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Researching governmentalities through ethnography: The case of Australian welfare reforms and programs for single parents
Abstract
In this article I argue that the spaces of freedom and constraint that personalized planning programs targeted at Australian single parents open up and close down are distinctly different when viewed from a top-down perspective of governmental rationalities as compared to a bottom-up perspective, or what Foucault referred to as the ‘witches’ brew' of actual practices. Around 90% of single parents with dependent children in Australia are single mothers, and around 80% of these single mothers receive single rate Parenting Payment. Changes to this payment (and its precursor, Sole Parent Pension) over the last 25 years have recognized this gendered composition by focusing on issues of mothering and the intensive activities of care that continue to be carried out most commonly by mothers. While the existing literature argues that the 2005 Welfare to Work package sharply broke with this practice by not focusing on gender and the unique features of mothers' life courses, I find that these considerations have remained a key part of the ‘witches’ brew' of actual practices. Given this finding, a key argument is that studies of governmentalities which combine sociologies of actual practices together with studies of official governmental rationalities can make important critical contributions to understanding the heterogeneous logics and practices through which welfare reform policies occur.
... 29 Whereas the active society is impregnated by market logic, it is important to consider that such rationality may not always concur with the everyday life of local communities. In line with Michelle Brady (2014Brady ( , 2011, I suggest that more research on welfare state reforms should employ ethnographic methods in order to explore what becomes, in practice, of policies translated at the local level. ...
... In the introductory part of this thesis, I argued that large scale policy changes, such as the turn from the welfare society to the active society, are seldom scrutinised by way of ethnographic methods (Brady 2014(Brady , 2011Hansen Löfstrand & Jacobsson 2022). The present thesis has sought to redress this deficit by contributing with insights into the everyday life of making operational the policy concepts travelling with the active society, such as lifelong learning, employability, life-skills, and entrepreneurship. ...
... Genom att undersöka dessa frågor etnografiskt är min avhandling ett bidrag till den litteratur som belyser "situerade" aktiveringspraktiker (Künzel 2012;Jacobsson et al. 2017). Den är också ett bidrag till den litteratur som genom att premiera etnografiska metoder kommit att problematisera synen på välfärdsreformer som nyliberala projekt vilka antas forma nyliberala subjekt enligt en linjär top-down-modell (Brady 2014(Brady , 2011Hansen Löfstrand & Jacobsson 2022). Inte minst är avhandlingen ett bidrag som ger viktig empirisk kunskap om hur 195 vardagen kan se ut när aktiveringspolitik skall omsättas lokalt ute i kommuner, vilket fortfarande är ett relativt underutforskat område ( Thorén 2009: 150;Hornemann Møller & Johansson 2009: 7;Lundahl 2010: 24). ...
... I challenge the notion that managing the unemployed in street-level encounters is about producing self-governing, active citizens and managing the relationship to self. I draw from governmentality approaches (Dean, 1995;2002) and ethnographies of governmentalities (Brady, 2011(Brady, , 2014Leppo and Perälä, 2017;McKee, 2009) to make two arguments. First, I argue that the street-level practice entails not only liberal ideas of self-governing individuals but also embodies authoritarian measures. ...
... Theoretical perspectives: Ethnographies of governance and street-level organizations as policy-making sites Ethnographies of neoliberal governmentalities complement research on governmentalities of textual sources with ethnographic accounts (Brady, 2011(Brady, , 2014Leppo and Perälä, 2017). ...
... In her work on ethnographies of neoliberal governmentalities, Brady (2011also Lippert, 2014) proposes that ethnographic work helps to make visible the existence of competing or marginalized political rationalities. Ethnography exposes that the power structures are not unified and help to distinguish how neoliberal and other rationalities are played out in localised practices. ...
Activation policies form the core of employment policies in most OECD countries. They are part of ‘active’ welfare states and associated neoliberal forms of governance that seek to govern through freedom by producing self-governing and responsible subjectivities. Ethnographies of governmentalities have been used in the research reported in this article to examine if and how such subjectivities are put in practice in street-level encounters in local welfare delivery. Based on an ethnographic research of youth services in the Public Employment Services (PES) in Helsinki, Finland, it is shown that despite the policy focus on active citizenship the street-level practice entails not only liberal ideas of self-governing individuals but also authoritarian measures. What is governed in the meetings is not the young people’s selves but their time and behaviour. In the process, the notion of active citizenship is emptied and transformed to mean participation in supervised activities offered by the PES. Such practice also reworks the temporal structures and creates insecure and eventful experience of time for PES clients. In contrast to governing through freedom, the localized interpretation of activation policies represents the authoritarian and paternalistic side of neoliberal governance.
... education reform) with a singular way of thinking (e.g. neoliberalism) (for discussions see Brady, 2011;Li, 2007a). When examining practices of modern government, care is needed to ensure an analysis of explicit, specific rationalities rather than always drawing on more general rationalisations (Foucault, 1982). ...
... A number of scholars, however, are critical of the dominant approach to governmentality studies in which government is reduced to its rationalities and 'humble and mundane' technologies (for examples of these criticisms, see Brady, 2011;Li, 2007aLi, , 2007cMcKee, 2009;O'Malley, 2009;Stenson, 2005 studies of health education there has been a scarcity of research "that considered governmentality in motion in the lived sites of educational places and spaces .... let alone considered how attempts to govern were being played out in schools" (Leahy, 2012, p. 75). It was therefore critical that my research encompassed both the plans of government (such as those articulated by corporations to teach children to live healthy lifestyles) and how this 'played out' in three New Zealand primary schools. ...
... An outcome of discursive governmentality studies is a disassociation between rationalities of government, official technologies of government, and the 'actual' social relations, practices, subjects, and spaces (see Brady, 2011). Although joining rationalities and technologies is an integral aspect of governmentality studies, it is dangerous to assume that governmental endeavours to 'conduct the conduct' of individuals and populations have their intended effects. ...
This thesis explores the phenomenon of corporations funding, devising and implementing healthy lifestyles education programmes in primary schools as ‘part of the solution’ to childhood obesity. Based on a critical ethnography of three primary schools in Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand, this thesis illuminates how an array of organisations and actors, including multinational corporations, government agencies, charities and schools, are assembled together through their combined ‘will to improve’ children’s (un)healthy bodies, thoughts and behaviours. This study explores how children, teachers, principals and external providers understand and experience these outsourced programmes and resources. It also discusses how the attempts to ‘teach’ children about health shapes children’s understanding of health, fatness, teachers, corporations and ‘healthy’ consumption of corporate products.
This thesis is a study of governmentality, where I examine the rationalities, technologies and subjects of government, not only the ‘official’ plans to govern, but how they are actually enacted in schools and how they are experienced. My evidence is gathered from a range of sources: observations within and outside of the classrooms; my own journal entries; research conversations with children, teachers, principals and external providers; building relationships with participants; and documentary evidence, such as annual reports, organisation websites, resources, media releases, and children’s school work. I employ the notion of assemblage as a key analytical framework to examine evidence and demonstrate how healthy lifestyles education programmes endeavour to govern schools, teachers and children towards certain ends.
My analysis of the corporatised healthy lifestyles education programmes reveals that the assemblage is messy and complex. It is constituted by an ensemble of elements that converge together to provide simple solutions to the ‘problem’ of children’s (fat) bodies and (un)healthy lifestyles. A number of these elements, such as the neoliberal political rationality, dominant discourses of health, fatness, individual choice and responsibility, multinational food corporations and regional charities, pedagogies of disgust, fear and silence, and technologies of consumption, outsourcing, privatisation, and corporatisation, have been identified and critiqued in governmentality studies of public health and public education. However, what my research reveals is some of the ways that disparate elements are brought together and made to adhere. This includes practices of assemblage, such as anti-politics, re-assembling, rendering technical, forging alignments, resolving tensions, and managing contradictions.
Throughout the thesis I argue that analysing these practices of assemblage is integral to understanding how corporations and their ‘not-for-profit’ partners endeavour to govern children to become certain kinds of ‘healthy’ consumers. This is not to say the authorities were always successful. The students were often willing and able to contest and critique the corporate attempts to commercialise their educational space. However, I argue that healthy lifestyles education programmes act as a form of mis-education, one that constrains and constricts how teachers teach and what students learn about health, corporations and consumption. Finally, this thesis explores the possibilities for teachers and children to work together to employ counter-politics that ‘unsettle’ the assemblage.
... NPM as a concealed track of welfare reform (Brodkin 2013) for service providers and service users. Building on recent scholarship that emphasizes the need to study what actually happens when governmentality practices 'hit the ground' or the 'street level' (Brady 2011;Lipsky 1980Lipsky /2010, our central claim is that the articulation of managerialism in employment service delivery, and the heightened pressure on staff to 'make the numbers work', results in series of interrelated effects. These effects include work intensification for service providers; reconfiguration of the relation between service providers, funders, and clients; and heightened insecurity for service providers and service users. ...
... According to Soss et al. (2011), attempts at discipline through NPM cannot be assumed to be easily achieved given that "disciplinary power of the NPM (new public management) shapes consciousness and behaviour in ways that are deep and far reaching yet also fractured, inconsistent and incomplete" (i205). Ethnographies of neoliberal governmentalities further highlight the importance of attending to failures and contradictions that become visible when such strategies unfold in service provision spaces (Brady 2011(Brady , 2014. Moreover, research that has expanded on Lipsky's seminal work on street-level bureaucracy points to the importance of better understanding the "ways in which discretion interacts with managerial reforms and what that means for production of policy in everyday organizational life" (Brodkin 2011: i255). ...
... In our research, we aim to demonstrate how service provision organizations and front-line service providers negotiate the effects of NPM in their everyday practices and discretionary capacities. Based on the data analysed below, we offer a critique of NPM's premises and promises by pointing to the contradictions, tensions, and 'unintended' implications that arise in its application (Brady 2011;Brodkin 2011). ...
... To date, policy analyses have highlighted the ways in which activation and austerity measures have been combined in official documents in various national contexts, and ethnographic research has begun to examine the enactment of such measures in service provision processes [2,17,20,24]. As highlighted by Brady [25,26], "bottom up" analyses that address what happens as neoliberal discourses, policies, and technologies are put into action via service provision are important vehicles for understanding how activation and austerity re-configurations are negotiated within multiple rationalities and discretionary practices. Ethnographic research has raised critical awareness of the unintended consequences and challenges of enacting activation and austerity measures within service provision [23,27]. ...
... Indeed, while not explicitly informed by a critical occupational perspective, research examining long-term unemployment for single parents underscores the need to explore occupations outside formal labor force activities. For example, Brady's [25] ethnographic work has highlighted the importance of examining how service providers actively negotiate governmental guidelines and enact discretion to help clients fit activity expectations and paid work within mothering practices and identities. Gazso and McDaniel's comparative study concluded that "both Canadian and American lone mothers' experiences of neo-liberal support policies can, in a largely counter-intuitive matter, expose them to greater rather than less economic insecurity and inequality" [16] (p. ...
... The implications of this stuckness encompassed experiencing a life "on hold", pervasive uncertainty, unwanted dependency, feelings of isolation and depression, struggles to maintain a positive self and social identity, and fears regarding the future. As such, the findings add to the emerging body of work using a "bottom up" or "street level" approach to expose the limits of neoliberal governance [18,25,45]. In particular, this study exposes the limits of contemporary approaches to defining and managing long-term unemployment which focus on activation in one occupational domain-in this instance, activities framed as essential for managing and remediating the situation of joblessness. ...
Background: Solutions for the problem of long-term unemployment are increasingly shaped by neoliberally-informed logics of activation and austerity. Because the implications of these governing frameworks for everyday life are not well understood, this pilot study applied a critical occupational science perspective to understand how long-term unemployment is negotiated within contemporary North American socio-political contexts. This perspective highlights the implications of policy and employment service re-configurations for the range of activities that constitute everyday life. Methods: Using a collaborative ethnographic community-engaged research approach, we recruited eight people in Canada and the United States who self-identified as experiencing long-term unemployment. We analyzed interviews and observation notes concerning four participants in each context using open coding, critical discourse analysis, and situational analysis. Results: This pilot study revealed a key contradiction in participants’ lives: being “activated, but stuck”. This contradiction resulted from the tension between individualizing, homogenizing frames of unemployment and complex, socio-politically shaped lived experiences. Analysis of this tension revealed how participants saw themselves “doing all the right things” to become re-employed, yet still remained stuck across occupational arenas. Conclusion: This pilot study illustrates the importance of understanding how socio-political solutions to long-term unemployment impact daily life and occupational engagement beyond the realm of job seeking and job acquisition.
... education reform) with a singular way of thinking (e.g. neoliberalism) (for discussions see Brady, 2011;Li, 2007a). When examining practices of modern government, care is needed to ensure an analysis of explicit, specific rationalities rather than always drawing on more general rationalisations (Foucault, 1982). ...
... A number of scholars, however, are critical of the dominant approach to governmentality studies in which government is reduced to its rationalities and 'humble and mundane' technologies (for examples of these criticisms, see Brady, 2011;Li, 2007aLi, , 2007cMcKee, 2009;O'Malley, 2009;Stenson, 2005 studies of health education there has been a scarcity of research "that considered governmentality in motion in the lived sites of educational places and spaces .... let alone considered how attempts to govern were being played out in schools" (Leahy, 2012, p. 75). It was therefore critical that my research encompassed both the plans of government (such as those articulated by corporations to teach children to live healthy lifestyles) and how this 'played out' in three New Zealand primary schools. ...
... An outcome of discursive governmentality studies is a disassociation between rationalities of government, official technologies of government, and the 'actual' social relations, practices, subjects, and spaces (see Brady, 2011). Although joining rationalities and technologies is an integral aspect of governmentality studies, it is dangerous to assume that governmental endeavours to 'conduct the conduct' of individuals and populations have their intended effects. ...
In recent years, multinational food and drink corporations and their marketing practices have been blamed for the global childhood obesity ‘crisis’. Unsurprisingly, these corporations have been quick to refute these claims and now position themselves as ‘part of the solution’ to childhood obesity. In this paper, I examine how and why corporations fund, devise and/or implement ‘healthy lifestyles education’ programmes in schools. By using a critical ethnographic research approach alongside Foucault’s notion of governmentality, I interrogate what those with the ‘will to govern’ (such as corporations) wanted to happen (e.g. fight obesity, change marketing practices and increase consumption), but also what actually happened when these corporatised education programmes met their intended targets in three New Zealand primary schools. I critically examine these programmes by focusing on the ways in which three technologies of consumption – product placement, transforming children into marketers and sponsorship – attempt to govern children to be lifelong consumers of the corporate brand image and their allegedly ‘healthy’ corporate products. Although students were not necessarily naïve and easily coerced into becoming mindless consumers of corporate products, students and their teachers readily accepted that sponsorship, product placement and marketing in schools were normal, natural, necessary and mostly harmless. Healthy lifestyles education programmes represent a new ‘brand’ of health, health education and corporation. The child-citizen is governed to become the child-consumer. Corporations’ anxieties about being blamed for childhood obesity are fused with technologies of ‘healthy consumption’: the consumption of corporate products, corporate philanthropy, the corporate brand and corporate ‘education’.
... Australia's social security system has long been thought of as inadequate and punitive -inadequate because the base rates of Australia's working-age social security payments have been below the poverty line for some time, and punitive because of the use of welfare conditionalities, more commonly called mutual obligations (Cahill, 2014;Brady 2011). Before the base rate of unemployment benefits was raised by $50 per fortnight in April 2021, it had not increased in real terms since 1997, setting the level well below both the Henderson (established by the 1973 Henderson poverty inquiry) and the relative (calculated as half of the median household income) poverty line (Melbourne Institute, 2019;Services Australia, 2021a). ...
... This framing resulted in the introduction of "conditional" welfare programmes (or "mutual obligation" as it is referred to in Australia). Under this system, payments are conditional on recipients undertaking tasks such as attending training or employment provider appointments, submitting job applications and undertaking "work-like" activities for their payments (Brady, 2011). Mutual obligations are mandatory, and so people are often met with sanctions, such as the suspension or cancellation of payments, if they do not undertake these obligations and report them in a timely manner. ...
During the 2020 COVID‐19 wave, the Australian Government made an additional $550 Coronavirus Supplement available for people receiving social security payments, and temporarily suspended mutual obligation requirements. By doing so, the government effectively gave people who had been long stigmatised and subject to punitive conditionality to compel them into the labour market, financial security and their time back. Drawing on survey responses from people who received the $550 Supplement and had their mutual obligation activities suspended or reduced, this research examines how people used their time during this period and whether it differed from pre‐pandemic government policy. We find that the increase in payments through the Supplement and the suspension of mutual obligations impacted positively on people's lives including the (1) the ability of respondents to meet basic needs and improve their long‐term financial security, (2) improvements to physical and emotional well‐being, (3) increased labour market engagement and (4) engagement in other forms of unpaid productive work.
... These resistances have been observed from perspectives such as the 'everyday' (Bodsworth, 2012), governmentality (e.g. Brady, 2011;McDonald and Marston, 2005) and the sociology of emotion (Peterie et al., 2019). ...
... In Australia forms of everyday resistance exercised by single mothers in the context of Australian welfare to work included tactics such as concealment and avoidance (Bodsworth, 2012). There have also been studies employing governmental orientations which focused on discursive resistances involving single mothers rejecting the imposition of a mother/worker role identity (Bodsworth, 2012;Brady, 2011). Empirical research also noted that emotions like anger are elements of resistance (Blaxland, 2009;Bodsworth, 2012;Grahame and Marston, 2012;Peterie et al., 2019) and these observations align with social movement study theory, in which anger and a sense of injustice are important preconditions of protest (Klandermans, 2011). ...
This research applied Bourdieusian field theory to explain the forms of resistance exercised by single mothers exposed to the cultural and economic domination of Australian welfare-to-work policy. The mothers were affected by policy changes that reduced their social security benefit income and brought them into the field of activation policies. Unlike other studies focusing on well-being effects, this study focused on understanding resistance, that is, how welfare subjects like single mothers exercise resistance in dominating contexts. Bourdieusian field theory was applied to explain these resistances as a reaction to a social policy reclassification and to identity the enabling resources for it. This article observes the conditions that enabled single mothers to convert individual forms of resistance into collective action. In this respect, Husu’s adaptation of Bourdieusian field theory to social movement studies provided insight into how dominating fields like those of activation policy, generate resistances and social movements.
... Scholars have examined how 'welfare dependency' has been defined as a problem to which social assistance reform, with its focus on control and improvement of recipients, is the solution (Fraser and Gordon, 1994;Dean, 1995;Cruikshank, 1999;Rose, 1999;Dean, 2002). Others have shown how welfare-to-work policies produce classed, racialised and gendered subjects (Fraser and Gordon, 1994;Korteweg, 2003Korteweg, , 2006Dubois, 2010;Brady, 2011;Soss et al, 2011;Jensen and Tyler, 2015;Skeggs, 2015;Patrick, 2017;Krivonos, 2018Krivonos, , 2019. Still others have argued that through stricter eligibility criteria, 'creeping' conditionality, the focus on low-paid work and harsher sanctions, welfare-to-work policies are slowly closing off social assistance as a way to sustain oneself outside of the market, thereby undermining its social security function (Dwyer, 2004;Wiggan, 2015;Greer, 2016). ...
... organised around paid work and principles of reciprocity). Welfare-to-work thus encompasses many specific ways of knowing and thinking about the 'problem' of 'unemployment' and 'welfare-dependency' and how these should be addressed (Fraser and Gordon, 1994;Dean, 1995;Cruikshank, 1999;Rose, 1999;Dean, 2002;McDonald and Marston, 2005;Rose, 2006;Newman, 2010;Brady, 2011;Pykett, 2012;Brady, 2014;Van Houdt, 2014;Whitworth and Carter, 2014;Whitworth, 2016). ...
The gradual retreat of many governments from guaranteeing secure labour relations and social security, and the attendant normalisation of precarious working and living conditions, goes hand in hand with a promise that ‘the good life’ can be attained through paid work. Welfare-to-work programmes are at the centre of this, as they problematise social assistance and seek to ‘improve’ recipients and their positions in society by obliging them to find precarious employment in the post-Fordist labour market. This dissertation examines how this is done within the daily practices of ‘labour market (re)integration’ in social assistance offices in the Netherlands. It asks how the focus on future employment takes shape in these practices, what exactly is required of recipients who are deemed ‘work-ready’ in return for the right to social assistance benefits, and what the observed practices tell us more generally about the politics of social security. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, I reveal the work that goes into obtaining and retaining the right to social assistance and the pedagogical techniques that case managers use to entice, persuade and coerce recipients to find precarious paid work. ‘Work-readiness’ (being continuously and completely ready for and able to adapt to potential future employment) is accomplished by problematising the need for social assistance, by mobilising ‘the right’ aesthetics and affects, and by glorifying paid work. It is by looking presentable, feeling optimistic and performing potentiality that social assistance recipients are deemed able and willing to find paid work and to become potentially valuable members of society.
... Some scholars have scrutinised the way 'welfare dependency' has become defined as a problem to which welfare reform, with its focus on control and improvement of welfare clients, is intended to be the solution (Cruikshank, 1999;Fraser & Gordon, 1994;Rose, 1999). More recently, from a governmentality-inspired ethnographic approach, others have focussed on the implications of welfare reform for actual practices as they occur daily within and beyond the walls of the welfare office (see, for example, Brady, 2011;Dubois, 2009). This article builds on these studies by using ethnographic methods to scrutinise how 'labour market activation', or 'reintegration' as it is called, takes shape in daily practices at three local welfare offices. ...
... I ask specifically in what ways they (are encouraged to) 'improve' themselves and what this selfimprovement promises to deliver them. Although others have examined this too (Brady, 2011;Cruikshank, 1999;Kampen, 2014;McDonald & Marston, 2005), this article takes the labour market into account in order to understand the specific ways in which 'improvement' for and through (paid) work takes shape. Consequently, it starts from two observations that will be elaborated on in the next section: first, the prominence and promise of paid work in contemporary society (and workfare policy), and secondly the increasingly precarious forms of paid work that are characteristic of post-Fordist labour markets. ...
The gradual retreat of many governments from actively supporting secure labour relations and social security through welfare arrangements, and the related normalisation of precarious conditions, goes hand-in-hand with a promise of the attainability of ‘the good life’ through work. Workfare programmes are at the centre of this, as they are aimed at ‘improving’ welfare clients and their position in society through performing precarious work. Based on an ethnographic study of group workshops in three Dutch workfare programmes, this article shows how welfare clients are taught the promise of upward mobility through waged labour and are required to give ‘the right’ performances that might (in principle if, often, not in practice) potentially enable them to be successful on the post-Fordist labour market. I argue that these workshops function as temporal spaces of imagination in which adherence to the promise of upward mobility through paid work can best be understood as a form of post-Fordist affect, one that enacts, albeit temporarily, a resolution that is frequently lacking in real life.
... Research literature on human capitalisation has tended to focus either on theoretical conceptualisations (Bowsher, 2018;Gane, 2014;Lemke, 2001;McNay, 2009) and/or on the policy side of human capitalisation (Adamson, 2009;Bengtsson, 2011;Brown, 2015;Prasad, 2009) rather than on grass-roots-level practices and experiences. Existing research has analysed labour market activation as the production of new forms of governance through the repertoires of governmentality, empowerment and individualisation (Boland, 2016;McDonald & Marston, 2005;Van Oort, 2015) and demonstrated that differing policy and management contexts shape street-level practices and their aims (Brady, 2011;. However, significantly less is known about the implementation of labour activation at grass-roots level through frontline practices from the perspective of human capitalisation. ...
... Our ethnographic fieldwork consisted of participant observation, interviews with both youth and staff, and photographs of the research sites. Traditionally, ethnography has not been the main source of data in governmentality studies (on the benefits of combining ethnography and governmentality studies, see Brady, 2011). Our use of the concept of human capitalisation, however, stems not from a research setting based on governmentality studies, but results from our analysis of the data we collected. ...
This article analyses how processes of ‘human capitalisation’ work in various labour-market activation services aimed at young people in Finland. Drawing on multi-site ethnographic research on activating workshops, public employment services, and career counselling for youth in the Helsinki metropolitan region of Finland in 2014–2016, we trace sites and instances of human capitalisation. Capturing processes through which previously non-economic areas of life become economised, human capitalisation marshalls abilities, skills, knowledge and a consumeristic understanding of self-responsibility. Its promise is a more flexible workforce that can be adjusted to the varied demands of the labour market in the future. Taking a Foucauldian approach to governmentality, our research demonstrates that activation practices focus on generating a form of human capital that enhances a particular relation to and understanding of one’s self, body and skills.
... Schram et al., 2010). Comparing interview data to neoliberal ideology is a particularly useful methodological approach in that it solves the problem of how to interpret and contextualise interview data when the research lacks a broader ethnographic setting (see Brady, 2011). Comparison to neoliberal ideology becomes the context, and this approach can be circularly justified by reference to the Foucauldian model of neoliberal governmentality that the data might be being carefully selected to fit. ...
... Welfare administrator views form vitally important components of much welfare-towork research. Recent debates, particularly Marston versus Dunn, and contentions, such as that between the Centre for Social Justice and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation regarding 'intergenerational worklessness', have highlighted the need to problematise these views with reference to empirical field contexts (see Brady, 2011;Marston, 2013). Without ethnographic fieldwork, welfare-to-work interview data contextualisation has tended to fall, broadly speaking, somewhere between acceptance as 'frontline reportage', and a Foucauldian governmentality/elite conceptual download model. ...
Researchers both supportive and critical of welfare schemes regularly explore the influence, legitimacy and effects of welfare administrator opinions. However, the ‘origins’ of those opinions are generally less well considered. This article explores and problematises the use of welfare-to-work administrator testimony in social science and social policy research. Rejecting both Foucauldian models of ‘elite conceptual download’, and approaches that take administrator views at face value, it argues that the material circumstances of day-to-day working may constitute the most significant influence on administrator views. This both supports a more materialist, less idealist and/or positivistic approach, and also suggests the pressing need for more contextualised, ethnographic analysis of data in welfare-to-work debates.
... They emphasise 'thicker' description of the political process in governance, including 'people's understanding of themselves and others as actors' (Alasuutari and Qadir, 2014: 75). Several scholars have advocated other theoretical and methodological resources to provide a better account of the messy side of governance, examples being ethnography (Li, 2007), the sociology of translation (Kaisto, 2010) and the sociology of actual practices (Brady, 2011). In studies on welfare, ethnographic methods in particular have been popular (see e.g. ...
... In studies on welfare, ethnographic methods in particular have been popular (see e.g. Brady, 2011;McKee, 2009;Perälä, 2015). This inclination has shifted the focus to strategies of resisting governmental ambitions from below as well as to emphasising the reflexivity of subjects of welfare. ...
Foucault’s work has inspired studies examining how subject positions are constructed for citizens of the welfare state that encourage them to adopt the subject position of active and responsible people or consumers. Yet these studies are often criticised for analysing these subject positions as coherent constructions without considering how their construction varies from one situation to another. This paper develops the concept of subject position in relation to the theory of justification and the concept of modality in order to achieve a more sensitive and nuanced analysis of the politics of welfare in public debates. The theory of justification places greater weight on actors’ competence in social situations. It helps to reveal how justifications and critiques of welfare policies are based on the skilful contextual combination of diverse normative bases. The concept of modality, in turn, makes it possible to elaborate how subject positions in justifications and critiques of welfare policies become associated with specific kinds of values. We demonstrate the approach by using public debates on children’s day care in Finland. The analysis illustrates how subject positions are justified in relation to different kinds of worlds and made persuasive by connecting them to commonly desirable rights, responsibilities, competences or abilities.
... In a similar vein, Gregory Feldman (2011b) has described his study of the European Union's 'migration apparatus' as 'nonlocal ethnography'. This multi-sited approach allowed him to map out linkages between border checkpoints, biometrics, technologies for tracking people, international regulations, and more, which together 'manage, channel, and regulate global circulations of people and objects' (Feldman 2011a(Feldman , p. 380, 2011b; see also Brady 2011;Riles 2011;Davies 2012). Much like the development apparatus that Ferguson and Escobar studied, the migration apparatus, Feldman argues, 'activates and proliferates without central coordination, without tight networks among its technicians, and without a detailed master plan, all of which render it an evasive object of empiricist field research' (Feldman 2011a, p. 378). ...
... As a form of social practice, the texts, along with the integration practices they promote, participate in subjectification, or put more simply, in constructing and creating the to-be integrated subject. Analysing these texts makes normalized discursive emphases and techniques embedded in the solutions visible (Brady, 2011) and facilitates the tracing of what makes it even possible to propose them. It allows for the critical examination of practices, identifying their potential effects. ...
In January 2022 the new Dutch Civic Integration programme was launched together with promises of improvements it would bring in facilitating the ‘integration’ of newcomers to the Netherlands. This study presents a critical discourse analysis of texts intended for municipalities to take on their new coordinating role in this programme. The analysis aims to understand the discourse in the texts, which actors are mobilized by them, and the role these texts and these actors play in processes of governmental racialization. The analysis demonstrates shifting complex assemblages are brought into cascades of governance in which all actors are disciplined to accept the problem of integration as a problem of cultural difference and distance, and then furthermore disciplined to adopt new practices deemed necessary to identify and even ‘objectively’ measure the inherent traits contributing to this problematic. Lastly, the analysis displays that all actors are disciplined to accept the solution of ‘spontaneous compliance’; a series of practices and knowledges, which move the civic integration programme beyond an aim of responsibilization, into a programme of internalization, wherein newcomers are expected to own and address their problematic ‘nature’, making ‘modern’ values their own.
... Dean 2001. 53 Dean 2001Brady 2011. ...
Thomas R. Dye’s much cited definition of public policy as whatever governments choose to do or not do – that is, government action and inaction – helps us to understand the parameters of what policy is but says very little about the dynamics that produce government policy choice. The field of critical policy studies offers one way to understand these dynamics, the power relations that produce them and a means to evaluate policy against democratic and social justice values. Critical policy studies is different from more rationalist forms of policy analysis in that it rejects the notion that policy can be designed and implemented in a neutral and scientific fashion, free from interests, values and ideologies. This claim, and scholarly focus, is important to note as it underpins the research themes of critical policy studies – the analysis of the social construction of policies to unpack common knowledge, perceptions, values, ideologies and power relations, and evaluate them against social justice and democratic ideals and values.
The chapter proceeds in three main sections. Firstly, the origins of critical policy studies are examined and critical policy studies is defined. The relation, and reaction, of critical policy studies to the work of Harold Lasswell and the policy sciences is especially examined. Secondly, the relation of critical theory to critical policy studies is unpacked, sketching the links between Marxist theory to present-day critical theory. In the third section, three common critical policy studies themes are analysed: technocratic policy, power and democracy; social construction in the policy process; and policy discourses. The chapter concludes by drawing out key themes for students of critical policy studies to use in their own analyses and evaluations of policy.
... Dean 2001. 52 Dean 2001Brady 2011. 53 Dean 2001 ...
Thomas R. Dye’s much cited definition of public policy as whatever governments choose to do or not do, i.e., government action and inaction, helps us understand the parameters of what policy is but says very little about the dynamics that produce government policy choice. Critical policy studies offers one way to understand these dynamics, the power relations that produce them, and a means to evaluate policy against democratic and social justice values. Critical policy studies is different to more rationalist forms of policy analysis, in that it rejects the notion that policy can be designed and implemented in a neutral and scientific fashion, free from interests, values and ideologies. This claim, and scholarly focus, is important to note as it underpins critical policy studies’ research themes – the analysis of the social construction of policies to unpack common knowledge, perceptions, values, ideologies and power relations, and evaluate them against social justice and democratic ideals and values.
The chapter proceeds in three main sections. Firstly, the origins of critical policy studies are examined and critical policy studies is defined. Critical policy studies’ relation, and reaction, to the work of Harold Laswell and the policy sciences is especially examined. Secondly, the relation of critical theory to critical policy studies is unpacked, sketching the links between Marxist theory to present day critical theory. In the third section, three common critical policy studies themes are analysed: technocratic policy, power and democracy; social construction in the policy process; and policy discourses. A case study in Australian politics and policy is provided for each theme: Robodebt; sexual and gender based violence; and COVID governance of Indigenous communities. The chapter concludes by drawing out key themes for students of critical policy studies to use in their own analyses and evaluations of policy.
... To address the problem as represented, strict levels of conditionality characterise social security in Australia. The resulting 'hostile conditions' have been well-documented and criticised as a conscious policy decision to deter individuals and families from seeking support (Brady, 2011;Klein et al., 2021;Mills & Klein, 2021). Parenting support is means-tested by both assets and income, and is only available to partnered parents until a child turns 6 years of age and to single parents until the youngest child turns eight. ...
From March 2020, Australia introduced a range of policies to respond to COVID‐19, most of which impacted significantly on the lives of children. This article applies a child‐centred framework, developed from rights‐based participatory research with children, to analyse how children have been represented in policy narratives around COVID‐19 and the extent to which policy responses have been child‐inclusive or child‐centred. We argue that, overall, COVID‐19 policy responses have failed to be child‐inclusive or child‐centred. This has important implications not only for understanding the impact of COVID‐19 on children but also in understanding—and potentially rethinking—the place of children in policies as Australia emerges from COVID‐19 restrictions.
... Whereas the vast body of literature on governmentality concerns either analysis or discourse, the present chapter explores the ways in which individuals respond to interventions aimed at transforming subjectivity ( cf. . In line with B oulus-Rødje ( 2019) and Brady ( 2011, it highlights the complexity of applying Foucault's apparatus to the lived reality of individuals, reiterating the notion that governmentality is not stable t op-do wn work but a process imbued with tensions and cracks , thus revealing the nuances of governmental subject formation. ...
... Sunnerfjell & Jacobsson 2018). In line with B oulus-Rødje ( 2019) and Brady ( 2011Brady ( , 2014, it highlights the complexity of applying Foucault's apparatus to the lived reality of individuals, reiterating the notion that governmentality is not stable t op-do wn work but a process imbued with tensions and cracks ( Juhila et al. 2017), thus revealing the nuances of governmental subject formation. ...
... Dey and Teasdale's (2013) work on dis/identification of third sector practitioners in London revealed how practitioners resisted and 'appropriated' certain aspects of social enterprise discourse. Thus, a social enterprise that was understood as a neoliberal tool to control the third sector (Carmel and Harlock, 2008) unexpectedly demonstrated resistance at the level of practice (Brady, 2011) which is indicative the extent to which practitioners dis/identify with 66 practice. It further showed that practitioners were able to 'displace' the identities attributed to them by discourses (Holmer-Nadesan, 1996). ...
The discursive construction of the social enterprise phenomenon to an extent has dominantly been accomplished through the western academic literature and policy discourses by embracing a business-management school perspective. Literature also highlights social enterprises as a contextual phenomenon, however there is a dearth of qualitative and region-specific investigation and there is a considerable deficiency of literature critically examining the construction of social enterprises in India. Entrepreneurship research has highlighted the multiplicity and intersectionality of context and re-examines ‘all-are-alike’ approach which prevents from understanding diverse nature of entrepreneurship (Welter & Gartner, 2016), which involves moving away from compartmentalisation of ‘context’ and ‘individual’ to provide a more authentic understanding of entrepreneurial actions (Spedale & Watson, 2014). Although scholars highlight multiplicity of context in theorising context in entrepreneurship research, however context has been dealt in a simplistic manner ‘discrete contexts’ (singular variable) having a functionalist role in promoting or constraining entrepreneurship. Thus, theorising context in entrepreneurship needs ‘multi-context perspective’ using diverse sampling (groups), across multiple sectors (sampling) and conducting contextual research in diverse settings from different disciplines (Welter, 2011). Taking this forward, in a special issue of six papers Chandra and Kerlin (2021) puts back theorising context in social entrepreneurship research and expanding the facets of social entrepreneurship. This special issue offers a typology of contexts in social entrepreneurship research that points out the extant of areas available for further research that can help in theory, practice and policy building. This qualitative enquiry adopts a social constructivist lens and an inductive theory-building approach to examine social enterprise phenomenon in India. It will use semi-structured interviews involving thematic narrative analysis research design with two groups of participants: (a) paradigm building actors (i.e. Government, social impact investors, incubators and educational institutions) (b) practitioners from three generational cohorts (i.e. SG senior generation, generation X and generation Y).
... Unemployment is framed not as a structural issue of advanced capitalist economies, but a problem stemming from individual behavioural deficiencies, in which people are unable or unwilling to use their time productively and are considered to be lazy, 'bludgers', and/or faulty citizens (Brown, 2015;Cahill, 2014;Dee, 2013). This approach has resulted in 'conditional' welfare programs, (or 'mutual obligation' as it is referred to in Australia), where payments are conditional on recipients undertaking tasks such as attending provider appointments, training, submitting job applications and undertaking 'work-like' activities for their payments (Brady, 2011). Mutual obligation is mandatory, and so people are often met with sanctions, including having their payment suspended, if they do not undertake these obligations and report them in a timely manner. ...
During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, the Australian Government dramatically changed its approach to social security by introducing a temporary $550 per fortnight Coronavirus Supplement and the temporary suspension of mutual obligations. In late October 2020, we launched an online survey that asked respondents about how these changes impacted on their everyday lives and time use. Our findings suggest that the suspension of mutual obligations was extremely positive for respondents especially because it reduced the psychological and time pressure which make it harder for respondents to undertake long-term planning and preparation for employment. There were also considerable gendered impacts including how the reduction in time and psychological pressure allowed respondents to engage in their unpaid work such as looking after children and community engagement. Furthermore, our findings suggest that people placed onto mutual obligations undertake a range of productive work which provides important inputs into the economy and society more broadly despite being considered to be unproductive members of society. Respondents indicated that this work is easier to do when they had the time and economic base to do so, suggesting that a rethink of contemporary social security policy is needed. JEL Codes: J16, H55, I31
... The principal-agent chain, already complex in the public sector compared to the simple shareholder/director paradigm of the private sector (Mayston, 1993), becomes yet more convoluted. The splitting out and fragmentation of government departments into executive agencies and external parties means that what authorities hoped would happen may not happen in practice when reforms meet the worlds they aim to transform (Brady, 2011). ...
Purpose
Contemporary organisational landscapes offer opportunities for hybrids to thrive. Public–private partnerships (PPPs) are one thriving hybrid form incorporating the use of resources and/or structures from both public and private sectors. The study examines the impact of such a hybrid structure on governance and accountability mechanisms in a context of institutional complexity.
Design/methodology/approach
This study uses an approach that draws on institutional logics and hybridity to examine governance arrangements in the PPP policy created for the delivery of UK schools. Unusually, it employs a comparative case study of how four local governments implemented the policy. It draws on a framework developed by Polzer et al. (2017) to examine the level of engagement between multiple logics and hybrid structures and applies this to the delivery of governance and accountability for public money.
Findings
The Polzer et al. framework enables a study of how the nature of hybrids can vary in terms of their governance, ownership and control relations. The findings show how the relationships between levels of engagement of multiple logics and hybrid structures can impact on governance and accountability for public money. Layering and blending combinations led to increased adoption of private sector accountability structures, whilst a hybrid with parallel co-existence of community and market logics delivered a long-term governance structure.
Research limitations/implications
The paper examines the operation of hybrids in a complex education PPP environment in only four local governments and therefore cannot provide representative answers across the population as a whole. However, given the considerable variation found across the four examples, the paper shows there can be significant differentiation in how multiple logics engage at different levels and in varying combinations even in the same hybrid setting. The paper focuses on capital investment implementation and its evaluation, so it is a limitation that the operational stage of PPP projects is not studied.
Practical implications
The findings have political relevance because the two local government bodies with more robust combinations of multiple logics were more successful in getting funds and delivering schools in their geographical areas.
Originality/value
The study extends Polzer et al. 's (2017) research on hybridity by showing that there can be significant differentiation in how multiple logics engage at different levels and in varying combinations even in what was planned to be the same hybrid setting. It shows how in situations of institutional complexity certain combinations of logics lead to differentiation in governance and accountability, creating fragmented focus on the related public accountability structures. This matters because it becomes harder to hold government to account for public spending.
... Our work on jobactive was done in the context of work by Australian researchers who have used Foucault's concept of 'governmentality' to rethink practices within Employment Services Australia (see for example Brady, 2011;;Dean, 1995;Dean, 2010;Marston McDonald, 2008;McDonald & Marston, 2005;McDonald et al., 2003). Authorities ...
In this paper we discuss the reproduction of the compliant worker, required by the neoliberal labour market, through subjective re-constitution. We follow Foucault in positioning neoliberalism as a political rationality which can usefully be excavated with Foucauldian 'tools': analytics of gov-ernmentality, problematisation and power-knowledge. We adopt a Foucauldian-inspired 'critical attitude' to illuminate through critical knowledge-work how the ADHD child and the unemployed adult are (re)constituted into compliant labour via practices, institutions, policies, assessment and disciplinary procedures. We aim to demonstrate an alternative way to engage critically with the reproduction of the human means of production without: reinscribing the psy-complex; without essentialising and naturalising human beings as stable, unitary, rational entities; and without making or legitimising causal claims.
... Our informants do not believe their care responsibilities should, for instance, be more equally distributed; they feel society misrecognizes the importance of their care responsibilities. A policy transition to mandatory volunteering is very likely to erode the fulfillment of this priority and is therefore considered as unfair (see also Brady 2011). When thinking about other people on welfare benefits, Inge thinks that there are some people that 'should certainly be convinced to do volunteer work,' but she feels the situation at home and the strength of that particular person should be decisive in that matter. ...
Dutch citizens on welfare have to volunteer at Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) in return for their benefits. Through applying the ‘worlds of justification’ of Boltanski and Thévenot, this article aims to provide a better theoretical and empirical understanding of social justice of policies that obligate welfare clients to participate in CSOs. The analysis of 51 in-depth interviews with Dutch welfare recipients shows that respondents perceive these policies partly but not unilaterally as unfair. If respondents perceive welfare as ‘free money’ and if they are convinced that civic behavior demands interventions against free riding on welfare resources, ‘mandatory volunteering’ is considered as fair. Our main contribution is to the theoretical debate on recognition and redistribution by showing empirically how ‘othering’ plays an important role in determining when mandatory volunteering becomes a matter of redistribution or recognition.
... These approaches might be regarded as a branch of neo-institutionalism or as Rice (2013) argues as a form of micro-institutionalism. In this family of studies, can be placed constructivist accounts which use forms of discourse analysis such as Brady (2011) and McDonald and Marston (2005). ...
This article draws on qualitative research which focused on worker experiences of Workfirst activation during the Job Services Australia (JSA) contract of employment services. The Workfirst orientation of Australian labour market programmes created imperatives for activation workers to monitor job seeker compliance with activity tests. As part of the broader cohort interviewed in the study, activation workers were interviewed about the way sanctions were used to discipline job seekers in street‐level exchanges. These workers had experienced the transition from the Job Network to JSA and had observed how a shift to Workfirst became institutionalised in organisational practices and culture.
Concepts from Bourdieu's field theory are used to situate activation workers in the employment services field that became more managerial during the transition to Workfirst and where sanction‐based practice was mainstreamed. Drawing also on Peillon's sociology of welfare, employment services are described as part of the welfare field in which the activation workers experienced the misrecognition associated with Workfirst, which is described as a structure of domination. The analysis employs the concept of intersubjective recognition to draw attention to the subjective and objective co‐construction of street‐level interactions. This study has implications for understanding how welfare reforms affect activation workers, the contributors to the erosion of employment services capability, and the need for investment in workforce development in the employment services sector.
... Ethnography has long been used to analyse practices and relationships within organisations and institutions (Yanow, 2012) and, more recently, within local government specifically (Valverde, 2012;Van Hulst, 2008). It has also recently begun to be employed in critical policy research adopting a Foucauldian perspective (Brady, 2011;McDonald & Marston, 2005;McKee, 2009). ...
This paper seeks to refine the analytical tools available to critical policy scholars for analyzing policy problems by extending upon the popular ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’ (WPR) approach. WPR is highly effective at revealing how policy problems are contingent upon prevailing discourses; however, it is less effective for addressing how this contingency unfolds at the level of practice in particular governance context. Hence, this paper argues for supplementing the WPR approach with an analysis of the situated practices that give rise to particular problematizations. To demonstrate the utility of studying situated practices, a case study is presented wherein this approached is deployed alongside a more standard WPR analysis. The case study is based on research into the adoption of ‘customer focus’ policies by the compliance branch of an Australian city council. The paper makes a contribution to literature on policy problems, policy practice, compliance-oriented services, and customer focus.
... We must ask ourselves: if it is neither possible to have unmediated access to life's events nor to report on them in a detached manner, then what can be gained by engaging with the 'individual' in an interview? Many Foucault-informed scholars have used interviews to investigate the formation of 'subjectivity' (Doughty and Murray, 2014;Hacking, 2004), resistance to governmental programs (Brady, 2011;Gibson et al., 2008) and the formation of ethical selves (Hanna et al., 2014;McCabe and Holmes, 2009). Problematically, this kind of work reintroduces the pre-discursive individual, 1 whether in the form of a choosing subject who deploys discourses and takes up/rejects subject positions (for critiques see Bastalich, 2009;Jones, 1997) or a material being whose 'subjectivity' is multiply and continually formed within social contexts. ...
This article offers a poststructuralist analytic strategy that highlights the political nature of interview analysis. Interviews pose a particular challenge for poststructuralist researchers given a widespread view that they are a method for accessing the ‘truth’. We develop a strategy that bypasses this difficulty by analysing precisely ‘what is said’ in interviews. In our analysis, discourse refers to knowledge, not language. With this understanding, we argue that focusing on exactly ‘what is said’ provides an entry point into the knowledges that make it possible for something to be said and into the eruption of new possibilities. This focus displaces assumptions about an ‘interior’ self who constructs versions of the world, with a concern for the strategic relations – the politics – within which objects and subject positions are produced. The paper draws on interviews conducted during a study into women cycling to demonstrate our poststructuralist analytic strategy.
... Brady argues that such studies give the researcher 'greater insights into the multiplicity of power relations and practices within the present, as well as the actual processes through which subjectivities are formed' (Brady 2014, 12;also Teghtsoonian 2016). While traditional governmentality studies are interested in political rationalities and ambitions, a governmental ethnography asks how these rationalities are made practical, how they are interpreted, perceived, responded to and resisted in concrete programs, techniques and ways of working (Teghtsoonian 2016;Brady 2011;Brady 2014, 11-33;McKee 2009;Li 2007a). Kim McKee maintains that this perspective helps to avoid attributing a false 13 coherence to political rationalities and programs of governance, revealing instead their 'messiness', situatedness, struggles and multiple possible consequences' (McKee 2009, 478-479;also Brady 2011, 267;Fridman 2014, 94;Lippert and Brady 2016 15 seven projects, six invited the experts-by-experience to act in and through their own organizations, while one was focused on 'producing' experts-by-experience for the needs of other organizations in the social welfare sector. ...
This article investigates the micro-level practices of subject-construction in Finnish participatory social policy. Through a governmental ethnography on projects that invite former beneficiaries to become 'experts-by-experience' in social welfare organizations, I discern the possibilities for freedom in the participants' self-construction. By making use of Michel Foucault's conceptual tools of care of the self and confession, I illustrate how, contrary to the projects' emancipatory promise of providing the service users the freedom to reconstruct themselves, the projects entail practices that curb the participants' way of 'knowing themselves'. They require the service users to reframe their raw experiences as neutral and objective knowledge, making alternative ways of knowing appear 'irrational', and hence easily discountable. I conclude that despite the user involvement initiatives' promise of incorporating different forms of knowledge, the participants are in practice required to realign their way of knowing with the dominant knowledge paradigm in order to be accepted as participants.
... This transformation of work practices required extensive staff training, increased management supports to motivate staff, and input from the DWP (Riccio et al., 2008). Brady's (2011) Australian study with employees in JN 37 agencies delivering employment support programmes for lone parents concludes that many service providers acknowledge lone mothers as 'mothers' and have produced 'spaces' where they can discuss and wrestle with ways they can combine 'mothering work' and paid work. The JN agencies interpret activation as focusing on what claimants had to do as opposed to how new programmes could assist them, and employees viewed the welfareto-work message for clients as 'harsh, punitive and often scary'. ...
This research sought to discover those policies, programmes and practices which enable lone parents to engage in employment which will lead to adequate living standards and improved well-being for them and their children. This evidence is grounded in its application to the Irish context, by giving due consideration to the profile of Irish lone parents and the barriers to paid employment experienced by them as well as the relevance and applicability of such approaches to the Irish policy landscape.
... This civic republican view of politics also places a lot of emphasis on the notion of a public good, prior to and independent of individual desires and interests ( Van Gunsteren, 1998;Boyte, 2011). However, the policy discourse accompanying Dutch territorial governance laid claim to a strong political potential precisely because it did not bother residents with this, but instead urged them into a provoked sphere of citizenship where they could share their wishes and dreams for the neighbourhood in creative, informal ways and invited them to act upon these dreams together and invest in them both through "the habits of the heart" (Tocqueville, [1814] 2004) and also through small, informal acts of responsibility (see also Miraftab, 2006;Brady, 2011). ...
... As Peck (2010) and others have argued, one of the most remarkable characteristics of neoliberalism is its general variability and adaptability (see also brenner, leitner, Peck, & Sheppard, 2007;Ong & Collier, 2004). These theoretical insights often draw heavily on the empirical research of geographers, sociologists, and anthropologists engaged in ethnographic on-the-ground work around the globe (e.g., Atia, 2013;brady, 2011;li, 2007;lippert, 2005;Roy, 2012a). Actually, existing neoliberalism is shown by these studies to consist of often disconnected and contradictory practices, always indicating both historical forms of path dependence and geographical adaptation to local context. ...
In this chapter we unpack what being a parent means in the context of the neoliberal construction of parenting. We use Nikolas Rose’s conceptualisation of governmentality to understand how responsibilisation is central to the construction of the role of the parent in a neoliberal society. The chapter examines the broad and expanding expectations placed on parents. It demonstrates the responsibilisation of the parenting role by state institutions—using parental labour as a technology to achieve contemporary political rationalities embedded in neoliberal policies that have resulted in the massification of higher education. This responsibilisation creates an idealised version of parenting and renders ‘incompetent’ parents as failures in place of recognition of the impact of systemic failures and structural inequalities as root causes for divergent educational outcomes. This framework derives from our data analysis presented in the previous chapters. It provides a means of understanding the impact of responsibilisation and the technology of parenting on children’s educational outcomes and their career transitions beyond school and into higher education.KeywordsResponsibilisationFoucaultMassificationParental labourCare experience
This chapter establishes the foundation of parental engagement in the education system as it pertains to career development. By surveying the Australian and international literature it considers contributions that illuminate how parents have been drawn into the schooling system and transformed into having a stakeholder role; and it thus traces the process of responsibilisation of parents by the schooling system. The chapter reflects on the operations of obliged collaboration, which emotionally and operationally compel parents to become involved in the core operations of schooling, including by supporting the career decision-making of students. This chapter examines the broad and expanding expectations placed on parents and traces the long-term growth of responsibilisation of the parenting role by state institutions. This process has been accompanied by an increase in family engagement and a positioning of parents as consumers of education in schools. Increasingly, the gaps in the system are being compensated for by parents and this has become normalised, despite the fact that concerns about this have been sounded for over 50 years. We note the added demands of parental support in the school years, including significant amounts of pre-transition school support. Many assumptions relate to idealised notions of the ‘good parent’ and the demonising of the behaviours of some parents.KeywordsIdeal parentsSchoolCare experience
This article examines the changes in social security measures introduced by the Australian government during the first wave of Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020. These measures were basic income-like in that they became both more unconditional and adequate for a reasonable standard of living. This was achieved through a significant supplementary payment, suspension of mutual obligation requirements, and the relaxation of eligibility criteria on a range of unemployment-related payments. Through drawing on the results of an online survey, we examine the impacts of these measures and find that they significantly helped to alleviate poverty and improve wellbeing. These gains were not insignificant for the individuals involved, and offer empirical insights into studies of basic income. While seeing the Australian government embrace more generous and basic income-like measures, we also note that during Covid-19 gendered and class inequalities increased. This reminds us that basic income is never a silver bullet and, alongside implementing basic income payments, there also needs to be a concerted effort to restructure economic relations more generally.
As a way of managing the challenges posed by automation, relocation of production, and economic crises, the Western welfare states have sought to implement so called active societies fostering changeable and self-reliant citizens able to navigate flexible capitalism responsibly. Increasingly, this plays out at the local level. Under the banner of active inclusion, a sense of community is here thought to turn the unemployed and presumably excluded into active and productive citizens. Drawing on much-needed ethnographical observations from a local activation scheme situated in a former industrial community, this article highlights the difficulties of implementing the active society locally. Employing Boltanski and Thévenot’s ‘worlds of worth’ framework, it is shown how the management of the operations sought to balance the fostering of employable individuals with maintaining institutionalised community obligations. Ultimately, the article raises questions of the ideals inherent in the active society policy orientation, and what tensions it entails.
The Chinese government views the Olympic Games as a critical platform to present national pride on a global scale. Olympic education also has an important role to play for China, as it is a requirement for any Olympic host country. In the context or preparations for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, this original ethnographic research examines the governance of Olympic education, with a focus on how relationships between China's government and a range of stakeholders (e.g. private sectors, academics, and individual teachers) ‘worked’ to shape the implementation of Olympic education in two Beijing primary schools. Utilising Foucault's notion of governmentality, we demonstrate that Olympic education was a significant tactic for Chinese government to realise their ambition of the great rejuvenation of China. Here, the state employed two technologies of government: policy announcements and outsourcing. In tension with common assumptions about China – and Chinese education – being purely authoritarian, our research illuminates how hybrid socialist-neoliberal rationalities worked to shape Olympic education in schools.
This report examines how the Coronavirus Supplement and the temporary suspension of mutual obligations influenced the time use and wellbeing of people receiving social security payments in Australia.
Welfare conditionality where social security payments are conditional on recipients undertaking tasks such as training, submitting job applications and taking part in ‘work‐like’ activities, is an enduring punitive feature of contemporary welfare provision in global North economics. In Australia, welfare conditionality or mutual obligation as it is commonly referred to, is continually targeted at specific groups such as single women and First Nations women. Drawing on fifteen in‐depth interviews with women put on a mutual obligation program in Australia called ParentsNext, I examine the relationship between mutual obligation and the expropriation of women’s unpaid care work. I argue that welfare conditionality targeted at First Nations women and non First Nations women, reinforces and intensifies the expropriation of women’s unpaid care work, as well as settler colonial expropriation. The expropriation of women’s unpaid care work intensifies under ParentsNext in four notable ways – through punitive mutual obligation requirements, stigma, the privatisation of community services and assisting ongoing settler colonial expropriation.
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This paper is a critical reflection of a critical ethnography, a study focused on how ‘healthy lifestyle education’ programmes were implemented and experienced in two primary schools. In an attempt to disrupt the status quo I employed a range of ethnographic methods: ‘hanging out’ with children and adults; building trusting relationships; having research conversations with participants; observing children and adults; and, journaling. However, the messy assemblage of diverse organisations, people, relations of power, discourses, truths, and practices, resulted in the emergence of ethical and methodological conundrums, including how to represent children’s voices, whether (or not) to ‘intervene’ during problematic pedagogical moments, and how to ‘act’ as a critical ethnographic researcher in schools. Applying a critical lens to my own methodology helped to ensure that I embarked on a continuous, reflexive process; one that enabled a critique of research methods and a negotiation of issues of power, positionality, and privilege.
The social security fraud prosecution rate has fallen by approximately 74.9 per cent in Australia since 2010. This is remarkable considering the national dialogue continues to propound a ‘zero tolerance’ approach to fraud in the welfare system. Drawing on interviews with compliance staff from the Australian Department of Human Services, documentary research and a Foucauldian governmentality analytic, this article charts and interrogates the declining welfare fraud prosecution rate in the context of neoliberal welfare reform. It argues that this decline is at least partially the result of the reformulation of the objects of prosecution strategies by staff responsible for their enactment. This finding highlights the importance of localized accounts of welfare administration to supplement and complicate macro analyses of the ‘criminalization of welfare’ in Western industrialized nations.
Single parents are increasingly a target group for “activation” through new obligations to seek paid work or engage in education or training. Researchers commonly characterize new activation policies in terms of epochal shifts or unidirectional movements away from understanding single parents as “carers” or “mothers”. This characterization downplays the degree to which the postwar welfare state viewed single parents as potential workers and the degree to which contemporary reforms view them as carers. Based on historical research and drawing on Foucault’s concept of problematization and research on neoliberal governmentalities, pre-emptive politics and anticipatory modes of power, this article seeks to extend existing characterizations of activation policies for single parents.
This dissertation analyses expertise-by-experience in Finnish social welfare organisations as part of the participatory practices presented as new democracy. It employs a governmental ethnographic method to investigate how a person with difficult experiences is made into ‘an expert of one’s own life’ and how the subjectivity thus created is connected to different possibilities and rationales of participation. It asks: 1. What characterises the subjectivities created in the initiatives? 2. How (through which practices) are the participants constructed as experts? In this summary article the democratic quality of expert-making practices is interpreted through a critical democratic lens by inquiring: 3. How do the practices identified sustain or, conversely, undermine democracy? Conceptually, the research builds on a Foucauldian vocabulary by connecting processes of subjectivation with knowledge-claims as undergirding practices of governing. The data consist of ethnographic material produced in a civil society organisation, of themed interviews with experts-by-experience and practitioners from seven projects in Finnish social welfare organisations and of policy-documents delineating the concept and its related practices. The research argues that the initiatives studied primarily seek to construct collaborative and consensus-seeking participants. This is achieved by defining ‘expertise’ as the ability to present neutral and objective knowledge over specific issues despite one’s personal experiences. Participation is constructed as a distinctly a-political activity based on objectified knowledge. Collective advocacy, emotions and opinionated inputs are deemed unfitting. This configuration of expertise as a pre-requirement for the right to participate establishes epistemic thresholds for participation, making it possible to choose participants according to the projects’ predefined objectives. This is a cause for concern for democracy. Nonetheless, the research also suggests that the emphasis on expertise also renders the concept available for contestations and critique. The participants’ and practitioners’ attempts to destabilise the technocratic expert-construction illuminate the existing boundaries of expertise and serve to politicise the boundaries of inclusion in participatory governance. Still, the acts of resistance do not contest participatory governance’s underlying premise of joint knowledge production, which reaffirms that the value of participation lies in its epistemic contributions to decision-making.
Activation reforms targeted at single parents simultaneously construct them as a legitimate target for activation policy and subject them to new obligations to engage in paid work or education/training. The social policy literature has established that the work of ‘making-up’ target groups occurs at the street level as well as in government legislation. The street level has become even more significant in recent years as there has been a shift towards establishing quasi-markets for the delivery of welfare-to-work programmes and organising these around the principles of performance pay and process flexibility. However, what is largely missing from the existing literature is an analysis of how contract conditions, together with individuals' activation obligations, shape how they are targeted at the street level. Drawing on a study conducted over eight years with agencies in Australia's quasi-market for employment services, this paper argues that the changes to the contracts for governing this market changed how Australian single mothers were targeted by employment services. Over time there was a shift away from making-up single-parent clients as a distinct, vulnerable target group and a shift towards viewing them in terms of risk categories described within the agencies’ contracts.
This paper examines the recent phenomenon of social impact bonds (SIBs). Social impact bonds are an attempt to marketize/financialize certain contemporary, intractable “social problems”, such as homelessness and criminal recidivism. SIBs rely on a vast array of accounting technologies including budgets, future cash flows, discounting, performance measurement and auditing. As such, they represent a potentially powerful and problematic use of accounting to enact government policy. This paper contains a case study of the most recent in a series of SIBs, the London Homelessness SIB, focusing on St Mungo's, a London-based charitable foundation that was one of two service providers (charities) funded by the SIB. The case study is intended to enable a critical reflection on the rationalities that underpin the SIB. For this purpose, the paper draws upon Michel Foucault's work on biopolitics and neoliberalism. The SIB is thoroughly neoliberal in that it is constructed upon an assumption that there is no such thing as a social problem, only individuals who fail. The SIB transforms all participants in the bond, except perhaps the homeless themselves, into entrepreneurs. The homeless are instead “failed entrepreneurs” who become securitized into the potential future cash flows of investors.
In this article we first review what is generally believed to be the case regarding the relationship between unemployment and mental health. Since we believe the treatment in the dominant literature of both ‘unemployment’ and ‘mental health’ to be critically problematic, we then subject each domain to brief critical examination. We close by suggesting ways in which we need to progressively move forward in theory and practice.
This chapter aims to examine how Centrelink’s delivery of the Welfare to Work policy is illustrative of broader economic and social factors that create the conditions of account for the sole parent postgraduates in this research. Centrelink is the Australian government’s agency which delivers social security provisions and as such is an important and complex site of recognition for the sole parents who participated in this study. It is through Centrelink that the emergent Welfare to Work policies were implemented and all but two of the participants in this study were beholden to this agency and spoke of significant issues in dealing with this agency. These problems are connected with financial means and how sole parents negotiated being recognised by a government agency. This analysis also contributes to understandings of the ‘relationship between equality regimes (in post-welfare times) and continued societal inequalities’ (Taylor, 2013, p. 243), by considering social welfare policy and equitable access to higher education. These negotiated relationships are prescriptive and productive.
Neoliberal fiscal austerity policies decrease public expenditure through cuts to central and local government budgets, welfare services and benefits and privatisation of public resources resulting in job losses. This article interrogates the empirical, theoretical, methodological and ideological relationships between neoliberalism, unemployment and the discipline of psychology, arguing that neoliberalism constitutes rather than causes unemployment.
Thisexploratory study sought to assess the job satisfaction of employed Australian single mothers who had mandatory employment participation requirements. In particular,wesought to identify the characteristics of the job and the individual that were closely associated with participant's job satisfaction. Self-report data on job satisfaction,employmentcharacteristics and parenting stress were collected from 155 employed single mothers. Participant job satisfaction was compared to female Australian population norms and linear regression analyses determined the job-related and individual predictors of single mothers' job satisfaction. Findings from this exploratory study revealed that single mothers involved in a mandatory welfare-to-work program experienced significantly lower job satisfaction than the Australian female population. The individual variable,parentaldistress,negativelypredicted each of the six job satisfaction domains while being employed on a casual basis was inversely associated with three domains (job security,workhours and overall job satisfaction). The Australian government purported that making the transition from welfare to work would improve wellbeing for program participants,under the assumption that 'any job's a good job'. However,therelatively low levels of job satisfaction experienced by single mothers in the current study provide little support for this assumption.
In this article I present a comparative consideration of two conceptual frameworks that have informed critical research by policy-interested scholars: institutional ethnography and governmentality. I argue that these two approaches to research are similar in important respects: both focus on the analysis of linkages between everyday practices and the ruling/governing programs and strategies that aspire to shape these; both accord a central place to the operation and effects of discourse/discursive practices – particularly texts – in their accounts of how these linkages are forged. I also discuss several differences that distinguish them, including their diverse assessment of the value and effects of mobilizing research for social justice oriented ends. In closing, I consider the possibilities for analysis and action that may be opened up or, alternatively, narrowed or closed down by research conducted using each of these frameworks, and suggest the value of ongoing reflexive dialogue between them. © 2015 Institute of Local Government Studies, University of Birmingham
This article examines Michel Foucault's critical investigation of neoli-beralism in the course published as Naissance de la biopolitique: Cours au Collège de France, 1978-1979. Foucault's lectures are interrogated along two axes. First, ex-amining the way in which neoliberalism can be viewed as a particular production of subjectivity, as a way in which individuals are constituted as subjects of "human capital." Secondly, Foucault's analyses is augmented and critically examined in light of other critical work on neoliberalism by Wendy Brown, David Harvey, Christian Laval, Maurizo Lazzarato, and Antonio Negri. Of these various debates and discus-sions, the paper argues that the discussion of real subsumption in Marx and Negri is most important for understanding the specific politics of neoliberalism. Finally, the paper argues that neoliberalism entails a fundamental reexamination of the tools of critical thought, an examination of how freedom can constitute a form of subjection.
In this paper I argue that increasingly neoliberal forms of governmentality are evident in the educational sector of the European Commission. This is especially the case vis-a-vis the institutional philosophy of how immigrants and second-generation 'nurionties' should be best integrated into European society. Both the policies and the programs associated with education and training are becoming more oriented towards the formation of mobile, flexible, and self-governing European laborers and less oriented towards an institutionalized affirmation of personal development and individual or group 'difference'. This represents a fairly substantive philosophical and practical transformation over the past five to ten years. with significant implications for conceptions of European citizenship, multiculturalism, and social belonging.
Educational guidance is often seen as something good and empowering for the individual. In the present article, such taken-for-granted ideas will be destabilised by analysing educational guidance as a practice in which confession operates as a technology that fosters and governs specific subjectivities. White papers produced by the Swedish Ministry of Education will be analysed drawing on Foucault's concepts of technologies of the self and governmentality. I shall argue that the practice of educational guidance fosters our will to learn through the technology of confession. We are not only confessing ourselves to, and are the confessors of others, we are also our own confessors; that is, we confess our inner desires to ourselves, thus participating in shaping desirable subjectivities. Our desires in life coincide with the political ambition to govern, and thus we govern ourselves.
The growth of the goernmentality literature represents a significant development in current social teory. However, certain prominent and interlinked tendencies, which are associated with the place of politics as a subject and object of theoretical work, are queried. Most especially the concerns are with: the rejection of critique as part of the work of social theory; the rendering of government programmes as univocal and as overly coherent and systematic; and the foucs on politics as “mentalities of rule” to the virutal exclusion of understanding politics as social relations. The paper explores some of these difficulties which are here seen as presending problems for the future devlopement of governmentality research and theory. Without aiming to systematize the literature, nevertheless the paper suggests that the time is overdue for central issues in the literature of govermentality to become the subject of more open and vigoruous debate.
This paper falls into two parts. The first contributes to the development of concepts necessary to understand questions of ‘self-formation’, particularly in relation to domains of government. The second seeksto work these concepts within a casestudy of what it calls ‘governmental-ethical practices’. The case-study consists of an examination of the recent reform of social security and income support practices concerning the unemployed in Australia and the utilization of the language, rationality and techniques that have been elaborated under the rubric of the ‘active society’ by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. It offers an analysis of these governmental-ethical practices of the unemployed in terms of what they seek to govern, the means by which they propose to do so, their forms of subjectification, and the mode of existence they envision. It suggests that the analysis of these practices challenges and forces us to refine our approach to the formulae of neoliberal or advanced liberal government.
Policy ethnography approaches provide useful qualitative data that give a nuanced and realistic ground-level view of policies too often analyzed abstractly from the top. However, the scope of these approaches must not be limited to producing more precise information. Fieldwork on the control of welfare recipients in France shows that ethnography, and more specifically direct observation, is particularly suited to uncovering the structural features of the new wave of public policies sweeping through advanced societies in the wake of the demise of the Fordist–Keynesian compact. Among other consequences, the ‘de-objectivation’ of the collective categories created during the process of welfare state development leads to more stringent and intense controls of recipients. These controls are based on loose criteria defined in situated practices and interactions. The ethnographic capture and analysis of the concrete practices of agents of welfare bureaucracies enable us to track and critique the more abstract transformations of the social state in the age of ‘workfare.’ Such fieldwork provides an illustration of the empirical and theoretical potentials of critical policy ethnography.
Australia recently enacted welfare-to-work reforms for sole parents, the partially disabled and the long-term unemployed. At the same time, it enacted labour law reforms which dismantled labour law award protections in favour of 'individual bargaining'. This paper argues that the combined effect of these reforms not only brings about closer integration between social security and labour law, but also increases the 'disciplinary' controls over the lives of welfare clients, while also degrading the conditions of the most vulnerable welfare clients, whether they are in work (on reduced employment conditions) or on welfare (on less generous benefits.
Over the last decade, Australian social security for people of workforce age has incorporated, in an unduly purist form, neoliberal concepts of contested markets for labourmarket services, individualisation of responsibility/risk for remaining on welfare, a 'job first' approach to exiting from welfare, and the combined pressure of deregulation of the labourmarket and welfare sanctions for breach of 'mutual obligations' to pressure people to return to work. This paper argues that such one-dimensional approaches have added to the economic disincentives for workforce participation, bear harshly on vulnerable populations such as sole parents and the disabled, have a poor record of generating lasting labourforce participation, and are ethically problematic on the basis of a return to 'blaming the victim'. Despite shortcomings of the 'capacity' literature, it is argued that the state owes a moral obligation to develop the human capital of welfare clients, in ways respectful both of their dignity and their rights, consistent with a social citizenship model.
This review surveys the development of Michel Foucault's analysis of political power in terms of governmentality and outlines its key characteristics. It examines the spread of this perspective, focusing in particular on how this genealogical approach to the analysis of the conduct of each and of all has been taken up and developed in the English-speaking world. It evaluates some of the key criticisms that have been made of the analytics of governmentality and argues for the continuing productivity and creativity of these ways of analyzing the emergence, nature, and consequences of the arts of government.
Promoted as the key policy response to unemployment, the Job Network constitutes an array of interlocking processes that position unemployed people as `problems' in need of remediation. Unemployment is presented as a primary risk threatening society, and unemployed people are presented as displaying various degrees of riskiness. The Job Seeker Classification Instrument (JSCI) is a `technology' employed by Centrelink to assess `risk' and to determine the type of interaction that unemployed people have with the job Network. In the first instance, we critically examine the development of the JSCI and expose issues that erode its credibility and legitimacy. Second, employing the analytical tools of discourse analysis, we show how the JSCI both assumes and imposes particular subject identities on unemployed people. The purpose of this latter analysis is to illustrate the consequences of the sorts of technologies and interventions used within the job Network.
The article, having characterised present European work-welfare policies in terms of a process of re-commodification, considers the consequences both from a capabilities and a rights perspective. Drawing on recent empirical research it seeks to bring these two perspectives together in order to illustrate an alternative ‘life-first’ approach to work-welfare policy, an approach that would reach beyond both work-first and human capital approaches and expand the possibilities presented by the policy concept of ‘work-life balance’.
A significant feature of the organisation of public affairs in the 1990s in liberal welfare states has been a rebirth of contractualism. In Australia, the provision of social security and employment assistance to unemployed people has been characterised by an incremental shift away from entitlement as a right once certain preordained eligibility requirements are met. Instead, payments are becoming more dependent on compliance with individualised quasi-contractual agreements between the unemployed person and the relevant agency. Moves to create a competitive market in employment services also make it increasingly likely that this agency will not be a public body, but a private or non-governmental provider which itself operates in a contractual relationship with the state and in competition with other providers. The paper examines the nexus between the contracting-out of services for the unemployed and the quasi-contractual relationships being established with individual job seekers. It considers whether through this process we are seeing new relations of welfare developing which could be shifting Australian social security towards some different model. Supporters of the 'new contractualism' suggest that individual contract status could offer advantages compared to previous forms of paternalistic collectivism. The paper argues that job seekers are in a weak position to assert such status in the quasi-contratcual employment assistance regime, and that there will be a need for greater attention to securing clients' rights if the positive aspects of case management and public/private complementarity are to be retained.
While joblessness is by no means a phenomenon specific to this century, the concept of 'unemployment' is. This book follows the invention and transformation of unemployment, understood as a historically specific site of regulation. Taking key aspects of the history of unemployment in Britain as its focus, it argues that the ways in which authorities have defined and sought to manage the jobless have been remarkably varied. In tracing some of the different constructions of unemployment over the last 100 years - as a problem of 'character', as a social 'risk', or today, as a problem of 'skills' - the study highlights the discursive dimension of social and economic policy problems. The book examines such institutionalized practices as the labour bureau, unemployment insurance, and the 'New Deal' as 'technologies' of power. The result is a challenge to our thinking about welfare states.
This chapter serves as a report on the findings of an ethnographic study about the street-level experiences of welfare reform in Centrelink, which is a national benefits agency in Australia. These findings show that there is more incoherence and contradiction within welfare reform than is being suggested by the linear neo-liberal accounts of the process. The discussion focuses on three important aspects of Australian welfare reform, namely: policy concerning sanctions, the delivery of a personalised ‘One-to-One Service’, and the changing role of ‘risk management’ techniques. The chapter concludes with a review of the implications of the findings for the theories of welfare governance.
A similar trend is apparent in Australian and Canadian programs to enhance work incentives and program effectiveness, but the Canadian provinces are increasingly insisting that low-income mothers with school-age children enter the workforce rather than accept social benefits to care for their children at home. There is no Canadian counterpart to the Sole Parent Pension or Parenting Allowance, although the provinces pay higher rates of social assistance to needy families than to individuals. Furthermore, there is little public support for the idea that low-income mothers should care for school-aged children at horne at the taxpayer's expense. This paper discusses the similarities and differences in rhetoric and policies for low-income mothers, and seeks reasons for the stronger social support for mothering at home in Australia. Although the current discourse of economic rationalism suggests that enhancing work incentives and 'employability' Mill bring prosperity, this paper illustrates that neither paying mothers to care for their children at home nor pushing them into the workforce has reduced family poverty. To make employability programs more effective, governments need to deal with low female wages, the shortage and high cost of child care, and the lack of full-time permanent jobs.
This paper(1) argues that the JET Scheme, a jobs, education and training scheme for sole parent pensioners, is limited and insufficient to its tasks of preparing sole parents for entry into the workforce and minimising the stare's financial burden. It argues that JET training programmes ascribe and regulate female identity and maintain the gendered subjugation of sole mothers, confirming rather than decreasing their dependence on welfare. The representation and language used to promote JET position sole mothers within a functionalist discourse of motherhood and the nuclear family The paper explores the ramifications of such positioning for the women's prospects for entry into full rime employment. It concludes that JET does not meet its goal of lessening the long term welfare burden of the state. Equally, policy which promotes low paid part rime work, combined with partial pension, may serve to entrench the very cycle of dependence it seeks to dismantle.
Against the prevailing interpretations which disqualify a Foucauldian approach from the discourse of freedom, this study offers a novel concept of political freedom and posits freedom as the primary axiological motif of Foucault's writing. Based on a new interpretation of the relation of Foucault's approach to the problematic of sovereignty, Sergei Prozorov both reconstructs ontology of freedom in Foucault's textual corpus and outlines the modalities of its practice in the contemporary terrain of global governance. The book critically engages with the acclaimed post-Foucauldian theories of Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri, thereby restoring the controversial notion of the sovereign subject to the critical discourse on global politics. As a study in political thought, this book will be suitable for students and scholars interested in the problematic of political freedom, philosophy and global governance.
Work/family reconciliation policies can be harnessed to diverse political agendas, ranging from feminist-inspired equality strategies to coercive, neo-liberal programs. In Australia, such policies have served a range of ends under different governments. This article focuses on developments since 1996 when the conservative coalition parties led by John Howard were elected to government. It explores three policy domains that are central to Australia's work/family agenda: family payments, maternity/parental leave, and child care. Changes in these areas are situated in the context of the government's broader strategies concerning labor market flexibility, tax reform, and declining fertility. The article argues that there has been a substantial retreat from the "femocrat" strategies adopted under Labor in the 1980s and early 1990s. The general thrust of the Howard government has been to discourage labor force participation of mothers of young children, with the important exception of sole parents. In a number of areas policies are inconsistent, reflecting the government's ambivalence about whether to support women as home-based carers, wage earners, or both.
n recent years, the labour force participation rate of sole parents has been of growing concern in Australia and in some overseas countries. Wilson, Pech and Bates (1999:4), for example, showed that the labour force participation rates of sole parent mothers remained about 10 per cent lower than those of partnered mothers during the 1990s. While their analysis suggested a marginal increase in the labour force participation rates of both groups during the 1990s, it is clear that the pronounced increases in female labour force participation rates have been due primarily to growing participation by women without children. The labour force participation rates of sole parent fathers, while higher than for sole parent or partnered mothers, are still well below those of partnered fathers. The creation of new longitudinal datasets has challenged the perception of mobility among the sole parent pensioner population. For example, Barrett (2001) analysed four years of longitudinal data and found that 18 per cent of recipients were 'short-term' and received Parenting Payment Single (PPS) for six months or less; 15 per cent remained on the program for the entire four years and 25 per cent experienced multiple episodes of Parenting Payment Single receipt, thus cycling on and off the program. Using similar data, Gregory and Klug (2003:21) found that, while it was difficult to be precise, 'the average cumulative use of income support over the period for which parents have dependent children may be as much as 12 years'. They found that sole parents frequently cycle through different income support payments, moving from PPS to Parenting Payment Partnered and back again. This has raised concerns that the current structure of Parenting Payment Single may be a 'tender trap', promoting long-term dependence on welfare and discouraging active participation in the labour market and the community (Saunders and Tsumori, 2003). Low labour force participation has adverse consequences both during the prime age years and later in life during retirement. Research by NATSEM and AMP, for example, has shown that the savings of many baby boomers are not sufficient to finance a comfortable retirement. The problem is particularly acute for baby boomer women and sole parents (Kelly and Harding, 2002; Kelly, Percival and Harding, 2002; Kelly, Farbotko and Harding, 2004). As a result, in Australia and New Zealand, 'the direction of policy has moved towards promoting self-reliance through paid work' (Goodger and Larose,
Work/family reconciliation policies can be harnessed to diverse political agendas, ranging from feminist-inspired equality strategies to coercive, neo-liberal programs. In Australia, such policies have served a range of ends under different governments. This article focuses on developments since 1996 when the conservative coalition parties led by John Howard were elected to government. It explores three policy domains that are central to Australia's work/family agenda: family payments, maternity/parental leave, and child care. Changes in these areas are situated in the context of the government's broader strategies concerning labor market flexibility, tax reform, and declining fertility. The article argues that there has been a substantial retreat from the “femocrat” strategies adopted under Labor in the 1980s and early 1990s. The general thrust of the Howard government has been to discourage labor force participation of mothers of young children, with the important exception of sole parents. In a number of areas policies are inconsistent, reflecting the government's ambivalence about whether to support women as home-based carers, wage earners, or both.
Governmental interventions that set out to improve the world are assembled from diverse elements - discourses, institutions, forms of expertise and social groups whose deficiencies need to be corrected, among others. In this article I advance an analytic that focuses on practices of assemblage - the on-going labour of bringing disparate elements together and forging connections between them. I identify six practices that are generic to any assemblage, whatever its specific contours: 1) forging alignments, 2) rendering technical, 3) authorizing knowledge, 4) managing failures, 5) anti-politics, and 6) reassembling. I demonstrate the power of this analytic through an extended study of community forest management. This is an assemblage that brings together an array of agents (villagers, labourers, entrepreneurs, officials, activists, aid donors, scientists) and objectives (profit, pay, livelihoods, control, property, efficiency, sustainability, conservation). Its very unwieldiness helps to sharpen analysis of how such an assemblage is, in fact, assembled, and how it has been sustained for more than thirty years, absorbing hundreds of millions of dollars in programmes from the west coast of Canada to the eastern islands of Indonesia. I do not attempt to adjudicate the rights and wrongs of this assemblage. Rather, I deploy an analytic of assemblage to explore the practices that fill the gap between the will to govern and the refractory processes that make government so difficult.
Purpose – To understand practices of inscription and description used by the US Government in the production of discourse concerning the war in Iraq as part of the post 9/11 War on Terror and as part of a neo-liberal project of governance. Design/methodology/approach – Using an analytics of governmentality, this paper interrogates US government discourse on the war in Iraq, focusing on a series of Department of Defense documents entitled Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq (MSSI). Findings – Through the use of New Public Management techniques, the MSSI reports render the war in Iraq in depoliticized, decontextualized, apolitical and amoral terms. Such a rendering does an unacceptable violence to the experiences of those living in the war zone and to the complex context of US military involvement in Iraq. Originality/value – Neo-liberal regimes of knowledge and practice are ubiquitous, perhaps even hegemonic. This analysis disturbs the neat logic of neo-liberalism and seeks to reinsert the troubling bodies, both political and material, which such a logic obviates. In so doing, it problematizes both the deployment of neo-liberal regimes of knowledge production and critics’ easy dismissal of the War on Terror as an evanescent discursive construction.
Privatisation is a more adventitious process than often understood. This paper identifies distinctive governmental practices in the UK and New Zealand. In the UK privatisation was associated with a political campaign for a 'shareholding democracy', whereas in New Zealand privatisation was conducted in the name of the taxpayer. The UK campaign to popularise shareholding connects with the reconstruction of the field of social security around personal finance and private insurance. In New Zealand privatisation was linked to attempts to promote national well-being through economic internationalisation. These differences suggest the need for a more variegated understanding of neoliberalism.
This paper examines policy and maternal accounts of parenting in light of New Labour's reforms aimed at reducing social exclusion among lone parent families in the UK. Drawing on documentary policy sources and in‐depth interviews with welfare reliant and employed lone mothers, the paper highlights convergence and divergence between policy and maternal accounts. While policy and maternal perspectives demonstrate a shared concern with good mothering, differences emerge in how responsibilities and needs are defined, prioritised and resourced. New Labour's welfare reforms stress parental responsibilities for labour market participation, children's educational development and children's social behaviour; with parents who do not prioritise these activities deemed problematic. However, mothers’ accounts demonstrate a much more complex understanding of the risks as well as opportunities associated with paid work, education and behavioural control. Mothers negotiated concerns about mothering practices, maternal authority, children's agency, family well‐being and access to resources which are downplayed in national policy debates. The conclusion argues that New Labour policy discourses neglect issues of well‐being, diversity and inequality which, if more fully recognised, could enhance anti‐poverty and family support measures aimed at mothers.
The broad contours of the move from the old to the new welfare are well
established but the changes in social theory which bear on this have been
relatively neglected. Also neglected are the links between these theoretical
positions and contemporaneous shifts in economic thought. Drawing
on the works of Titmuss, Marshall, Putnam and Etzioni, this paper traces
how understandings of social cohesion, social provision, responsibility
and obligation have shifted over time. It then indicates the relationship
between these constructions and parallel developments in economic
theory. Here attention is drawn to a fundamental ideological tension
between communitarian and neo-classical accounts. It is argued that
governments attempt to resolve this tension by projecting notions of
moral disintegration onto welfare claimants. Alternatives to the new
welfare are canvassed in the final section of the paper.
Based on Michel Foucault's 1978 and 1979 lectures at the College de France on governmental rationalities and his 1977 interview regarding his work on imprisonment, this volume is the long-awaited sequel to Power/Knowledge. In these lectures, Foucault examines the art or activity of government both in its present form and within a historical perspective as well as the different ways governmentality has been made thinkable and practicable. Foucault's thoughts on political discourse and governmentality are supplemented by the essays of internationally renowned scholars. United by the common influence of Foucault's approach, they explore the many modern manifestations of government: the reason of state, police, liberalism, security, social economy, insurance, solidarity, welfare, risk management, and more. The central theme is that the object and the activity of government are not instinctive and natural things, but things that have been invented and learned. The Foucault Effect analyzes the thought behind practices of government and argues that criticism represents a true force for change in attitudes and actions, and that extending the limits of some practices allows the invention of others. This unique and extraordinarily useful collection of articles and primary materials will open the way for a whole new set of discussions of the work of Michel Foucault as well as the status of liberalism, social policy, and insurance.--Publisher description.
This paper examines the implications of welfare reform for the meaning of social citizenship in Australia. Australian welfare reform has been under way since the late 1980s, and reflects the themes of activity and participation that are shaping social policy in many advanced industrial nations. The paper suggests that Australian welfare reform is following a liberal trajectory of change which places a continuing emphasis on market and family as the preferred institutions for social support with a newly salient appeal to moral ideas about the responsibility of citizens to be self-sustaining. The paper argues that welfare is being transformed from a limited social right to support provided on condition, and from treating the claimant as a sovereign individual to a subject of paternalistic supervision. Together, these changes are redefining the meaning of equality in Australian social citizenship.
This paper addresses the emergence of microcredit programmes as a preferred strat-egy for poverty alleviation world-wide. Taking the paradigmatic case of Nepal, it engages a genealogical approach to trace how Nepalese planners' enduring concerns about rural development intersect in surprising (and gendered) ways with donors' present focus on deepening nancial markets. In the resulting microcredit model, the onus for rural lending is devolved from commercial banks to subsidized 'rural development banks' and women borrowers become the target of an aggressive 'self-help' approach to development. As a governmental strategy, microcredit thus consti-tutes social citizenship and women's needs in a manner consistent with neoliberalism. Drawing on ethnographic research, the paper also considers the progressive and regressive possibilities in the articulation of such constructed subjectivities with local cultural ideologies and social processes. Such an investigation can in turn provide a foundation for articulating a more normative agenda for development studies – grounded in the perspectives of those in subordinate social locations.
This paper examines the radical sectoral shift effected by the Government's 2005/6 welfare-to-work reforms. For the affected group - sole parents (and parenting payment partnered recipients), the partially disabled, and the long-term unemployed - these reforms will be shown to have transformed 'social security policy' into a form of 'labour policy' (or more accurately 'labour-market policy'). They also alter the lines of responsibility for, and the content of welfare for these groups, other than those in 'protected' categories (such as disabled people unable to work for more than 15 hours) or those covered by the temporary 'transitional' measures (such as people in receipt of payments when the reforms were announced). It is suggested that for most people of workforce age (including transitional categories), social security is now effectively an individual-responsibility-gateway into labourmarket exposure (or delayed exposure in the case of transitional Parenting Payment recipients). For these groups, the primary role of social security payments is to impose a set of conditions (backed by a strong compliance regime) which serves to oblige people to accept any job, of almost any duration or terms, which the labourmarket generates.It is argued that genuine welfare reform requires that attention return to the social rights of welfare recipients (their 'social rights of citizenship') and the community's reciprocal social responsibilities to ensure that collective state (or governmental) action is taken to ameliorate the risks of participating in an (increasingly deregulated) labour market.
Using administrative records on Australian income support (welfare) recipients over the period July 1995 to June 2002, we examine dynamic properties of income support receipt and the personal characteristics associated with alternative patterns of receipt. We draw on three concepts: churning–the process of ending a spell on income support and subsequently commencing a new spell; transferring–moving from one payment type to another within a spell on income support; and Total Time On payments (TTO)–the proportion of time on income support in a given period. We find that churning and transferring are significant features of income support receipt in Australia. For example, over half of recipients churn within five years of commencing an income support spell, and one-fifth make a payment transfer within the same time frame. Examination of the characteristics associated with each of five distinct patterns of receipt reveals substantial differences in patterns by age, family composition, unemployment status, health status, and recent history of income support receipt.
This article explores how having children impacted upon (a) paid work, domestic work and childcare (total workload) and (b) the gender division of labour in Australia over a I 5-year period during which government changed from the progressive Labor Party to the socially conservative National/Liberal Party Coalition. It describes changes and continuity in government policies and rhetoric about work family and gender issues and trends in workforce participation. Data from three successive nationally representative Time Use Surveys (1992, 1997 and 2006), N=3846, are analysed. The difference between parents' and non-parents' total workload grew substantially under both governments, especially for women. In households with children there was a nascent trend to gender convergence in paid and unpaid work under Labor, which reversed under the Coalition.
This paper reports the preliminary results of a randomised social experiment conducted by the Department of Family and Community Services involving approximately 5,000 Parenting Payment customers. Three samples of Parenting Payment customers were randomly selected. One sample was asked to voluntarily undergo an interview with a Jobs, Education, and training (JET) adviser, another was compelled to undergo an interview, while the control sample received no information about JET interviews at all. Our results indicate that a widespread policy of compelling individuals to participate in JET interviews affects both the level of participation and the characteristics of those who participate. On the whole, however, there is little evidence that individual responses to the interview differ significantly between those who voluntarily and those who are compelled to attend. Finally, differences in local labour market conditions or perhaps JET advisors themselves appear to play a role in influencing policy outcomes.
Case management has become a key technology in governing the problem of unemployment in western countries such as Britain, the United States and Australia. In this paper we argue that case management represents a radical localization of governance wherein the rights and responsibilities between unemployed people and the state are articulated primarily in the relationship between the case manager and his or her client. This paper reports on a study undertaken in Australia’s Job Network system of employment services. Using a governmental analysis we show how the case management relationship is experienced by case managers and long-term unemployed people in a sample of nonprofit and for-profit Job Network agencies in two states of Australia. The research reveals the micro relations of power and authority that are invoked in the everyday politics of welfare reform. We argue that engaging in policy research at a local level of analysis acts as a necessary balance to more macro welfare state comparisons. Working within a ‘street-level’ approach illuminates how workfare policies and programmes are aligning social relations and identities with new welfare ends and means.
This paper sets out an approach to the analysis of political power in terms of problematics of government. It argues against an overvaluation of the 'problem of the State' in political debate and social theory. A number of conceptual tools are suggested for the analysis of the many and varied alliances between political and other authorities that seek to govern economic activity, social life and individual conduct. Modern political rationalities and governmental technologies are shown to be intrinsically linked to developments in knowledge and to the powers of expertise. The characteristics of liberal problematics of government are investigated, and it is argued that they are dependent upon technologies for 'governing at a distance', seeking to create locales, entities and persons able to operate a regulated autonomy. The analysis is exemplified through an investigation of welfarism as a mode of 'social' government. The paper concludes with a brief consideration of neo-liberalism which demonstrates that the analytical language structured by the philosophical opposition of state and civil society is unable to comprehend contemporary transformations in modes of exercise of political power.(1).
Unemployment policy is currently informed by notions of labour force flexibility, workfare and mutual obligation. Things have not always been this way. Over this century there have been profound shifts in the way in which unemployment and government responsibilities have been conceptualized. Using the notion of ‘welfare rationalities’ to guide the discussion, this paper records the nature of these changes. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which economic objectives intersect with the social and moral-behavioural components of unemployment programmes. The changing nature of these factors is traced through three distinct welfare rationalities surrounding un/employment: relief, full employment and mutual obligation.
Targeting is increasingly used to manage people. It operates by segmenting populations and providing different levels of opportunities and services to these groups. Each group is subject to different levels of surveillance and scrutiny. This article examines the deployment of targeting in Australian social security. Three case studies of targeting are presented in Australia's management of benefit overpayment and fraud, the distribution of employment services and the application of workfare. In conceptualizing surveillance as governance, the analysis examines the rationalities, technologies and practices that make targeting thinkable, practicable and achievable. In the case studies, targeting is variously conceptualized and justified by calculative risk discourses, moral discourses of obligation and notions of welfare dependency Advanced information technologies are also seen as particularly important in giving rise to the capacity to think about and act on population segments.
Estudio que analiza desde los presupuestos de la etnografía y la socioeconomía, la identidad cultural, los programas de inversión de ayuda internacional y las políticas económicas que se han implementado en Indonesia con el fin de mejorar las condiciones de vida de sus pobladores y sus espacios territoriales.
Powers of Freedom, first published in 1999, offers a compelling approach to the analysis of political power which extends Foucault's hypotheses on governmentality in challenging ways. Nikolas Rose sets out the key characteristics of this approach to political power and analyses the government of conduct. He analyses the role of expertise, the politics of numbers, technologies of economic management and the political uses of space. He illuminates the relation of this approach to contemporary theories of 'risk society' and 'the sociology of governance'. He argues that freedom is not the opposite of government but one of its key inventions and most significant resources. He also seeks some rapprochement between analyses of government and the concerns of critical sociology, cultural studies and Marxism, to establish a basis for the critique of power and its exercise. The book will be of interest to students and scholars in political theory, sociology, social policy and cultural studies.
The aim of this paper is to analyse the work incentive effects of a change in the Australian tax and transfer system on lone parents in July 2000. To evaluate the effect of the total change only, microsimulation can be used; but for a subgroup of lone parents, a few components of this policy change can be analysed through two alternative approaches - microsimulation and quasi-experimental evaluation. Both approaches examine the effects on the probability of employment and on average working hours. The results from microsimulation show that the combined changes introduced in July 2000 - involving reduced withdrawl rates, changed family payments and lower income tax rates - have increased labour supply for lone parents to a moderate extent. The estimated effect on average working hours when using microsimulation is very close to the effect estimated in a quasi-experimental approach using matching techniques to control for alternative influences. Copyright (c) 2008 The Authors Journal compilation (c) Institute for Fiscal Studies, 2008.
High welfare withdrawal rates generate high effective marginal tax rates and work disincentives; but reducing withdrawal rates extends welfare to the better-off. We analyse pension taper reduction effects for lone mothers subject to the Australian tax and welfare reforms of July 2000. The changes in work incentives were trivial. Taper reductions extended income support and provided larger family payments to high income lone mothers previously excluded from welfare. Approximately 90 per cent of the better-off group now made eligible for income support had a long history of welfare reliance. The taper reduction encouraged them to stay on welfare longer. Copyright © 2008 The Economic Society of Australia.
The length of time families spent on the Sole Parent Pension (SPP) is analysed using the FaCS Longitudinal Data Set covering the period from June 1995 to June 1999. It is found that lone mothers, relatively younger and older lone parents, and those with younger children had lower exit rates from SPP. There is significant regional variation in the SPP exit rate, and there is evidence this is related to the implicit subsidy of public housing. Lone parents with greater job attachment had substantially shorter stays on SPP. Program payment levels had a relatively small effect on the length of time on SPP. Copyright 2002 by The Economic Society of Australia.
Welfare reform in Australia centres on both economic and social participation. The policy concern is that people who fail to participate in economic and social life may become entrenched in disadvantage. In 2000-2001, a randomised trial was conducted by the Department of Family and Community Services to assess whether an intensive interview with follow-ups would result in increased participation for long-term recipients of income support. Participation in the trial led to a reduction in average hours worked, but increased hours spent in study or training. We find evidence of increased social integration associated with participation in the trial. Copyright 2003. The Economic Society of Australia..
This paper derives and estimates an econometric model of labour supply among sole parents in Australia, using modelling techniques which treat the labour supply decision as a utility maximising choice between a given number of discrete states. The model is then used to look at the likely effects of actual and hypothetical welfare policy reforms. Model estimates are based upon net incomes generated by the Melbourne Institute Tax and Transfer Simulator (MITTS), developed at the Melbourne Institute in collaboration with the Department of Family and Community Services (FaCS). Copyright 2002 by The Economic Society of Australia.