management and administration
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Table I. Modes of governance
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administration convention is inspired by the absent and incentive giving state. Corporations strongly influence social policy and can have direct influence, pursuing their interests and objectives through a variety of means. They can have indirect influence as well, imposing themselves as the socially legitimated source of institutional logics: an example of what Powell and DiMaggio (1991) called “mimetic isomorphism”. The liberal and the participative bureaucratic management and administration models represent “new” modes of governance. Advocates of new governance usually use arguments derived from both models in defending the necessity of transforming public governance. This does not take away, that the rationale of liberal bureaucratic management and administration is clearly dominant in many present-day governance reform processes. In this perspective, service individualisation is mainly interpreted in terms of giving freedom of action to already established individual preferences, applying a managerial strategy that moves towards a “pro-market, non market reconstruction of social caring and responsibility”: pro-market mechanisms are introduced in a sector that in reality operates “entirely outside of the realm of capital accumulation”, that is, in a non-market context (Baines, 2004, p. 6). The introduction of so-called intermediate public service providers (IPSP) weakens the responsibility of public administration in effectively building an institutional setting of citizenship: “By rendering the relationship between the citizen (as customer of the IPSP) and the government (which operates through the IPSP) an indirect and incidental one, these remodelling exercises downgrade the citizen’s voice in government, both by denying the directedness of that voice and by commercializing the subject-matter of the discussion between citizen and government” (Freedland, 2001, p. 91). The differences concerning the nature of individualisation and participation in the second and third modes of governance in our scheme are related to different institutional key-ideas (Eder, 1997; Be´land, 2005) that orient concrete governance. The impoverishment and weakening of public institutions and their authority in the second model are not caused by the involvement of private organisations per se, but by “privatism” and the “pervasive notion that public domain institutions should be managed as though they were market institutions” (Marquand, 2004, p. 135). The classical liberal vision of a separation between public and private organisations and institutions looks, in Hirst’s (2000, p. 20) words, “less and less convincing as a descriptive account of modern advanced societies. In fact it would be better to see the state as a part of an ‘organisational society’, with large hierarchically controlled institutions on both sides of the public-private divide that are either unanswerable to or rely only weakly accountable to citizens”. A context in which a growing portion of previously social informal relationships as well as social (volunteer) and civil activities are absorbed by large organisations and corporations, requires that we “need to rethink the notion of democratic government to fit the reality of an organizational society” (Hirst, 2000, pp. 21-22). It is in this perspective that differences between the approaches introduced above should be put. In a company-like ruled public administration, the concept of individualisation is almost completely treated as a means to increase employability and individual competitiveness (Dean et al., 2005; Bonvin and Farvaque, 2007), showing little inclination to develop participative citizenship beyond its limited consumerist interpretation. In the third approach, public institutions take into account
(and are responsible for) the whole process in which, through fully participative and deliberative practices involving public and private entities, individualisation is pursued as a (virtually endless) project, driven by a “life-first” and capability approach to welfare and activation. Our scheme is ideal-typical: actual governance reforms often combine elements derived from different approaches. Nonetheless, the scheme may help us to improve our understanding of the deeper structures and trends that are producing changes in the individualisation of service provision. Three case studies of individualised provision of activation The United Kingdom The UK belongs to the countries where public sector reforms are highest on the political agenda. These reforms have had a significant impact on the British social security and welfare-to-work systems. First of all, they influenced the way in which these systems are organised: the creation of a service market, the involvement of private (for profit and non-profit) agents in the provision of services, and the merger of benefit agencies and employment services in one institution, the Jobcentre Plus, are clear examples of this. Second, the management of service providers underwent considerable changes, of which the increasing emphasis on performance and on output/outcome is an outstanding element. Third, public sector reforms have affected the actual delivery of social security and welfare-to-work related services (on the British case, see Finn, 2005; Stafford and Kellard, 2007). British activation reveals a clear trend towards an individualisation or, as the British prefer to call it, personalisation of services. Through the years, the New Deal programmes have become more flexible and less standardised, and the model of the Personal Adviser, who is supposed to develop an individual action plan for each client, has become widespread. However, it is less clear how this individualisation trend is related to public sector reforms, the underlying new governance project and the rhetoric that this project will better serve citizens’ needs. The individualisation of service provision is aimed at stimulating providers to offer services that are tailored to individual needs and circumstances, are capable of dealing with a heterogeneous clientele and with complex social problems and lead to more effective welfare-to-work interventions. According to Stafford and Kellard (2007), evaluation studies show that clients like the Personal Adviser model. However, as far as promoting choice and empowering clients is concerned, it is not very clear how this is pursued in the context of social security and welfare-to-work services. For example, Freedland and King (2005, p. 122) argue, in a critical analysis of the Jobseekers’ Agreement (the British version of contractualising relationships between service providers and service users), that client contracts may tend towards “illiberal contractualism”: “(. . .) the quality of coerciveness or oppressiveness in relations between public agencies and their clients may present itself in the guise of freedom of contract or contractual individualism”. A crucial issue here is the justification of the decisions made and the sanctions imposed by personal advisers. When non-compliant behaviour of the client is interpreted and dealt with as an offence rather than a response to an inadequate intervention of the advisor, contractualism runs the risk of resulting in authoritarianism. The evaluation studies discussed by Stafford and Kellard show that practices of the delivery of welfare-to-work programmes cannot be grasped in theoretical either-or terminology.
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Personal advisers are often reluctant to implement a harsh sanction regime, as the results of activation partly depend on the relationships of trust they manage to realise with their clients, whose cooperation and information is necessary to make activation successful. At the same time, this shows that client participation in the process of activation is the result of professional pragmatism, rather than of formalised and institutionalised resources made available to clients in order to empower them in their relationships with their personal advisers. The Netherlands During the last 15 years, the governance of the Dutch welfare state underwent significant changes, involving curtailing the role of social partners in the administration of social insurance and employment services, decentralisation in the area of social assistance, and the privatisation and marketisation of the provision of activation services (on the Dutch case, see Sol and Westerveld, 2005; Van Berkel and Van der Aa, 2005; Van Berkel, 2006). In defending these reforms, successive Dutch governments have argued that these were necessary steps to reduce welfare state dependency and promote labour-market participation. Improving the successfulness of activation was an important objective of the reforms of welfare state governance. For example, the decentralisation of Social Assistance should promote the provision of tailor-made and individualised activation, as it would enable municipalities to design activation programmes that are adapted to local circumstances. At the same time, it created strong financial incentives for municipalities to increase their efforts aimed at reducing the number of Social Assistance recipients. The marketisation and privatisation of services were expected to result in increased effectiveness and efficiency, lower prices and higher quality of services, and more responsive service providers. It is generally recognised that the successfulness of activation will increase when it meets the needs of clients and fits in with clients’ motivations. The mainstream interpretation of individualised activation is, that clients provide information on their situation and circumstances, and that the benefit agencies and activation providers decide about the nature and content of activation. Social policy reforms have reduced rather than increased the room for clients’ choice or voice: the social security client is constructed as someone with obligations rather than rights, whose autonomy needs to be curbed instead of expanded. The increasing use of client contracts has not changed this situation: Westerveld and Faber (2005, pp. 171-72) qualify the reintegration plans concluded with social assistance recipients as “(. . .) a top-down instruction from the government to the jobseeker to be re-integrated”. Nevertheless, some developments – mainly in the area of the activation of social insurance recipients, although several municipalities have introduced similar developments where activating social assistance recipients is concerned – point in a different direction. The introduction of so-called “individual reintegration agreements” for insured disabled and unemployed people, created room for choice and voice. Clients are allowed to develop their own reintegration plan (which needs approval by the benefit agency before it can be put into practice) and to select one or more service providers. This reintegration instrument is gaining clients’ popularity, partly because it produces better results but also because it gives clients increased say in their individual activation trajectories.
Finland In comparison with the two countries discussed above, the Finnish new governance hype has been relatively modest until now. New governance reforms have been taking place: for example, a decentralisation of autonomy and responsibilities where policies aimed at vulnerable groups are concerned, and an integration of the service provision of social welfare and employment administrations (on the Finnish case, see Sakslin and Keskitalo, 2005; Keskitalo, 2007). Processes of marketisation and privatisation in the provision of social security and activation services, however, are absent. Individualised service provision has become a characteristic of Finnish activation as well, not so much to promote the functioning of a service market, but mainly to promote the integrated activation of young and long-term unemployed people. Interestingly, the introduction (2001) of the Rehabilitative Work Experience programme reveals a concern to prevent rather than promote fragmentation and intermunicipal variation in activation. Where flexibilisation of activation in the UK, and decentralisation of Social Assistance in The Netherlands, are aimed at promoting different treatment of different individuals, the Finnish Rehabilitative Work Experience programme seeks to promote universalism in the sense of strengthening social rights and encouraging equal treatment of citizen, for example by legally regulating entitlements to activation and procedural arrangements concerning the activation plans. This raises the question, whether social-democratic welfare states such as Finland promote different forms of individualisation compared to other welfare state regimes, and invest more vigorously in protecting people against a violation of social rights and in ensuring active participation. The tradition and culture of universality certainly marks the debates and practices concerning individualised service provision in Finland. This is also visible in the way obligations and sanctions are dealt with: even though the target groups of activation are obliged to participate in activation interviews, they may refuse activation offers. Sanctions are applied seldom, and social workers interpret the obligatory nature of activation as “voluntary compulsion” (Sakslin and Keskitalo, 2005). Thus, the Finnish social-democratic tradition seems to have an impact on the sensitivities experienced by policy makers and policy implementers where changing the entitlements and duties of target groups of activation is concerned. Discussion In this article we analysed the development of individualised activation services against the background of public governance and social policy reforms. Gaining insight into the precise content of individualisations is complex, as it requires a study of delivery and implementation processes, and of the interactions between service providers and service users. Unfortunately, research of the actual delivery of individualised activation services is scarce, especially where internationally comparative research is concerned. Furthermore, where merely describing the provision of individualised activation services is quite difficult in itself, explaining why certain forms are being promoted rather than others, is even more difficult; partly, because so many contextual factors are relevant in shaping individualisation processes. Therefore, we have to be careful in drawing general conclusions. Nevertheless, some tentative comments can be made.
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First of all, studies of the provision of individualised activation services should not only be looking at dominant trends, but also at the diversity of forms of individualisation and user participation realised in practice. This might increase our insights into ways in which individualisation is used to make services more effective; into tensions and contradictions in official reform policies; into the impact of implementation conditions on the practice of individualisation; etcetera. Second, we believe that it is useful to study processes of individualising service provision at the interface of public sector and social policy reforms. In the context of activation, the dominant social policy discourse on responsibilities and obligations of the unemployed often seems to overrule the governance reform discourse of “putting customers in the driver’s seat” (although Finland, where the development of more liberal forms of governance is less pronounced, is more reluctant to change the balance of rights and obligations and to promote a differentiated treatment of citizens). Apparently, policy makers are afraid that when customers are in the driver’s seat, they will take completely different directions than the ones policy makers want them to take. Because of that, individualisation often means de-standardisation and individualising obligations and responsibilities rather than putting citizens in charge of service provision processes; and participation means providing information rather than taking part in decision making. At the same time, we encountered more or less formalised initiatives where clients gain more control over activation. These initiatives may shed light on the question whether doing so actually jeopardises the promotion of employability and labour-market participation. Third, in terms of the modes of governance distinguished in Table I, we observed a move towards more liberal modes of governance, especially in the UK and the Netherlands. From the point of view of the role of clients in service provision, the process of liberalisation remains incomplete: clients are often dealt with in a “traditional” way, rather than being treated as competent customers on a competitive service market. The Dutch individual reintegration agreement seems the clearest example of moving away from this traditional approach, as it embodies a mix of liberal and participative modes of governance. Finally, evaluations of individualised service provision often focus attention on issues of responsiveness, effectiveness, efficiency, quality, user satisfaction, etcetera. In as far as user participation is considered relevant in the context of governance reforms, it is often treated as a means to improve the functioning of the service market and as an incentive for service providers to produce services that attract customers. However, individualisation and user participation could also be evaluated as ends rather than means: as a possible contribution to a more democratic society, that gives citizens more voice in deciding how they want to live their lives, putting the debate on a more fundamental level than the more pragmatic and instrumental issue of whether individualisation and user participation may improve services. Probably it is this perspective that is at stake when service users report in evaluation studies that they value being taken seriously, being treated respectfully, being listened to, etcetera – values that are looked for even irrespective of the actual results and outcomes of activation. References Baines, D. (2004), “Pro-market, non-market: the dual nature of organizational change in social services delivery”, Critical Social Policy, Vol. 24 No. 1, pp. 5-29.
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