The Disabling State of an Active Society

Description

Across the traditional welfare states of Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Canada there has been an increasing emphasis in recent years on 'activation' by the unemployed as a tool for fighting unemployment. The core idea of activation programmes is the integration and empowerment of jobseekers through active work-related measures rather than passive income support. The active society is defined as one that ensures people can work, and enables them to do so by strengthening their skills and competences, and avoiding the pitfalls of creating a permanent underclass of welfare recipients. However, the empirical evidence of the efficacy of activation programmes is far from conclusive and there have been no systematic studies of the effects of activation programmes on the lives of the unemployed people who come into contact with them. This book is based on a detailed ethnographic study of the highly praised Swedish rehabilitation organization Samhall, which the author augments with archival research on activation programmes in Sweden and extensive interviews with both welfare agencies and jobseekers. Samhall today is one of Scandinavia's largest corporations, employing 22,000 previously unemployed individuals. It is also highly embedded into the Swedish welfare system and often regarded as a model welfare state. Based on his empirical findings Holmqvist analyses how the concrete practices that aim to enact the active society can produce passive and incapacitated citizens. By individualising the reasons for their unemployment, activation programmes tend to stigmatize the behaviour of their participants, effectively casting them as responsible for their own unemployment. By 'disabling' people, thereby accommodating them in activation programmes, there is the potential for societies to 'solve' pressing social issues such as unemployment, particularly in regions where there is a weak labor market, concomitant with a form of state-sanctioned provision of inexpensive labor.