Psychology, Punitive Activation and Welfare

Blaming the Unemployed

Rose-Marie Stambe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000599077
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book explores welfare politics, unemployment, and interventions in relation to the labour market from a critical psychological perspective. Using critical fieldwork and theory, the author explores the administration of the unemployed, and the drive to increase labour market participation through strategies of activation.

There is a strong and coherent conceptual and theoretical framing for this work, with a critical perspective (essentially, question everything) taking centre stage. It will give an overall coherence in addressing the topic. The theoretical framing is cogent and, in combination with the critical perspective, works well for integrating the material and delivering a fresh approach to this topic.

Psychology, Punitive Activation and Welfare will appeal to students engaging with critical psychology, unemployment or policy, by providing a distinct application of theoretical and methodological tools to think differently about the relationship between labour market non/participation, human misery, psychology, and frontline enactment of policy and research.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003112518-1

Introduction

At the time of writing this introduction, the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) was still having considerable ramifications for countries around the world. The virus reshaped the political, economic and social landscape of many countries, with public health orders restricting economic activity leading to higher un(der)employment. Measures taken to address the pandemic before vaccines were made disrupted global supply chains, movement of people and local economies. Unemployment and underemployment increased dramatically across the globe (International Labor Organisation [ILO], 2020). In Australia, where I live, social distancing measures initiated in March 2020 stopped nearly 1 million Australians from working (Hayne, 2020). By the end of April 2020, 587,686 applications had been processed for the unemployment payment (Job Seeker payment, formerly Newstart), which is more than what is processed in one year (Office of the Prime Minister [OPM], 2020).

In July 2020, the Australian unemployment rate was 7.4%, and underemployment was at 11.7%. These figures do not incorporate the ‘discouraged’ who have dropped out of the labour market because they have stopped actively looking for a job, meaning that the number of people who consider themselves to be unemployed was much higher (Coates et al., 2020). These unemployment figures are dwarfed by numbers in different parts of the world, for example, the unemployment rate in South Africa was 30.1% in the first quarter of 2020 (Statistics South Africa, 2020). There are many important arguments to make in relation to how unemployment figures are counted, the social, economic and political context where numbers are counted, and how the unemployment figure functions. This includes political and economic constructions of unemployment and how it relates to ‘calculating’ and ‘managing’ inflation and the implications of having a certain ‘active’ group of unemployed ‘count’ (Baxandall, 2002; Stambe & Fryer, 2015). I will not revisit these concerns in this book. Instead, I want to unsettle any easy readings of what ‘unemployment’ is, why it is a problem, and reconsider the role of psychology and research regardless of the official unemployment figure.

Welfare regimes, COVID and the psy-complex

The welfare policies of OECD-member countries have been characterised by increasing conditionality, underpinned by the notion of ‘activation’ that became dominant from the 1990s (Moreira & Lødemel, 2014). The administration of the unemployed has been placed at the centre of employment policies, shifting concerns from labour demand to labour supply. The governmental focus shifted to ‘activating’ individuals to maintain job search and improve their employability despite labour market conditions. Governments intervene on the market aiming for an ‘active society’ where individuals are responsibilised to ensure their own wellbeing. In the context of Employment Services (ES), the organisations that in various policy contexts are supposed to activate the unemployed, that wellbeing is operationalised as getting a job. As succinctly explained by a former Australian Prime Minister, the “best form of welfare is a job” (Abbott, 2015). The behaviour and emotional lives of the unemployed are now the targets of policy. Activation strategies involve a combination of carrots and sticks, such as job search clubs, vocational skills training and sanctions to ensure job seekers are attached to the labour market, supposedly providing a surplus of motivated and job-ready labour.

In an Australian context, ES is a conglomerate of for-profit and not-for-profit organisations, or ‘Providers’, that are contracted by the Australian Government to ‘activate’ the unemployed. The current model is called jobactive and involves activation strategies that are designed to ‘encourage’ job seekers to persist with job search despite labour market conditions. The increasingly punitive nature of activation and the refusal to adequately raise social security payments reflects a general policy shift away from the original welfare policy objectives to alleviate poverty towards a more neoliberalised focus on labour market participation. Similar trajectories that prioritise coercive behaviouralism are occurring in other countries such as the USA, the United Kingdom and Aotearoa/New Zealand (Abramovitz, 2006; Wright et al., 2020, Ware et al., 2017). In some OECD contexts (see Friedli & Stern, 2015; Yang, 2015; Pultz, 2018), psychologised discourses provide the expertise and common sense to justify and authorise many of these practices that, as I argue in this book, function to blame the unemployed for their unemployment.

This book was built around research that I did in 2015 and 2016 in South East Queensland. It was a quasi-ethnographic study that brought together a critical reading of policy, interviews with employment consultants and observations of the service delivery model of one ES provider that I’ve named ‘Active Job’. The research aim was to highlight how the unemployed are produced as such through the practices used to govern them. Namely, I studied how unemployment was produced as a problem of the unemployed who required reformation into an affective subject ready to withstand the ebbs and flows of the market. This research also extended methodological debates in governmentality studies by attuning the research focus onto how methods, especially the interview, are implicated in the power-knowledge nexus. I wanted to develop a ‘post-disciplinary’ approach to research unemployment; to rethink the study of unemployment/unemployed as an ‘object’ and take a more critical attitude to the question, how should we study unemployment?

Then the pandemic happened. In Australia, as in many other OECD countries, the Government response to suppress the COVID-19 reshaped the policy, legal, political and economic landscape. Like other states, the Australian Government did something that seemed extraordinary. The neoliberal-influenced policies that I briefly described above, which have endured over decades and resisted any meaningful revision (Watts, 2016), were dramatically altered almost overnight. The federal government introduced a quasi-wage subsidy program to keep people employed, added a COVID-19 supplement to increase Job Seeker payments, which doubled the payment despite having refused to raise the rate in real terms for more than 20 years (Australian Counsil of Social Services [ACOSS], 2020), and suspended welfare conditions (known as mutual obligations, MO). Nevertheless, the Australian Government was determined to return to business as usual and these initiatives have been phased out.

Simultaneously, the uniqueness of this ‘quarantine unemployment’ changed some of the public discourse about worklessness. Unemployment was catapulted into the headlines and it appeared as though the public conversation about unemployment had shifted. Previous to the pandemic, media representations of unemployment were generally limited to depictions of the lazy undeserving poor (Gibson, 2009; Nolan, 2003). These stories of the ‘welfare bludger’ have long histories in a Global North welfare context, particularly in Australia (Klein, 2020), the United Kingdom (Walters, 2000) and the United States (Fraser & Gordon, 1994). The pandemic changed the tone to empathy, repeating known ‘truths’ about the negative impact of unemployment on the individual. For example, when the United Statesian Alex Reiff confessed on his LinkedIn account that he has lost his job, identity and sense of worth, the Australian media ran a story about the ‘viral’ post alongside the advice from a psychologist who posited the ‘truth’ that being unemployed is a financial and psychological blow, “when you lose a job, you’re obviously losing an income, but you’re also losing a way of [navigating] the world” (Kesley-Sugg & Tickle, 2020). These narratives that explore the angst of the unemployed mirror a ‘truth’ in advanced liberalism – that unemployment causes ill-being.

Here the psy-complex finds a renewed sense of authority in relation to unemployment. The ‘psy-complex’ is a network of relations, about psychological knowledges which are made into ‘common sense’ in the public domain (Parker, 1997) and become ingrained as regular ways of talking about oneself and others (Rose, 1996). It becomes the foundational source for understanding how unemployment ‘feels’, and how best to manage and cope in order to ‘bounce back’. I find the individualising and pathologising impact of psychological theory, research and practices inadequate to explain and ‘intervene’ in this area of ‘unemployment’. How can we reduce such a complex social phenomenon that serves multiple purposes to be an issue of cognitions, mindsets, coping strategies or personality traits? Moreover, how do these knowledges function in contemporary welfare regimes that are increasingly punitive? How can we research unemployment without reproducing such individualised notions of unemployment? In this book, I present an argument that the unemployed are blamed for their misery, which is constituted through the network of political, economic, social, psychological and research practices. Rather than resort to psychologised notions of self and wellbeing, we need to reimagine how we think about and research unemployment.

A ‘post-disciplinary’ approach to unemployment

A critical psychological approach to researching unemployment is a small area with few researchers explicitly taking such a perspective (see Blustein et al., 2012; Fryer & Stambe, 2014a; 2014b; for a community critical perspective see Fryer, 2012). This body of work mostly covers theoretical components using Foucault, to describe psychological notions of unemployment within neoliberalism. Others have engaged in Foucauldian-inspired research, usually applying governmentality to critique psychological knowledges in ES (Cromby & Willis, 2014; Drewery, 1998; Friedli & Stern, 2015; Pultz, 2018). This book extends on this literature by incorporating the trend in governmentality studies to use social science fieldwork practices to attend to the messiness of policy enactment in situ, including how neoliberal discourses sit alongside, clash and contradict with other discourses and problematisations (Walkerdine & Bansel, 2010). Attending to the implications of governing practices also requires examining the productivity of research practices. Research should seriously examine what types of problems are assumed and produced through the research process, and which concepts are left self-evident and unproblematised.

For th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figure
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Putting critique to work
• 3 A critique of methods
• 4 Participation, activation and compliance
• 5 Affective governing and the psy-complex
• 6 Unpacking interviews, unpacking unemployment
• 7 Conclusion
• Index