How Do Activation Policies Affect Social Citizenship? The Issue of Autonomy

Abstract

The spread of the activation discourse partly driven by the European Employment Strategy since the mid-nineties initiated a new orientation, especially in the field of employment policies, throughout the industrialized Western world. Activation policy reforms reflect a new ethical justification of social security provision, mainly by redefining the individual’s responsibility for her economic subsistence through employment, emphasizing people’s work capacity and obligations, and diminishing the state’s duty to intervene (Dean, 2007). Of course, we find varying activation strategies in different types of welfare state regimes (Van Berkel and Hornemann Moeller, 2002a; Barbier, 2004a; Serrano Pascual, 2007). Obviously, we are well prepared to understand shifts that have occurred in the normative dimension of social security provision, which are driven by the introduction and amplification of activation policies, but, as some authors claim, the connection between normative and institutional change has not been analysed systematically (Lister, 1997; Kildal, 2003).