Governing the Active Jobseeker

This chapter explores a fundamental premise that enables emotional indebtedness, individualization, and self-responsibilization. The individual is designated as the one who is to blame for unemployment (unemployment is individualized) as well the agent who can solve the problem of unemployment (self-responsibilization). This subjectification of the individual provides the necessary ground for emotional debt to emerge. These dynamics are intimately linked with the introduction and spread of activation policies associated with the active turn in employment policies discussed in the previous chapter. The goal of activation policies is to construct the unemployed person as a competent and active job seeker. This requires a machinery (Tyler, Stigma: The machinery of inequality, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020) that continuously creates the unemployed person as mastering agent who can solve the problem of unemployment. Increasingly, digital technologies such as profiling are deployed and take part in shifting risk management to the individual. In this chapter I argue that these technologies encourage people to turn the arrow inward when looking for somebody to blame. Self-blame is however not a ‘single story’ and there is plenty of variation with some unemployed people feeling more self-blaming as unemployed compared to others. In addition to individualization, we are witnessing a psychologization of the unemployment issue. Various psychological constructs have been identified as relevant targets of improvement such as work on motivation (or the supposed lack of motivation). Problematizing unemployment as a matter of motivation also affords the arrow to turn against the individual rather than outward toward society or the labor market more broadly. This results in a fertile ground for self-blame and self-doubt to grow. The push toward thinking about and doubting oneself is key when it comes to understanding the overall emotional debt that unemployed people find themselves.