Introduction

Welfare to work (WTW) policies aim at bringing recipients of social policies back to the labour market as quickly as possible. Moving from a statutory view of rights, they follow a contractual vision of social entitlements (Handler, 2003) according to which no rights should be granted without corresponding duties being imposed on their beneficiaries. By the same token, they convey normative expectations about recipients that are required to comply with them in order to be entitled to benefits and services. As such, WTW policies include a normative view about how human beings are supposed to behave and what rights and duties are implied by membership in society (Gilbert, 2002). They are instruments combining capacitating (improving employability, providing work experience, and so on) and constraining elements (pushing people back to work through the use of more restrictive conditionality and financial penalties or incentives). This mix of empowerment and constraint takes various shapes with respect to the countries and target groups involved: Anglo-Saxon countries tend to give more emphasis to constraining elements (Peck and Theodore, 2000) while Scandinavian countries rather focus on the development of employability (Barbier, 2004).

Mixing restraint and empowerment raises complex issues in terms of social justice, which ought to be tackled not only at theoretical but also empirical level. This task requires extensive attention to implementation processes: that is, how a normative prescription contained in a legislative provision or an administrative directive translates into a specific practice and, of equal significance, how it is received by the beneficiaries concerned. Three categories of actors are thus involved in such processes: those that shape or design the policy (policy makers in parliamentary arenas, but also high-level civil servants in charge of designing specific directives for street-level bureaucrats), those responsible for the implementation of such policies and directives (mainly street-level bureaucrats in public administrations, but also in private and third-sector providers to whom such tasks are increasingly subcontracted), and the target groups that ‘receive’ such policies (beneficiaries, users, clients or ‘citizens-consumers’ as they are sometimes called). The claim of this chapter is that infringements of the principles of non-interference and non-domination can happen in different ways at all three levels: at design level, where specific normative contents may be imposed by majoritarian parties or by high-level civil servants on the other stakeholders of the policy process;