Performances for upward mobility: How Dutch workfare programmes function as temporal spaces of imagination

The gradual retreat of many governments from actively supporting secure labour relations and social security through welfare arrangements, and the related normalisation of precarious conditions, goes hand-in-hand with a promise of the attainability of ‘the good life’ through work. Workfare programmes are at the centre of this, as they are aimed at ‘improving’ welfare clients and their position in society through performing precarious work. Based on an ethnographic study of group workshops in three Dutch workfare programmes, this article shows how welfare clients are taught the promise of upward mobility through waged labour and are required to give ‘the right’ performances that might (in principle if, often, not in practice) potentially enable them to be successful on the post-Fordist labour market. I argue that these workshops function as temporal spaces of imagination in which adherence to the promise of upward mobility through paid work can best be understood as a form of post-Fordist affect, one that enacts, albeit temporarily, a resolution that is frequently lacking in real life.

According to the Dutch prime minister, ‘hard-working Dutch citizens’ are people who strive to ‘make something of their lives’ and should be rewarded for ‘working hard’. In an interview on public television in 2011, he was asked to explain who he does not consider to be ‘hard-working’. In his answer he referred to welfare clients. While saying that he does not necessarily blame them for ‘not working’, he explained they should get jobs in order to become part of the group of ‘hardworking Dutch citizens’.¹ The prime minister thus equates ‘hard work’ with earning money in the (labour) market and being independent of welfare, which is something to strive for. Moreover, his statements reveal a belief in a society in which it is possible to thrive through paid work. The promise is thus that ‘work pays off’ – which is actually the name of a municipal workfare programme in the Netherlands.

While people who ‘work hard’ are believed to be deserving of (financial) rewards, those deemed not to be working hard enough (since they need income support) are obliged to do so in what is called ‘workfare’ programmes (McDowell, 2004; Paz-Fuchs & Eleveld, 2016; Standing, 1990). These programmes are aimed at labour market (re)integration and require welfare clients to perform all kinds of work – from unpaid and community work to course work – in return for receiving benefits. The Participation Act (that organises welfare in the Netherlands as of 2015) is an example of this. It states that the right to benefits is conditional on the individual’s effort to find any kind of ‘generally acceptable’ paid employment as soon as possible. Moreover, to ensure welfare clients do their utmost to obtain and retain this kind of employment, the law states that benefits can be cut when welfare clients are deemed to ‘obstruct obtaining, accepting and retaining generally acceptable employment by clothing, a lack of personal grooming or behaviour’ (Article 18, par. 4 g). In addition, welfare clients are obliged to participate in ‘labour market reintegration services’ as offered to them by the municipality they live in. These services are intended to assist welfare clients in their quest for paid work.

The Participation Act is the most recent example of welfare reform in the Netherlands, starting in the early 1980s. Due to a sharp increase in unemployment rates resulting from the global economic recession, welfare benefits shifted from being primarily a means to sustain oneself independent of a spouse or relatives, to acting as a substitute income in times of (long-term) unemployment (Van Berkel, 2017). This marked the beginning of a (still ongoing) debate about the rights and duties of welfare clients. Welfare policy has become increasingly conditional upon requirements with regard to welfare clients’ aesthetics, affects, behaviour and active participation in workfare programmes, as well as in society through obligatory ‘volunteering’ (Arts & Van den Berg, 2019; Van den Berg & Arts, 2019; Kampen, 2014). Today, welfare is not merely seen as a way to provide an income to those in need, but importantly as a way to ‘activate’ welfare clients in order for them to become ‘self-reliant’, ‘independent’ of income support (again).

Although the focus is on job search rather than training, workfare policies contain pedagogical strategies (Arts & Van den Berg, 2019; Van den Berg & Arts, 2019; Newman, 2010), as the underlying assumption is that welfare clients have gaps – in knowledge about the current labour market, and in personal skills needed to successfully participate in that labour market – that can be filled through performing (unpaid) work and participating in workshops (Cruikshank, 1999; Gerrard, 2014; Kampen, 2014). According to Gerrard (2014), we are witnessing a conflation of a ‘learning ethic’ with a ‘work ethic’: a commitment to learning and personal development in order to ‘accrue value upon the self’ for and through paid work (Gerrard, 2014, p. 863; cf. Walkerdine, 2003; Walkerdine & Bansel, 2010). Workfare programmes are thus not merely intended to ‘put welfare clients to work,’ but also to improve them – in terms of their ‘employability’ – in order to increase their chances of successfully participating in post-Fordist labour markets and thereby improving their position in society.

Welfare reforms in the Netherlands can be situated in terms of wider policy developments in Europe (and beyond) aimed at encouraging and compelling citizens to be ‘active’ in the labour market as well as in civil society, as this is believed to improve people’s lives and society as a whole, while simultaneously reducing welfare expenditure (Clarke, 2005; Cruikshank, 1999; Muehlebach, 2011; Sage, 2019). These policy developments have been described and analysed in much detail (see, for example, Betzelt & Bothfeld, 2011; Brodkin & Marston, 2013; Newman & Tonkens, 2011). Some scholars have scrutinised the way ‘welfare dependency’ has become defined as a problem to which welfare reform, with its focus on control and improvement of welfare clients, is intended to be the solution (Cruikshank, 1999; Fraser & Gordon, 1994; Rose, 1999). More recently, from a governmentality-inspired ethnographic approach, others have focussed on the implications of welfare reform for actual practices as they occur daily within and beyond the walls of the welfare office (see, for example, Brady, 2011; Dubois, 2009). This article builds on these studies by using ethnographic methods to scrutinise how ‘labour market activation’, or ‘reintegration’ as it is called, takes shape in daily practices at three local welfare offices.

From a governmentality perspective, ‘workfare’ is an example of the myriad ways in which citizens are governed today – by others and themselves – to become ‘entrepreneurial’ individuals focussed on economic success (Rose, 1999). The practices that comprise this ‘governing’ are done by all kinds of actors, including, but not limited to state bodies (Cruikshank, 1999; Fridman, 2014). Although I will look at practices and interactions within the demarcated space of the welfare office, I realise that governing welfare clients does not begin or end there. Nevertheless, I take the welfare office as a location in which to study how welfare clients are governed (by others as well as themselves). I ask specifically in what ways they (are encouraged to) ‘improve’ themselves and what this self-improvement promises to deliver them. Although others have examined this too (Brady, 2011; Cruikshank, 1999; Kampen, 2014; McDonald & Marston, 2005), this article takes the labour market into account in order to understand the specific ways in which ‘improvement’ for and through (paid) work takes shape. Consequently, it starts from two observations that will be elaborated on in the next section: first, the prominence and promise of paid work in contemporary society (and workfare policy), and secondly the increasingly precarious forms of paid work that are characteristic of post-Fordist labour markets. In this article, I argue that the particular ways in which ‘improvement’ for and through (paid) work takes shape can be understood as a way of resolving in imagination, since it cannot be resolved in fact, the tension between the ideal of paid work and the reality of precarious labour markets.

Political discourses about work and workfare policies suggest that work is a ‘happy object,’ in the words of Sara Ahmed (2010, p. 28). At any rate in certain contexts, it is recognised as a source of happiness and wellbeing, for both individuals and societies as a whole (Sage, 2019; Tokumitsu, 2015; Weeks, 2017). On the website of the Dutch government one can read that ‘a job offers people social contacts, self-confidence and the possibility for personal development’.² In addition, the minister of Social Affairs and Employment, recently stated that ‘paid work is the fastest way to integration and participation in Dutch society’.³ Work is not merely a source of income, therefore, but, when it is linked to social status, it is regarded as a foundation for the experience of social usefulness, recognition and belonging (Berlant, 2007; Castel, 1996; Muehlebach, 2011; Tokumitsu, 2015), a means for self-actualisation and improvement (Honneth, 2004; Walkerdine & Bansel, 2010), or even ‘a source of joy in and of itself’ (Tokumitsu, 2015, p. 60; cf. Weeks, 2017). Work, then, is understood to keep societies together and make life worth living. This rhetoric of work as the ‘promise of happiness’ (Ahmed, 2010) is ostensibly at odds with the observed increase in the number of people who have to face precarious employment conditions in contemporary post-Fordist labour markets (Harvey, 1990; Sennett, 1998). Standing (2011) and Savage et al. (2015) have even defined a new social group: ‘the precariat’, consisting of individuals working in low-paid, insecure jobs that are ‘unlikely to assist them to build a desirable identity or a desirable career’ (Standing, 2011, p. 27; cf. Savage et al., 2015, p. 193; Walkerdine, 2003). For them, paid work does not seem to offer ‘the good life’.

Judith Butler (in Puar et al., 2012) and Lorey (2012) describe the current situation in terms of precarity and precarisation. For Butler, it is a ‘social condition of political life’ which is unequally distributed, emanating from ‘dominant norms regarding whose life is grievable and worth protecting’ (Puar et al., 2012, p. 170). Lorey argues that precarisation is a process of normalisation, in which having to struggle in a precarious form of labour is increasingly becoming the norm in formerly well-developed welfare-state-societies (Lorey, 2012). This is, of course, not ‘naturally’ so, but the result of political choices and public policies that have resulted from deindustrialising labour markets and related socio-economic problems, in combination with the dominant belief that neoliberal policies are the best answer to this new order (Harvey, 2005; McDowell, 2004; Standing, 1990). Contemporary politics and policies have contributed to the disappearance and devaluation of certain types of work and related citizenship status and identities, while simultaneously promoting (upward mobility through) labour market participation (Reay, 2013; Walkerdine & Bansel, 2010).

Workfare policies exemplify this constellation of processes, as they are conditional and based on the premise that if you work hard enough to learn and to improve yourself, you can be successful in the labour market, thereby securing your position in society – even if you start at the bottom. While this may have been the case for many people (mainly men) in Europe (and beyond) in Fordist times, post-Fordist waged labour does not seem to offer many people a secure existence, nor an outlook on improving their condition (McDowell, 2004; Savage et al., 2015; Sennett, 1998; Standing, 2011). Many authors have argued, therefore, that this type of social policy enhances precarity and (re)produces inequality (Greer, 2016; Wiggan, 2015), since workfare policies require welfare clients to accept any obtainable job and are characterised by ‘an emphasis on job search (rather than training), conditionality and sanctions (rather than unconditional entitlements)’ (Greer, 2016, p. 164). Lorey describes contemporary Western modes of governing in terms of ‘governmental precarisation,’ because they offer merely a minimum of safeguarding while requiring people to take responsibility for creating the life they desire in the post-Fordist political economy (Lorey, 2012).

Since post-Fordist labour markets offer increasingly flexible, insecure jobs that require a certain type of labour and relation to that labour, cultivating ‘employability’ has become crucial and very specific. Post-Fordist labour markets require ‘a worker who is “all in”’ (Weeks, 2017, p. 52), workers who are willing to continuously develop their characters for and through jobs (Gerrard, 2014; Walkerdine & Bansel, 2010). Not surprisingly, then, to participate successfully in the current labour market requires continuous ‘self-invention’ (Walkerdine, 2003) or ‘self-work’ (Gerrard, 2014). Education does not self-evidently result in having a career, as ‘linear hierarchies of the education system of the past and jobs for life’ have largely been replaced by the need to keep learning constantly and have multiple career trajectories over the course of a lifetime (Walkerdine, 2003, p. 240). Consequently, as Mäkinen (2016) argues, this ‘self-work’ is not about ‘accumulating skills or developing abilities’ per se, but primarily about developing capacities enabling the individual to anticipate at least something of the insecure future, as well as to offer employers flexible, adaptable, potentially improvable labour power (Mäkinen, 2016, pp. 77–78). ‘Self-work’ is thus inherently future-oriented and about potential, both for the individual (in terms of future labour market opportunities) and for the employer (in terms of future market opportunities) (Mäkinen, 2016). As Beverly Skeggs writes, for many, it has become almost impossible to be a ‘subject of value’ in the contemporary precarious labour market that requires an individual to (be able to) become a ‘risk-taking, enterprising, mobile, reflexive, individualistic self,’ a process which ‘requires access to the right resources’ (2004, p. 176; cf. Rose, 1999).

Fordist ideals, then, – ‘the promise of relative economic security and well-being, plausible middle-class aspirations, and a sense of linear biographical legibility’ (Muehlebach & Shoshan, 2012, p. 317) – seem to be increasingly removed from the reality of people who live in precarious conditions. Nonetheless they are still very much present in contemporary imaginations, hopes and dreams. Several scholars have conceptualised the continued adherence to these ideals in terms of ‘post-Fordist affect’ (Berlant, 2007, 2011; Muehlebach, 2011; Muehlebach & Shoshan, 2012). They understand this to be problematic, ‘cruel’ even (Berlant, 2011), because it contributes to the continuation and justification of existing inequalities (Reay, 2013). In this article, I examine Dutch ‘labour market (re)integration’ as a case in which the requirement to take care of one’s own improvement and wellbeing through ‘self-work’ and ‘working hard’ in the labour market – and, not least, the promises this brings – converges with precarious labour market conditions.

Due to its welfare state and labour market restructuring, the Netherlands is at the forefront of labour market activation and flexibilisation (Kremer, Went, & Knottnerus, 2017; Paz-Paz-Fuchs & Eleveld, 2016). These developments have gone hand-in-hand with an increase in ‘in-work poverty’ (Snel, de Boom, & Engbersen, 2008; Vrooman, Josten, Hoff, Putman, & Wildeboer Schut, 2018). Welfare clients are thus obliged to find paid work as soon as possible in a labour market that makes it ever more difficult for increasingly more people to sustain themselves. This combination of characteristics makes the Netherlands an interesting case to study in what ways and with what effects a belief in paid work as a way to improve people’s lives forms part of daily practices in welfare offices.

The implementation of national workfare policy (institutionalised in the Participation Act) is decentralised to a large degree. Consequently, municipalities have ample room to devise local welfare policy and practices. The law requires municipalities to offer services to welfare clients, to command active participation and to impose sanctions if welfare clients do not fully meet requirements. However, there are many varieties among local workfare policies in terms of the types, amounts and intensities of activities that welfare clients are required to do (Van Berkel, 2017). Among municipalities, this also varies for different categories of welfare clients. Welfare clients are generally categorised into two groups: those who are deemed ‘work-ready’ and are expected to find paid employment in the near future, and those who are ‘not work-ready’ (yet) due to ‘obstacles’ such as health issues, language barriers or severe debts that require attention first (loc. cit.). The group workshops studied here are set up to assist welfare clients who are deemed ‘work-ready’ to find waged labour (as opposed to self-employment, for which other services are offered).

To maximise variation (Flyvbjerg, 2006), the three welfare offices were selected on the basis of their local policy objectives, numbers of inhabitants and proportions of welfare clients. The case selection includes two of the four largest cities in the Netherlands, each with approximately 40,000 welfare recipients at the time of the fieldwork. They are both above the national average in terms of numbers of welfare clients as a proportion of inhabitants, but differ in policy objectives (as formulated in their local policy framework). The third welfare office is a collaboration between three small municipalities located in a rural area in the Netherlands, together with approximately 1,400 welfare recipients at the time of the fieldwork. The proportion here of welfare clients is below the national average and the policy objective of this office is not made explicit. In this article the goal is not to compare municipal welfare offices, but to get a broad view of the various ways in which welfare arrangements take shape in daily practices in the Netherlands. In all three welfare offices I was present for 2–3 days a week, during a period of four to five months, and I observed respectively 48, 46 and 15 workshops. The workshops focussed on how to find vacancies, write a CV and motivation letter, approach potential employers, present oneself properly and perform in a job interview. They lasted between a few hours on one day only, and a few hours on one, two or three days over three to fifteen weeks. The workshops were always led by two case managers,⁴ but the number of participants varied, ranging from about three to fifty participants.

This study is part of a larger research project on evaluation and pedagogical practices in three Dutch municipal workfare programmes focussed on ‘work-ready’ welfare clients. It consists of 13-month ethnographic fieldwork, in which ‘ethnography’ is understood as ‘a family of methods’ that constitutes ‘the disciplined and deliberate witness-cum-recording of human events’ (Willis & Trondman, 2000, p. 6). The main focus was to observe and analyse the interactions between agents working on the authority of a municipality (case managers) and inhabitants of that municipality (welfare clients) in the context of the various daily practices that are part of local workfare policies. I have observed (and sometimes actively participated in) group workshops and have frequently conversed with case managers and welfare clients before, during and after the workshops. My role as researcher was always disclosed and visible as I took notes on paper during the workshops. I asked all those involved (both case managers and welfare clients) for permission to observe at least once (at the start of each new workshop series, or when new participants joined). To ensure their anonymity, all participants’ biographical information is omitted from the presentation of the findings.

As workfare is aimed at ‘(re)integrating’ welfare clients into the labour market and this is to an important degree done via group workshops that are organised on the premise that welfare clients need guidance in order to find paid work, I specifically focussed on the way this guidance takes shape. What do case managers teach welfare clients about (finding) paid work, what do welfare clients have to do in order to find paid work, according to the case managers, and how do they legitimate this? The methodological approach that I employed is abductive analysis (Tavory & Timmermans, 2014). This entails an iterative process of, first, gaining knowledge from existing theories on workfare, post-Fordist labour markets and governmentality, and using this to guide and interpret my empirical observations, and, second, systematically gathering, describing and analysing observational data and letting this push my theorisation ‘in unexpected directions’ (Tavory & Timmermans, 2014, p. 2). The literature thus offered me a broad background, while the fieldwork enabled me to look for patterns (that is, recurring interactions, practices and themes), similarities and differences, as well as contradictions (Tavory & Timmermans, 2014, p. 126). Based on my observations, I engaged with new theories, further immersed myself in fieldwork and further analysed my findings. This approach assisted me in making sense of the local practices that constitute contemporary workfare policy in the Netherlands.

The primary task of case managers working with ‘work-ready’ welfare clients was to assist them in finding waged work in a highly competitive and precarious labour market that offered no (or very limited) career perspectives, while requiring typical post-Fordist employee skills – characterised by paradoxical demands for authenticity and emotional commitment on the one hand and adaptability and flexibility on the other. Most vacancies required a certain educational background that often did not fit the welfare clients’. Case managers’ principal task appeared to be challenging and often even impossible. Within the workfare programmes, the solution to welfare clients’ unemployment (or insufficient employment) was sought in pedagogical and psychological interventions aimed at improving their selves (cf. McDonald & Marston, 2005). Case managers were obliged to fill several hours of workshops and make these into ‘motivating’, ‘empowering’, and, ultimately, ‘employability-enhancing’ workshops. By means of various exercises, the workshops required continuous ‘self-work’ (Gerrard, 2014) from welfare clients in the hope that it would increase their chances of finding paid employment and, ultimately, having a career. Simultaneously, the unattainability of this ideal was often acknowledged by both case managers and welfare clients, based on their knowledge of and experiences with the labour market (also see Arts & Van den Berg, 2019). Thus, the aims and ideals on which the workshops were based did not ‘fit’ the labour market realities.

In this section, I will first show how Fordist ideals and post-Fordist realities guided the workshops, resulting in the perceived need for welfare clients to work on their selves in order to have a chance of attaining the life to which so much value was accorded: to belong to the group of ‘hardworking Dutch citizens’ and, most importantly, to have a chance to further improve their position in society through waged labour. Subsequently, I will focus on the techniques used by case managers that were aimed at ‘improving’ welfare clients and their situation: introspection and imitation of labour market situations. These techniques resulted, ultimately, in the requirement for welfare clients to give performances of an imaginary, potential yet not actual, post-Fordist worker of valued, secured status with possibilities for upward mobility. The deployment of these techniques can be seen as an attempt to solve the conflict resulting from adhering to Fordist ideals in the context of post-Fordist realities.

A central part of ‘labour market (re)integration’ is the reproduction of the ideal of work as the way to achieve something in life, be a valuable member of society and have a decent source of subsistence – things welfare benefits cannot provide – as the following example shows:

Most of the welfare clients expressed their desire to have a paid job (again). This was mainly for financial reasons and so that they could ‘be independent’ or ‘free’ (from welfare), but also to be able to ‘participate in society’, to ‘(re)gain self-confidence’, or more generally to ‘matter’. However, some (predominantly older) welfare clients would state that waged work is not ‘something that necessarily makes you happy’ (‘zaligmakend’), as they believed there are other ways to have a meaningful life as well – through volunteering and caring for others, for example. Yet, whereas the goal of workfare programmes (finding paid work) and what achieving that goal would yield (a better life), appeared to be fairly uncontested,⁵ the ways in which this goal should be achieved, as well as the feasibility of it, were not so self-evident. Case managers offered a wide range of assistance: giving advice, transferring knowledge, providing spaces for welfare clients to practise and offering an indirect line to employers – through intermediaries such as job hunters, account managers and recruiters.⁶ The conditions under which case managers had to provide these services, however, often presented them with difficulties.

Firstly, they were not able to offer education, since budgets for this were practically non-existent. Welfare clients were primarily encouraged to climb the career ladder through work. Accordingly, case managers would teach them to distinguish between a ‘bread job’ and a ‘dream job’. The latter is a job to keep in mind, even to visualise on a mood board, whereas the former is the first step in the direction of acquiring that dream job. Welfare clients were thus encouraged to find a job, any job, as soon as possible and to work their way up from there. As one case manager explained to me:

During one of the workshops, another case manager explained the same idea to a welfare client:These examples show how the ideal of upward mobility was maintained while, at the same time, it was acknowledged that, for welfare clients, this ideal might not be feasible in the short term, or maybe ever. Still, paid work was deemed ‘better than being on welfare’ as it would offer a daily routine, social contacts, more money and, in theory at least, the chance of improving one’s condition.

Next to a lack of opportunities for schooling, another rather crucial problem for case managers was the severely limited number of appropriate vacancies for their clients to apply to. Finding paid employment appeared to be very difficult, especially for welfare clients, since they often lacked the required educational background and/or job experience, or because they were deemed too old according to employers. The welfare clients that were able to find paid employment, would almost always be hired in temporary, flexible or zero-hour contracts. One case manager, therefore, gave a welfare client who obtained a temporary employment contract some words of encouragement: ‘Go and work really hard, so that they never want to lose you!’

During my presence in the welfare offices, I observed that the support that case managers could offer mostly did not result in welfare clients finding paid employment or even being invited for job interviews, especially not for durable jobs with career prospects.⁷ To make their own working life bearable, case managers had to find ways to contribute to welfare clients’ quest for jobs, as well as to keep believing they could actually do so. They did so by means of encouraging them(selves) to optimistically persist (see Arts & Van den Berg, 2019) and helping them to improve themselves according to the (perceived) requirements of potential employers. Consequently, welfare clients were encouraged to (re)discover themselves in order to find work that would fit their personalities or to learn to adjust their personalities to fit jobs (cf. Honneth, 2004; Mäkinen, 2016; Walkerdine & Bansel, 2010). As the next section will show, the focus during the workshops was mainly on introspection – in order to come to ‘know’ or ‘(re)discover’ oneself. These exercises of introspection were followed by imitations of meetings with network contacts and potential employers, where welfare clients would practise ‘selling’ themselves. These exercises were not merely intended to help welfare clients to find work now, but, importantly, to learn ways of moving up in the labour market later.

The workshops mainly revolved around answering the questions: ‘Who am I? What do I want? What am I capable of?’ as well as practising job interviews with potential employers and giving short presentations (termed the ‘elevator pitch’) for hypothetical network contacts. Case managers would explain to welfare clients that ‘knowing who you are’ and ‘being able to communicate that’ is crucial in order to get a good job. This way, it was believed, welfare clients learn to ‘discover’ their potential and ‘bring it into being’ (Mäkinen, 2016, p. 80). Consequently, case managers encouraged welfare clients to incorporate ‘personal profiles’ in their CV: short texts in which they would describe their personalities. To help them write these, case managers handed out questionnaires, personality tests and/or lists of qualities to choose from:

This quote explicitly states the core of the workshops: personality and presentation. It also shows the work that goes into ‘knowing oneself’ and ‘knowing’ the boundary between ‘private’ and ‘professional’. Many welfare clients strictly separated the two, while case managers encouraged them to involve their private selves into their (search for) paid work. As this example painfully shows, in the view of the case managers, almost nothing was considered too private, except if it would deter employers (one can only speculate why the case manager would choose precisely this example to make that clear). As Skeggs has noted, who one can be (or say who one is) depends on one’s position in society (Skeggs, 2004). She points to the long history of poor people having to ‘tell themselves’ in ways that are expected from them in order to receive income support, thereby lacking ‘the option of being public or private’ (Skeggs, 2004, p. 134). As this example shows, for those who desperately need a job, keeping certain things private is either not an option, or essential – with regard to things that others (in this case employers) might perceive to be less valuable or worthy. Welfare clients are, thus, forced to know and present themselves ‘in ways not of their own making’ (ibid.), as the following example will also illustrate. It shows a frequently occurring exercise that case managers used to ‘help’ welfare clients to increase their ‘self-insight’:This example shows in more detail what ‘self-insight’ entails and that not all ‘self-insight’ and personal attributes are deemed valuable. Legitimated by ‘knowing what employers look for’, case managers convey ‘knowledge’ about what welfare clients should know about themselves and, once they know, what they should do with that knowledge: turn ‘negative’ characteristics, or ‘pitfalls’, into ‘something positive’. Oftentimes, exercises were accompanied by lists of character traits that were recategorised into ‘positive’ traits – such as ‘autonomous’, ‘composed’, ‘spontaneous’ – and ‘negative’ ones – ‘intractable’, ‘impersonal’ and ‘fickle’, for example. Welfare clients were taught to perform ‘self-work’ in order to develop what were perceived to be objectively designated positive personal characteristics.

As Skeggs (2004) and Walkerdine (2003) have argued, we should not only question the value of ‘self-insight’ itself – and the particular ways in which this should be obtained and articulated – but also scrutinise the specific characteristics that are deemed to be ‘good’ and ‘valuable’. These workshops showed that self-insight (being able to apply the right words to the right character traits) was valued as opposed to ‘not knowing’ or not being able to articulate them. In addition, the character traits that were deemed valuable, were understood to be necessary to be successful, making these kinds of exercises examples of ways in which welfare clients were to become ‘subjects of value’ as is ‘deemed necessary by global economic rhetoric’ (Skeggs, 2004, p. 176). Moreover, this example shows that it seemed to be easier for the women in the workshop to articulate their ‘pitfalls’. This gendered dimension, however important, is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that Walkerdine points to a ‘feminisation’ of the discourse of the self, in which ‘the values of a psychology and interiority’ that have usually been ascribed to women, have become central (Walkerdine, 2003, p. 242). This might explain what I have observed here.

Next to introspection, an important part of the workshops revolved around welfare clients continuously having to practise interacting with an imagined other who might possibly give them a job. During many workshops, meetings with employers or network contacts were imitated, so that welfare clients could perform their ‘improved self’ in a hypothetical job interview or ‘elevator pitch’. The latter was a short presentation in which all the knowledge and skills welfare clients had obtained during the workshops had to come together. Welfare clients had to practise their pitch over and over again, to make sure they could present themselves properly when the time came when they met someone who could get them a (better) job. This is how a case manager explained the content and purpose of an elevator pitch to a group of welfare clients:

As this quote shows, the elevator pitch is, quite literally, about upward mobility. To be able to present yourself in such a way that ‘you sell yourself’ was not only considered necessary for welfare clients in order to get a job now, but also to move upwards later – as the concepts ‘bread job’ and ‘dream job’ also show. The following example shows how practising the pitch during the workshops worked:This continuous performing during the workshops, in the absence of anyone present who could possibly get them a job, often resulted in welfare clients’ frustration. To prepare for one of the workshops, which was about how to dress properly, welfare clients were instructed to dress as if they were going to a job interview. During the workshop, the case manager explained that the welfare clients should actually always come to the welfare office dressed like this, in case a potential employer might visit and because it would help them to ‘get into the work-mode’ (see Van den Berg & Arts, 2019). A welfare client responded to this by saying: In order to make the performances more real, case managers would regularly invite job hunters, account managers and recruiters from employment agencies to the workshops to function as potential employers, as in the following example:The analogy with selling and buying a product was a recurring one, as welfare clients were taught to think of themselves as being entrepreneurial (cf. Weeks, 2017) and making themselves ‘valuable’ in the market (cf. Skeggs, 2004), commodifying not only their labour power, but their whole selves (Tokumitsu, 2015; Weeks, 2017; cf. Lorey, 2012). This is despite the fact that, according to many case managers, money should not be the primary motivation for wanting to work. Asking about salary, for example, was said to be ‘not done’. As Savage et al. argue, this type of reasoning is mainly adhered to by those who can afford it (2015, p. 62) and is in line with the dominant ideology that work should be done out of love (Tokumitsu, 2015; Weeks, 2017). It was, in a sense, a fantasy to expect these particular welfare clients to adhere seriously to this value.

Performing the elevator pitch in front of someone who was ‘in contact with’ actual employers was a frequently occurring practice during workshops. The intermediary would give feedback on the content as well as the form of the pitch – the way a welfare client would use her or his or body and make eye contact, for example. In addition, she would give welfare clients general, and sometimes more concrete, suggestions for jobs to apply to – in care, retail, cleaning, call centres and catering, for example. It was, however, not the intermediaries’ task to help welfare clients to get jobs, nor did case managers expect this from them. This way, the performances remained a matter of form, not functioning as an actual activity in (proximity to) the labour market, but performed within the boundaries of the welfare office: they took the form of acting out an imagined reality.

At another workshop series (specifically for more highly educated welfare clients), the case managers had not invited intermediaries to the welfare office, but had arranged – together with a local organisation aimed at enhancing ‘corporate social and environmental responsibility’ – for the group of welfare clients to visit a company in the city’s business district. During one of the workshops at the welfare office, this upcoming event was imitated in order to prepare for it. The case managers explained that the meeting had been set up so that HR-Managers from several businesses (law firms, consultancy firms, IT companies, banks, real-estate offices) could give the welfare clients feedback on their elevator pitches and help them to think of ways to get jobs. The case managers also told the welfare clients not to expect too much: they would not get jobs out of the meeting, but they would get valuable feedback and maybe even network contacts. Moreover, they said, it always remained to be seen who would actually show up, since ‘these are very busy people’. During the actual meeting, which took place in a conference room on the 17th floor of an impressive building in the business district, the welfare clients performed their elevator pitches one by one in front of the mood boards they had made prior to the meeting (in order to visualise their personalities and aims in life). The audience consisted predominantly of the same intermediaries that regularly visited the workshops at the welfare offices.

During the subsequent workshop at the welfare office some welfare clients expressed their disappointment with the lack of representatives from the business district, as well as the lack of actual results from the meeting. One of the welfare clients said he thought the meeting was a ‘let-down’, as he didn’t even get useful feedback, let alone anything that might lead to a job. He felt like a ‘charity project’ which didn’t result in the welfare clients meeting actual employers. Therefore, it did not meet his expectations, even though the case managers had already told them not to expect too much. Other, though not all, welfare clients said they agreed with him. One of them told the case managers that she had talked to one of the very few representatives present from the business district and asked her if she could introduce her to some of her contacts in the district. She declined and explained that she did not have that type of relationship with the other businesses. Thus, although the meeting brought the welfare clients physically close to, or even into the work place, it did not bring them closer to paid work. Instead, as with all the observed ‘imitation’ exercises, it merely offered welfare clients a space to ‘perform, and imagine through that performance, themselves otherwise’ (Dawney, 2011, p. 537): as potential employees instead of welfare clients. However, this is a special form of counterfactual imagination: imagining not what could really be, or what one might choose, but imagining what one is instructed to hope for by a system with little intention of granting it.

The workshops observed in the three municipal welfare offices entail ‘self-work’ intended to ‘improve’ welfare clients (through introspection, telling about and performing themselves in certain ways), and thereby their condition (through paid work). The workshops offer welfare clients temporary spaces in which they can perform (and imagine through that performance) becoming and being an employee – by means of imitating (closeness to) paid work. These observed practices can be understood as resulting from several aspects all coming together in workfare policy practices. First, there is the promise of paid work as a way to improve individual wellbeing: ‘a reason to get up from the couch, the feeling of belonging again, the feeling of living again,’ as one case manager articulated it. Second, workfare policy obliges welfare clients to become ‘employable’ in order to ‘(re)integrate’ into a labour market that mainly requires flexible, adaptable, continuously self-improving employees that ‘fit’ the job (in terms of their ‘personality’). Last, there is the tension of adherence to (Fordist) ideals of upward mobility through paid employment in a time when the (post-Fordist) labour market barely offers ways to have a career. This applies especially for people who are over fifty years old, have little formal education and/or lack the required work experience – as is the case for many of the welfare clients I encountered.

The workfare programmes I have studied are, then, best understood as a governmental strategy that mobilises ‘powerful affective attachments’ (Muehlebach & Shoshan, 2012, p. 317) to Fordist notions of economic security, social belonging and upward mobility through waged labour – but that does so in essentially contradictory ways. These ideals have become practically unfeasible for certain populations in post-Fordism, yet are mobilised by the state exactly for them, because they are not (yet) deemed to be ‘subjects of value’ (Skeggs, 2004). As this article has shown, this is carried out in the form of exercises through which welfare clients learn to give certain performances that are (perceived to be) required in post-Fordist labour markets. By means of these exercises, case managers encourage welfare clients to transform themselves into ‘subjects of value’ for the labour market without being able to offer ways to actually obtain secure positions through durable waged labour with career perspectives. These performances, thus, function as ways to approximate or to imitate Fordist forms of economic security, social status and belonging to, in this case, the group of ‘hardworking Dutch citizens’.

This way, welfare clients are continuously performing a potentiality: someone yet to be and something yet to come. Or, in the words of Lauren Berlant, they ‘perform not the achieved materiality of a better life but the approximate feeling of belonging to a world that doesn’t yet exist reliably’ (Berlant, 2007, p. 277). Workfare is thus premised on the potential of welfare clients to become employees, as well as the potential that paid work will offer them economic security and status – something welfare does not offer. However, for many people, and especially welfare clients, it is highly unlikely that this potentiality will in fact become a reality, as the labour market primarily offers them precarious positions. Through workfare, then, governments contribute to upholding promises that cannot be redeemed for increasingly more members of their population, while simultaneously normalising their current precarious conditions (cf. Lorey, 2012). These findings bring with them important questions as to why so many people are invested in workfare policies and the promise of the attainability of ‘the good life’ through paid work.⁸

I would like to thank Marguerite van den Berg, Jan Willem Duyvendak and Elsbeth Dekker for help with and comments on earlier versions of this article, as well as the editors and anonymous reviewers of the European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology for their excellent reviews and helpful suggestions.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.