Search Results (5)

This study explores the governance and implementation of local labor market programs (LLMPs) in Swedish municipalities, analyzing the tension between national mandates and local policy practices. Drawing on institutional ethnography (IE), intersectionality, and emotional labor theories, we examine interviews with politicians and managers from eight municipalities. Politicians frame LLMPs as budget-driven initiatives, depoliticizing local labor market issues to comply with national policies like the January Agreement. This approach prioritizes efficiency, workfare models, and quick labor market entry, often sidelining individualized support. In contrast, managers describe their role as navigating policy constraints while addressing diverse local needs. They emphasize the challenges of aligning “one-size-fits-all” activation strategies with the realities of their participants, advocating for flexibility and adaptation within national frameworks. These contrasting perspectives reveal how LLMPs, although locally implemented, are shaped by textually mediated national policies, which influence local governance practices. Politicians focus on the need to meet national objectives, while managers struggle to reconcile these goals with participant-centered approaches. This study contributes to the understanding of how LLMPs operate within a governance framework that prioritizes efficiency over holistic support, highlighting the limitations of workfare-oriented policies and their implications for labor market integration. Full article

Over the past 30 years, Swedish labor market politics has swayed towards stronger workfare tendencies, emphasizing activation requirements for unemployed individuals to access welfare benefits. This process aligns with broader neoliberal reforms, fostering an individualistic view of unemployment characterized by personal responsibility for employability. In 2023, the Swedish Public Employment Service (PES) published a report addressing the needs of and solutions for long-term unemployed individuals ‘distant from the labor market’ (Sw. personer långt från arbetsmarknaden), marking the first formal use of this term as the main adhesive category in a political document. This paper examines the construction of the subject position ‘distant from the labor market’, investigating how it delineates and differentiates subgroups within the unemployed population, how this subgroup is understood in relation to other actors, and how discursive frameworks imbue this category with various meanings. Lastly, the paper discusses the categorization in relation to the current developments in the Swedish welfare system, arguing that the formalization of this category should be understood in relation to parallel political processes, such as proposals for a duty of activity for the unemployed, suggesting how this points to a way forward defined by neoliberal tendencies and welfare conditionality. Full article

This paper traces the colonial logics embedded within Western states’ welfare and workfare programs. The imperial and capitalist underpinnings of Western welfare states have been well elaborated. Less research has focused on the colonial logics and strategies at work in their administration of welfare and ‘integration’ programs targeting newly arrived refugees. Drawing on ethnographic work with Syrian refugees living in Denmark, I examine Syrians’ encounters with the Danish welfare state and the five-year mandatory ‘integration’ program. Through Syrians’ accounts, I argue that we can begin to re-narrate the nature and meaning of contemporary welfare states and the colonial and racialized policing logics that structure and sustain them. More specifically, Syrians’ accounts draw attention to the often-overlooked roles that welfare regimes perform in maintaining colonial, racialized hierarchies of humanity as well as extractive and dispositive processes typically understood as economic aid and sustenance. Moreover, Syrians’ experiences of the Danish welfare state help to unpack the centrality in un- and under-paid forms of labor that refugee communities are required to perform, thereby enabling capital to materially benefit from stigmatized Others living in Denmark. Thus, by centering racial capitalism, this article contributes to scholars’ emerging attention to the coloniality of ‘integration’ and how this imperative manifests in practice. Full article

Among the most significant issues facing welfare states are the implications of economic globalization for employment policies. This issue is confronted from the viewpoint of workfarism, the incentives created by social policies for increasing participation in the labor market. To measure the limited changes involved, the analytical framework also includes institutional stickiness, pointing to the capability of welfare state institutions to resist external pressures. Panel data on capital flow, an active labor market policy (ALMP), and unemployment benefit (UB) expenditures in 19 welfare states between 1985 and 2010 are drawn from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the KOF Index of Globalization (KOF). The Vector Autoregressive Moving-Average model with exogenous regressors (VARMAX)-regression analysis found institutional stickiness to be a more significant factor than capital flow in 61% of the observations. The impact of capital flow was particularly significant in the United Kingdom, and in northern and continental Europe, and a tendency toward workfarism was detected in 37% of the welfare states. From a comparative perspective, the impact via the increased capital flow to workfare-related policies is a matter of contrasts rather than a unilateral phenomenon. Full article

This paper explores the role of disgust in mediating disabled women's experience of workfare in the Australian state. As global social policy has been restructured along neoliberal lines in Western nations, the notion of ‘workfare’ has been widely promulgated. This paper draws on nine case studies from across Australia to explore how this has resulted in disabled women being coerced to participate in a range of workfare programs that are highly bureaucratised, sanitised and moralised. The findings suggest that with the advent of Australian neoliberal welfare reform, some disabled women are increasingly framed in negative affective terms. A primary emotion that appears to govern disabled women forced to participate in Australian neoliberal workfare programs is disgust. The experience of the participants interviewed for this study suggests that the naming of them in negative emotional terms requires disabled women to perform a respectable unruly corporeality to ensure that they gain and maintain access to a range of services and supports, which are vital to their wellbeing. Full article