The Productivity of Unemployment and the Temporality of Employment-to-Come: Older Disadvantaged Job Seekers

Abstract

This article demonstrates how unemployment is made productive through workfare activities for older disadvantaged job seekers. We suggest that the requirement to look for work, engage in education and training, and participate in voluntary work blurs the boundaries between employment and unemployment. Drawing on in-depth qualitative research with older disadvantaged job seekers, we demonstrate how this obligatory productivity is lived and felt, characterised by shame and frustration and framed by the temporality of waiting and searching for work. We suggest that this experience of ‘productive’ unemployment can be described as a dissonant state of ‘transitional stasis’, whereby job seekers are expected to transition out of unemployment and poverty while experiencing the long-term and ongoing effects of immobility.

Shaping the Selves of “At Risk” Youth in Debt and Poverty in the Context of Economic Vulnerability

“…In light of the governmentality literature (Foucault 2008;1991;Rose 1999;Miller and Rose 2008;Dean 2010), we have brought out the many power relations that shape young people in their poor financial circumstances, that is, in their contextual economic vulnerability. The perspective of governmentality that encompasses this study is a way of analysing how the process of becoming a subject, that is, subjectivation, is possible and how it works in neoliberal governing practices in the context of youth support systems.…”

“…The concept of regimes of practices that we used in our analysis refers to institutionalised perpetual practices that are part of power/ knowledge flows of institutions like youth support systems and schools (Dean 2010;Foucault 1978). Regimes of practices involve practices to produce truth and knowledge, comprise multiple forms of technical and calculative rationality, and are subject to neoliberal policies, programs and problematisations for their reform (Dean 2010;Foucault 2008). Neoliberal governmentality refers to politics that transform its citizen-subjects into psycho-emotional vulnerable individuals, competitive and entrepreneurial entities (Brown 2015;Thrift 2005;Harvey 2005; Löppönen 2017).…”

“…Lazzarato (2014) writes about how debt produces obedient subjects who want to escape from their subaltern situation by making themselves into enterprises. These subjects as enterprises are flexible in the way that they take responsibility for expenses and risks of neoliberal management and the "financed economics" of society (Foucault 2008).…”

“…If we consider this in terms of governmentality (Dean 2010;Foucault 2008) and how it operates here, the shaping of the self of a young adult takes place through economically driven practices, through which a young adult is obliged to practise the process of becoming the subject in debt. In the context of economic vulnerability, through subjectivation of regimes of practices, young people are expected to become autonomous, self-responsible and individual subjects who think of themselves as subjects in debt and as subjects whose futures are limited by their indebtedness (Lazzarato 2014).…”

Doble invisibilidad: los efectos del paro oculto en los colectivos vulnerables de población de los países del sur de Europa durante la pandemia del COVID-19

“…A large share of the existing literature has been characterised by an essentially positivist approach, as it has formulated the concept of unemployment using administrative registers and other secondary data sources (Baum and Mitchel, 2010). From this perspective, unemployment has often been understood as a general situation outside of productive employment: a problematic space that needs to be managed (Gerrard & Watson, 2021).…”