Activation and ethical foundations of welfare

Active labor market policies, as the workfare policies are named in the Western European context, can be seen as constructed from political discourses of

obligations and responsibilities. These discourses are interwoven with notions of reciprocal relationship between the responsibilities of the citizens and the rights guaranteed to them by the state (e.g. Bonvin 2008, Dean 2004, Gilbert 2002).

The individuals are given opportunities by the state and their responsibility is to put them into active measures (Maeder and Nadai 2009). What follows is that the benefit payments are made conditional upon activity and participation in welfare measures. While the degree of conditionality differs by welfare regimes, the basic idea of activation is that benefit receipt is more conditional upon job search activities, acceptance of suitable jobs and participation in active labor market measures than before.

The ALMPs are linked to the ‘Third Way’ measures promoting activation as a solution to welfare dependency and the mutual obligation of the contract parties by matching rights and responsibilities. The 'Third Way' policies originated from European welfare regimes oriented to Social Democratic and reformative ideals particularly in the UK, Germany and Scandinavian countries in the 1990's (Konle-Seidl and Eichhorst 2008). The ideal was that they would increase employment rates and social inclusion and thus guarantee equal access to employment (Sunley et al. 2006). These policies have been scrutinized from the perspective of individual responsibility and the role of the private sphere (Bonvin 2008, Borghi and Van Berkel 2007, Clarke 2004, Handler 2004, , Van Berkel and Valkenburg 2007).

Thus, the relationship between the state and the individual has reached a new definition introducing a social contract between the rights and responsibilities.

The causes of unemployment as well as the responsibility of making oneself employed are held upon the individual, whereas in the past society was held responsible for the risk management (Åkerstrøm Andersen 2007, Crespo Suarez and Serrano Pascual 2004). This development can be seen in the light of the changes from traditional, unquestionable focus on solidarity and its disintegration from the new modes of citizenship. Reconciliation between the ideals of responsibility and solidarity poses new challenges for the construction of welfare states. Indeed, solidarity is not accepted as a valuable goal in itself but needs to be accompanied by the self-control of individuals over their behavior (Rosanvallon 2000).

According to Bonvin and Moachon (2007), the movement towards establishing a social contract tells us about changes within the balance between centrally and locally based government as well as the relationship between public and private.

In the case of Switzerland, contractualization is based on the creation of provision agreements fixing targets and special timetables for both the welfare beneficiaries and the welfare agents. As the role of the state in monitoring local practices decreases, the local actors have more margins for maneuver for the implementation of social policies. Participation of the socially excluded has an important meaning in the contractualization process, for which a contract of inclusion has been introduced to promote re-integration into society. However, there are implications of power imbalance within the contractual base as a number of authors have claimed that the rights implied by welfare contracts do not correspond to ordinary contracts (e.g. Bonvin and Moachon 2007, Crespo Suarez and Serrano Pascual 2007, Trickey 2000). With such contracts the

welfare clients do not have equal bargaining power with the state – unlike with ordinary contracts (Handler 2004).

As a result, it has been claimed that a fundamental shift in the meaning of social citizenship is being witnessed as the conditionality of social benefits presents rights through a contract as opposed to unconditional rights provided by citizenship as a status (Handler 2003, Vitale 2005, White 2000). According to Lister and Pia (2008), the direction of the development of citizenship in Europe from the communitarian perspective is two-fold: the neo-liberal emphasis on welfare benefit reductions and the social democratic model of citizen duties for maximizing welfare efforts. By referring to several European countries, Valkenburg (2007) identifies a change in citizenship as a 'shift in the rights and duties of the welfare state and citizens' (p. 29). This change is towards an idea of the welfare state that should be protected from the citizen promoted by the neo-liberal ideals as opposed to the earlier reverse connection.

For the new forms of citizenship, the opportunity for having a job is seen as a right empowering the citizens (Korpi and Palme 2003). The concept of citizenship is strongly connected to employment seen as the solution for everything; integrating people, giving them voice and purpose to their lives while boosting the global and national economies (Clarke and Newman 2004). The consequence of the discursive construction of citizenship based on activation, consumerism and employment seems to imply a corrosion of collective and agency based self-identification. Similarly, citizenship through paid employment denies the inclusion of certain groups in the category, such as people with marginal claims for nationality (migrants), unpaid labor, women with care responsibilities and disabled people (Newman 2011).

2.2.1 Normative and moralizing aspects of activation - employability The promotion of employment as an answer to exclusion and disintegration directs the public attention to employability of individuals. The concept of employability in the policy context is understood as 'the combination of factors which enable individuals to progress towards or get into employment, to stay in employment and to progress during their career' (Garrouste 2011: 9; italics in original). In literature, the term refers first of all to the policy focus on supply-side interventions improving individuals' aptitudes and skills. Individuals' competitiveness is brought to the forefront illustrating the shift of focus from 'lack of employment' to 'lack of employability' as individual shortcomings (Garsten and Jacobsson 2004). Secondly, the concept implies expectations towards the unemployed of self-activation and adaptation to different circumstances by constantly improving their employability (Van Berkel and Valkenburg 2007).

Therefore, employability-related policies have a tendency to attribute unemployment to individual factors rather than structural opportunities leading to the likelihood of holding individuals as solely responsible for their employment.

Thus, the high emphasis on employability in social policies brings along expectations of active involvement of the individuals in their employability. The state is providing policy instruments for a change in behavior and controlling human conduct, which by Foucault (1991) can be seen as a form of governmentality. With this light, certain normative aspects have been identified

that influence the behavior of individuals by bringing them to govern themselves by constant practices of self-reflection (e.g. Archer 2007). As mentioned before, the idea behind activation logic is that social benefits that are too generous create and maintain a culture of dependency by discouraging people from striving for employment. By Levitas (1998) dependency is interpreted as being the outcome of psychological pathology or moral deficiencies, which then leads to a decrease in work ethic. The social protection system is believed to maintain and encourage this behavior.

The moralization processes of welfare are particularly visible in the US model, where the discourse on passive welfare benefit recipiency has led to stigmatization of the beneficiaries weakening the solidarity between groups (Lister 2001). Participation, in this context, not only implies emancipation but develops a moralizing tone: intervention in individual motivations and attitudes becomes crucial in order to advance economic growth (Serrano Pascual and Crespo Suarez 2007). While moralization has been described as a particularly explicit feature in the American human services (e.g. Hasenfeld 2010b), also the European welfare institutions are claimed to introduce a discursive reproduction of the individual through deficits and lack of competences (Serrano Pascual 2003).

In the European welfare context, employability can be interpreted as implicitly associating the problem of unemployment to the individual’s lack of technical, general, social and moral competencies. The difficulty of the term 'competencies' lies in its subjectivity leading to arbitrary assessment without the chance for them to be certified. It implies that now the workers spirit and readiness has been disposed for the employer and that unemployment is due to the deficiency of the individual’s personality. Therefore the individuals have little power over the criteria used to evaluate their work and this situation favors their flexibility and capacity to adapt to new demands of the labor market (Serrano Pascual 2003).

Similarly, Valkenburg (2007) recognizes elements in the discourses on European Employment Strategy¹¹ that identify a moral problem in individuals who are 'assumed to have a questionable calculating attitude, to put unjustifiable and unsustainable claims on the welfare state, and to be unwilling to take care of themselves in a changing economy' (p. 30).