Activation policies form the core of employment policies in most OECD countries. They are part of ‘active’ welfare states and associated neoliberal forms of governance that seek to govern through freedom by producing self-governing and responsible subjectivities. Ethnographies of governmentalities have been used in the research reported in this article to examine if and how such subjectivities are put in practice in street-level encounters in local welfare delivery. Based on an ethnographic research of youth services in the Public Employment Services (PES) in Helsinki, Finland, it is shown that despite the policy focus on active citizenship the street-level practice entails not only liberal ideas of self-governing individuals but also authoritarian measures. What is governed in the meetings is not the young people’s selves but their time and behaviour. In the process, the notion of active citizenship is emptied and transformed to mean participation in supervised activities offered by the PES. Such practice also reworks the temporal structures and creates insecure and eventful experience of time for PES clients. In contrast to governing through freedom, the localized interpretation of activation policies represents the authoritarian and paternalistic side of neoliberal governance.
This article analyses how processes of 'human capitalisation' work in various labour-market activation services aimed at young people in Finland. Drawing on multi-site ethnographic research on activating workshops, public employment services, and career counselling for youth in the Helsinki metropolitan region of Finland in 2014-2016, we trace sites and instances of human capitalisation. Capturing processes through which previously non-economic areas of life become economised, human capitalisation marshals abilities, skills, knowledge and a consumeristic understanding of self-responsibility. Its promise is a more flexible workforce that can be adjusted to the varied demands of the labour market in the future. Taking a Foucauldian approach to governmentality, our research demonstrates that activation practices focus on generating a form of human capital that enhances a particular relation to and understanding of one's self, body and skills.
This article discusses how second-generation identities are negotiated in the intersection of multi-ethnic realities of everyday life in Helsinki and often multi-sited kin-based transnational ties. The discussion draws from a research project that examined the second generation's reproduction of transnational fields of relations and identity negations. First, the article outlines the societal context of ethnic hierarchies in Finland that structure identity negotiations. Then it presents four case studies, each representing a specific combination of transnational ties and experiences and local identity negotiations. The intersection of a transnational context, local structures of ethnic hierarchies, and family practices places the children between competing reference points that lead to distinct identities between, but also, within different ethnic groups. The article concludes that children of immigrants do not simply continue their parents' transnational practices, but reproduce and interpret the transnational context as a part of their local lives. Transnational identity construction is an exercise that does not lead to transgressive identities related to global space, but to local struggles for a positive identity. Nevertheless, it opens up a global perspective for identity negotiations that is not contained within the local or national context.
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