Governing Unemployed People Through Technologies of Power and Those of the Self

This book aims at giving voice to unemployed people, working with them, not on them. By critically exploring both the intended and the unintended consequences of ALMPs, I explore how policies are linked to moral evaluations of unemployed people and judging them as either deserving or undeserving (van Oorschot, Journal of European Social Policy, 16(1), 23–42, 2006). In order to address my overall social psychological research question, how do young unemployed people govern themselves as an effect of how they are governed in the Danish welfare state, I approach the relationship between the individual and society by turning to governmentality studies. This theoretical approach enables me to investigate experiences in a delimited context. I add to the existing unemployment literature by rendering visible the actual practices and the situated knowledge that unemployed people develop. The claim is that governing is not only viewed as a practical and bureaucratic way of dealing with unemployment but is, in fact, co-constituent in the production of subjectivity; that is, it is co-constituent in the shaping of how it is experienced to be unemployed in the Danish welfare state. In the following, I map some of the most influential interpretations of governmentality studies, largely inspired by Foucault’s work, and on that basis, I specify the strands of research that this book largely follows as well as I develop my own approach attuned to affects and the emotional aspects of subjectification. I clarify how I develop the analytical framework to strengthen a focus on a micro-level of analysis. Here, I also expand on how the self-management is an affective and messy affair as unemployed people are governed as embodied, feeling, and affective capacities in contemporary affective economies.