45 THREE The concept of activation Rik van Berkel and Iver Hornemann Møller Introduction For more than two decades, the governments of the EU have presented welfare state reforms as reactions to rising levels of unemployment and other types of labour-market marginalisation, and in terms of their need to curb expenditures on social security. The growing use of public funds to support people of working age over the past 50 years evidently plays a major role in these reforms. However, welfare state reforms have gradually come to be placed in the context of broader
The activation of social welfare recipients has been, and still is, a central issue in the development of social and employment policies in Europe. This ambitious book explores the employment effectiveness of minimum income schemes, and provides the first comprehensive examination of its dependency on how the rights and obligations of the recipients are defined.
The book argues that the right to a minimum income can only be adequately justified with reference to the individual’s right to personal development. Combining political theory and policy analysis, the author draws on evidence from eight different European countries to illustrate how it is possible to combine higher levels of employment effectiveness with the respect for recipients’ right to personal development.
Exploring the balance between fairness and effectiveness in the activation of minimum income recipients and acknowledging that individuals have both rights and obligations, this book will provide a useful reference tool to students, researchers and policy-makers with an interest in the work versus welfare nexus.
Activation policies which promote and enforce labour market participation continue to proliferate in Europe and constitute the reform blueprint from centre-left to centre-right, as well as for most international organizations. Through an in-depth study of four major reforms in Denmark and France, this book maps how co-existing ideas are mobilised to justify, criticise and reach activation compromises and how their morality sediments into the instruments governing the unemployed. By rethinking the role of ideas and morality in policy changes, this book illustrates how the moral economy of activation leads to a permanent behaviourist testing of the unemployed in public debate as well as in local jobcentres.
welfare system, such as unemployment insurance or paid sick leave, they are referred to social assistance, which is mainly the case for the young unemployed people in our study. Thus, the work ethic, often labelled as the ‘work-first approach’, entails a tension between a carrot and a stick ( Junestav, 2004 ; Johansson and Panican, 2016b ). Unemployed people should participate in activation measures, which are government-driven interventions to bring citizens into work. These processes of governmentality aim to create self-regulating and disciplined citizens able to
113 SEVEN Citizenship and the activation of social protection: a comparative approach Jean-Claude Barbier The activation of social protection is one of the most important current transformations of social protection across Europe. However, there is disagreement about how it should be interpreted. The purpose of this chapter is to point out that: • The concept of activation can be used in both a broad and narrow sense. In the broader sense, it reaches well beyond what is usually described as ‘activation’ (all sorts of welfare-to-work programmes and making work pay
between the reformed UK public employment service and emerging forms of social marginality is under-researched. Moreover, recent studies have focused on the compulsive aspects of welfare delivery (see Wiggan 2007 ; Fletcher and Wright, 2018 ) and have paid scant attention to the support provided. There is also a need to enhance our understanding of the experiences and perceptions of those being supported and explore theoretically whether the precariat is being ‘activated’ and/or ‘civilised’. The article begins by considering the emergence of the precariat and
Introduction There is a growing interest in the role of employers in the delivery and success of activation policies. In this chapter, we put forward a typology of policy approaches to employer engagement in activation policies. We identify three main policy approaches: regulation, facilitation and negotiation. The policy approaches rely on different assumed problems and different target groups of unemployed and apply different types of governance and policy instruments. The typology that we put forward can be used to classify national policy approaches in
217 The ‘Hartz reforms’ in Germany ELEVEN Rushing towards employability- centred activation: the ‘Hartz reforms’ in Germany Dirk Jacobi and Katrin Mohr Introduction A common feature of reform processes and discourse throughout Europe since the mid-1990s has been the shift from ‘passive’ towards ‘active’ policies for unemployed people. While in some countries the move towards activation implies the introduction of a comprehensive framework of active labour market policy, others have long-standing traditions in this respect. Germany belongs to the latter group
Ireland’s recent history of welfare reform, as discussed in Chapter Two , is a timely illustration of how the social policy turn towards activation and the administrative turn towards market governance unfold ‘as two sides of a single political project’ ( Soss et al, 2013 : 139). In this case of Ireland, the project was one of moving from a purportedly ‘passive’ model of welfare to one concerned with catalysing employment through ‘job activation of [the] long-term unemployed’ (Government of Ireland, 2012 : 21). To achieve this, policymakers turned not only to
