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A post-industrial ‘precariat’ has emerged characterised by social insecurity to which the state’s response has been to secure habituation to insecure labour. This article provides new empirical evidence regarding how the precariat encounter and experience the reformed welfare delivery system. It seeks to explore theoretically whether the precariat is being ‘activated’ and/or ‘civilised’. The author finds that the primary role of Jobcentre Plus is to assess whether the unemployed are ‘active’. This has been interpreted by Marxist scholars as a class disciplinary project which renders labour more dependent upon precarious work. However, the evidence presented here suggests that an inappropriate white-collar model of support combined with sanctions frequently results in ill-discipline and disentitlement from benefits. Furthermore, support cannot be conceptualised as a ‘civilising offensive’ because it is not a deliberate and targeted attempt at inculcating ‘civilised’ behaviour. Moreover, rather than enforcing the norms of civilised behaviour it drives many into destitution and crime.
This paper examines the impact of increased welfare conditionality on people with mental health issues claiming benefits in the UK. Drawing on data from the DeStress study, this paper explores the lived experience of welfare claimants in low-income communities, and the perspectives of GPs seeking to support them. Particular focus is placed on people’s experience of the Work Capability Assessment, the tool used to determine welfare claimants’ entitlement to sickness benefit, and how the narratives and culture surrounding welfare reform and the actual assessment itself can have a negative impact on mental health and wellbeing.
This study examined the potential influence of policies and practices on the ability of children from low-income families to participate fully in the school day. Pupils from six schools participated in 71 focus groups and revealed a range of barriers affecting their school experience: transport costs and limited support; clothing costs, stigma and enforcement of school dress codes; material barriers to learning at school and home; concerns about free school meals; missing out on school trips, clubs and events.
Findings on school uniform were an important catalyst towards a recent policy change in Scotland in increasing the school clothing grant.
This paper explores the experiences of 15 Irish mothers who have undergone a legal separation and/or divorce and highlights that while both parents have a legal responsibility to care for children in the event of a dissolution of marriage, the enforcement of such responsibilities is deficient in the case of the absent parent. This is particularly deleterious for mothers living in poverty and we question the adequacy of current policy to deal with changing family circumstances. The narratives of the mothers show that their lived reality is exacerbated by the failure of the state to enforce fathers’ obligations to their children at the time of separation and divorce, a situation which is untenable 21 years after the introduction of divorce.
Early years practitioners are integral to government policy on addressing child poverty in the UK. Drawing on findings from a qualitative study this paper seeks to contribute new understandings about how practitioners’ narratives are shaped by discourses of poverty. Overall practitioners’ understandings of poverty reflected a moral discourse of deserving and undeserving poor. However, the complexity of interconnections between morality, gender and motherhood (and fatherhood) reveals how understandings were also broad, nuanced and at times contradictory. The study highlights the need for further research into how understandings of poverty are formed together with the need for new narratives of poverty.
The growth of solo self-employed workers in the Netherlands (zzp’ers) has not yet triggered a debate on how to combine their income security and business autonomy. The extent to which the social protection system and interest groups promote zzp’ers to take up collective arrangements mitigating income insecurity due to work incapacity and preventing income insecurity due to poor employability is investigated using the social risk management framework. Correcting economic obstacles and irrational risk perceptions, collective arrangements are found to encourage the take-up of work incapacity insurance and training among zzp’ers.
This article stems from an interest in discovering how working conditions have changed in qualified professions in Spain, concentrating on lawyers. Using a qualitative method, we have found significant sources of precariousness that are transforming the profession's ways. Throughout this article, light has been cast on the connections between the changing professional model of the lawyer's job over the past three decades and the emergence of precarious situations. Our findings highlight that there has been a transformation in the occupation of lawyers in Spain: income and professional careers are marked by extreme uncertainty, raising psychosocial risks.
Using Milan's entrepreneurship policies as a case-study, this paper explores the diversity that the broad policy category of ‘inclusive entrepreneurship’ may entail in terms of policy instruments and participants’ experiences. To this end, the study considers policymakers, practitioners and young adults receiving local support to establish their own businesses. It does so by drawing on qualitative interviews. It argues that inclusive entrepreneurship policies may entail a ‘differentiated inclusion’ that is produced by the simultaneous interaction between diversified policy instruments and a system of inequalities that affect individual capacities to strategise entrepreneurial risks and opportunities.
