Activating the Welfare Subject: The Problem of Agency

Abstract

While accepting Banton’s recently expressed view that sociology and social policy are distinct disciplines, this article argues that times of radical change can profitably bring the two into closer dialogue. Considering an argument from Emirbayer and Mische that agency becomes especially apparent in unsettled times, it focuses on conceptions of agency at play in the design and implementation of recent UK welfare reforms, and in subsequent legal challenges. Identifying a series of key measures in the Welfare Reform Act of 2012 and the Welfare and Work Act of 2016, this article examines the challenges that have ensued, and the way that agency is revealed as both a site of disciplinary control and as a focus for contestation, pitting the purposive rationality of welfare reform against the practical reason that emerges from claimant experience.

‘It Isn't Charity because We've Paid into it’: Social Citizenship and the Moral Economy of Welfare Recipients in the Wake of 2012 UK Welfare Reform Act

“…Under reform, participants had become subject to new and increased tests of conditionality that aimed to 'activate' them to become more responsible for themselves and decrease their reliance on benefits. Yet such conditions failed to take into account the complexities of participants' lives (Hays 2003;Morris 2019), and they were thus interpreted as inflexible and punitive. For instance, although many participants were classified as over-occupying their property, they claimed to either need the 'spare' room (commonly for family members or carers to use) or that there were no smaller properties available or, at least, no suitable smaller properties (see Joseph Roundtree Foundation 2014; Thiel et al 2015).…”

A Quest for Passion: Understanding Precarious Migration of Young Highly Qualified EU Citizens as Lived Neoliberal Subjectivity

“…As another deeply neoliberal construct, workfarism stresses individuals’ responsibility in managing the social and economic risks they confront in the labour market through embracing flexibility and actively working on their employability (McDonald and Marston, 2005). It also includes the conception of accountability that legitimises increased conditionality and penalties for non-compliance (Morris, 2019). Young people in particular are expected to show flexibility and willingness to improve their employability while trained to regard themselves as enterprises (Paju et al, 2020).…”

Digital welfare: designing for more nuanced forms of access

“…Conceptualizing the system as solely technological and focusing the understanding of access on the control of access, gives rise to many of the critiques of Universal Credit (Dwyer and Wright 2014;Morris 2020;Pantazis 2016;Reeve 2017) One means of responding to these critiques might be to design for a broader notion of access where access control can be maintained but attention can also be given to the wider access goals of welfare. Ribot and Peluso (2003) theory of access offers a framework through which different aspects of access can be brought together.…”