Recent decades have seen the category of unemployment transformed into job-seeking. Attention has generally focused on the disciplining effects of interventions, procedures and techniques within social welfare offices, or on scrutinizing policy documents as political expressions of neoliberalism. This article examines advice for unemployed people who are 'seeking a role', from the official leaflets of social welfare offices or Jobcentres, and state sponsored and associated careers websites and advice books. Such documents constitute an extension of the disciplinary apparatuses of government and particularly inculcate 'self-discipline' for actors in the labour market. Strikingly, these documents not only involve disciplining jobseekers to seek work, but to present themselves as an ideal candidate for any job, to become a protean thespian who can act convincingly. Jobseekers are required to manage, conceal and overcome the unpleasant economic and social consequences of unemployment and turn these negatives into a positive performance within a theatricalized labour market.
The category of ‘unemployment’ is gradually being replaced with ‘job-seeking’, in contemporary welfare policy – driven by ‘liberal’ or neo-liberal politics. Here we attempt to go beyond the ‘deprivation theory’ of unemployment, emphasising how the experience of ‘unemployment’ or ‘jobseeking’ is shaping the way it is governed – drawing on the Foucault inspired governmentality approach. Firstly, we examine the apparatus of supervision, interventions and sanctions introduced in Ireland under Pathways to Work. Secondly, we analyse a set of interviews with job seekers in 2014, specifically focusing on interactions with the social welfare office, internships, sanctions and job-seeking activities. Building on these empirical investigations we suggest that unemployment/job-seeking can be understood as an artificially produced liminality, characterised by uncertainty, self-questioning, tedious time to be filled and frantic seeking to escape to a job, and, in many cases, repeated failure.
Severe sedimentation since lock and dam construction in the 1930s has reduced water depth in Upper and Lower Brownˈs lakes, a backwater complex in Pool 13 of the upper Mississippi River, and resulted in periods of chronic anoxia. This backwater complex was rehabilitated by construction of a deflection levee, installation of a water control structure, and excavation of canals through the area. Water quality variables inside and outside the project area, movement of radio‐tagged largemouth bass in response to changing oxygen concentrations, and creel statistics were used to evaluate the success of the improvements. Turbidity was significantly less in the Brownˈs Lake complex than in the main channel. Oxygen concentrations were allowed to deteriorate to 3 ppm before the water control structures were opened during the winter; within 7 d, oxygen concentrations as high as 10 ppm were found in the top strata in most of the Brownˈs Lake complex. Chemical and thermal stratification observed in the dredge canal water column were caused by colder (32°F), highly oxygenated water from the main channel moving over denser, warmer (36–38°F) water in the dredge canals. Water in the dredge canals remained stratified until ice‐out, with colder, oxygenated water in the surface stratum; warmer, but anoxic, water in the bottom stratum; and a mixture (3–7 ppm oxygen and 35–36°F) in the middle stratum. Fourteen radio‐tagged largemouth bass Micropterus salmoides were located in the Brownˈs Lake complex in December before oxygen concentrations began to decline, Concurrent with oxygen declines, most radio‐tagged fish exited the complex through a slough connected to the main channel and returned when the water control structure was opened and oxygen concentrations increased. Some radio‐tagged largemouth bass moved 4 mi under ice to return to the complex. Estimated angler effort and catch increased 58 and 117%, respectively, in the Lower Brownˈs Lake–Lainesville Slough complex following rehabilitation. A 10‐fold increase in angler effort and catch was estimated for Upper Brownˈs Lake after the project was completed.
Critique can be located anthropologically in liminality, particularly the experience of communitas wherein everything is open to question and structures appear as external and meaningless. Rather than an intellectual preserve or an individual achievement, I argue that critique emerges from crises; that it diffuses proliferates and extends these liminal events and can be observed in contemporary politics, economics, media and everyday life. This anthropology of critique is situated alongside the emergent sociology of critique of Boltanski and others, and is historically grounded within chronic crises in modernity characterized by Szakolczai as ‘permanent liminality’. Thus, modernity is constituted by critique and has become, amongst other things, a critical society.
Drawing on the Weberian spirit, our key problem is trying to understand the irrational rationality of Active Labour Market Policies adopted across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, despite their limited utility. Rather than explaining these as inefficient policy formation or reflecting neo-liberal ideology, we suggest that the experience and governmentality of welfare is historically informed by the idea of purgatory. Drawing from the genealogical impulse in Weber, Foucault and Agamben, and adapting Weber’s concept of ‘world-images’, we suggest that the history of welfare, from workhouses to Active Labour Market Policies, is animated by the purgatorial logic of judging, punishing and purifying individuals. This resonance is clearest in the interpretation that jobseekers give to the time they spend unemployed, but also in political speeches, policy making and the creation of welfare systems. Counter-intuitively, this analysis is drawn from Ireland, a latecomer to Active Labour Market Policies, where the imposition of an increasedly purgatorial conception of welfare is clearly visible.
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