The purgatorial ethic and the spirit of welfare

Abstract

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.

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

“…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. In attempting to situate the contribution made in this article within a body of literature, Boland and Griffin (2015a, 2015b, 2016, 2018) and Boland (2018) are particularly relevant as, collectively, their work constitute very recent Irish examples and thus is grounded in the same welfare space as the work presented here. However, there are also examples of cognate literature from further afield and within this specific idiom.…”

“…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.…”

What is Economic Theology? A New Governmental-Political Paradigm?

“…Nevertheless, this first version of political theology rests principally on a synchronic sociology of juristic concepts that identifies systematic, or, as we might say, 'structural', analogies between the theological-metaphysical and juridical-political concepts of a particular society. The relation is 'sociological' for Schmitt in that it follows Weber's (1948: 280-281;Boland and Griffin, 2017: 3) discussion of the radically transformative effects of what he calls certain 'world images', that can act as 'switchmen' by determining the tracks for action. Like Weber, Schmitt proposes a relation between metaphysical, often religious or theological, images of the world and normative political organization and concepts, and the way in which crises can act as occasions for the changing hegemony of such images.…”

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).…”