Justifications of citizens’ subject positions in public debates on welfare

Introduction

Michel Foucault introduced the notion that power is based on persuasion rather than on coercion. In that view, the exercise of power is ‘a set of actions upon other actions’ that operates by inciting, inducing and seducing subjects to behave in certain ways (Foucault, 2000: 341). Post-Foucauldian studies on governmentality have applied this idea to analyse how subjects are constructed in the politics of contemporary society, what kinds of positions they are given and what capabilities, properties and intentions inhere in those positions (Dean, 1999: 32). In the context of the welfare state, governmentality studies have focused mainly on the ways in which government or political projects – in particular neo-liberalism and New Public Management (NPM), but also consumerist thinking in delivering public services – endeavour to steer citizens towards active and responsible citizenship (e.g. Dean, 1999; Miller and Rose, 2008; Rose, 1999; Schram et al., 2010).

However, these studies on the welfare state, as well as governmentality studies in general, are often criticised in two respects: they analyse subjects (subject positions) as coherent constructions without considering how construction of the positions varies from one situation to another and they fail to take into account the resistance that governmental aspirations may encounter (Clarke, 2004; Eliasoph and Lichterman, 2010: 484; McKee, 2009). Critiques also fault the line of research for its tendency to describe changes in citizens’ positions as discursive shifts in which one particular kind of subject position is replaced with another. These interpretations often neglect the messiness of the phenomena under scrutiny; that is, the analyses do not bring out how the politics relating to citizens’ social rights and responsibilities often include various and even conflicting premises, nor do they illustrate how popular premises are interconnected and translated in political discussions, debates and decision-making (Autto, 2012; Clarke, 2004; Clarke et al., 2015; Kingfisher, 2013: 12).

In light of the above-mentioned limitations, some scholars have sought to improve governmentality analysis with a return to Foucault’s works. Pertti Alasuutari and Ali Qadir (2014), for example, have proposed an epistemic perspective on governance that draws on Foucault’s distinction between analytics and theory. They emphasise ‘thicker’ description of the political process in governance, including ‘people’s understanding of themselves and others as actors’ (Alasuutari and Qadir, 2014: 75). Several scholars have advocated other theoretical and methodological resources to provide a better account of the messy side of governance, examples being ethnography (Li, 2007), the sociology of translation (Kaisto, 2010) and the sociology of actual practices (Brady, 2011). In studies on welfare, ethnographic methods in particular have been popular (see e.g. Brady, 2011; McKee, 2009; Perälä, 2015). This inclination has shifted the focus to strategies of resisting governmental ambitions from below as well as to emphasising the reflexivity of subjects of welfare. Reapplications of Foucault, for their part, have emphasised local contexts to gain sensitivity to temporal, spatial and other relevant dimensions that may shape governmental rationalities (McKee, 2009: 467, 479–480).

In this article we explore the viability of certain theoretical and methodological tools for analysing and understanding the messy side of the politics of welfare in public debates. By ‘politics of welfare’ we refer here both to normative questions of what kind of welfare state we want to have and to more practical questions of how welfare policies should work (Borghi, 2011: 327–328; Borghi and Berkel, 2007: 357–358). While the notion of subject position has been criticised in the literature, in our reading of the scholarship there is no question about the value of the concept, for it foregrounds how political debates are based on the social positioning of citizens (see also Clarke, 2005: 456). However, we address the shortcomings of research to date, noted above, by augmenting it with insights from Luc Boltanski’s and Laurent Thévenot’s ideas on justification as well as with the concept of modality developed in semiotic sociology (Sulkunen and Törrönen, 1997). Boltanski’s and Thévenot’s work on justification represents pragmatic sociology, which gives greater value to actors’ capacity and knowledge and to the situational nature of politics than the governmentality approach does (e.g. Blokker, 2011; Dosse, 1999). In the present context, pragmatic sociology helps to reveal how justifications and critiques of welfare policies rest on diverse normative bases and on their skilful contextual combination. The concept of modality, for its part, makes it possible to elaborate how subjects or subject positions in justifications and critiques of welfare policies become associated with specific kinds of rights, responsibilities, ideals, competences and abilities linked to diverse normative orders.

We draw on the three bases noted above – the concept of subject position and ideas on justification and modalities – to put forward and demonstrate an approach to analysing the politics of welfare. We argue that the theory of justification and the concept of modality offer tools for a sensitive analysis of subject position as discursive and situational practice. Our approach brings out the variety of normative bases that figure in discussing the welfare state and whose invocation is often overlooked; many studies describe them simplistically in terms of straightforward discursive shifts, for example, from welfare to neo-liberalism and NPM, to consumerism, to the workfare state or to activating policies (Clarke, 2004: 13; Clarke, 2008). Drawing on two newspaper articles exemplifying the debate on children’s day care in Finland, we illustrate how our approach makes visible the complex processes of using citizens’ subject positions to defend or challenge welfare policies. Specifically, the approach captures common understandings of citizens’ needs, abilities, rights and responsibilities, and thus better comprehends the diverse discursive bases of the welfare state’s legitimacy.

We first introduce the two texts that serve as empirical examples. We then proceed to discuss the three elements of our approach and illustrate how the approach is productive in the analysis of political debates. In the last section, we draw conclusions about the applicability of the approach to analyses of political disputes in research on the welfare state and citizenship.

The dispute on ‘the subjective right’ to day care

The particular example we draw on to illustrate our approach is the public debate on day-care policy. It is a debate that easily takes on moralistic tones (Ellingsæter and Leira, 2006: 4), given that state policy seeks to influence parents’ roles and families’ behaviour, which have traditionally been considered private matters; this in turn offers fertile ground for analysing the relation between the state and citizens as well as justifications for citizens’ subject positions. We have selected the example from a wider study that analysed the public debate on day-care policy in Finland from 1972 to 2006 (Autto, 2012). The example offers a typical or ‘paradigmatic’ (Flyvbjerg, 2006) case in that it illustrates the most commonly used justifications for citizens’ subject positions. Furthermore, as it illustrates a heated dispute, the example also serves as an ‘intensive case’ (Miles and Huberman, 1994). The debate centres on a day-care reform sparked by the unconditional right to day care that came into force in the 1990s and which the legislation and related debates refer to as ‘the subjective right to day care’. The reform required municipalities to arrange full-time day care for children if their parents asked for it (see e.g. Autto, 2012, 2015c; Salmi, 2006). The public discussion on the reform culminated in 2004 with a polarised dispute on the subjective right, the opposing sides of which our two texts demonstrate.

Similar kinds of disagreements over day care have appeared in public debates in other Nordic countries, where child care has attracted considerable political interest. The public debates have centred on questions such as how children’s, mothers’ and fathers’ welfare, rights and responsibilities should be understood, how their behaviour should be influenced and what kinds of policy measures should be implemented to these ends (e.g. Ellingsæter, 2007; Hiilamo and Kangas, 2009: 467–468).

Both of our examples were published in the newspaper Kaleva, which has one of the largest readerships in Finland. Text 1, titled ‘Your children are not your own; they’re daughters and sons of the municipality’ ( Kaleva, 2004a), criticises the reform, arguing that the best place for a child is his or her home rather than a day-care centre. The journalist starts her argument by contrasting the leftist orientation of the 1960s and the 1970s with the mind-set of the 2000s. She says that in the leftist period we thought that our children were not ours but children of life, whereas today we act as if our children belong to the municipalities. She indicates that in the leftist period we still understood what was good for children but that later we lost this understanding. She continues her argument by emphasising that:

(1) The subjective right to day care has led to families getting two public subsidies. Probably

(2) no one knows how many such families there are. In the city of Espoo [a city in Finland],

(3) for example, there are 1 300 children who are in full-time day care and whose mother or

(4) father is at home. Eight hundred of those children have no particular reason to use

(5) municipal day care. The double subsidy means that society is supporting both children’s

(6) home care and children’s day care at the same time. In Espoo, day care for one child

(7) costs 10 000 euros per year. The figure is probably the same in the other big cities as

(8) well. The double subsidy becomes very expensive for Espoo. The care given to 800

(9) children amounts to seven million euros.

(10) As a consequence of the subjective right, ‘parking’ a child in municipal care has become

(11) a national custom. When a mother takes maternity leave to care for a new-born baby,

(12) the baby’s siblings continue their eight-hour ‘jobs’ at the day-care centres. As it is

(13) impossible to cut the budget for day care, the municipalities must save on nappies for

(14) senior citizens.

(15) Equality has eroded the meaning of the family. Mothers and fathers no longer

(16) understand their uniqueness as parents, even though we are only talking about a few

(17) paltry years. ( Kaleva, 2004a)

The following excerpt, Text 2, is a response to the above text, an argument in favour of the reform. In it a father defends families’ and children’s subjective right to day care. He starts by saying that the journalist’s argument irritated him to the point where he felt compelled to answer. He first claims that the welfare society that once provided equal services for all Finns ‘is now quickly being run down in the name of savings, cost-efficiency and competitive bidding’. He argues for the subjective right to day care since:

(18) [I]t has guaranteed families municipal day care

(19) services irrespective of their situation in life. This has fit in well with the needs of

(20) industrial life by making mothers available to the labour markets, given that the Finnish

(21) model of working life is based on families having two breadwinners. […]

(22) The company of peers and activities supervised by skilled professionals, available at a

(23) day-care centre, are important even for a four-year-old. Besides, caring for a new-born

(24) baby and having insufficient sleep drain a mother’s strength (often a father’s as

(25) well). The result is that too little attention is paid to the needs of older siblings. Not

(26) to mention postnatal depression, which may sap the mother’s strength completely. In the

(27) past, mothers were made of stone, and the nappies of wood, ha ha ha. [Reference to a

(28) Finnish song according to which, in the past, men were made of stone and boats of

(29) wood, but now it is the other way round.]

(30) What you are criticising day care for is not a result of day care itself, much less of the

(31) competence of the staff; its shortcomings can be attributed to the continuously

(32) diminishing resources for day care. If the care-givers change frequently, it is a

(33) consequence of the increasing number of short-term employees. Not having the time to

(34) wipe a child’s bottom is a sign that the staff in the day-care centres are overworked. In

(35) the last part of the text, you put the blame on the parents for exercising the right to day

(36) care, although it is, in point of fact, the child’s subjective right. Saying that children are

(37) ‘parked’ in the care of the municipality is insulting to families who are trying to deal

(38) with the demands of everyday life. No doubt everyone is free to take care of their

(39) children at home and to do everything by themselves so that the responsibility is not

(40) dumped onto others. It is a task of society, however, to support parenthood and families

(41) instead of leaving them on their own. I can tell you, we can afford that. It is a question of

(42) values. ( Kaleva, 2004b)

Using the two excerpts, we proceed to show the applicability of our approach. We suggest that analyses of political debates on welfare should consider the kinds of subject positions one is analysing, the kinds of orders of values these subject positions are related to and the kinds of modalities (or responsibilities, desires, abilities and competences) these subject positions are expected to have if they are to be considered publicly legitimate and justified agencies. To concretise the approach, we introduce additional examples from studies analysing the above-mentioned debate on children’s day care.

The problem of subject position in studies of governmentality

In Foucauldian governmentality studies, subjects are approached as constructions that either act as governing subjects or are the targets of governing (Dean, 1999). The analyses usually ‘focus on the subject positions inscribed in governmental discourses, excluding or subordinating other relations, positions and identities as the source or focus of mobilization’ (Dean, 1999: 115). Governmental projects, strategies and practices, as well as media texts, are conceptualised as instantiations of a certain form of liberal governmentality and analyses concentrate on demonstrating how liberal governance works from a distance through the construction of subject positions that invite the targets of governing to act as self-regulating or self-governing subjects (Dean, 1999: 112).

From a governmentality perspective, we can consider our texts as instances of the use of power in which the writers act as governing subjects vis-a-vis the readers, who become objects of the power. Both texts endeavour to govern readers’ understanding of child-care politics by constructing specific kinds of subject positions for the family, parents and children. The writer of Text 1 ( Kaleva, 2004a) identifies with neoliberal governmentality and constructs subject positions for parents that address them as self-governing subjects. The writer of Text 2 ( Kaleva, 2004b), by contrast, rejects neoliberal governmentality and constructs subject positions for the family members based on the old form of welfarism.

The concept of subject position as applied by governmentality studies tends to overemphasise the coherence and homogeneity of subject positions and under-theorise their contested and heterogeneous character (Clarke, 2004: 114–115). This problem becomes clearly visible in the argument that we have moved from one form of governance to another, such as from ‘welfarism’ to ‘neo-liberalism’ (Rose and Miller, 1992) or to a ‘new paternalism’ (Schram et al., 2010). When an entire period is categorised as being based on one form of governing or rationality, for example neoliberal subject positions, other subject positions are likely to be subordinated to these hierarchically. From a governmental perspective, Text 1 represents neoliberal discourse articulating a dominant subject position and Text 2 embodies welfare discourse expressing a subordinate position, one that has lost its momentum, power and assertiveness and can thus be described as a residual position. Furthermore, in governmentality research the analyses of subject positions often tend to be rather impressionistic. By keeping the analysis on an abstract and structural level, governmentality studies overlook the multiplicity of subject positions, how their character and interrelations vary from one situation and text to another and how actors may identify with them, use them and place others in them flexibly for different purposes.

To do justice to the contested and heterogeneous character of subject positions, we propose that they should be analysed as resources that actors use to construct certain kinds of positions for themselves and others. These vary by situation, are related to commonly recognised orders of values and are constructed such that they produce specific kinds of obligations, rights, desires, abilities and competences on the part of the target audience (e.g. politicians, authorities, citizens, parents) (Törrönen, 2001, 2014).

The construction of subject positions can be analysed from multiple perspectives. For example, one can examine how speakers position themselves in the field of politics and in relation to their audience by creating certain kinds of implicit images of themselves through their arguments (Prince, 1988). The emphasis in such an analysis would be on the identity of the speaker. This is not, however, our focus here. Rather, our interest lies in how people debating an issue in a public forum construct specific kinds of subject positions for citizens in their arguments in order to prompt their target audience (e.g. families, parents, authorities, politicians) to pursue a given aim.

Justifying subject positions in relation to orders of values

The authors of both texts construct subject positions for children, mothers, parents or families. It would be simplistic to say that the author of Text 1 relates these subject positions to neoliberal values and the author of Text 2 to the traditional values of welfarism. It is here that Boltanski’s and Thévenot’s ideas can be applied, for they offer more nuanced tools to analyse the kinds of orders of values in which subject positions are embedded and how these then function as justifications for the decisions or actions which the author advocates. Boltanski and Thévenot highlight situated action, in which actors, even where they have an individual interest at stake in an issue, tend to lean on justifications that are commonly recognised, have general validity and are products of the political history of the society in question (Boltanski, 2011: 31, 44; Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006: 144–145).

Initially, Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) identified six orders of values, or worlds of justification: civic, industrial, domestic, market, inspired and fame. They specified that the six worlds are not an exhaustive mapping. Other orders of values may come into play depending on the empirical reality, the topic of the study and the changes that have occurred in the focal society. Later, Boltanski, in work with Eve Chiapello, added a project-oriented world, called ‘cité’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005a), or ‘the projective city’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005b; for later developments in Boltanski’s thinking, see e.g. Basaure, 2011; Boltanski, 2011). Thévenot, in turn, working with Claudette Lafaye, added a world of ecology (Lafaye and Thévenot, 1993). In addition, Thévenot later approached justification from another perspective by sketching two grammars: a liberal grammar, which emphasises negotiation, trade-off and balance between interests of individuals and groups; and a grammar of personal affinities, which emphasises familiarity and personal attachments (Thévenot, 2015). In what follows, we confine ourselves to examining justification from the perspective of orders of values.

We could call commonly recognised justifications ‘discourses of justification’. Boltanski and Thévenot (2006), however, call them ‘worlds of justification’ to emphasise that they do more than just construct reality from a specific perspective, unlike discourses; they also organise it explicitly in terms of orders of values and are thus normative. Since these worlds are commonly recognised cultural resources circulating in local and global contexts, a person may use them all to justify his or her argument on any policy options (see Autto, 2012; Autto, 2015b: 282–285; Liukko, 2013). However, because the worlds are products of a society’s political history, they usually change over time and vary by cultural context (Boltanski, 2011: 31). Moreover, their power and applicability depend on the nature of the dispute or debate. Our two debaters have selected only three worlds – the civic, domestic and industrial – as being the most convincing orders of values to justify citizens’ subject positions in the context of the debate.

In the civic order of values, actors are approached through a projected subject position in which their values, as well as their rights and responsibilities, stem from their being members of a collective (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006). The author of Text 1 invokes the civic order of values in relation to the subject position of family. She criticises families in which the mother or father is at home yet which put one or more of their children in full-time day care, claiming that they are using their civic rights irresponsibly. In her view, families like these are using the scarce resources of the welfare state such that they endanger the civic rights of another, perhaps more vulnerable, group of citizens, senior citizens: ‘As it is impossible to cut the budget for day care, the municipalities must save on nappies for senior citizens’ ( Kaleva, 2004a: ll. 12–14). Where the author of Text 1 uses the civic order of values to defend the social rights of senior citizens against young families using municipalities’ scarce resources to their selfish ends, the author of Text 2 defends the civic rights of families and children against the values of the industrial world.

In the industrial world, actors are framed in subject positions that are related to efficiency, performance and productivity. The industrial world places a high value on an actor’s capacity to respond to economic needs and to ensure the predictability and reliability of production (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006). For example, the author of Text 2 faults the prevailing politics for unduly emphasising the values of the industrial world. Since the 1990s, as the competitiveness of nations in the global economy has grown in importance as a policy objective (e.g. Kettunen, 2011), welfare states have increasingly been seen from the perspective of the industrial world. Justifications in terms of that world argue that welfare resources should be made more cost-effective or should be reduced. The author of Text 2 does not agree with such efforts to transform the welfare state into a competitive state in the name of savings, cost-efficiency and competitive bidding. Rather, he argues that these actions have put the civic rights of families and children in jeopardy and hampered the efficient functioning of day-care centres, which he now sees as struggling with scarce resources and overworked staff. For her part, the author of Text 1 takes a positive view of the recent changes. By criticising families for ‘parking’ their children in municipal day care, she aligns herself with neoliberal rhetoric emphasising that the state should control citizens in order to prevent unnecessary use or misuse of public benefits (Lundström, 2013; Newman and Clarke, 2014).

In the domestic world, subject positions are usually justified by invoking the traditional model of the family and referring to hierarchies between actors and to customs and generations (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006). Both authors evoke this world in their arguments. In Text 1, the author criticises mothers and fathers for no longer understanding the unique contribution they are able to make as parents. She argues that parents should respect traditional family values and stay at home for a couple of years with their children. The author of Text 2 constructs a different kind of domestic subject position for the family. He argues that families who have a newborn baby and older children can put the older ones in municipal day care and focus on caring for the baby.

Our examples demonstrate that the contributors are skilful and competent debaters who flexibly combine several forms of justification in placing citizens in certain kinds of subject positions. The combination may be based on harmonious, hierarchical or conflicting interrelations (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006). In a harmonious interrelation, subject positions are justified with a compromise between different worlds. For example, the author of Text 2 defends the substantive right to day care (‘the subjective right’) in this spirit, arguing that it is efficient from the perspective of the industrial world because it frees mothers to work outside the home, that is, to serve the needs of industrial life: ‘This has fit in well with the needs of industrial life by making mothers available to the labour market, given that the Finnish model of working life is based on families having two breadwinners’ ( Kaleva, 2004b: ll. 19–21). At the same time, he invokes a civic subject position for families and children by emphasising their right to proper day-care services (ll. 18–19 and 22–29). In his view, the right to day care is a compromise between the civic and industrial worlds, since it both assists families and children and promotes the common good.

When the worlds invoked are placed in a hierarchical relation, the principles of one world take a dominating position in relation to the others. This is exemplified in Text 1 when the author criticises the families who use both the home-care and day-care resources of the city at the same time. In her argument, she positions industrial subjects above domestic ones. She claims that the public costs to the industrial world from day-care services (e.g. ll. 5–9) could be avoided if parents would respect domestic family values and stay at home for a couple of years with their children. With this orientation to domestic values and a domestic subject position, parents would protect the common good of their municipality, contributing to saving its resources and thus to strengthening its economy.

In the case of a conflicting relation, the values of one world are criticised with reference to the values of another. In Text 2 we find a telling example of this. In his argument, the author criticises the values of the industrial world with reference to the values of the civic world. He claims that the efforts to transform the civic welfare state into a competitive state in the name of savings, cost-efficiency and competitive bidding have hampered the efficient functioning of day-care centres, which now struggle with scarce resources and overworked staff (ll. 31–33). In Text 1, by contrast, the author criticises the civic subject position from the perspective of the domestic, constructing a confrontation between the two worlds. In her view, the substantive right to day care, which is based on civic values, has undermined the domestic subject position of parents: ‘Equality has eroded the meaning of the family. Mothers and fathers no longer understand their uniqueness as parents, even though we are only talking about a few paltry years’ (ll. 15–19).

Mapping orders of values

A look at the day-care debates in Finland in general offers additional examples of how citizens’ subject positions have been justified in relation to other worlds, such as the market and the inspired worlds (Autto, 2012). The following quotation is an example of how citizens’ subject positions in day-care politics may be justified by relying on the market world. The author argues for a ‘fixed-sum model’ that would increase families’ freedom as consumers to choose from different day-care alternatives:

A family should choose the alternative that suits it best. […] In [the fixed-sum] model all children under school age entitle a family to a certain sum of money, which the family can use for the form of care that suits them best. Could this be the right way of thinking in times when individual needs are emphasised in every way? Family policy should be up to date. (Kaleva 19 September 2004, quoted in Autto, 2015c: 14).

In the market world, competition is the highest principle. The other central values in the world are market value and the satisfaction of demand. Citizens, for their part, are placed in the subject position of client or consumer (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006).

The next excerpt is an example of how citizens’ subject positions in day-care politics may be constructed in relation to the inspired world. The author of the article defends day-care services with an argument that they free mothers from family responsibilities to work, give them independence and allow them to actualise personal ambitions and dreams:

I do not think the daughters of the seventies are easily tempted into the insecure position of a housewife. Most of them have better education than their mothers did, and a job means much more to them than simply having their own money, which gives them a measure of independence (Helsingin Sanomat 28 September 1994, quoted in Autto, 2012: 95–96).

In the inspired world, actors are linked to subject positions that focus on freeing up one’s personal resources. Whereas in the domestic world conventions, habits and traditions are highly valued, in this world they are seen as negative elements that hinder individuals from utilising their personal skills to the full (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006).

It is interesting that very few of the Finnish day-care debates to date have used the world of fame, the project-oriented world or the world of ecology to justify their arguments for or against day care (Autto, 2012). Even though they have not appeared as appealing justifications in the field of day-care politics in the past, they may serve as useful justifications for reforms of the services in the future.

In the world of fame, actors’ subject positions are constructed around visibility, recognition, reputation and public respect (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006). In the present context, citizens’ subject positions could be constructed by associating public day-care services with the positive image of Finland as a representative of the famous Nordic welfare state model (Autto, 2012: 182). In other words, the world of fame could offer a chance to defend families’ and children’s substantive right to day care as a matter of national pride.

The project-oriented world values adaptability, flexibility, self-control, mobility and social networking (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005a, 2005b). By appealing to these, one could argue that an extensive right to day care would give citizens the flexibility to plan how they divide their time between work and parenting when their children are young. Likewise, it would help them to adapt and become active job-seekers when unemployment increases (see Autto, 2015a: 34–35; 2015c: 103, 109).

In the world of ecology, actors’ subject positions are justified in relation to nature and biological diversity (Lafaye and Thévenot, 1993). Not surprisingly, the world of ecology features prominently in debates on environmental matters. Yet, it could also be invoked in day-care politics. In Finland, where environmental issues are part of the pre-school curriculum covered in day-care centres, advocates of the substantive right to day care could defend it by arguing that it provides children early and equal access to environmental citizenship.

Modal qualities of subject positions

Thus far we have seen how those debating child-care politics construct subject positions for citizens and skilfully justify them with novel combinations of orders of values. We use the adjective ‘novel’ to emphasise that the character of these subject positions requires empirical analysis. Rather than being reducible to one governing position or set of homogeneous values, the value bases of the positions are complex and context-dependent.

In order to make the analysis of subject positions sensitive enough, we need to draw on one additional element, pragmatic modalities, originally introduced by AJ Greimas and later developed in semiotic sociology (Sulkunen and Törrönen, 1997). Some scholars have already pointed out that governmentality studies need to discuss modalities. For example, Mitchell Dean (1999) emphasises that analyses of governance need to pay attention to how governance regulates facets of subjects and their lives such as desires, abilities, choices, interests, aims, rights, obligations and knowledge. But rather than identifying differences between these considerations, governmentality studies tend to lump them together in a single position. We submit that it matters whether it is obligations (responsibilities), desires (motivations), abilities (physical and material resources) or competences (knowledge-related resources) that one tries to regulate, govern or justify. Boltanski and Thévenot note the importance of considering the qualities that make citizens worthy or unworthy subjects in different orders of values, but do not elaborate their views on the topic (see Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006: 141–142).

The analytical value we see in pragmatic modalities is that they allow us to specify how subject positions and their associated orders of values are related to norms and differ in terms of whether they deal with rules, desires or resources. The modalities also elucidate how subject positions and orders of values are made persuasive: by linking the orders of values of a subject position in a specific way to obligation, want (will), ability or competence (Sulkunen and Törrönen, 1997), authors (speakers) intensify the motivation or the obligation of the audience, authorities or politicians to work towards the aim articulated in their argument. At the same time, an analysis in terms of pragmatic modalities provides more detail on the normative character of the orders of values linked to the subject positions, that is, how subject positions and the orders of values they embody are used to build obligations, strengthen wills and amplify resources (abilities, competences).

Obligation refers to attributes such as responsibility, duty, compulsion, prohibition, command, permission and right. Wanting is denoted by modifiers that indicate internal motivation to act with a specific kind of desire, passion, lust, need, willingness or unwillingness. Ability stands for resources – physical, psychic, social or technical – to act, whereas competence signifies the acquired and internalised know-how that is needed in action (Törrönen, 2001).

In the present case, the author of Text 1 draws a distinction between parents who have the ability and desire to provide proper care for their children and those who lack this ability and desire (ll. 2–5). She ascribes to 800 families a modal identity characterised by a desire to use public services even if they could live without them or ‘have no special reason to use municipal day care’ (ll. 4–5). In her argument, the author constructs an obligation for parents who have lost their understanding of traditional domestic duties to re-orientate their will back towards those duties. She argues that the civic subject position, with its order of values that emphasises equality, has destroyed the parents’ natural sensibilities towards their children (ll. 15–17).

The author of Text 2 questions this understanding of the domestic subject position of parents and its modal qualities. He argues that caring for a baby may well drain both parents’ ability to give sufficient care to the other children in the family (ll. 36–42) and that the state should thus have an obligation to provide resources for families in such a situation.

The authors of our example texts differ on not only the modal qualities of the subject position of parent but also those of the subject position of child. The author of Text 1 categorises children as persons who should be allowed to be cared for by their parents and feel loved by them. In other words, she describes children as subjects who, above all, want to be with their parents. In this way she motivates parents to be willing to limit their freedom of choice as regards work.

The author of Text 2, by contrast, categorises children as subjects whose desires and needs are best fulfilled in day care: ‘The company of peers and activities supervised by skilled professionals, available at a day-care centre, are important even for a four-year-old’ (ll. 22–23). Here the author invokes a widely recognised cultural image whereby families (especially in the working class) usually lack the specific abilities to provide care and the pre-formal education that a child needs to succeed in modern society (Autto, 2012: 85, 187). The title of the article, ‘Day care is meant to support parenthood’, evokes this image, suggesting as it does that the state is expected to give resources or abilities to parents with small children. By connecting a need for day care to the subject position of children, the author gives his audience a reason to believe that prevailing policy serves children’s best interest. In addition, he constructs a subject position for children that includes a legal right to day care; in other words, he portrays the child as a legally competent actor (ll. 40–42). By addressing children as juridical subjects, the author underscores both a moral and formal responsibility on the part of the audience to respect children’s rights (see also Autto, 2012: 81).

Conclusions

In this article, we have developed and demonstrated an approach that helps to make sense of the messiness of the politics of welfare as they play out in the public sphere. For this purpose, we have drawn on the concept of subject position and supplemented it with Boltanski’s and Thévenot’s theory of justification as well as with the concept of modality. We have demonstrated the applicability of the approach with two texts from media (a newspaper column and a letter to the editor). Yet, the approach is not limited to the analysis of media debates, but is applicable to other kinds of public debates as well, such as arguments over welfare in political speeches.

The nuanced concept of subject position as we have elaborated it here enables us to examine how citizens are addressed in the politics of welfare in terms of specific kinds of identities, which in our examples were constructed around children, mothers and family/parents. Our examples concretise how these subject positions are used to influence not only the actions of citizens thus positioned, but other audiences as well (e.g. the general public and policy-makers).

The governmentality approach typically focuses on the dominant discourses and the ways in which they construct citizens’ subject positions. Boltanski’s and Thévenot’s thinking, by contrast, prompts one to examine the ways in which contributors to a public dispute apply different shared premises when defending or attacking citizens’ social rights and responsibilities. The work of the two scholars has provided concepts allowing researchers to investigate how subject positions are linked to ideals, a consideration which has figured significantly in the later theorisation of governance (Alasuutari and Qadir, 2014: 76–78). By tapping this theory of justification, we have illustrated how actors use their social and cultural competences to produce citizens’ subject positions as they negotiate the legitimacy of welfare policies. We find that this kind of inquiry complements – and at the same time problematises – the picture of the politics of welfare drawn by the research using a governmentality framework, which tends to posit homogeneous hegemonic discourses that produce dominating and subordinated subject positions for actors. Our analysis of the examples above has demonstrated how actors, including citizens, recognise the shared normative assumptions behind citizens’ subject positions and sustain, question and transform the positions in creative ways. The examples illustrate how domestic, civic and industrial values were applied to either attack or defend the social rights and responsibilities of citizens.

Furthermore, our analysis of the excerpts above illustrates how the subject positions of welfare state citizens were justified such that neoliberal discourse became blurred and dissolved into a spectrum of orders of values. Our examples show not only how neoliberal governance succeeds in maintaining its dominance although opposed in concrete political contexts and situations, but also how the neoliberal project leans on different culturally recognised premises (see also Ong, 2006; Saarinen et al., 2014). In the first of our examples, the author constructed various subject positions in relation to neoliberal discourse and embedded them in multiple value orders. She constructed a neoliberal-minded industrial subject position advocating the view that the state should monitor citizens in order to prevent unnecessary use (or misuse) of public benefits (Lundström, 2013; Newman and Clarke, 2014). Moreover, she justified her argument in relation to a domestic subject position by linking it to the neoliberal strategy of ‘responsibilisation’, which obligates parents to take moral responsibility for their family members (Kingfisher, 2013; Rose, 1999: 74). In the second of our examples, as our analysis above shows, the opposition to neoliberal subject positions and values was heterogeneous and unexpected as well. Thus, in their justifications both authors used or opposed neoliberal discourse in a creative way and transformed it into a heterogeneous cluster of arguments. Their argumentation drew on several worlds of justification, combining them in novel, unpredictable ways.

We have also demonstrated how bringing in the concept of modality makes our approach even more fruitful, for it analyses in detail the normative character of the orders of values that are linked to the subject positions. By paying attention to the pragmatic modalities involved, we can identify how subject positions and the orders of values they embody are used in political disputes to build obligations, to strengthen actors’ wills and to amplify resources (abilities, competences). In political disputes, the modalities are not produced solely for the actors described but are also shaped in order to strengthen the target audience’s engagement. For example, our analysis shows that the construction of the child’s subject position as including specific kinds of modalities does not usually suggest that children should act in a certain way; rather, it is designed to produce obligations and motivations for parents, families, authorities, policy-makers and the general public to take action towards the goal outlined in the author’s argument.

Overall, the approach proposed above helps to identify an order underlying the messy side of the politics of welfare without losing sensitivity to its situational and contextual nature and variation. We have shown that even within a small sample of discourse – two newspaper articles – the nature of subject positions varies, they are justified with multiple orders of values and they are made persuasive by linking them in a specific way to modalities of obligation, desire, ability and competence.