Beyond individualisation: The German ‘activation toolbox’

Abstract

This article discusses recent debates on ‘activating’ labour market policies in light of German reforms since 2003. Beckian and Giddensian theories of modernity, political economy, and the governmentality school all argue within a common paradigm of individualisation, assuming the ‘responsibilised’ and isolated individual to be the focal point of activation policies. This paradigm is questioned, as the exclusive focus on the individual obscures something else, namely that ‘activation’ policies can also be seen as contributing to a dynamic of dividualisation, i.e. of making the subject of labour power fundamentally divisible. It is demonstrated that in the recent German reforms, dividualisation provides an organising logic pervading the instruments of activating labour market policies and the ways in which they are articulated in a policy programme. It is concluded that dividualisation, particularly evident in the German case, may provide a useful frame for analysing labour market reforms in other advanced capitalist economies.

Keywords

activation dividualisation governmentality subjectivity production

In this article I want to take issue with the way that ‘activating’ labour market policies are commonly being interpreted in sociological literature on the subject. I argue that the bulk of this literature, by explicitly or implicitly drawing on a paradigm of individualisation, misses a crucial point of what these policies are about. In highlighting the individual’s release and/or isolation from previous collectivities and the imposition of responsibility upon her, these approaches portray the individual as the ultimate focal point of recent change in labour market policy. What is overlooked in this paradigm is that at the same time, it is becoming much more problematic to assume that the subjects so addressed can rightly be called ‘individuals’. Indeed, ‘activation’ policies may just as well be seen as contributing to a capitalist dynamic of making the subject of labour power fundamentally divisible – a process that I propose to call dividualisation.

The basic narrative of the debates addressed here is that the last two decades or so have seen a major transformation of labour market policy regimes in European welfare states. The post-war era’s ‘Fordist’ labour market policies, geared to preserving the social status of individual wage earners as members of a class by securing a basic level of income in the face of employment risks, have been transformed into ‘activating’ regimes, aiming at the quickest possible integration of each unemployed person into paid employment by means of intensified pressure as well as through systematic attempts to enhance their skills, competences and attitudes toward work (Walters, 1996; Serrano Pascual, 2004). In the course of this policy shift, induced both by growing debt-induced pressure to reduce public spending and by rising skill and mobility requirements expressed by firms under conditions of intensified global competition, constant activity, flexibility and self-initiative are seen to become imperative to everyone, and the responsibility for maintaining them is ascribed to each individual labour market subject (Daguerre, 2004; Lessenich, 2008). Calling such policies ‘individualising’ highlights their inherent dialectics, as encompassing both an ‘enabling’ dimension of personalised, more needs-adequate integration services, and a ‘restrictive’ dimension of imposing a regime of ‘compulsory choice’ (Howard, 2012). While different schools of thought disagree on the relative weight of the enabling and constraining aspects, they do, as I will show in more detail below, widely agree in assuming the validity of the paradigm of individualisation.

The individualisation debate certainly struck a nerve when sparked by Ulrich Beck in the 1980s (Beck, 1983, 1986; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002). By then, the Fordist accumulation regime, founded as it was on the integration of a majority of the population into institutionalised collectivities (defined by occupation, labour rights, collective agreements and class-specific cultural norms) and, simultaneously, the imposition of relatively uniform, normalised roles and biographies (as workers, housewives, consumers), had entered into an obvious crisis. The rising standards of living that had been won collectively and that, at the same time, kept consumption and thus the whole economy growing had, in a somewhat paradoxical turn of events, given people the means (in terms both of money and of disposable time) to develop diversified, de-standardised practices of everyday life. These, and the individualised frames of mind that went along with them, were at the root of an inner erosion of those very collectivities that the Fordist regime had been built on (Castel, 2011; Eversberg, 2014b).

Beck portrayed this process as a ‘release’ of individuals from uniform collective identities as well as solidarities, and saw it as a structural dynamic of ‘reflexive modernity’ that would end up in a new centrality of the individual – both as the smallest unit of the social and as the focal point of political intervention. Critical scholars have long challenged this claim, pointing to the continuing relevance of divisions in terms of class, gender or ethnicity, as well as to the persistence of socially specific forms of consciousness (Atkinson, 2007; Dawson, 2012). Still, with its intuitive appeal to the zeitgeist, the individualisation paradigm became standard wisdom among policy makers, inspiring (and, in the case of Giddens, its second key figure, actively contributing to) the policy turn toward ‘activation’.

Most critical analyses have taken up the portrayal of ‘activation’ as individualisation, showing how it has proved a false promise or how the newly central role accorded to the individual also conveys new duties, pressures and restrictions on her. In effect, as I will argue in the following section, such work has provided critical analyses of ‘activation’ as individualisation, rather than analyses critical of the idea of individualisation itself. I argue that a deeper understanding of the recent wave of ‘activation’ in labour market policy requires this latter kind of critique, which currently seems obstructed by the prevalence of the individualisation paradigm, albeit in a negative version, in the minds of critical scholars.

Intuitive as it may be to interpret recent policy changes as homing in on individuals as the smallest unit, the ‘atoms’ of the social, the question of whether ‘activation’ schemes actually really address individuals cannot be answered a priori. So far, most scholarship critical of the individualisation thesis has argued that empirically, people in advanced capitalist societies cannot be conceived as ‘pure’ individuals, as their subjectivities are still to a substantial degree shaped by collectivities. While seeing no reason to dispute this empirical argument, I want to add to it a second critical point that diverges from the individualisation paradigm in the opposite direction. If we look beyond its superficial legitimatory rhetoric to consider the elements and overarching structural logic of its actual ‘toolbox’ for shaping subjectivities, ‘activation’ appears as a political programme for not so much hypostatising as rather dismantling the individual.

‘Activation’ schemes aim to render people fit for the labour markets of highly specialised, knowledge-based economies, in which the totality of the skills, knowledge and experience of a worker, purchased for an indefinite period, often appears as too clumsy and cumbersome a trading unit in the face of firms’ rapidly fluctuating demand for ‘flexible’ labour with specific ‘competences’. Ideally, integration into this kind of labour market requires workers to learn to marketise their personal skills one by one and to feed them into ever shorter production cycles, in which the ‘just-in-time use’ of labour power is coordinated through computer networks and mobile communication devices (Frade and Darmon, 2005; Berardi, 2009; Holst, 2014).

The present argument is thus one about the logic of a class of political interventions, analysed as attempts to create a certain kind of subjectivity. The inevitable resistances against this on the part of labour, and the many ways in which such political subject production invariably fails, lie outside the scope of this article (for treatment of this dimension, see Eversberg, 2014a, 2014b).

The argument proceeds in three steps. Firstly, the three main strands of sociological debate on ‘activation’ – theories of modernity, political economy, governmentality studies – are reviewed and shown to implicitly agree in construing ‘activation’ as individualising. After pointing to the inherent limits of the paradigm and raising the question of dividualisation, I will draw on the example of recent German labour market reforms to demonstrate the point, showing how the key instruments of ‘activating’ labour market policy contribute to producing labour power in a dividual form.

Activation as individualisation

Proponents of ‘activation’ present their agenda as a shift of focus ‘from employment to employability’. Whether in their market liberal ‘work first’ or in the social democratic ‘human capital’ flavour (Peck and Theodore, 2000), ‘activation’ policies mark a turn away from demand-side and toward supply-side approaches to labour market policy. According to the neoclassical tenet that any commodity can be sold if offered at a sufficiently low price, the cause of unemployment is located not in a lack of jobs, but in deficiencies of the unemployed’s labour power or their inappropriate wage expectations (Layard, 2000).

Although this has been widely refuted (Solow, 1998; Peck and Theodore, 2000: 120, 131–132), policy makers have held on to an agenda that finds its primary point of intervention in an alleged lack of ‘employability’ (Serrano Pascual, 2004; Darmon and Perez, 2011: 78). Instead of promoting ‘demand’ – creating employment opportunities – ‘activation’ focuses on ‘supply’, i.e. on getting the unemployed to offer the skills, attitudes and dispositions adequate to employers’ needs (McDonald and Marston, 2005: 381, 396). ‘Activation’ policies are thus productive projects aimed at ‘shaping attitudes suitable for the labour market and facilitating mobilization for work’ (Darmon and Perez, 2011: 79), i.e. producing subjects who will prefer any kind of work over staying ‘inactive’ and who possess the skills needed to find a job (Serrano Pascual, 2004). From this point of view, sociological analysis of such policies requires an understanding of how this production is to be organised and what properties an ‘activated’ worker is supposed to exhibit. To date, the common answer is that ‘activation’ is a project of individualisation: of producing worker-subjects acting as socially disembedded individuals, both free to pursue their own preferences and personally responsible for their choices.

With regard to the three perspectives on political subject formation distinguished by Clarke (2005: 454–456) – the sociology of modernity, political economy and the Foucauldian governmentality school – I want to demonstrate in the remainder of this section that this holds true not only for sociological perspectives supportive of ‘activation’, but also for those critical of it.

The sociology of modernity, going back mainly to Beck and Giddens, is of course the mainstream of individualisation theory, and has provided sociological legitimacy to ‘activation’ reforms. While Beck emphasised the new forms of strain imposed on the individual by her release from former collectivities that had, at the same time, provided her with important securities, Giddens has foregrounded modernity’s inherent promises and potentials for greater individual autonomy and democratic participation. In this context, ‘activation’ policies are presented as opening up choice and tailor-made opportunities to each individual, while taking her to task for actively pursuing her self-defined goals.

Howard (2012: 663) points to empirical differences between ‘Beckian’, ‘compulsory choice’-based schemes, drawing on increased pressure, limited discretion for frontline workers, strong conditionality and strict sanctions, and ‘Giddensian’, participatory variants relying on personalised case management, the building of trust between staff and clients, enhanced frontline discretion and the availability of exit options. Both stand for ‘different and incompatible forms of welfare individualisation’ (Howard, 2012: 657) that, in the Australian case discussed by Howard, collided in practice, eventually leading the more restrictive ‘Beckian’ variety to prevail.

Now, the notion of individualisation deployed here does seem in need of clarification if two ‘different and incompatible’, even logically opposed types of practice can both be so labelled. Indeed, both variants stand for a change in social policies away from standardised benefits based on collective rights and toward specific treatment of personal problems, and both theorists portray individualisation as an inherent feature of modernity. However, while Giddens’ one-sidedly optimistic account tends to treat this development as unambiguously positive and the autonomous individual as its natural endpoint, Beck’s theory also stresses the dangers and restraints faced by the individual. Howard’s ‘Giddensian’ kind of ‘activation’ scheme is thus based on the assumption that it is actually possible to make the individual’s needs and preferences the guideline of the assistance given and empower her as an individual. The ‘Beckian’ variant, however, is unambiguously individualising only insofar as clients are individually held responsible. However, the demands of the labour market that they are to be exposed to are not themselves defined by the ‘activation’ policies, and thus may not empower, but restrain and coerce the individual. Still, to both variants, individualisation is a core feature that modern societies will inherently tend toward.

From this vantage point, attempts to critically challenge individualisation itself must appear as backward, politically useless, or even dangerous and potentially totalitarian. In short, individualisation is seen as a fact that must be embraced (Giddens) or at least accepted as inevitable (Beck).

In the Marxist and social democratic political economy literature, individualisation features no less prominently, albeit in an overwhelmingly negative sense. ‘Activation’ is portrayed as a process of ‘abandonment’ (Clarke, 2005) and atomisation, imposed on those on the margins of the labour market through ‘neoliberal’ political strategies (Peck, 2001; Daguerre and Taylor-Gooby, 2004; Etherington and Jones, 2004) and individualising them in a number of ways (Peck and Theodore, 2000: 127–131):

strengthening conditionality forces people into competition for contingent low-wage jobs, weakening collective bargaining power and creating pressure on wages and working conditions,

enforcing acceptance of any job offer erodes skills and devalues certified vocational qualifications, and

holding individuals responsible for failing to gain access to employment amounts to punishment even if that failure was structurally determined.

In short, both workers and the unemployed are forced into individual isolation and structurally prevented from recognising and defending their common interests. From this perspective, the promises of ‘activation’ appear as little more than legitimatory rhetoric for a political campaign to rupture solidarities, dismantle welfare rights and weaken organised labour, making way for a thorough recommodification: ‘So, workfarist measures do not so much raise the level of employability across the labour market as a whole as increase the rate of exploitation in its lower reaches’ (Peck and Theodore, 2000: 132). Instead of empowering the unemployed, ‘activation’ aims at removing collective protections that restrict the ‘flexibility’ of firms in exploiting individuals’ labour power and at lowering the cost of unemployment. Ultimately, ‘activation’ programmes appear as rationalisation measures driven by the imperative to reduce welfare costs and improve national competitiveness. People are forced into work in order to reduce welfare expenses and to provide firms with a ‘continuously job-ready, pre-processed, “forced” labour supply’ for contingent low-wage employment (Peck and Theodore, 2000: 123). To authors from this tradition, individualisation is an overwhelmingly negative phenomenon, and it is not a necessary by-product of modernity but the outcome of active strategies pursued by capital and political elites and directed against the working class.

Authors within the governmentality literature explicitly conceive of ‘activation’ policies as the production of a certain kind of labour power, with their main interest focusing on how this production is organised. Here, ‘activation’ appears as a governmental rationality according to which assumptions about human nature, ethical prescriptions and technologies of organising conduct are articulated in programmes for producing a particular kind of subjectivity. The aims stated by such programmes are not seen as mere ideology, but as part of said productive rationality, elements of the reality to be produced. ‘Individualisation’, then, is a specific mode of production of subjectivity, and ‘activation’ measures aim to produce individuals exhibiting some particular properties.

Firstly, of course, they must be active: worker-citizens actively striving to overcome dependency on public assistance and become ‘self-sustaining individual[s]’ (Clarke, 2005: 448). Secondly, their activity must be pro-active, arising from their own initiative, ‘planned, purposive and prudential […]. Pro-active behavior means calculating and (on that basis) taking risk(s), adopting an entrepreneurial stance toward life, relying on self-management and self-control’ (Lessenich, 2011: 312). Thirdly, producing subjects inclined to such behaviour requires holding them responsible. ‘Self-sustaining’ and ‘self-regulating subjects’ are ‘subjects who understand themselves as responsible and independent agents’ (Clarke, 2005: 452). Although expected to act ‘independently’, i.e. without outside assistance, they are not to consider themselves isolated from all others, but to manage their own risks in order to minimise the burden they put on ‘society’.

The ‘responsibilised’ individual is hence a ‘socialized self’, produced by ‘relocating the promotion of the social into the individual’ and ‘subjecting the subject to a social – or societal – logic’ (Lessenich, 2011: 307, original emphasis). Rather than just for their own situation, ‘activation’ renders individuals responsible for the interests of ‘society as a whole’ as an equally binding ethical imperative (Lessenich, 2011: 315). This imposes on them the prime ethical duty to work, and to do everything they can to improve their capacity to do so. The ‘social right’ to public assistance is thus transformed into a ‘social duty’ to actively commodify one’s own labour power (Serrano Pascual, 2004; Lessenich, 2008: 90–97). In short, from the governmentality perspective ‘individualisation’ constitutes a relevant element of contemporary government because its self-descriptions portray it as such. Specifically, individualisation refers to the way in which the subject is herself being made the key support of forces shaping her in such a way that she will conform to the norms and needs of ‘society’.

Calling on dividual subjects

The three perspectives discussed above differ significantly in their assessment of the changes they diagnose as well as in where they locate their causes or the responsibility for their coming about. However, they are complicit in arguing within a paradigm that frames all this as resulting in a newly central status of the individual. Now, this is hardly disputable as long as ‘individual’ is taken to mean the singular human being, who is disembedded from social ties and rendered responsible for her own situation. This very act of responsibilisation, however, is at once a move of dividing her up into two parts: a ‘responsible’, disciplining element produced in the ‘activation’ process, and an element of pre-existing subjectivity that supposedly needs to be disciplined. And once instilled in the individual, the ‘responsible’ element serves as a conduit for a whole catalogue of external demands or expectations that are to be internalised either by transforming pre-existing subjectivity, which is thus itself divided up into multiple parameters, or by creating new elements, traits, dispositions in the person.

Empirical studies have identified a number of such properties the unemployed are to foster in themselves: they ought to be realistic (abandoning inappropriate expectations) and motivated (intrinsically desiring success) (Darmon and Perez, 2011: 87), they will strive to be employable (acquiring the competences ‘the market’ demands), flexible (mobile, free of constraining obligations) and creative (seeking novel ways to promote themselves) (Serrano Pascual, 2004).

Responsibilising the subject thus opens up a space of intervention at the sub-individual level: she is no longer to conceive of herself as an individual, but as a dividual. Taking up a term used by Deleuze (1992) to refer to ‘digital doubles’ of the physical person circulating in virtual networks, and putting it to a broader use, I am using the notion of ‘dividual’ to refer to someone whose subjectivity is conceived of as composed of multiple parameters – attitudes, abilities, skills – each of which can be separately assessed, compared with a standard or norm, and improved in order to contribute to overall ‘employability’:

[N]eo-liberalism attempts to govern unemployment in terms of skills. It uses complex categories and concepts of skill to make visible the unemployed individual’s deficiencies, while at the same time it enjoins the individual to act on their problem by improving their skills. (Walters, 1996: 208)

Accordingly, dividualisation refers to a mode of production of subjectivity in which discourses, technologies and (proposed) practices of self-conduct are aligned in such a way as to incite subjects to conceive of themselves and act as such dividuals. The claim here, that is, is not that people are actually becoming dividuals, but that this is the underlying logic of policies attempting to adapt subjects’ labour power to deregulated, increasingly short-cycled labour markets.

This logic pervades current political reasoning to the point of having been made the basis of European Union policy. The EU Council’s 2008 resolution on guidance in lifelong learning states that everyone is called on to ‘identify their capacities, competences and interests, to make educational, training and occupational decisions and to manage their individual life paths in learning, work and other settings in which those capacities and competences are learned and/or used’ (cited by Darmon and Perez, 2011: 81).

These ‘life paths’ are called individual because they are not standardised, but actively created (‘managed’) by people themselves. In-dividuality – a subjectivity coherently and autonomously assembled by the subject herself – is thus but a prize for those playing the market well enough to succeed in strategically assembling a ‘portfolio’ of profitably marketable competences. Within the conceptual horizon of this political rationality, ‘autonomy’ amounts to a personal capacity for agency based on successful management of a ‘capital of skills’ (Darmon and Perez, 2011: 91) – and like any management, this can fail, leaving individuality a promise unredeemed.

Dividualisation is intimately connected to a shift in the culturally dominant concepts of labour power. In the organised capitalism of the mid-twentieth century, the dominant concept had arguably been that of the occupation, which had, in a very real sense, characterised individuals by linking them to the common identities, status guarantees and rights hard won by the collective of those sharing the occupation. In contrast, the now-dominant concept of competences – the basic building blocks out of which those occupations had formerly been composed – is logically situated at the sub-individual level. Under an ‘activation’ regime, competences are the basic units of dividual labour power. Since acquiring and combining them strategically is everyone’s personal responsibility, this will (re)produce inequalities between those capable of such active self-management and those unable or unwilling.

Using recent German labour market reforms as an example, the following section will show how ‘activation’, as a policy of dividualisation, is played out at the technical level.

The logic of dividualisation in German labour market reforms

Starting with the so-called ‘Hartz reforms’ initiated by the Schröder government in 2002, Germany’s labour market has been subject to an extraordinarily concerted and thorough effort of implementing an activation-oriented labour market regime (Jacobi and Mohr, 2007; Bonoli, 2010). Owing to the decisiveness of the rupture with previous labour market policies, the whole process, including a series of subsequent readjustment reforms that have occurred to date, provides a particularly suitable example for studying the political intentions and socio-technical devices of ‘activating’ subjectivity production.

It comes as no surprise that the debates on the reforms in German sociology are widely framed within the individualisation paradigm (Jacobi and Mohr, 2007; Bartelheimer, 2008; Bartelheimer et al., 2012; Bode, 2012), considering that political rhetoric had always portrayed them as a reorientation toward the individual. To quote the opening paragraph of their central programmatic document:

The new guiding idea is: ‘trigger activities – grant security’. Employment promotion policy is reorganised in terms of an activating labour market policy. At the centre is the unemployed’s own effort at integration, supported and secured by the services and aids on offer. The services offered – from taking up agency work and participating in a qualification scheme to accepting a new job – put the unemployed in a position to personally take action for reaching the goal of integration. In return, the integrated system of counselling, assistance and provision of material security helps in purposefully using these options. (Hartz et al., 2002: 19)

At the level of instruments, however, the picture is different. Classic ‘active’ measures, aimed at replacing outdated or missing occupational qualifications (vocational training) or augmenting labour demand (job creation schemes), were decidedly curtailed (Oschmiansky and Ebach, 2009: 88f.). The practices replacing them follow an entirely different logic in addressing unemployment as a result of personal deficiencies rather than of a labour market imbalance. The ideal typical mode of treatment introduced since 2003 and further refined by a series of subsequent follow-up reforms is in essence a programme of altering the subjectivity of the unemployed. It aims at optimising their ‘employability’ and generating ‘activity’ by precisely diagnosing and purposefully modifying sub-individual elements of their personality.

This logic, pervading reformed labour market services and their methods since the initial reforms, has recently been made the explicit basis of the integration process for all those who register as unemployed by the introduction of a standardised ‘4-Phase Model’ (Schmitz, 2009). This model, decreed by the Federal Employment Agency as the guiding concept for all local agencies in 2009, establishes a common frame within which the different technologies of analytically taking apart, strategically optimising and reassembling the unemployed subject and holding her responsible for her own progress can be brought to bear:

As a matter of principle, a strength- and potential-oriented profiling is conducted with all customers, a common definition of goals is carried out and a joint route is agreed on, defining how and within what time frame the labour market-related goal is to be reached in cooperation between the customer and the agency. The conclusion of a mutual integration agreement marks the binding starting point for the implementation and later monitoring of the agreed course of action. (Schmitz, 2009: 8)

The four phases of this stylised process provide a useful grid for showing how each of the instruments of ‘activating’ labour market policy is deployed to contribute to its overall dividualising impact.

Phase 1: Profiling

The first step in the process is the creation of a ‘customer profile’ in the agency’s information technology system, VerBIS. This is done either by the case worker at the first appointment, or online by the applicants themselves. The standardised, yet minutely detailed profile contains information not only about the ‘customer’s’ formal qualifications, previous employment record and job preferences, but also about their private circumstances, mental and physical conditions, aptitudes and limitations, and the like. The profiles are regularly updated to allow a permanent monitoring of possible matches with employers’ posted labour demands not only locally, but nationwide. The profiling process amounts to an analytical ‘disassembly’ of the individual into a number of parameters (education, work experience, certified and self-reported skills and abilities, etc.), each of which can be measured as a ‘competence’ and assessed as a ‘strength’ or a ‘weakness’, depending on their magnitude in relation to the ‘market average’.

The picture of the unemployed person thus obtained is not to be regarded as a portrait of an individual, but indeed as a tableau of the sub-individual elements or properties that she, as a dividual subject, is composed of. These are what makes up the labour power she has to offer, and what thus needs to be rendered knowable in order to ease the selling of said labour power in the labour market.

Phases 2 and 3: Goal setting and choice of strategy

At the next stage, the ‘customer profile’ provides a basis for defining a goal that the unemployed person is to achieve on her way to labour market integration. The necessary steps toward that goal are specified in an ‘integration schedule’ (Weise et al., 2009: 127), in which the diagnosed shortcomings are addressed by assignment to one or more of the schemes the agency’s ‘toolbox’ has on offer (cf. Darmon and Perez, 2011: 85–86; Legnaro and Birenheide, 2008: 79).

Currently, the most commonly used of these tools are the so-called activation schemes or ‘measures for activation and occupational integration’. These short-term measures, meant to support the adoption of ‘marketable’ attitudes and practices of self-conduct, can assume a number of forms, such as application trainings, assignments to private employment agencies, or internships designed to attune participants to the everyday practice of work and convey basic practical skills. In its current form, this instrument was created by a 2009 readjustment reform that regrouped a number of different types of scheme under a common heading in order to strengthen their ‘positive elements’ (Oschmiansky and Ebach, 2009: 85–86).

The basic approach underlying these measures is to swiftly improve the marketing of participants’ labour power and quickly fix obvious deficiencies among the competences diagnosed in initial profiling, rather than systematically creating a coherent skill set from scratch. Accordingly, they are normally limited to a few weeks in duration, both keeping their cost low and avoiding ‘lock-in’ effects, i.e. not letting participants suspend active job search. Currently, ‘activation schemes’ are by far the most frequently used instrument of active labour market policy in Germany, totalling well over a million participants per year. In addressing one complex of ‘deficiencies’ at a time, they logically fit into a process structured by the analytical identification of ‘deficiencies’ (profiling) and by a schedule drawn up to address these.

Another important type of measure is integration and start-up allowances, jointly called ‘benefits accompanying employment’. Their basic idea is to improve recipients’ ‘employability’ virtually in a first step, by offering potential employers financial compensation for the ‘deficient’ skills that they would have to pick up on (integration allowance), or by subsidising the unemployed themselves, allowing them to temporarily sell their services at a reduced price in order to establish themselves as self-employed micro-entrepreneurs (start-up allowance). This virtual improvement operation aims to indirectly adjust the subjectivity of the unemployed to the demands of profitable economic activity by temporarily ‘subsidising them into’ the situation they are meant to remain in and exposing them to the demands and restrictions they need to adapt to – a rationality already described by Walters (1996: 202) for the example of the British ‘Enterprise Allowance Scheme’ introduced in 1983. The underlying assumption is that missing elements in a personal ‘competence portfolio’ can temporarily be compensated for financially, giving the client time to develop the corresponding competences and ‘close the gaps’.

Reformers had initially placed particularly high hopes on the model of the so-called ‘Personnel Service Agency’ (PSA), a ‘new form of integration-oriented temporary employment agency’ (Hartz et al., 2002: 148). Temporary agency work, in elevating the partial and discontinuous trade in workers’ labour power to its core principle, appeared to the authors of the initial reform concept as a naturally suitable platform for the kind of integration practice they envisaged. Their report explicitly called PSAs the ‘centrepiece’ of reformed labour market policy (Hartz et al., 2002: 148).

Designed as ‘public private partnerships’ between public employment agencies and commercial temp agencies, PSAs were to receive subsidies for hiring a significant portion of the unemployed and deploying them to client firms under regular conditions. In addition to the assumed motivating and habituating effects of being fully exposed to market conditions (cf. Peck and Theodore, 2000: 126), PSAs were to assist integration by providing counselling and training during vacancy periods. This concept, combining the virtual (subsidised integration) and actual (treatment of ‘deficiencies’) adjustment of dividualised labour power, appeared as a kind of ‘philosopher’s stone’ of activation. However, it foundered in practice. PSA employment figures remained marginal (Bernhard et al., 2008: 24–26), leading to their subsumption under the category of ‘activation schemes’ in 2009. Still, considering the inherent discontinuity of activities and the combination of multiple elements it aimed at, the idea of using temp agency work as a platform for integration efforts remains prototypical to the dividualising character of ‘activation’ policies.¹

Activation, however, draws not only on new types of instrument, but also on modified versions of established ones. One of these is public job-creation schemes, which saw a significant boom in the years immediately following the reform. This boom was exclusively due to the so-called ‘work opportunities’ (Arbeitsgelegenheiten), commonly known as ‘one euro jobs’. Recipients of unemployment benefit II² could now get volunteer work, basic retraining activities or odd jobs that would otherwise not have been done approved as ‘work’ for which they would receive one to two euros per hour in addition to their benefits. In contrast to earlier, regularly paid variants, this ‘discount variety’ of subsidised employment was not intended as compensation for a lack of jobs, but as another means of working on the subjectivity of the unemployed. By engaging participants in a regular employment-like pattern of activity, the ‘one euro job’ was to mark ‘a first step toward the labour market’, aiming ‘primarily at the creation or preservation of employability and at social stabilisation’ (Bundesagentur, 2011: 30). Since these jobs are normally limited to six months in duration, agencies started letting people periodically rotate between these and other schemes for years on end. This has had the side effect of inuring a section of the long-term unemployed to a pattern of discontinuous and polyvalent work activities (Eversberg, 2014a: 92–93; cf. Dörre et al., 2013).³

Phase 4: Implementation and monitoring

Once the ‘integration schedule’ has been set, the client’s collaboration in the effort to make her dividually employable must be ensured. This is achieved through the integration agreement, the key instrument of implementing the conditionality of benefits in the current German system. Although scarcely mentioned in the programmatic documents of reform policy, the integration agreement plays a central role in its practical manifestations. §2 Section 1 of the Social Code 2 states that

Beneficiaries fit for work as well as those living in a community of dependence [‘Bedarfsgemeinschaft’] with them must exhaust all opportunities for ending or reducing their dependency on assistance. A fit beneficiary must actively collaborate in all measures for their integration into work, especially by concluding an integration agreement.

This agreement, normally renewed every six months, legally sanctions the prescriptions of the integration schedule and can also impose other duties (such as a minimum number of job applications) to be fulfilled in exchange for benefits paid, as well as the obligation to accept any ‘reasonable’ job offer. On the face of it, signing it is voluntary. However, since declining to do so (or subsequently infringing it) entails the loss of all claims to public assistance, this voluntariness is usually purely fictional (Legnaro and Birenheide, 2008: 60–61; Ludwig-Mayerhofer et al., 2009: 23–24). Such compulsion-backed personalised responsibilisation subjects the client to the ‘domination of the social point of view’ (Simmel, cited by Lessenich, 2008: 93), which she can only live up to by adopting the view of herself as composed of different ‘competences’ that underlies the goals defined in the agreement.

The literature indicates that the processual logic of the steps detailed in this section (profiling – planning – responsibilisation by agreement – treatment of deficiencies) is not a German specialty, but a common pattern to be observed in many European countries (McDonald and Marston, 2005: 387; Darmon and Perez, 2011: 81, 84–86). A key condition for the whole multi-step process has been the simultaneous professionalisation and standardisation of guidance procedures. Agency personnel needed to be trained in the technology and the logic of dividual labour power administration, and guidance for the hardest to integrate was intensified to a ‘case management’ by trained social workers (Kolbe and Reis, 2008; Bundesagentur, 2011: 38). Although the word ‘case’ addresses the individual, this mode of treatment, drawing on detailed knowledge gained in a profiling procedure and working on the ‘deficient’ elements identified therein, finds its field of operation at the sub-individual level. And again, this is not specific to the German case: case management or ‘coaching’ for the unemployed is widely seen as another staple element of ‘activating’ reforms (McDonald and Marston, 2005; Darmon and Perez, 2011: 84ff.; Howard, 2012).

Conclusions

The overview given in the preceding section shows that there is a common underlying logic to many of the instruments of ‘activating’ labour market policy, as well as to the ways in which they are combined, that is not fully grasped by sociological perspectives interpreting these policies within the individualisation paradigm. This common logic consists in the coordinated use of forms of knowledge, social technologies and ethical prescriptions in such a way as to (a) analytically take the subject apart into a number of sub-individual parameters – skills, attitudes, ‘competences’ – each of which can be measured, compared to a market standard and marked as sufficient or deficient (profiling). Then, (b) goals for overcoming the diagnosed deficiencies are defined and a plan for strategically overcoming the diagnosed deficiencies is drawn up, specifying which of the schemes offered by the BA (Bundesagentur für Arbeit) are suitable for achieving this, and (c) the client is made responsible for adopting this self-image and following the plan’s prescriptions by way of a contractual agreement rendering benefits conditional on their compliance. Agency staff can then (d) monitor the sub-individual improvement activities and keep track of each parameter’s development.

The ‘activation’ toolbox – as demonstrated here for its German variety, but arguably also in many other national flavours – thus provides a whole array of instruments for enabling, promoting and facilitating a dividualising re-formatting of labour power that is all too easily overlooked by scholars arguing within the individualisation paradigm. Instead of ‘activated, empowered, responsibilized’ or ‘abandoned’ (Clarke, 2005) individuals, what policies of ‘activation’ seek to provide the labour market with is a type of commodified labour power tradable in units smaller than the individual. The subject of that labour power is to disentangle the marketable components from her personality and offer them up for sale one by one, thus rendering herself dividual. Given the core assumption behind ‘activation’ reforms that the (deficient) labour power of the unemployed needs to be adapted to market demands, this seems anything but a coincidence. In fact, it neatly fits in with the logic of the model of capitalism that has established itself in the same countries during the last four decades: a ‘flexible capitalism’ (Lessenich, 2008) geared to permanently optimising the cost efficiency of production through digitalised control and systematic elimination of all kinds of deadweight and drag.⁴ For employers in such a production regime, the ideal worker is fully transparent in the skills they can offer and willing to be hired or discarded ‘just in time’ whenever and wherever necessary. It is these requirements that ‘activation’ is to help its subjects cater to by rendering them ‘employable’.

There is a parallel between this process of dividualisation and what Rose (1996) called the ‘death of the social’. He described the latter as a logical disintegration process of ‘society’, in which it was taken apart into an array of communities in order to make it governable. Rose argued that ‘society’, as an object of knowledge and government accompanied by a single, homogeneous social norm, was supplanted by specialised technologies of intervention producing and supporting a plurality of normalities and fostering communities as more versatile units that could more effectively integrate themselves into the world market than cumbersome national societies. What I have identified here appears structurally homologous. Dividualisation consists in the (logical) ‘death of the individual’ insofar as, by virtue of the governmental strategies described here, the subject herself is disassembled into smaller units that can more thoroughly and effectively be integrated into the market. According to this logic, dividualising technologies of competence production may eventually replace previous regimes of in-dividual occupations, which proved too cumbersome to suit the short-term demand of globally operating firms.

The sociological analyses of ‘activation’ discussed in the first part of this article seem unable to grasp the kind and extent of this change, precisely because the paradigm of individualisation limits their scope. According to Lessenich (2008: 72), we are witnessing ‘the relocation of the promotion of the social to the interior of the individual – amounting to an individualising “reinvention” of the social’ (original emphasis). Accurately observed as this undoubtedly is, labelling the result ‘individualising’ seems to miss a crucial point, namely that the intervention into and within the subject that once again places her under an obligation to ‘the social’ does not render her in-dividual, but precisely dividual.

At this point, a word of clarification is in order. What we are talking about here is not the administrative realities, but the programmatic ideals of ‘activation’ policy. It cannot be deduced from the rationalities detailed here that current German labour market policy actually produces this kind of dividual labour power, that German capitalism actually functions this way, or that there are no countervailing powers of labour that may be able to curb the potential effects. These are questions to be answered empirically on a different level of analysis. Yet, in showing how the governmental rationality of dividualisation pervades the way in which the legal, institutional and processual structures of German labour market administration have been and are still being reformed, I have also pointed to the ongoing attempts to make the ideal a reality in a very practical way, without organised labour having offered much effective resistance in the process.

Indeed, it seems possible that organised labour, being conceptually mired in different variants of political-economic thinking, is itself subject to the impaired vision imposed by the individualisation paradigm. Political economy, while on the right track in identifying changes in the capitalist economy as an important driving force behind the political turn toward ‘activation’, remains limited by its narrow focus on the detrimental impact of international competition on social solidarity and the welfare state. The sort of perspective applied here, in drawing together the concern with the effects of change in capitalism and the governmentality school’s interest in the ways and means of politically producing realities, may help overcome such portrayals of current reform processes as a mere ‘decline of the social’. Neither, however, is it intended to promote a ‘Giddensian’ optimism about the democratic potential of such change, or indeed the kind of shrugging acceptance of its effects as inevitable concomitants of modernity that Beck’s individualisation theorem seems to imply. Instead, in pointing to dividualisation as the direction that ‘activated’ realities are moving toward, what I meant to show is that the very same process critical scholarship has constantly dubbed ‘individualisation’ may in fact end up endangering individuality. The danger, however, is not, as common thinking would have it, in the assimilation and repression of the individual by a uniform collective, but in its very converse: its disarticulation and fragmentation in the interest of the most efficient possible use of all its productive capacities.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank three anonymous referees for their comments on an earlier version of this article, which helped to greatly improve it.

Funding

This research received no specific funding from any public, commercial or non-profit agency.

Notes

Author biography

Dennis Eversberg is a postdoctoral researcher in the research group on ‘Post-growth societies’, funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft at the Institute of Sociology, Friedrich Schiller University of Jena. He has worked on research projects on trade unionism and on labour market policy at the universities of Hannover and Jena, and received his doctorate in Jena in 2013. His current research focuses on the subjective limits of capitalist growth regimes, the movement for ‘degrowth’, and trade unions and youth. His doctoral thesis on the subjective impact of activating labour market policies, Dividuell aktiviert (Campus, 2014), was recently published in German.

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