Risk, Power and the State

After Foucault

Magnus Hörnqvist

• Publisher: Routledge-Cavendish
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135154394
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Derecho
• Subtopic: Teoría y práctica del derecho

Risk, Power and the State addresses how power is exercised in and by contemporary state organisations. Through a detailed analysis of programmatic attempts to shape behaviour linked to considerations of risk, this book pursues the argument that, whilst Foucault is useful for understanding power, the Foucauldian tradition – with its strands of discourse analysis, of governmentality studies, or of radical Deleuzian critique – suffers from a lack of clarification on key conceptual issues. Oriented around four case studies, the architecture of the book devolves upon the distinction between productive and repressive power. The first two studies focus on productive power: the management of long-term unemployment in the public employment service and cognitive-behavioural interventions in the prison service. Two further studies concern repressive interventions: the conditions of incarceration in the prison service and the activity of the customs service. These studies reveal that power, as conceptualised within the Foucauldian tradition, must be modified. A more complex notion of productive power is needed, which covers interventions that appeal to desires, and which govern both at a distance and at close range. Additionally, the simplistic paradigm of repressive power is called into question by the need to consider the organising role of norms and techniques that circumvent agency. Finally, it is argued, Foucault's concept of strategies – which accounts for the thick web of administrative directives, organisational routines, and techniques that simultaneously shape the behaviour of targeted individuals and members of the organisation – requires an organisational dimension that is often neglected in the Foucauldian tradition.

Chapter 1
Activation guaranteed

Individualizing the pressure to perform

During the 1990s, the obligation to work was extended into the duty to become employable. In Sweden, as in most other Western countries, governments would impose a strict regime of work-related requirements. The dual approach to simultaneously coerce and train individuals into wage labour came to be known as ‘activation’ (Gilbert and van Voorhis 2001; Lødemel and Trickey 2001; Goul Andersen and Jensen 2002; Hemerijck 2002). In Sweden, the assumption that everyone could and should be made employable was spelled out most explicitly in the ‘activity guarantee’ launched in 2000. Everyone who is, or is at risk of becoming, a long-term enrollee in the public employment service may be referred to individually designed labour market policy activities corresponding to full time activity. Participation is mandatory. For the duration of this open-ended intervention, the enrolled individual will circulate through a variety of training programmes and activation measures, which have a common focus on basic employability, including presentational skills.

The activity guarantee and similar schemes are usually contrasted against passive labour market policies, which entitle those who are unemployed to income provision without requiring any activity in return (van Berkel and Hornemann Møller 2002a). The overtly coercive nature is also stressed in the literature (Lødemel and Trickey 2001; Giertz 2004). In that sense, however, the activity guarantee was nothing fundamentally new. In a Swedish context, ‘activation’ had been official government policy since the 1920s (Junestav 2004). The emphasis on work-related activities, in order to be entitled to unemployment benefits or social assistance, was prominent from the very beginning (L. Eriksson 2004). By comparison with other countries, Sweden distinguished herself through the combination of a strict obligation to work and high levels of unemployment benefits. In a study from the late 1990s, Sweden was found to have both the highest level of compensation and the toughest legal requirements among a sample of 15 Western countries (ARM 1999: 154–55). The strict requirements to accept employment were not always enforced. During the period of the classical welfare state, ‘these demands have been generously interpreted and the unemployed have usually had the possibility of rejecting the offered position or programme’ (Johansson 2001: 66). In addition to a lenient interpretation of the requirement to accept work, some groups were exempted from these requirements altogether. For instance, ‘the ambition to make use of the residual work capacity of people on social insurance benefits was extremely low’ (Lindqvist and Marklund 1995: 231). This was to change in the 1990s, when work requirements came to be enforced with more vigour and few groups were exempted. Individuals who had traditionally been exempted from the obligations of labour market availability were subjected to demands similar to those on other people out of work. Work requirements were extended to new groups such as those on long-term sick leave and social assistance clients. In addition, attempts were made to activate people with disabilities and handicaps (Bergeskog 2001). In principle, there was to be no exception. Under the assumptions of the activation policy, no one is exempted from the duty to become employable.

Each agency dealt with a segment of the target population in accordance with its own specific categories and routines. In the social insurance system, the notion of ‘labour market oriented rehabilitation’ was introduced in 1992 (SOU 2000a). It was made obligatory for persons on sick leave to participate in ‘rehabilitative’ measures that would enable a return to the workplace. If the individual was too sick to return to his or her present employment, any kind of work should be considered. The residual work capacity was to be tested in relation to the entire national labour market (Proposition 1996/97). Insurance benefits could be made conditional on compliance, and this constituted the incentive to participate in rehabilitation or to accept any position corresponding to the individual’s residual work capacity. In the social services, the legislation was changed in 1998 so that social assistance could be made conditional on carrying out assigned work or training programmes. Those who were considered to be immediately job-ready would compete on the regular labour market, whereas social assistance recipients found to be ‘in need of skill-enhancing measures’ were referred to activities organized or contracted out by the social services (SFS 2001: section 4). These legal changes were significant. Although the new requirements were far from always enforced (Hetzler 2004; Salonen and Ulmestig 2004), the centuries-old distinction between the sick – who don’t work because they cannot work – and the able-bodied – who don’t work because they don’t want to – was being blurred (Castel 2003). The conception of those who can, or can be made to, work was widened.

The extension of work requirements to new groups was implemented in close co-operation with the public employment service. Substantial minorities of social assistance recipients were managed in a joint venture undertaken by the public employment service and the social services, while interventions for those on long-term sick leave were co-ordinated by the public employment service and the social insurance agency (Lindqvist 2000; Giertz 2004). A total of 1.1 million individuals were enrolled at the public employment service at some point in the course of 2004 (AMS 2005a: 2). The sum total of enrollees during one year thus represents a substantial segment of the entire workforce, or one quarter of the population in the ages 16 to 64 years. Since its inception at the beginning of the twentieth century, the public employment service has confronted everyone formally registered as unemployed by means of a dual role of service provision and control – with a varying emphasis and level of vigour (Delander et al. 1991). While controlling that the unemployed actively seek work, the agency also provides a range of services to facilitate employment. Nowhere was activation turned into a more coherent strategy as in this agency, positioned at the centre of the state campaign to reconstitute labour.

The activity guarantee did involve a displacement towards more state-designed labour market intervention and more coercion. But it cannot be understood simply by contrasting passive and active labour market policies, or by using the distinction between coercion and consent as the sole point of departure. Instead of accounting for change using the dichotomies between passive and active, or between voluntary and involuntary interventions, activation will in this chapter be analysed as a strategy comprising a mix of repressive power and productive power towards the target group, built on a layered control structure within the organization. The analysis focuses on the momentary composition of the activation strategy, dealing with each of the three stages separately. At the target-setting stage, I will follow the way in which the risk of long-term unemployment was linked to a broader risk of social disintegration and came to be operationalized in terms of job-search activity and employability. The targeting, consequently aimed at increasing job-search activity and employability, involved the two main inventions of the decade – individual action plans and the activity guarantee – that revolutionized the business of laying down activity requirements. This will be followed by an account of the multiple layers of control within the public employment service that enabled and directed the first-order targeting. A disciplinary surveillance regime, assessing the individual members of the organization and shaping the organizational control performance, ensured that the power exercised towards the target group was on target.

A Setting the target

The state is a key actor in the production of wage labour under capitalism. Activation may be seen as the historically specific form, directed at those who are unwilling or unable to work, involving a thoroughgoing individualization of state power. The goal has been described as ‘personalized trajectories of integration’ into the world of work (Procacci 1998: 74). It involves a tacit, but very specific, conception of the state’s role in regulating the labour market. The state must design a solution for each and every individual, and the different responses must reflect the differences that exist between individuals in terms of employability and the motivation to work. This notion of social inclusion excludes the ‘demand side’ from policy considerations – neither the number of available jobs nor labour market conditions constitute an object for intervention. The performance of the private organizations operating on the labour market is similarly exempted. Jamie Peck and Nikolas Theodore have remarked that this is an example of ‘supply-side fundamentalism’, since the intent of the state is to ‘work aggressively on the supply side to “flexibilise” and “motivate” the unemployed’ (Peck and Theodore 2000: 729). More or less everything except the excluded themselves is excluded from policy considerations. The sole focus is on the unemployed as individuals who must be integrated into the workforce via state-designed ‘personalized trajectories’.

The elusive long-term unemployed

In the mid-1990s, the government registered a new and growing problem through the lens of applications for unemployment benefits, social assistance and sickness benefits. Rather suddenly, after decades of almost full employment, individuals who were out of work for long periods of time became a prime policy concern. Different agencies defined the problem in different ways. In the public employment service it was defined as long-term enrolment. The group emerged during the 1990s and referred to those who had been out of work for more than two years. At the end of the decade, the government concluded that ‘the number of long-term enrollees has increased dramatically during the 1990s, from having been virtually non-existent at the beginning of the decade’ (Proposition 1999/2000a: 22). In the social services, the problem came to be known as welfare dependency. A government inquiry observed that the problem was growing at a dramatic pace: long-term dependency on social assistance increased fivefold between 1990 and 1996 (SOU 1999). Although most households receive social assistance for other reasons, those for whom unemployment constituted the primary reason were conspicuous. An OECD report noted that the ‘long-term unemployed’ had ‘been the group showing the highest rate of increase among social assistance clients in most countries’ (OECD 1998a: 68). Within the social insurance agency, the target population was perceived as persons on long-term sick leave. Long-term sick leave is not a medical but an administrative concept which is used to refer to individuals who lack the capacity to work for a considerable period of time because of illness. This group also grew rapidly, but its expansion started later, at the end of the decade. Between 1997 and 2002, the number of persons on long-term sick leave more than doubled. In addition, the number of persons in receipt of disability pensions grew steadily (Hetzler 2004: 81–88). Together these groups comprised a substantial proportion of the total workforce. At the beginning of the new millennium, up to 25 per cent of the total workforce was not supported by wage labour. And the majority of the members of this group were not actively competing in the labour market.

For the government, the trend represented both a threat and an opportunity. The economic cost to the state was a recurrent concern in the government bills (Proposition 1996/97, 1999/2000a, 2002/03). All those who were not performing wage labour had to be supported by other means, either through the state budget or, in the case of social assistance recipients, the municipal budgets. It was also assumed, however, that the threat that needed to be averted was far greater than both the economic ramifications and the personal costs of long-term unemployment. Long-term unemployment became a policy concern not least through its intimate connection with a perceived threat to social cohesion. Given the sudden proliferation of the concept of social inclusion in policy discussions, and the establishment across Europe of ‘the new Durkheimian hegemony’ (Levitas 2005: ix), societal integration became a prime consideration in its own right. This concern for social breakdown was not of a neo-conservative nature, framed in terms of a corrupted and culturally different underclass, but rather a social democrat one, articulated within what Ruth Levitas calls a ‘social integrationist discourse’ (Levitas 2005: 7). It was embedded in a normative analysis of the social order, yet its moral fragmentation was seen to be rooted in economic circumstances, something which distinguishes the approach from neo-conservatism. The central problem was not viewed as being the consequences of welfare dependency per se, but social exclusion ‘understood as the breakdown of the structural, cultural and moral ties which bind the individual to society’ (ibid.: 21). Exclusion in this sense was regarded as endangering society’s capacity to maintain its own cohesion.

The threat became identified with – and visualized in terms of – the groups who were at risk of being excluded from the moral and economic order of society. It was labelled ‘the new social question’ in an influential book of the same name written by Pierre Rosanvallon. Similarly, Robert Castel points to a ‘threat of breakdown’, that is ‘borne by groups whose very existence shakes the cohesion of the whole collectivity’ (Castel 2003: 3). The groups are characterized as:

vague silhouettes, at the margins of labor and at the frontiers of socially consecrated forms of exchange – the long-time unemployed, inhabitants of abandoned suburbs, recipients of national minimum income, victims of industrial downsizing, young people in search of employment who carry themselves from place to place, from menial jobs to temporary work.

(ibid.: xv)

Together, they form a significant and growing segment of the total population. Yet these disaffiliated individuals have little in common with each other. As Rosanvallon notes, ‘the excluded form a “non-class”’ (Rosanvallon 2000: 98). The only thing that unites them is a common position in relation to the labour market – they are either out of work or in temporary work in the lower tiers of the labour market. This disaffiliated ‘non-class’ is loosely attached to the economic order and as a consequence their moral ties to mainstream society also become weaker. Employment is not seen as a strictly economic relation; ‘it is through the attachments of the workplace that identity and social integration are effected’ (Levitas 2005: 182). Consequently, being out of work involves a combined moral and economic estrangement, which endangers social cohesion.

The flip side of this threat was found in the constitution of wage labour. The growth of groups with a marginal attachment to the world of work was simultaneously seen as a potential waiting to be realized. According to an analysis conducted by the head office of the public employment service, there were ‘substantial unexploited resources on the labour market’ (AMS 2003: 3). The threat to social cohesion also constituted an unexploited resource. The government envisioned ‘a mobilization of the large reservoir of labour power that exists today in this country among young as well as older people, immigrants and individuals with disabilities’ (Proposition 2002/03: 36). Tapping into this ‘large reservoir of labour power’ was viewed as crucial.

The endeavours were framed in terms of social inclusion. Social inclusion was a cornerstone in the overall strategy to make Europe the most dynamic and competitive economy in the world (CEC 2001). In one of its submissions to the European Union, the Swedish government described its labour market policies as ‘an expression of an ambition to make everyone part of society and prevent social exclusion’ (Regeringen 2003a: 24). Social exclusion was prevented primarily by raising the level of participation in the labour market. According to the dominant conception, social inclusion means above all else being employed. As Rik van Berkel and Iver Hornemann Møller have noted, this assumption was shared by most European governments at the turn of the millennium, when regular paid work was ‘considered both the most desirable form of inclusion, and the most important instrument for inclusion in a wider sense’ (van Berkel and Hornemann Møller 2002b: 3). One cannot be socially included unless one is performing wage labour. The employment moreover serves as the stepping stone to inclusion in other areas of society. Thus, through its conceptualization as both a precondition and gateway, the focus on paid work is made consonant with the prevalent emphasis found within the ‘social integrationist discourse’ on a thorough embeddedness in society, in which the concept of social inclusion also refers to the individual’s integration in the local community, housing conditions, levels of education, citizenship, health and political participation (Levitas 2005: 23).

To achieve social inclusion, everyone who is unemployed could be forced to participate in work-related activities based on their risk of remaining unemployed. This risk is framed in terms of their personal shortcomings in relation to a labour market that was excluded from policy considerations from the outset. It is the unemployed individuals who have to be changed. Yet to know what about them has to be changed presupposes a notion of their problems. One route towards this has been via empirical investigations asking the question ‘What increases the risk of becoming long-term unemployed?’ This line of enquiry is tied to a traditional risk-management approach, which has the goal of first identifying common characteristics among the long-term unemployed, and then intervening to target these characteristics, thereby reducing the risk of long-term unemployment. This has been attempted, but with only limited success.

One reason for the limited success is that the question ‘Who are the long-term unemployed?’ has proved very difficult to answer. One government inquiry attempted to pin down the long-term unemployed by pointing to ‘people who have been struck by the restructuring of rural areas’ and ‘unemployed social assistance clients in the larger cities’ (Proposition 1999/ 2000a: 1). This implicitly refers to two groups that occasionally appear in policy documen...

Table of contents

• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Activation guaranteed
• Chapter 2 Subjected freedom
• Chapter 3 Institutional order
• Chapter 4 Generalized control
• Chapter 5 Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index