Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures and tables
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on contributors
- Introduction
- one The individualisation of activation services in context
- Part One Theoretical perspectives on individualised activation services
- Part Two Individualising activation services: Case studies
- Conclusion
- twelve Individualised activation services in the EU
- Index
three - A capability approach to individualised and tailor-made activation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures and tables
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on contributors
- Introduction
- one The individualisation of activation services in context
- Part One Theoretical perspectives on individualised activation services
- Part Two Individualising activation services: Case studies
- Conclusion
- twelve Individualised activation services in the EU
- Index
Summary
For a couple of decades, employment and social integration policies have undergone significant transformations. In order to grasp the theoretical and practical meaning of these evolutions, new analytical tools and normative frameworks are needed. This is the very task that we pursue in this chapter. In the first section, the main evolutions are identified as well as their consequences in terms of analytical tools. Indeed, the contemporary transformations imply that the key locus of social policies is the local agency where the beneficiaries are assessed (as to the legitimacy of their claim, their degree of employability, and so on) and where active labour market programmes are actually designed and implemented. Therefore, new analytical tools are to be found in order to theoretically and critically assess these new modes of governance. The second section paves the road in this direction, by advocating the relevance of the capability approach (Sen, 1985, 1992, 1993, 1999) in such a context. In contrast with an employability (or human capital) perspective, which remains to a large extent entrapped in a technocratic or centralised conception of social policy, the capability approach genuinely takes into consideration what is the true goal of social policy, that is, the well-being and capacity to act of the beneficiaries. The concluding section takes a more policy-oriented view and identifies the main challenges faced by contemporary social integration policies in a capability perspective.
Individualisation and situated public action
New patterns of public action
Since the early 1980s there has been a threefold evolution of social policies in the field of labour market integration and the struggle against unemployment, which is by now well documented:
• first, a shift from passive measures (that is, benefits provided on the basis either of citizenship or of previous payment record, without further behavioural requirements on behalf of the jobseeker) to active programmes, in which the benefit payment is conditional upon the appropriate behaviour of the recipient, especially concerning their efforts to get back to the labour market as quickly as possible. In the literature, this first shift is captured as the move from decommodification to recommodification, where social policies are subordinated to labour market objectives as illustrated by the current focus on employability;
• second, a move towards individual measures, implying the substitution of the standardised programmes of conventional social policies based on predefined categories of social risk by individualised tailor-made policies.
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- Making It PersonalIndividualising Activation Services in the EU, pp. 45 - 66Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2007
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