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Contemporary governments employ a range of policy tools to ‘activate’ the unemployed to look for work. Framing unemployment as a consequence of personal shortcoming, these policies incentivise the unemployed to become ‘productive’ members of society. While Foucault’s governmentality framework has been used to foreground the operation of power within these policies, ‘job-seeker’ resistance has received less attention. In particular, forms of emotional resistance have rarely been studied. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 80 unemployed welfare recipients in Australia, this article shows that many unemployed people internalise activation’s discourses of personal failure, experiencing shame and worthlessness as a result. It also reveals, however, that a significant minority reject this framing and the ‘feeling rules’ it implies, expressing not shame but anger regarding their circumstances. Bringing together insights from resistance studies and the sociology of emotions, this article argues that ‘job-seeker’ anger should be recognised as an important form of ‘everyday resistance’.

Social networks play an important role in helping people find employment, yet extant studies have argued that unemployed ‘job-seekers’ rarely engage in ‘networking’ behaviours. Previous explanations of this inactivity have typically focused on individual factors such as personality, knowledge and attitude, or suggested that isolation occurs because individuals lose access to the latent benefits of employment. Social stigma has been obscured in these debates, even as they have perpetuated stereotypes regarding individual responsibility for unemployment and the inherent value of paid work. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 80 unemployed Australians, this article argues that stigma-related shame is an important factor in networking decisions. First, it demonstrates that stigma is ubiquitous in the lives of the unemployed. Second, it identifies withdrawal from social networks and disassociation from ‘the unemployed’ as two key strategies that unemployed people use to manage stigma-related shame, and shows how these strategies reduce networking activities.

Australia's income support system has always been conditional. However, since the mid-1990s conditions have escalated considerably, with a raft of new administrative and activity conditions attached to the receipt of payments and tough financial sanctions imposed for non-compliance. Social security appeal rights have also been weakened and - with the introduction of income management policies - some benefit recipients have had conditions placed on where, and on what, their payments can be spent. Against this backdrop, some reformers argue for the eradication of punitive conditionalities and an increase in certain categories of payments; others, however, propose a more radical break with the past through the introduction of an unconditional and universal basic income that is paid to all permanent residents. This paper explores these developments in an attempt to discern whether universal basic income is a desirable alternative to a highly conditional social security system.

This paper explores contemporary contradictions and tensions in Australian social policy principles and governmental practices that are being used to drive behavioural change, such as compulsory income management. By means of compulsory income management the Australian Government determines how certain categories of income support recipients can spend their payments through the practice of quarantining a proportion of that payment. In this process some groups in the community, particularly young unemployed people and Indigenous Australians, are being portrayed as requiring a paternalistic push in order to make responsible choices. The poverty experienced by some groups of income support recipients appears to be seen as a consequence of poor spending patterns rather than economic and social inequalities. By contrast, Australia's National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) has been constructed as a person centred system of support that recognises the importance of both human agency and structural investment to expand personal choices and control. Here we look at the rationale guiding these developments to explore the tensions and contradictions in social policy more broadly, identifying what would be required if governments sought to promote greater autonomy, dignity and respect for people receiving income support payments in Australia.

The election of an Australian Labor Government in Australia in 2007 saw ‘social inclusion’ emerge as the official and overarching social policy agenda. Being ‘included’ was subsequently defined by the ALP Government as being able to ‘have the resources, opportunities and capabilities needed to learn, work, engage and have a voice‘. Various researchers in Australia demonstrated an interest in social inclusion, as it enabled them to construct a multi‐dimensional framework for measuring disadvantage. This research program resulted in various forms of statistical modelling based on some agreement about what it means to be included in society. The multi‐dimensional approach taken by academic researchers, however, did not necessarily translate to a new model of social policy development or implementation. We argue that, similar to the experience of the UK, Australia's social inclusion policy agenda was for the most part narrowly and individually defined by politicians and policy makers, particularly in terms of equating being employed with being included. We conclude with discussion about the need to strengthen the social inclusion framework by adopting an understanding of social inequality and social justice that is more relational and less categorical.

A number of governments around the globe have introduced conditional welfare programs tied to work and personal responsibility in an attempt to pressure the unemployed into labour market participation. This development is part of a broader move towards the reconceptualisation of the social contract from welfare being seen as a collective right towards welfare payments being used as a mechanism for changing the behaviour of disadvantaged sectors of the population (Deeming 2014; Dwyer & Bright 2016; Taylor, Gray & Stanton 2016; Social Policy Research Centre 2010; Standing 2014). Australia arguably took conditionality further than other countries through the introduction of Income Management (IM), which quarantines a set percentage of income security payments - usually somewhere between 50 and 80 per cent - into a special account which cannot be used to purchase proscribed goods - including drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, gambling and pornography - with the expectation that essential household items such as food, rent, clothing, health care, education and training, child care, public transport, and energy bills are prioritised. The remaining proportion of the payment is paid directly to the recipient to use at their discretion. The aims of the range of IM programmes vary from the specific to the highly general. The original aim of IM within the NTER was argued to be to protect children from abuse or neglect, and women from financial harassment and violence. An associated aim was to focus funds on essential household items such as food and clothing, and reduce or eliminate spending on substance use, gambling and pornography, which was seen to be associated with child sexual abuse. IM has also been described as a budgeting tool to assist families - particularly those with alcohol abuse or mental health concerns - to manage their finances. But governments have also suggested some much broader objectives of IM involving behavioural change, such as reducing welfare dependency, promoting self-reliance and responsibility, improving parenting skills, and increasing the capacity to learn work skills and potentially attain employment. The introduction of IM has provoked considerable political, legal and empirical contention. Much of this debate has concerned differing philosophical approaches, particularly individual versus structural, to addressing chronic disadvantage. Additional matters raised include the high cost of administering programs, the potential for racial discrimination, a revival of colonialist approaches given the disproportionate number of Indigenous Australians subject to IM measures (Bielefeld 2016), the lack of reliable evidence as to their effectiveness in meeting the stated policy aims (Bray et al. 2015), and the absence of consultations with representatives of local communities to discuss how and in what way IM measures might benefit their community (Mendes et al. 2014).

A key thrust of labour market policy in Australia and many other western countries is that long‐term unemployed people lack the personal motivation to engage proactively and successfully in the search for paid employment. In this paper we argue that the implementation of what are experienced as paternal workfare programs are counter‐productive to achieving the official policy goal of improving self‐efficacy and gaining paid employment. The empirical discussion presented in the paper is based on a semi‐longitudinal study that tracked 75 long‐term unemployed people in three different labour markets in Australia between 2005–2007. The study was funded by the Australian Research Council and Jobs Australia.

Human agency is core to social work. Practice theories and frameworks position human agency as socially mediated, but assume that people possess human agency to play determining roles in their life circumstances. Some of the discipline's seminal thinkers, however, argue that social work has adopted a disproportionate focus on the individual, whereby the human agency of social work clients and people experiencing marginalisation more broadly is highlighted. This article draws on a systematic search, screening and synthesis of contemporary (2008–12) social work journals to identify and assess the profession's engagement with human agency. Of the 6,935 articles screened, we identified 549 articles, or 7.9 per cent, that engaged with human agency of clients or non-social worker groups. The minority of social work literature engaging with human agency presents expressions of human agency, or an identification of the barriers to expressing human agency, in empirically and theoretically meaningful ways. The social work literature that considers human agency highlights the diversity and complexity of people's lives. Moreover, it demonstrates human agency as socially mediated and contingent. The research literature outlines an empirical basis to underpin social work's empowerment, change and emancipation objectives.

People with mental health problems, learning difficulties and poor literacy and numeracy are at risk of social exclusion, including homelessness. They are often disconnected from the formal education systems, with few opportunities for education and employment. Academic research has demonstrated a link between literacy and numeracy and social connectedness, however the pathways to enact this are not well understood. This paper presents insights into how a community based adult literacy program in Brisbane, Australia provides a successful model of socially inclusive learning. The paper is based on a 12-month action research project conducted by the Queensland University of Technology in conjunction with Anglicare Southern Queensland 2013-2014. The methodology for the project was qualitative in nature, involving participant observation of lessons, and semi-structured interviews with former and present students, volunteer tutors and the teacher. The central research focus was how literacy education can act as an instrument of social connection to the community. [Author abstract]

Outcomes of social policies have always been mediated by the discretionary agency of front‐line staff, processes which nevertheless have received insufficient attention in policy evaluation and in the social policy literature more broadly. This article takes the case example of the policy reforms associated with the Australian government's welfare‐to‐work agenda. Drawing on two discreet research projects undertaken at different points in the policy trajectory, the practices of social workers in Centrelink – the Commonwealth government's primary service delivery agency involved in welfare‐to‐work – is examined. Centrelink social workers have been and remain one of the core groups of specialist staff since the Department's inception in the late 1940s, working to improve the well being of people in receipt of income security. Their experiences of the recent past and their expectations of the future of their professional practice as welfare reform becomes more entrenched are canvassed. In summary, the discretionary capacity of the Centrelink social workers to moderate or shape the impact of policy on income security recipients is steadily eroding as this group of professionals is increasingly captured by the emerging practices of workfare.