Poverty and human capital in Chile: The processes of subjectivation in conditional cash transfer programs

Neoliberal rationality

Multiple interpretations of neoliberalism abound today with the term most often being associated with economic laissez-faire, free market competition, and minimal state intervention. The concept has frequently been defined as a globalized policy framework favoring international financial markets and the abandonment of the Keynesian welfare State by enforcing deregulation and privatization (Larner, 2000). Nevertheless, identifying and defining neoliberalism solely through these terms not only leads to its simplification but also to obscuring the rationality operating behind it (Dardot and Laval, 2013; Laruffa, 2017). While neo-marxist theorists offer a more critical analysis of neoliberalism, defining it as a hegemonic ideological transformation favoring the economic elite (Harvey, 2005), another critical theoretical lens for examining neoliberalism can be found in the works of Foucault and neo-Foucauldian scholars. While Foucault’s scholarship has been criticized for its ambiguity, in particular in regards to what some have identified as the author’s possible attraction towards neoliberalism (Garret, 2018), neo-Foucauldian scholars recognize that his work provides a critical analytical perspective from which to understand neoliberalism as an art of government, thus providing a lens from which to examine its practical techniques and strategies of application (Castro-Gómez, 2015; Dean, 2017; Larner, 2000; Lemke, 2019; Miller and Rose, 2008). These authors explore the manner in which neoliberalist rationality has extended economic logic to all aspects of society, transforming the role of the State through new government practices, or as coined by Foucault (2007) practices of governmentality.

Foucault’s genealogical examination of the ‘art of governance’ in his 1978–1979 lectures on the birth of biopolitics at the Collège de France (2007), provides a depth of insight into the manner in which neoliberal rationality has infiltrated all aspects of human life. Tracing shifts from classical liberal thought to neoliberalism, Foucault identifies a crucial transition in which the market evolved from being conceptualized as a sphere for the exchange of commodities to a sphere regulated by mechanisms of competition. This change was accompanied by other far-reaching transformations. Under this new rationality, the classical liberal homo œconomicus consumer was no longer useful, instead the competitive neoliberal market required a self-regulating entrepreneur, an autonomous individual willing to take on risk by investing and maximizing his or her own capacities or human capital (Castro-Gomez, 2015; Martínez, 2014; Miller and Rose, 2008). According to Foucault (2006; 2007), in order for this transformation to occur, a change in the art of governance was necessary. Unlike previous disciplinary or strategic power, this new art of governance, or as coined by Foucault, governmentality, installs new rationalities that ‘subtly guide’ individuals (Castro-Gómez, 2015).

Foucault’s methodological shift to governmentality is of particular relevance not only for comprehending neoliberal rationalization but also for understanding the transformation in his conceptualization of power and its relational nature. During the 1970s Foucault recognized the limitations of his previous understanding of the practices of power as physical repression (law) and ideological manipulation (discipline) which made escaping from power and its relations an impossibility (Foucault, 1981). According to Deleuze, this became Foucault’s ‘theoretical impasse’ (2006: 175), leading him to return to the subject and develop a third theoretical dimension: subjectivity. Subjectivity is no longer visualized as an intersection between knowledge and power as ‘the prisoner, the madman’ but as subjectivation processes capable of resisting domination, or in Foucauldian terms, technologies of power (Castro-Gomez, 2015: 15). Foucault’s concept of governmentality demonstrates how power is no longer pure dominance (violence) but rather operates through actions and practices connected to a certain political rationality that generates processes of subjectivation. Specifically, Foucault demonstrated the manner in which traditional disciplinary action was not efficient for producing neoliberal entrepreneurial subjects, rather subtler forms of government action and control were necessary in order to direct individuals and institutions to conform to the entrepreneurial needs of the market. These actions had to act on the desires and interests of individual subjects, in such a way that these interventions were perceived as a reinforcement of personal liberty and choice while at the same time generating processes of subjectivation (Castro-Gómez, 2015).

Governmentality and its relation to the state

The ‘art of government’ or governmentality and its articulations with biopolitics, as coined by Foucault (2006, 2009), is the attempt to control all spaces of ungoverned life. Although Foucault showed no interest in developing a ‘State theory’, it is possible to establish governmentality as a particular form of analysis of the State and its functioning. As Castro-Gómez (2015: 95) states in his analysis of Foucault’s thought, ‘the Modern State became “governmentalized”’, in which the State is shaped through a specific realization of neoliberal rationality through an ensemble of practices (Lazzarato, 2013) which deploy different technologies, defined as multiple techniques in order to achieve the objectives of governance. This new form of governmental power functions differently from previous sovereign and normalizing power exercised through violence (technologies of power) in confinement and punishment by utilizing subtler governing techniques of the body and the life of the individual. Under this governmentality framework, the focus of government becomes the population and its processes of subjectivation (self-technologies) implemented through a security dispositive sustained by notions of individual liberty.

In his 1978 class, Foucault defined dispositive as an heterogenous ensemble of discourses, institutions, laws, administration, architecture, morality, scientific statements which articulate a mode of government that provides a supposed security to the population through notions of individual liberty. Deleuze provides further insight onto the concept of the dispositive defining it as, ‘a skein, a multilinear set’ (Deleuze, 2007b: 305) which illuminates the manner in which knowledge, power and subjectivation are articulated under governmentality. This new political rationality employs precise government techniques that seek to govern and subjectivize the population in a particular manner (Castro-Gómez, 2015). This is the perfect intersection between governmentality and biopolitics, since the question of sovereignty, is now understood as a form of power that ‘triangulates sovereignty, discipline and governmental management’ (Foucault, 2006: 195; Mussetta, 2009).

Thus, a ‘government nomenclature’ appears in which three relevant elements are articulated. First, political rationalities that articulate practice regimes operating discursive concepts that exercise power through ‘government practices’ (Castro-Gómez, 2015: 31), an issue that installs consistent views of the government's goals by establishing a ‘legitimate field of intervention’ (Mussetta, 2009: 51). Second, these rationalities are assembled into constellations of power that must be articulated into precise actions through government technologies. These are techniques of domination over oneself, that permeate technologies of power (domination), for this reason government technologies hinge between the technologies of power and those of the self, asking: ‘What does it mean to effectively govern the behavior of others?’ (Castro-Gómez, 2015: 35). We see that this hinge of technologies (those of government) under the political rationality of governmentality allow us to specify a third element: subjectivity (Castro-Gómez, 2015), because they determine the behavior of subjects (as subjection) and make subjects believe they can direct their own behavior (as subjectivation). The subjectivation processes is an identity logic in which one tries to categorize all subjective experience towards a Subject (Rolnik, 2019).

This theoretical framework illuminates the manner in which governmentality has infiltrated all parts of society, including social policy, poverty, and the manner in which it has become an object of governments from which to subtly ‘control’ the population (Ramos, 2016). This illustrates a management of the political economy and its mechanisms of power, surpassing the disciplinary knowledge to arrive at a more precise understanding of governmentality (Foucault, 2006). We are no longer under the previous strategic disciplinary microphysical control model nor the legal law-sovereignty domination model, now neoliberal capitalism’s political rationality prevails through concrete governmentality practices going beyond the nation-state (Mussetta, 2009); and it is there that these practices of rationality are combined with particular government technologies and processes of subjectivation (Castro-Gómez, 2015; Lemke, 2019), which ‘are fully embodied in “human capital”, which makes each one of us a “subject” responsible for his own “actions” and “behavior”’ (Lazzarato, 2013: 183) as an interlocking subjectivation mode between social subjection and de-subjectivation (Lazzarato, 2013).

Chile presents an interesting case from which to study such subjectivation processes due to the fact that while neoliberalism was forcibly installed in Chile during Pinochet’s dictatorship, proceeding democratic governments maintained the neoliberal model and its rationalities. However recent social and political unrest in the country have revealed a population rebelling against these neoliberal rationalities citing 30 years of injustice and abuse resulting in a return to violent state control, thus revealing that when subjectivation no longer functions in the control of the population, a violent repressive State returns (Rojas, 2019; Lazzarato, 2019).

Between political rationality and government technologies: The processes of subjectivation

The art of government implies the deployment of government practices not crystalized in the State but which operate through different government technologies through micropower. Governmentality defined as a neoliberal rationality, does not seek the installation of a political truth, but rather designates how ‘individuals are conducted’ under these governmental practices, their rationality (Mussetta, 2009: 48–49) and the type of subject that is prioritized as part of this production. Governmentality, as science of life and the body, as biopower, is transformed into a precise mode of subjectivation.

However, as we outlined above, this last stage of Foucauldian thought did not seek to introduce the subject in order to reinvindicate individual rights and liberties under humanistic pretentions, rather, to a new analysis of power, in which power could be separated from domination. Power now implies a set of actions (Foucault, 2001) within a framework of liberty, and analyzing those rules of power connects with Foucault’s analysis of governmentality and his previous work. The need to return to the subject (and its subjectivation) implies specifying the subject’s emergence at the intersection of domination (technologies of power) and the self (technologies of the self), thus implying possibilities of resistance versus violence through domination (Castro-Gómez, 2015). Foucault needed to exit towards an ‘outside’ of the force of power, since it was here ‘resistance could come’ (Deleuze, 2015: 12).

From this analysis of governmentality, it is necessary to specify the implications in regards to the notion of the ‘outside’ and the subjectivation process. The first element consists of the third vector described by Foucault, which, according to Deleuze (2015) is the relation of the ‘outside’, its fold, and subjectivation. This outside established above regarding power is the possibility of thinking about the outside and its manner being inside, of folding. ‘Subjectivation is done by folding’ (Deleuze, 2010: 137), which also implies thinking that this ‘inside’ would be the effect, the result of the outside; thus, a subjectivation (Deleuze, 2007a). It was necessary to leave behind the relations of power in order to visualize the subjective irruptions that fold (always from the outside) and that enter the set of actions already described previously. The above makes the appearance of this dimension of subjectivity and subjectivation as a possibility of resisting power.

Although this Foucauldian shift allows us to visualize possibilities of resistance in ‘certain productions of subjectivity capable of resisting this new domination’ (Deleuze, 2007b: 310), at the same time, this interior can adopt different figures or modes ‘according to the way in which the fold is made’ (Deleuze, 2007a: 235). Thus, we see that the current non-disciplinary control dispositive installs a process of subjectivation not separated from neoliberal rationality, a very different matter from what Foucault analyzed in the ‘Greek city’, in ‘Christianity’ or in ‘modern society’ (Deleuze, 2007b: 307). The subjectivation depends on the type of dispositive that is deployed, therefore, these neoliberal modes of governmental security dispositive operate better with respect to the production of subjectivity itself: external coercion no longer exists, rather internal guilt, personal exigency, and the need to excel in all areas lead to ‘self-control’. Performance is thus the new mode of control of subjectivities and ‘one makes oneself responsible (. . .) instead of doubting society or the system’ (Han, 2014: 18).

The current mode of subjectivation inscribed in a neoliberal society that controls us through governmentality, functions under the notion of performance which is difficult to resist. Deleuze’s (2006) Foucault reader, stated in 1990 that the most horrific issue was that enterprise had a soul, it was through them that control was exercised: the concepts of human capital and managers inhabit the logic of the enterprise. This business logic leads to certain modes of subjectivation that impact the notion of work, but also the control of poverty (Castro-Gómez, 2015). Methodologically, it is pertinent to analyze certain configurations that model subjectivizations today (Bröckling, 2015), in particular poverty policies and programs. The prevailing mode of current subjectivation, which Foucault (2007) refers to under the notion of ‘human capital’ and its derivatives, leaves nothing but subjectivity as a commodity, destined for consumption and services (Lazzarato, 2013); that is, this neoliberal subject cannot establish relationships that are not exempt from these purposes (Han, 2014).

This neoliberal governmental rationality unfolds under the logic of ‘entrepreneurs of self’ and ‘self-entrepreneur’, emerging under the ‘management of human capital’ as processes of subjectivation in contemporary western societies. Nevertheless, due to globalization, these notions presented here are relevant analytical tools to visualize the government's own modes (Mussetta, 2009) that seep into Latin American realities (Bröckling, 2015), and specifically, in Chile. This directly impacts social policies, plans and poverty programs, such as CCTs. It is clear that ‘Foucault shows that neoliberal devices intervene in the social with the objective of establishing an appropriate means for the development of an entrepreneurial logic’ (Martínez, 2014: 136). The current prevailing rationality finds solutions to poverty in ‘social investment’ and through the development of ‘human capital'. In Chile, this practice has been present and evolving over the last 20 years.

Conditional cash transfer programs in Chile: Poverty and governmentality

Chile began implementing its first CCT program, Chile Solidario, in 2004. Internationally the program was considered an innovation due to its inclusion of an intensive 24-month psychosocial family accompaniment component in addition to more traditional cash transfers (Peck and Theodore, 2015). Participating families were required to sign a contract and participate in home visits sessions with the objective of completing 53 minimum conditionalities in the areas of health, education, employment, income, housing, identification, and family dynamics (Reininger et al., 2018). The objective of this psychosocial component of the program was to reduce future family risk and vulnerability by developing and strengthening family resources (Larrañaga and Contreras, 2015). Thus, home visit sessions consisted in guiding and educating families to make use of existing local public services while activating family capacities and resources. Under this program logic families became responsible for overcoming situations of poverty by actively choosing to develop and strengthen family resources while at the same time taking advantage of opportunities and making use of available public services. The relationships forged with psychosocial professionals were considered crucial in empowering and educating families in reaching the transformation towards personal responsibility (Rojas, 2014).

The first step of psychosocial professionals working with families was to steer them towards developing a rational internal disposition towards change. This change involved taking responsibility for themselves, their families, and their situations of poverty by identifying family resources and strengths. It was believed that ‘activating’ these resources, or human capital, families would learn to become independent and productive members of society (Rojas, 2010). In other words, these subtle practices of subjectivation sought to instill the notion that individuals had the liberty of action and were thus responsible for their success as well as failures (Castro-Gómez, 2015). Individuals were expected to actively seek self-realization projects to develop the best and most competitive versions of themselves (Miller and Rose, 2008). This form of governmentality veiled the role of larger structural causes in the perpetuation of poverty and inequality, placing blame for failure on the individuals lack of entrepreneurial skills (Rojas, 2010).

The personal choice and responsibility discourse of Chile Solidario was expanded on further in 2011 with the implementation of Chile’s second CCT program, the Ingreso Ético Familiar (IEF). ² This program emerged due to unfavorable evaluations of the Chile Solidario program, in particular the lack of evidence in regards to the programs efficacy in improving family employment and income (Carneiro and Galasso, 2007). In order to address this ‘flaw’, the IEF placed greater emphasis on cash transfers, differentiating between dignity (not conditioned), duty (conditioned on child health controls and school attendance) and achievement transfers (conditioned on academic excellence and graduation) as well as adding a socio-employment accompaniment in addition to the psychosocial accompaniment component (Larrañaga and Contreras, 2015). This new socio-employment component consisted of assisting employable individuals in accessing training and employment opportunities and/or developing entrepreneurial ventures (Fantuzzi, 2013). Participating individuals were required to elaborate employment and/or entrepreneurial plans in collaboration with socio-employment professionals, identifying steps to achieving economic independence. A greater focus was thus placed on poor families in acquiring, strengthening and utilizing human capital in order to overcome their situations of poverty by participating in the market, cementing the economic conceptualization of poverty and the poor subject as morally personally responsible for his/her well-being.

The individual responsibility discourse was also strengthened further in the IEF program by the incorporation of a more punitive and disciplinary stance towards families who failed to participate in the accompaniment components of the program. In comparison to Chile Solidario, the IEF program established automatic termination from the program in the case families failed to participate in three or more accompaniment sessions. Cash benefits were thus not only conditioned on school attendance and child health checkups but also on the active participation of families. Thus in order to receive aid families were required to ‘work’ towards individual and family behavioral changes underpinned by notions of personal responsibility and human capital investment.

Governmentality thus operates through the IEF program by seeking the self-regulation of program participants by installing the belief that active participation and human capital accumulation is sole solution for getting out of poverty (Castro-Gómez, 2015). Families who fail to undertake this ‘family-growth’ path risk losing benefits by failing to adhere to programs rules. Under this rationality human capital becomes a core component of neoliberal subjectivation.

Human capital, (self)governance, and personal responsibility: A mode of subjectivation

The increased focus on the accumulation and use of human capital in the IEF program due to the inclusion of a socio-employment accompaniment component reveals the extension and solidification of the neoliberal rationality operating behind the program. Poverty is understood as the result of unemployment and/or limited employment options. This market logic and the notion of human capital permeates all productions of subjectivation (Bröckling, 2015) within the program in which only those ‘entrepreneurial’ individuals will successfully ‘win’ the battle against poverty, finding happiness and individuation through personal merit and sacrifice. The State’s role transforms into a mere facilitator, in which skill building, training and personal improvement become the main foci of the program. The ‘poor subject’ experiences a process of subjectivity in which the ideals of meritocracy and human capital accumulation rein; there is no other form of subjectivity under the current neoliberal rationality.

Thus concretely, IEF program participants are expected to invest in their human capital by participating in training, skill building, and educational opportunities in order to increase their productive capacities and access better-quality employment. Furthermore, participation in the psychosocial accompaniment of the program also seeks to ‘improve’ and ‘invest’ in individuals and their families by working on other ‘psychosocial issues’ in order to improve social integration. A specific type of subject is sought in the IEF program in which processes of subjectivation have been produced by certain fields and lines of power (Bröckling, 2015), configuring the institutional through rules, contracts, transfers, trainings, and psychosocial and socio-employment sessions. Resisting such rationality is difficult since another type of subjectivation will fail if it is not part of the prevailing political rationality permeating the IEF program and CCT programs in general.

Hence, under this logic, individuals are transformed into self-entrepreneurs who choose when and how to invest in their own human capital in order to become competitive players in the ever-evolving market (Sugarman, 2015). No longer dependent on enterprise, individuals are expected to become self-enterprises with a constant focus on self-improvement and self-realization (Foucault, 2007; Martínez, 2014; Miller and Rose, 2008; Lemke, 2019). This means not only constant actualization in a specific occupation but also flexibility in assuming expertise in a new area when the former occupation is no longer lucrative. Under this rationality, individuals are expected to assume the risk and responsibility for personal failure even when this failure relates to market instability (Dardot and Laval, 2013). Individuals are thus thrust at the mercy of an ever evolving and competitive market in which they must assume risks in order to survive (Lazzarato, 2009). This translates into actively searching and investing in ‘smart’ training and educational opportunities in occupations that will prove ‘lucrative’ as an investment in the long term. Continuous education through the participation in classes, trainings and workshops become the individualized solution to overcoming poverty. Choosing which area in which to specialize and where to seek such training transforms market risk into individual risk.

However, as the women interviewed for this study repeatedly indicated, they found their options severely limited to short term training opportunities in order to quickly insert themselves into the market. These trainings were mostly centered on employment in the service sector. In order to become more attractive towards employers and compete in the fast-passed market the women interviewed often sought multiple training opportunities in order to increase their human capital. Adaptability and change are key in this scenario as is illustrated in the following interview excerpt:

You have to look for the best of each (training) because not every institute has them. And so I studied manicure at Patricia Seguel; hair removal at Faúndez; reflexology, which is a foot massage technique, at the school of pedologists; body massages at an institute called (inaudible) in Providencia, and the last class I took at the Chilean Professional Institute was in order to become a nursing assistant. (Conchalí 3).

The constant self-improvement and investment efforts on the part of individuals become effective forms of self-governance, or subjectivation, in which each person becomes responsible for their decisions and actions (Castro-Gómez, 2015; Miller and Rose, 2008). Individuals are thus constantly striving to become more competitive, efficient and disciplined (Dardot and Laval, 2013), continually seeking self-improvement (Miller and Rose, 2008). Through this neoliberal rationality subjectivation, the inability to overcome hardship becomes a personal failure due to lack of effort on the part of the individual, thus moralizing self-care and responsibility (Brown, 2003); this is the fold of the current subjectivation (Deleuze, 2015).

As exemplified in the following interview excerpt, this moralization and personal transformation is only possible through self-sacrifice and hard work:

Because if I had not put the effort in I would not have been able to get out (of poverty). This is what I tell the people I work with, the cleaning ladies who are poorer than I am. I tell them that getting out of poverty is the responsibility of each individual. One has to buy what one really needs, if you don’t need it, why do you buy it? I tell them my story and how I have tried to get out (of poverty). I tell those poorer than me, maybe they don’t have education, why is it so hard for them to get out of poverty? I have also had my downs, but i have always gotten out. I am always saying that this will not win me, it will not win (Conchalí, 5).

This extract highlights two interesting findings; the first is the self-improvement discourse that includes a conceptualization of poverty as an individualized battle one needs to ‘win'. This not only exposes the constant and unyielding competition of neoliberal rationality former program participants perceive but also the personal drive, self-responsibility, and moral obligation to not let poverty triumph. Poverty thus becomes a personal battle in which human capital investment and accumulation become the sole effective weapon. Through this individualized perspective, the structural causes of poverty and inequality remain unseen and untouched, thus effectively leading to the depoliticizing of social policies (Lazzarato, 2009; Rojas, 2010). It is the individual, who through hard work, perseverance, and responsibility triumphs over the individualized poverty war.

A second interesting finding reveals the manner in which self-governing techniques also lead to differentiating from others. In this specific interview, those others are considered to be ‘poorer’ individuals who make irrational choices such as buying unnecessary items or not having nor investing in education. This reveals suppositions of irresponsibility in which the poor are accountable for their situations of poverty because they fail to make good choices (Juhila et al., 2017). As in the previous finding, through this rationality, the role of larger structural inequalities in contributing to and maintaining poverty are also obscured (Laruffa, 2017; Lazzarato, 2013; Lemke, 2018), justifying the focus of active government interventions on the ‘irrational’ and ‘irresponsible’ poor by transforming and changing undesirable behavior. Interventions seek to ethically reform the poor through ‘empowerment’ strategies that seek to instill self-regulating behavior and autonomy (Rose, 2000). The individual will only overcome poverty by actively taking control and responsibility for their actions and decisions.

In the case of CCT programs in particular, conditioning cash transfers on desired behavior is considered an efficient and fair way of ethically educating and transforming the actions and attitudes of the poor (Fiszbein and Schady, 2009). Even former IEF participants excluded from the program due to non-compliance consider this practice justifiable:

There are many women who do not assume the weight of motherhood and the responsibility that it entails. (Conditioning transfers) is a way of obligating them because it is the only way, monetarily, to obligate them to comply. In reality it’s for their children but they don’t see it that way. (Conchalí 2)

As illustrated in the quote above, economic manipulation becomes a justifiable technique for educating and transforming the behavior of ‘bad’ mothers who lack self-governance and fail to invest in their child’s future. Under neoliberal rationality the mother-child relationship is conceptualized as an economic investment, transforming a previous non-market relationship into an economic one (Foucault, 2007). Specifically, early child cognitive and psychological stimulation is considered key to ending the intergenerational transmission of poverty by improving a child’s future chances of successful insertion into the market (Castro-Gomez, 2015). Mothering under neoliberalism thus transforms into an active and participatory task involving investments and calculations for achieving optimal child development that will ultimately lead to positive economic returns (Foucault, 2007). Under this rationality those mothers who fail to adhere to even the simplest of parenting tasks (such as sending their child to school) must be directed towards such actions through monetary incentives or risk losing benefits. Mothers thus become responsible for breaking the intergenerational transmission of poverty by assuring their child’s future success whilst structural inequalities that perpetuate poverty are overlooked or considered secondary in importance.

Further exacerbating the individual responsabilisation of poverty is its association with laziness, lack of self-governance and deceit:

I think that people who want to work will get ahead by themselves, not depend on society. Because there are jobs out there. There are lazy people who want to stay where they are, and they stay there. There are people who like earning money the easy way. That is what happens at the municipality sometimes. There are so many people that get so much but then you see them on the corner drinking or with money or going out but they leave the municipality crying for things. (Conchalí, 4)

The previous quote illustrates the manner in which receiving benefits is considered opting for ‘the easy way’ out of poverty instead of seeking honest employment. Receiving benefits implies no self-sacrifice, no self-discipline and no effort on the part of beneficiaries while perpetuating societal dependence. This belief has been identified in other studies on CCT’s in Latin America (Aquín, 2014; Corboz, 2013). Furthermore, the inefficient functioning of municipalities is charged with exacerbating such laziness by handing out ‘so much’ and failing to identify the worthy from the unworthy deceitful poor. This lack of self-sacrifice and effort on the part of the unworthy and deceitful poor sparks feelings of injustice that demand greater state intervention and control:

there are a lot of people who stay where they are with what they are given (refers to cash transfers). But something should be done, give them studies or work and so they can . . . there are people who can work during the day, study at night and get ahead. But not make it easy for them, give them a transfer and nothing else. (Conchalí, 10)

Underlying the previous interview excerpt is the manner in which neoliberal subjectivity installs the notion that program participants should ‘work’ for benefits. This rationality shapes meritorious recipients of state aid as individuals who invest and accumulate human capital thus transforming themselves from lazy societal dependents into responsible independent workers, or as coined by Foucault (2007), self-entrepreneurs.