THE ‘ACTIVE WELFARE STATE’ AND ITS CONSEQUENCES: A case study of sheltered employment in Sweden Open Access

In the traditional welfare state, populations were generally divided into workers and various groups of non-workers (see Considine 2001; Butcher 2002; Lindert 2004). Specifically, ‘to be fully regarded as a social citizen in the welfare society you need to be regarded as a regular worker. Many of the benefits and privileges associated with the welfare state are contingent upon this status’ (Walters 1997: 222). This is a role that has been difficult to bear for a number of disadvantaged groups, most notably disabled people (Drake 1999; Kvist 2002). As a result, they have often been given a secondary status as citizens, commonly resulting in inactivity and social exclusion (see, e.g., Abberley 2002; Branson and Miller 2002). This problem has, however, not been limited to this group of people only. Indeed, one of the main responses to social exclusion in terms of mass unemployment by welfare states has been to reduce the size of the active workforce, with, for example early retirement or disability pension. A common consequence in many countries has been the permanent exclusion of large groups of citizens from the regular labor market (Goul Andersen et al. 2005; Bauman 2007).

From the early 1980s and beyond, this policy has progressively become the subject of intense critique coming both from neo-liberals and neo-social democrats. First of all, there is the problem of future labor supply (see, e.g., Williams 1999; Saunders 2005; Serrano Pascual 2007). If large groups of people are constantly sorted out for various moral and social reasons regarding their lack of fitness, the active work force is likely to shrink given the generally low rates of nativity in industrial countries. Demographic facts talk against the traditional welfare model. Second, there is the fiscal problem. Large groups of people that live on social welfare (perhaps all their lives, which is the case of many disabled persons; see, e.g., Oorschot and Hvinden 2001; Lindert 2004) do not contribute economically to society's progress; from an economic point-of-view they are a ‘burden’. In the face of harsh global competition, nations need to constantly reduce their spending in order to stay competitive. Third, the popular division by the welfare state between ‘workers’ and ‘non-workers’ has lead to social unrest and morally disturbing results. Through the unintentional creation of divided societies, some people have become ‘insiders’ while others have become ‘outsiders’ (e.g., disabled people). Fourth, and finally, facing global competition, public and private employers need to become more flexible and entrepreneurial by adopting forms of management that are built around individual subjects’ self-governing capabilities and active participation, thus promoting an active and entrepreneurial attitude among all existing and prospective employees. In all, critiques of the welfare state have argued that there is both a need to welcome new groups into the labor market, thus recognizing the demand for participation, and making employment and activity the norm, as well as to stress the virtues of lifelong learning, employability, and change (see Garsten and Jacobsson 2004).

In many countries the increasingly popular notion of the ‘active society’ that is concretely manifested in ‘an active labor market policy’ seems to be a response to this need. Elm Larsen (2005: 137) observed:

In the active society all citizens, including the most disadvantaged ones, are expected to be active rather than passive recipients of financial aid, hence contributing to society's development. The activation model aims at ‘developing human capital and increasing the reserve workforce’ as well as providing people ‘with moral skills, such as self-management, self-help and self-reliance, in order to create a new kind of worker who is more flexible, responsible and active’ (Serrano Pascual 2007: 23).

Activation policies are commonly focused on supporting disadvantaged groups, particularly people with disabilities (see Drake 1999; Oorschot and Hvinden 2001; Abberley 2002; OECD 2003; Overbye 2005). The phrases ‘empowerment’, ‘integration’, ‘rehabilitation’ and ‘restoration’ of people with disabilities designate this enterprise. They are all concerned with enabling unemployed disabled persons to eventually control their own lives, hence achieving a kind of ‘reformation to normal life’ (see, e.g., Albrecht et al. 2001; De Lathouwer 2005). Disabled people, whether they suffer from physical or mental impairments, are to be given the means through which they by themselves can integrate in the social, economic and cultural life of society.

This development has been of particular concern to the disability movement, where disabled people, policy makers, lobby organizations, etc., have fought for the need for governments to design programs that breed activity rather than passivity among people with disabilities (e.g., Lane 1997; Abberley 2002; Branson and Miller 2002; Thomas 2004). With activation programs for disabled people in operation, disabled people are thought to increase their chances significantly to leave a life of social exclusion that was common under the old welfare-state regime, reducing their stigmatized status as secondary citizens and increasing their health and well-being (see Shildrick and Price 1996; Oorschot and Hvinden 2001; Corker and Shakespeare 2002; Wadensjö 2007). As a result of these recent socio-political changes, there has been a growing recognition of disabled people's capabilities and competencies to manage their own lives. The active society invites the disabled person into full participation, asking for his or her skills, competencies and capabilities. As students of disability policies have noted, it is a fundamentally new approach by societies to this group of people (see Drake 1999; Albrecht et al. 2001).

In the active society, integration and empowerment is an individual responsibility for the disabled person, but it is also a matter of concern for society, e.g., by way of various ‘welfare-to-work’ programs for disabled people, such as work training, wage allowances and sheltered employment for disabled people (Lindert 2004; Saunders 2005). Hence, disabled persons are to be helped to ‘help themselves’. As Hansen et al. (2002: 109) reported:

Government-sponsored activities for the training, empowerment and integration of disabled people in society are favored by the European Union, as well as by several non-government organizations. Likewise, single governments, lobby organizations and commercial industries in many European countries favor activating labor market policies of integration of disabled jobseekers in society (see Glennerster 1999; Lodemel and Trickey 2000; Hvinden et al. 2001; Oorschot and Hvinden 2001; Kvist 2002; Abrahamson and Oorschot 2003; Overbye 2005). The active society is one that ensures disabled people can work, and enables them to do so: “Active measures” comprise practical efforts to assist people to find or remain in paid employment and thus improve their prospects in the labor market’ (Hvinden et al. 2001: 169). It is based on the idea that ‘employment is the “royal road” to combating exclusion and promoting inclusion’ (Van Berkel et al. 2002: 33). By strengthening their skills, competencies and overall employability disabled persons become ready and able to work when opportunities are available, hence avoiding the pitfalls of creating a permanent underclass of recipients of welfare aid that has been the experience of so many disabled men and women (see Garraty 1978; Walters 1997). As Dean (1995: 579) concluded: ‘Contemporary social policy has devised a range of institutional conditions and governmental means by which the active subject could be formed’ in order to fight the specter of the self-reproduction of ‘a dependent group permanently living within the welfare system’.

Hence, since the early 1980s in many European countries there has been ‘a shift from passive to active measures, an emphasis on individuals’ responsibilities to be self-sufficient vis-à-vis citizens’ rights to social benefits, and a redefinition of policy objectives from income maintenance to social inclusion’ (Gilbert 2005: 9). An ‘active line’ towards the disabled person stresses how governments want to instil a new kind of responsibility where disabled people activate themselves in order to become ‘normal citizens’, i.e., people fulfilling certain obligations as part of a societal contract (Van Berkel and Hornemann Moller 2002). This is thought to be the primary means through which disabled people become eventually employable (Garsten and Jacobsson 2004).

Today there is a large research literature that describes the ideals, intentions and practices of various activation programs, such as sheltered employment, supported employment and wage allowances (e.g., Dean 1995; Oorschot and Hvinden 2001; Elm Larsen 2005). Overall, this literature address statements by policy-makers and the practices, routines and experiences of staff at social welfare organizations that are to execute the policies. Generally, however, these studies do not examine the results of activation programs. Certainly, there exist some studies that have analyzed the economic implications of the activation regime for disabled people's financial situation (e.g., Butcher 2002; Lindert 2004); but less attention has been given to the sociological consequences of the current activation paradigm, particularly from the viewpoint of the disabled people who constitute these programs’ targets. Hence, so far few, if any, systematic studies have been proposed of the effects the interest on activation programs has had upon the disabled persons who come into contact with it, or on the general social and welfare problems of disability in an active society.

The purpose of this paper is to bridge this gap by studying a particular activation program in a particular country: Samhall of Sweden. By drawing on the notions of ‘empowerment’ and ‘rehabilitation’ that are central concepts in the literature on the active welfare state, I aim to examine how Samhall's clients’ employability is affected. Since they stress training, rehabilitation and other measures to increase disabled people's employability and integration on the regular labor market (see below) Swedish labor market programs have been recognized as particularly prominent examples of activation programs for disabled people (see, e.g., Drake 1999; Oorschot and Hvinden 2001; Hansen et al. 2002; Wadensjö 2007). Indeed, much of Scandinavian and Swedish labor market policy has stressed an ‘active approach’ to disabled people well before the current international wave of activation programs began in the early 1980s (see Walters 1997; Lindert 2004). As both Kvist (2002) and Oorschot and Hvinden (2001) have noted, arguments from Scandinavia and particularly Sweden have significantly contributed to the current popularity of the active society concept among European and international policy makers and politicians.

In December 2002 I contacted Samhall's CEO, and suggested that I would undertake studies of how Samhall's occupationally disabled employees were put to work. As a sociologist with a particular interest in human change and learning, I was intrigued by Samhall's mission to ‘activate individuals with occupational disability’, as it was stated in one of its documents. Thus, I explained to the CEO that I had a particular interest in learning more about how ‘people with occupational disabilities develop in Samhall’. He agreed to the project and assigned a group consisting of four of his deputies to act as my contact group. The research was carried out during 2003 through 2005, and complemented with updated information during 2006–2008. The study was funded by a research grant from two national research foundations in Sweden without any obligations versus Samhall. Overall, Samhall had no influence on the design of my study.

I did 94 open ended interviews (Silverman 2006: 5) with members of Samhall's top management team; 30 with supervisors and local branch managers; and 59 with occupationally disabled employees. Interviews were theoretically sampled (Strauss and Corbin 1990) to represent various social, medical and organizational categories – men and women, physically and mentally impaired, senior members and newcomers, staff and employees, etc. Following Lincoln and Guba's (1985) guidelines for ‘purposeful sampling’ in choosing informants, my overall aim was to meet people who would be best able to inform me on my research question. Of particular interest were the occupationally disabled people's experiences of the organization and its activation practices: for instance, how did they perceive their rehabilitation and development; and how did they regard some of the activation programs that they were subject to, e.g., training and work? Most of the interviews with the occupationally disabled employees were made during practical work or during breaks and could hence involve the presence of colleagues and supervisors; the rest of the interviews were more formal in the sense that they took place in the person's office or in conference rooms. On average, interviews lasted around 40–60 minutes. They were all tape recorded. Overall, questions were broad but once themes began to emerge across interviews, e.g., that work was repetitive or simple, they were validated in subsequent interviews (Spradley 1979). As an example of this, during my pilot study of about seven weeks, my questions were much more general and tentative than during the main study when my ‘sensitivity’ to the case had increased (Strauss and Corbin 1990).

I conducted ethnographic observations (Spradley 1979; Hammersley and Atkinson 1995) at 10 sites, located in different regions in Sweden; four of which were visited during two periods. Each observation period lasted about 10 working days. Upon entrance at a site I was introduced by the plant manager as a researcher from a university. When staying at a site I wore the same clothes as the occupationally disabled employees, ate lunch with them, took coffee breaks with them, and so on. On three occasions, I was invited to live in the homes of the employees during my whole stay. Essentially, my goal was to work as an ordinary Samhall employee, thus experiencing for myself Samhall's activation program; most importantly the kind of work offered. Depending on the type of activity at the site, participation was made in a host of activation practices, such as cleaning, maintenance, archival work, production of food, manufacture of furniture, etc. For example, together with eight of Samhall's occupationally disabled employees I stowed ready-cooked food and beverages in plastic bags that were then distributed by us by car to private persons (mostly elderly) that were living in a city called Härnösand (Northern Sweden). We distributed the packages according to a set distribution route each morning. During work I chatted with employees about Samhall, about their careers and about their jobs in particular. The approach was necessarily tentative, even though more particular questions were asked as themes emerged (Spradley 1980). Observational activities were important to gain deeper understanding of what was going on in Samhall; how people looked upon themselves, how their careers progressed, how the supervisors organized the work, etc. The statements by employees and supervisors and my personal impressions were written down in a notebook as verbatim and as close to the event as possible. The notebook was transcribed once a week. Overall, my participant observation became all the more structured and focused as themes emerged, e.g., regarding how the work was organized and carried out.

Three sources of archival data were gathered with respect to the activation offered by Samhall. The first source of information was the Samhall staff magazine, ‘Samhall i Fokus’ (in English: ‘Samhall in Focus’). The second source of information was 10 government reports on Samhall that had been published between 1980 and 2005, ‘Statens Offentliga Utredningar’ – SOU (in English: ‘The State's Official Enquiries’). By and large, these reports of about 200 pages each consisted of studies of Samhall's economic dealings, its ability to reach its official goals of activation and rehabilitation and comments upon the organization of work. The third source of information was books about Samhall written by Samhall employees (see Aulin 2001) or persons formerly employed by Samhall. For instance, one former Press Relation Officer published a book in 1990 where she gave a personal account of her experiences of working as a manager for Samhall (see Rådahl 1990). All written materials were in Swedish.

When collecting the data, I also inductively analyzed it, following the recommendations for methods of naturalistic inquiry as outlined by Lincoln and Guba (1985) and constant comparison techniques as proposed by Glaser and Strauss (1967). I started the analysis by identifying initial and raw concepts in the data and grouping them into categories, i.e., open coding (Strauss and Corbin 1990). I identified in-vivo (Ibid) or first order codes (Van Mannen 1979) when possible or simple descriptive phrases when in-vivo coding was not possible. The codes I found were related to what can be referred to as ‘activation practices’ in terms of empowerment and rehabilitation. As I thought about them, activation practices are established and standardized ways for accomplishing a ‘normal career’ as occupationally disabled at Samhall. The activation practices identified, primarily the kind of work offered (see below) were used to structure the empirical narrative. Next I turned to axial coding (Strauss 1987; Strauss and Corbin 1998). I noted that many of the activation practices resulted in a mismatch between Samhall's official intentions and employees’ experiences. In order to better understand this result, I classified the data into four groups: (1) data that presented Samhall and proposed the basic principles of Samhall's activation program; (2) accounts of the practical organization of Samhall's program in terms of the work offered to the disabled employees; (3) accounts of the experiences and feelings by both the disabled employees and by Samhall supervisors working on the shop floor regarding Samhall's activation regime; and (4) findings on the consequences of this organization for the disabled employees’ willingness to eventually leave Samhall.

I ended up with a number of activation practices that were organized according to a ‘rehabilitation logic’ of entering-developing-exiting that is a central idea to most activation programs (see, e.g., Williams 1999; Saunders 2005; Serrano Pascual 2007). The way the organization framed and enacted its employees by viewing and treating them as disabled indicated that activation models had a significant role to play in managing employee behavior. The term ‘activation’ to designate this enterprise was suggested to me by the literature. This particular literature, it seemed to me, addressed in a theoretical way the data I had gathered. Hence, when analyzing the data I have followed what Strauss and Corbin (1990) and Miles and Huberman (1994) have respectively labeled ‘an iterative process’, i.e., a travel back and forth between the data and an emerging structure of theoretical arguments and ideas that found its inspiration in the literature.

In 1980 an organization called Samhall was founded in Sweden through a mandate by Swedish Parliament (www.samhall.se). Internationally, Sweden is often considered a model welfare state pursuing an activation policy that has been the subject of much interest internationally (see, e.g., Van Berkel and Hornemann Moller 2002; Lindert 2004; Saunders 2005); Samhall can be seen as the crown jewel in that system. Swedish (and Scandinavian) employment rates have for many years been among the highest in the world, implying a successful approach to activate jobseekers, e.g., by offering them rehabilitation with Samhall. As already implied, the foundation upon which Samhall's activities are based is the global discourse of the ‘active society’ as the best way to combat social exclusion of disabled people (see Van Berkel and Hornemann Moller 2002; Lindert 2004; De Lathouwer 2005; Overbye 2005). In Europe, there exist a number of equivalent organizations to Samhall that are members of the global network Workability International, e.g., Remploy in the UK (see www.remploy.co.uk).

Today, Samhall is one of Scandinavia's largest corporations. It employs around 24,000 individuals and has a turnover of approximately 1.2 billion dollars. Fully owned by the Swedish state, it is Sweden's leading subcontractor, selling goods and services to companies, government agencies, and municipalities. It has its own sheltered workshops that produce items that are sold in competition with other corporations both in Sweden and abroad; it also has a range of activities that take place at the premises of business partners where Samhall's employees work together with employees of other corporations. Well-known international partners are IKEA, Ericsson, ABB, to mention a few. As an important feature of contemporary Swedish labor market policy, it is an organization that recruits the least attractive unemployed people, the so-called occupationally disabled. An ‘occupationally disabled person’ is an individual that has difficulties getting or keeping a job, due to his or her physical or mental impairments. Therefore, he or she is assigned an employment at Samhall by the Swedish State¹ .

Besides offering occupationally disabled persons employment according to the same conditions as in any other Swedish company, Samhall's purpose is to provide ‘professional and personal rehabilitation, for instance, strengthening of self-confidence, increasing independence and developing valuable competence’, as it is stated in one of Samhall's brochures. Hence, Samhall constitutes an example of an activation program that aims ‘to transform disability into ability’, as suggested by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (see OECD 2003) and that seek to empower disabled people, thus promoting their employability. In one Samhall document, it is emphasized that ‘Samhall is an opportunity to personal and professional development through work for people with occupational disabilities’. The ultimate goal is that the employment at Samhall should end: ‘Work at Samhall is organized in such a way that it enables the employee to eventually find employment at another employer’, thus strengthening the disabled person's overall employability. In a government study (SOU 1997: 90–91) it was laid down that Samhall has a special role ‘in society's rehabilitation activities’.

Samhall's activation program is manifested in the concept ‘Development in Daily Work’, which is specified in several writings about Samhall, e.g., in miscellaneous information brochures, annual reports and books, such as ‘Rehabilitation through Work’ (Åberg 1992) and ‘The Healing Force of Work’ (Larsson 1996). For example, in the latter of these it is established that ‘the primary task of Samhall is to develop people’ and that ‘the specific thing with Samhall is that disabled people are activated through work’. Based on this perspective, in the Samhall document ‘Disabled People's Right to a Job’, it was stated that Samhall is ‘for people who will strengthen their ability to satisfy the demands of working life via concrete work situations and thus improve or retain their employability’.

Even if the work content at Samhall work places usually changes, e.g., one day an employee at a restaurant is packaging hundreds of portions of pancakes and thick pea soup, and the next day hundreds of portions of fish with mashed potatoes; or at a site where books are converted, one week the employee is ripping up fictional works and factual study books the following week; or that at one packaging facility, one month condoms are packaged, while next month lip balsam is being packaged, the actual character of the work remains unchanged: repetition and reiteration. One of Samhall's disabled cleaners expressed it as: ‘each day is like any other; I know this job by heart’. Another employee distributing food by car each morning according to a given driving schedule observed, as he put the key in the ignition lock, ‘I can do this job in my sleep’. Or as a third employee explained: ‘I don't think about what I'm doing; it all goes automatically’. One occupationally disabled employee who worked with soldering components declared: ‘Soldering is soldering; it's the same thing all the time regardless of what you are soldering’. A supervisor at a warehouse for lamps explained, ‘the object of the job is to pick, pack and sort, but naturally, it doesn't matter if the products are motor-car bulbs or ordinary electric light bulbs’.

Neither does the repetitive element in the job differ between work groups or between work units. The soldering of components, the packaging of frozen food, the preparing journals for microfilming or scanning, or the cleaning of stairwells imply no great variations in the collective supply of work at Samhall. A unit head at a packaging industry explained: ‘To facilitate this learning … disabled people learn things when they repeat the same thing over and over again, we have the same routines … or similar routines … if we package electric light bulbs for Osram, the routine for this job is similar to packaging for another customer’. One supervisor complemented this by saying, ‘each product has its own routines, but in some way they are quite similar’.

Supervisors encourage their employees to work in a repetitive way. One supervisor who circulated between tables in a packaging industry where different work teams worked with sorting and packaging thousands of packets of cigarettes for a few weeks, told his personnel, ‘You are so clever’ and ‘this is going well’. Another supervisor said to a newly employed occupationally disabled worker on his first day at work in a warehouse: ‘There are a lot of routines here; learn them; don't stress; don't do anything different’. A manager at an external work place where Samhall personnel worked with sorting collected clothing and where the work amounted to taking clothes from unsorted sacks and placing these into four different boxes, said ‘it's uncanny how clever disabled people are at this’. One of Samhall's former Press Relations Officers who, after her employment there, wrote a book about her time at Samhall, described her impressions after a visit to a work place: ‘The occupationally disabled sit each at his or her own work-table, which in turn makes up parts of a large common work-table. On the common worktable, there is a large carton with nails. The occupationally disabled employees pick nails from the box and place these nails in smaller packages. I assume that I have been unlucky and contact the regional CEO immediately. Surely, this is not meaningful work. Inside me, I just want him to tell me that it is a mistake. However, he smiles at me in a friendly manner. These are only temporary work assignments while waiting for other assignments to come in. Back at the corporate head office, I tell people about my visit during a mutual coffee break with a few fellow colleagues with many years at Samhall. I'm still waiting for a reassuring answer. However, one of the branch-hardened employees answers, “Well, if you've seen one workshop, you've seen them all”. The others nod in agreement’ (Rådahl 1990: 22).

Despite the general emphasis on the significance of offering Samhall employees meaningful and developing work in order to increasingly strengthen their employability, one supervisor declared, ‘I have people here with a university education that sit placing nails into plastic bags. I can think of it sometimes, but most often I dismiss it because it becomes too troubling’. One problem in this context, as one of his colleagues pointed out, is that ‘Samhall's jobs are intended for the weakest people’, but that ‘even the strongest people have to perform these’. He described a department at one work place where a group of occupationally disabled employees sat assembling painter's rollers, which entailed taking the roller holders from a carton, installing the rollers and then placing the finished product in another carton. ‘The work is perfect for several people in the group, but for others is just too simple’, the supervisor believed.

Likewise, the occupationally disabled employees do not always feel that Samhall is the basis for development and learning that it is often said to be. In a book about Samhall, one of the occupationally disabled wrote about the growing activity with the hiring of Samhall personnel to other companies: ‘People who are hired out to other companies from Samhall are given the lousy jobs’ (Aulin 2001: 36). One of his colleagues stated, ‘I want to work at a normal work place again; I want to be treated like all the rest’ and another of the employees declared, ‘They say meaningful and developing work … but sitting gluing paper days on end, do you think that is developing? All we hear is that we should develop, but that doesn't happen’. Yet another employee working with packaging toys for a few hours each morning, but who usually doesn't have any work to do in the afternoon, observed, ‘This is therapeutic work, but time passes nevertheless’. A fellow worker of his believed, ‘This is not rehabilitation for me, but more a way of having a job’. A colleague of his said, ‘At Samhall they are always talking about developing. What does to develop mean? Development implies that you keep getting new and more difficult assignments. It's not like that here’. A woman working in a large-scale kitchen stated, ‘They say that Samhall is for rehabilitation … but you don't get better here … I have never been rehabilitated and I've worked at Samhall for 15 years now’.

The most recent government study about Samhall concluded, ‘It is not enough merely to provide work for people with occupational disabilities. Even people with occupational disabilities have a right to demand both meaningful employment and a job that is developing’ (SOU 2003: 70). The fact that many at Samhall incur occupational injuries or are sick-listed during their employment at Samhall adds further to a perception that disabled people do not become more employable via their Samhall career. One of the employees related that earlier in her professional career, she had seldom been on the sick list, but since coming to Samhall she ‘often felt bad and was home a lot’. Another employee wrote in a contribution to a book about Samhall, ‘I have more pain now than I had when I began [at Samhall]’ (Aulin 2001: 16) and a relative to a Samhall employee wrote in the same book that Samhall recruits ‘completely able people’ who ‘have to work themselves to the bone in a mass of meaningless monotonous jobs which the open market automated a long time ago … My relative has pains in his arms and shoulders since he came to Samhall. They weren't there before’ (Ibid: 102). One of the employees observed in the same book, ‘Many become passive’ as a result of working at Samhall (Ibid: 107).

As already suggested, the ultimate goal with Samhall, as with any activation program, is that the client's employability is to be strengthened. Hence, ending one's career at Samhall and beginning employment with a ‘regular’ employer is the ultimate goal for Samhall employment, and according to Samhall the ultimate proof that the company's activation program is successful. At Samhall, this is called ‘transition’. According to the agreement with the State, Samhall should yearly be capable of achieving transitions amounting to 5 percent of existing staff. During the last 10 years, however, only 3 percent of the personnel have left the organization for a job on the regular labor market.

A principal reason to this may be found in the disabled employees’ propensity to eventually become all the more passive. Presumably, this can be attributed to the kind of work offered by Samhall. One of the employees, a man of around 25 related that when he was new at Samhall, he was optimistic about being able to leave the company soon, ‘It would only be temporary’, but that now after 6 years of employment, ‘I don't care anymore’. A newly employed occupationally disabled person emphasized, ‘I want to leave … At least I am not going to stay here all of my life’. In 2003, another person, who had previously worked as a car mechanic said, ‘The idea was that I would be here for a year; I have been here since 1985’, and a colleague of his, who had worked in Samhall for 12 years, declared, ‘I never thought I would be here so long’. One of the employees at another work place emphasized that it was important not to stay at Samhall too long, for ‘if you have been here too long, you give up, you lose your initiative’.

An administrative official at the National Employment Office (the organization responsible for assigning disabled jobseekers employment with Samhall) related that ‘many of the younger new employees at Samhall had a strong belief in their own ability, so there you almost have to apply the brakes for they don't know their capacity’. The administrative official could observe that the younger people she had recruited to Samhall during the course of the years still worked there, which she believed was due to ‘security … and if you work with these kind of monotonous assignments, you automatically get stuck, you lose faith in learning anything new…finally you don't believe in your own ability’. A government study ascertained, ‘Today, of Samhall's employees with an occupational disability, almost 40 percent have been employed in the company for more than 10 years. After this long period at Samhall, most of them have come to regard their employment at Samhall as a secure position. The longer employment at Samhall lasts, the less the possibility of leaving Samhall’ (SOU 2003: 187).

Based on the present study it seems plausible to suggest that Samhall is an example of an activation program that, contrary to its intentions, breeds passivity. Despite the idea that Samhall is a central part of the new policy emphasis on activating disabled people through empowerment and rehabilitation, the organization shares features of many traditional disability programs such as disability pensions and residential or institutional care, in the sense of people becoming progressively locked-in a situation of disablement, incapacity and helplessness (see Drake 1999; Abberley 2002). Contrary to the new activating regime, however, the old regime did not aim to empower the target group. In the new regime, those that for one reason or another are unable to live up to the norms of being a ‘normal’ and hence fully active citizen, are objectified as passive and unemployable persons through the same principles that aim to make them active. Essentially, people suffering from various impairments that are recruited by Samhall eventually learn to become disabled by participating in a work organization that is adapted to the presumed needs of disabled people; hence occupationally disabled people are produced and re-produced through the activation offered by Samhall. The longer they stay at Samhall, the more disabled they become in a sociological sense, i.e., in the sense of acquiring a ‘disabled self’ (see Lane 1997; Corker and Shakespeare 2002; Thomas 2004), making them all the less prone to leave Samhall. Perhaps an active society, through its emphasis on ability, strength, competence, and so on, has raised the bar higher than ever before, and so an increasing number of people risk ‘disablement’ and indeed end up as ‘disabled’ because they lack the capacity to clear the hurdle (see Bauman 2007). Potentially, this ‘sociological disablement’ is the result of a modern state's benevolent activities to empower unemployed people by activating them as disabled.

Overall, in the Samhall case one can conclude that there is a mismatch between stated goals and ideals and the practical results. Students of social welfare have for long time acknowledged this phenomenon (see, e.g., Goffman 1961; Resnick and Patti 1980; Gummer 1990). Traditional social welfare programs have often been founded on an ‘restorative approach’ to rehabilitation, but they have instead typically pursued an ‘accommodative approach’ in practice (see, e.g., Lane 1997; Schram 2000; Branson and Miller 2002; Holmqvist 2008). In this sense, the new activation programs seem no different from traditional welfare programs. A commonsense explanation to this phenomenon is that an activation program such as Samhall suffers from a number of pathologies regarding its management and overall organization, where responsibility should be laid both on politicians for their ignorance of some potentially unexpected consequences of these good intentions, as well as on staff at specific welfare organizations such as Samhall for their failure to provide a meaningful and enlightening work environment. Given the fact that few people that enter sheltered employment leave for a ‘regular’ job (see Considine 2001; Lindert 2004; Wadensjö 2007), one could argue that the work offered does not necessarily contribute to clients’ activation, hence claiming that they are examples of ‘failures’. Such problems should be relatively easy to address, e.g., by allocating resources so that greater variation in work content can be proposed at Samhall and in other sheltered work organizations, or by hiring staff that emphasize disabled people's capabilities and competencies, rather than their impairments and deficiencies. Another avenue to deal with these problems would be to design programs where disabled people are able to alternate between jobs at different non-sheltered employers. This would probably allow them to broaden their competency basis significantly, which could contribute to their overall employability so that they eventually could find permanent employment with a ‘regular’ employer. In such a system care needs, of course, to be taken so that people are not exploited as cheap, state-subsidized labor, used temporarily during peaks of production.

But perhaps one should rather interpret these programs as successes in the sense that they are able to effectively ‘massage’ unemployment statistics (e.g., Beatty and Fothergill 2002 ,2005). To this extent the phenomena under scrutiny here may be explained by harsh realpolitik, or it may simply be seen as an illustration of ‘organizational hypocrisy’, i.e., a way of adapting to conflicting or even irreconcilable requirements (see Brunsson 1989). By ‘disabling’ people, thus accommodating them in large welfare programs, there is the potential for politicians to ‘solve’ pressing social issues such as unemployment, particularly in regions where there is a weak labor market, concomitant with a form of state-sanctioned provision of cheap labor to industry that could contribute to regions’ or countries’ overall competitiveness. This activity may be an important one, despite sometimes negative consequences for single groups of individuals’ (such as disabled people) welfare and future career prospects. By clothing this enterprise as an example of ‘activation’, welfare states’ aura as the foremost provider of help to disadvantaged people in a harsh, global and capitalistic world, can be retained and even reinforced.

Following this kind of interpretation, one may also argue that the reason as to why activation programs disable people is their inherent potential for victim-blaming, i.e., active societies stress disabled people's individual responsibilities for their social situation (see e.g., Goul Andersen et al. 2005; Jensen and Pfau-Effinger 2005; Serrano Pascual 2007), where responsibility for their unsuccessful efforts to find a regular job is shifted to the individual who is seen as sick, impaired, and unhealthy (see Conrad and Schneider 1992; Crawford 2006). In the active society, people are expected to take responsibility for their health, wellbeing, fitness and competence irrespective of their physiological or mental status. By claiming that some people are disabled as explanations to their poor employability, their problems are individualized, removing them from the broader social context. The ideology of individualization can promote an idea of bad living or bad behavior among people that may have important individual and social consequences, e.g., by acting as a mechanism for deviance amplification by reinforcing the stigma associated with unemployment and disability in addition to projecting an image of disablement as personal tragedy rather than as a socially produced state (see Holmqvist 2009). This critique argues that modern policies for combating social problems that bring the individual's character into focus largely fail to address the consequences of industrial capitalism: social inequalities, poverty, structural discrimination and other social and material disadvantages of people's lives.

A final explanation to this enterprise is that Samhall, much like any other sheltered work shop in other countries, is operating on a business market, trying to successfully sell and promote its goods and services. That activation programs such as Samhall should be subject to a market's principles is consistent with the neo-liberal logic upon which the current activation regime rests (see Saunders 2005; Serrano Pascual 2007). Samhall needs to be economically efficient and operate according to standard capitalistic principles of growth and profit allocation; a cheap, disabled and impotent work-force that eventually becomes loyal to their organizationally enacted identities may be instrumental to achieving this aim. To this extent clients’ initial requests of rehabilitation and empowerment and the actual kinds of available welfare services run in two separate orbits, i.e., the services which are offered to disabled persons do not necessarily apply to all of them, nor are they necessarily benefited by them. According to this interpretation, the preservation and growth of the organization itself is a vital factor when analyzing the behavior of organized social welfare (see Scott 1980; Stone 1985; Holmq vist 2008).

Certainly, Sweden and other countries such as Denmark and The Netherlands that are proponents of an active line in unemployment policy enjoy among the highest rates of employment. But the number of formally organized disabled people in these countries is also among the highest in Europe (Fujiura and Rutkowski-Kmitta 2001: 78–79; Overbye 2005: 161–64). As Van Berkel et al. (2002: 19) concluded in their review of inclusion policies in Europe: ‘Without any exclusion there would not be any inclusion (policies): inclusion, so to speak, presupposes the existence of exclusion’.

It is a familiar observation that ‘by international comparison, Sweden has an especially strong emphasis on labor market policy programs for the disabled (measured in terms of the proportion of participants or costs)’ (Wadensjö 2007: 131–32). In his study ‘Dilemmas in Disability Activation in Scandinavia’, Overbye (2005: 167) suggested that ‘high disability prevalence might be the Achilles heel of Scandinavian social policy’, suggesting that the great number of excluded disabled people in Scandinavia – despite many resources given to inclusive programs – constitute a failure for society. Perhaps it is the other way around, i.e., the principal reason to why the Scandinavian countries (and particularly Sweden) have become such successful expressions of the active society.

To sum up, in this paper I have reported the findings of a longitudinal case study of sheltered employment in Sweden by examining how an organization named Samhall aims to empower its clients and the individual and social consequences of this. Of course, Samhall is deeply embedded in a unique political, social and economic context, i.e., Swedish welfare. This issue could fruitfully have been explored here at considerable detail given the important research that exists on Swedish welfare and its unique characteristics, e.g., by placing Samhall in a historical context, thus acknowledging its links to active labor market policy since the inter-war period, or by comparing Samhall's activities to other Swedish social welfare programs regarding the contrast between stated goals and practical realities and other relevant topics.

I have, however, chosen to focus this system's relevance for the international conversation on the welfare state by addressing the activation logic upon which the practices of Samhall and other countries’ welfare programs currently rest. The topic is an interesting and relevant one to developments in the career chances of those jobseekers who come to be socially organized as ‘people with disabilities’ in Europe and elsewhere. Samhall draws on an activating discourse, respecting the ‘active line’ in European welfare policy in order to empower and rehabilitate disabled people into able citizens. However, the end result is the reverse; my observations do not suggest that their employability is strengthened. Not only is this paper trying to address the design and consequences of a particular activation program in a particular country, it also aims to contribute to a general understanding of the effects the interest on activation programs may have on the disabled people that come into contact with it.

I am grateful for the constructive comments by the anonymous reviewers and the Editor. A more detailed analysis of the present study is offered in my book The Disabling State of an Active Society (Ashgate, 2009).

Mikael Holmqvist is an Associate Professor of organization sociology at the Stockholm University School of Business. His latest books are The Institutionalization of Social Welfare. A Study of Medicalizing Management (Routledge, 2008) and The Disabling State of an Active Society (Ashgate, 2009).