Making sacrifices: how ungenerous gifts constitute jobseekers as scapegoats

We have our dignity, yeah? Scrutiny under suspicion: Experiences of welfare conditionality in the Irish social protection system

“…It is also notable that the compulsive geography of the Irish welfare state has fairly recently broadened via the “insertion” of private job matching services into the infrastructure of the Irish welfare state via the Jobs‐Path initiative. Entities such as Turas Nua and Seetec (private job‐matching entities) have added a corporate visage to the physical geography of the Irish welfare state and appear to reinforce the compulsive “workfarist” approach to welfare conditionality (Boland & Griffin, 2015a, 2016; Collins & Murphy, 2016; Wiggan, 2015) which, in turn, feeds into the broader conception welfare conditionality as it has been presented here. In respect to the compulsion that resides within geography of the welfare state, this is something that Boland and Griffin (2015a) have also articulated in their work.…”

“…The concept of "Punishment beatings by public demand" also suggests that while the mechanism of conditionality is structurally bounded, in that, it is administered and carried out within a welfare system; it is nonetheless guided and influenced by public perception and discourse in the form of the welfare framing consensus (Boland & Griffin, 2016;Devereux & Power, 2019;Jensen & Tyler, 2015;Patrick, 2016Patrick, , 2017.…”

“…The purpose of this article is to shed light on experiences of conditionality in the contemporary Irish welfare state while further refining and nuancing what welfare conditionality means in the minutiae of the everyday. Welfare conditionality in general has seen an abundance of recent contributions in the context of the UK but has arguably suffered from a lack of cognate data that shed light on the Irish example, although this is slowly changing (see Wiggan, 2015; Boland & Griffin, 2015a, 2015b; Boland & Griffin, 2016; Boland & Griffin, 2018; Collins & Murphy, 2016; Boland, 2018; Millar & Crosse, 2018; Murphy, 2018, 2019; Gaffney & Millar, 2020). In attempting to remedy this further, this article presents data from a series of in‐depth interviews carried out with welfare recipients in Ireland in 2018.…”

Specters of Goffman: Impression Management in the Irish Welfare Space

“…Since the time in which Esping-Andersen (1990) was writing, welfare provision in Ireland has arguably undergone a paradigmatic shift, much of which has devolved upon increasing levels of welfare conditionality. Welfare conditionality and its effects have seen an abundance of recent contributions in the context of the United Kingdom but have arguably suffered from a lack of cognate data that shed light on the Irish example, although this is slowly changing (see Boland 2018; Boland and Griffin 2015a, 2015b, 2016, 2018; Collins and Murphy 2016; Gaffney and Millar 2020; Millar and Crosse 2018; Murphy 2018, 2020; Whelan 2020a, 2020b; Wiggan 2015). Internationally, literature suggests that ongoing reforms to welfare regimes across jurisdictions since about the 1970s are indicative of the bedding in of neoliberalism as a “global” ideology (Dardot and Laval 2013; Harvey 2007).…”

“…There may also be very good reasons why the people interviewed behave in the way that they do. The welfare space is projected in a language of scarcity as being resource limited, something that claimants and recipients are made to feel in every part of their welfare trajectory (Boland and Griffin 2016; Patrick 2017). In this respect, impression management that fosters the image of the “good” welfare recipient is very much about survival and the need to “keep a hold” of what are much needed resources.…”