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In Punishing the Poor, I show that the ascent of the penal state in the United States and other advanced societies over the past quarter‐century is a response to rising social insecurity, not criminal insecurity; that changes in welfare and justice policies are interlinked, as restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prisonfare” are coupled into a single organizational contraption to discipline the precarious fractions of the postindustrial working class; and that a diligent carceral system is not a deviation from, but a constituent component of, the neoliberal Leviathan. In this article, I draw out the theoretical implications of this diagnosis of the emerging government of social insecurity. I deploy Bourdieu’s concept of “bureaucratic field” to revise Piven and Cloward’s classic thesis on the regulation of poverty via public assistance, and contrast the model of penalization as technique for the management of urban marginality to Michel Foucault’s vision of the “disciplinary society,” David Garland’s account of the “culture of control,” and David Harvey’s characterization of neoliberal politics. Against the thin economic conception of neoliberalism as market rule, I propose a thick sociological specification entailing supervisory workfare, a proactive penal state, and the cultural trope of “individual responsibility.” This suggests that we must theorize the prison not as a technical implement for law enforcement, but as a core political capacity whose selective and aggressive deployment in the lower regions of social space violates the ideals of democratic citizenship.

The German federal government is planning a radical reform of the basic income scheme for the long-term unemployed. Besides strengthening qualification measures and removing the priority on job placement they want to improve the additional income rules for transfer recipients. To achieve this goal, they must solve the puzzle of how to reduce the almost prohibitively high transfer withdrawal rates in case of own earnings without rendering the whole system too expensive. The solution presented is a variation of the '\"work-fare\" model by Besley and Coate (1992) and consists of two elements: lowering the basic allowance for those who do not want to work andproviding a job guarantee for those willing to work so that all persons capable of work can contribute to covering their consumption needs. Die Bundesregierung will das System der Grundsicherung fur Arbeitsfahige radikal reformieren. Neben der Abschaffung des Vermittlungsvorrangs und der Starkung der Qualifizierung will sie vor allem die Zuverdienstmoglichkeiten fur Hilfeempfanger:innen verbessern. Fachleute zerbrechen sich schon lange den Kopf, wie die prohibitiv hohen Transferentzugsraten, also die Anrechnung von Markteinkommen auf den Transfer, auf ein ertragliches Mass gesenkt werden konnen, ohne dass das System zu teuer wird. Eine Losung konnte in einer Variante des \"Workfare\"-Modells liegen, die aus einer Absenkung des Sockeltransfers und einer Arbeitsplatzgarantie des Staates besteht, sodass jeder Arbeitsfahige zur Deckung seines Grundbedarfs durch Arbeit beitragt.

The relationship between morality and economy has been muddied in the course of disciplinary specialization. While dominant paradigms in economics abstract from the moral dimension, recent approaches to morality and ethics in anthropology neglect the material economy. E. P. Thompson’s “moral economy” has been an influential bridging concept in recent decades, but recent inflationary usage has highlighted shortcomings. Following an overview of the disciplinary debates, the moral dimension of economic life is illustrated in this paper with reference to work as a value between the late 19th and early 21st centuries in Hungary. Contemporary workfare is explored with local examples. It is shown how discourses of work and fairness are being extended into new ethical registers to justify negative attitudes towards a new category of migrants. La relation entre la moralité et l’économie a été perdue au gré de la spécialisation disciplinaire. Alors que les paradigmes dominants en économie font généralement abstraction de la dimension morale, les approches récentes de la morale et de l’éthique en anthropologie négligent l’économie matérielle. Le concept intermédiaire d’« économie morale » proposé par E.P. Thompson a été influent au cours des dernières décennies, mais l’inflation récente de ses usages a mis en évidence d’importantes lacunes. Après un tour d’horizon des débats disciplinaires, la dimension morale de la vie économique est saisie dans cet article à partir du cas du travail comme valeur en Hongrie, entre la fin du xix e et le début du xx e siècle. Le modèle contemporain du « workfare » est exploré à partir d’exemples locaux. Il est montré comment les discours sur le travail et l’équité sont étendus à de nouveaux registres éthiques pour justifier des attitudes négatives envers les migrants. Die fortschreitende Spezialisierung der Disziplinen hat die Beziehung zwischen Moral und Wirtschaft ausgeblendet. Während die dominierenden, wirtschaftlichen Paradigmen die moralische Dimension außer acht lassen, vernachlässigen jüngste Ansätze der Moral und der Ethik in der Anthropologie die materielle Wirtschaft. Das dazwischen liegende Modell der “moralischen Wirtschaft” von E.P. Thompson hat in den letzten Jahrzehnten einen großen Einfluss ausgeübt, wenngleich jüngste Anwendungen seine Lückenhaftigkeit verdeutlicht haben. Der Zusammenfassung der Fachdebatten folgt eine Analyse der moralischen Dimension des Wirtschaftslebens, verdeutlicht in Sachen Arbeit als Wert am Beispiel Ungarns vom Ende des 19. bis zum Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts. Das zeitgenössische Modell des “workfare” wird mittels örtlicher Beispiele untersucht. Es wird aufgezeigt, wie Reden über Arbeit und Gerechtigkeit auf neue ethische Register ausgeweitet werden, um negative Verhaltungsweisen gegenüber Migranten zu rechtfertigen.

This article concerns workfare and especially mandatory work activities for the unemployed. It focuses on the UK government’s Work Programme and recent challenges regarding its lawfulness. Drawing on the resources of actor network theory, and especially the economization approach to the study of markets, it outlines how the Work Programme is configuring a market for the labour of the unemployed, including a space of calculation in regard to that labour. The argument advanced is that the law and its instruments are part of the process of market making, contributing to both its design and calibration. This article therefore locates the law as an actor involved in the assembly of a market for the labour of the unemployed. It also foregrounds what is missing from recent debates on workfare, namely, an account of how the activities of the unemployed are configured and framed as labouring activities.

Despite the popularity of public works programs in developing countries, there is virtually no evidence on the value of the infrastructure they generate. This paper attempts to start filling this gap in the context of the PSNP – a largescale program implemented in Ethiopia since 2005. Under the program, millions of beneficiaries received social transfers conditional on their participation in activities such as land improvements and soil and water conservation measures. We examine the value of these activities using a satellite-based indicator of agricultural productivity and (reweighted) difference-in-differences estimates. Results show that the program is associated with limited changes in agricultural productivity. The upper bound of the main estimate is equivalent to a 3.6 percent increase in agricultural productivity. This contrasts with existing narratives and calls for more research on the productive effects of public works. (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Purpose This paper asks whether the separation of mental health from its wider social context during the UK benefits assessment processes is a contributing factor to widely recognised systemic difficulties, including intrinsically damaging effects and relatively ineffective welfare-to-work outcomes. Methods Drawing on multiple sources of evidence, we ask whether placing mental health—specifically a biomedical conceptualisation of mental illness or condition as a discrete agent—at the core of the benefits eligibility assessment process presents obstacles to (i) accurately understanding a claimant’s lived experience of distress (ii) meaningfully establishing the specific ways it affects their capacity for work, and (iii) identifying the multifaceted range of barriers (and related support needs) that a person may have in relation to moving into employment. Results We suggest that a more holistic assessment of work capacity, a different kind of conversation that considers not only the (fluctuating) effects of psychological distress but also the range of personal, social and economic circumstances that affect a person’s capacity to gain and sustain employment, would offer a less distressing and ultimately more productive approach to understanding work capability. Conclusion Such a shift would reduce the need to focus on a state of medicalised incapacity and open up space in encounters for more a more empowering focus on capacity, capabilities, aspirations, and what types of work are (or might be) possible, given the right kinds of contextualised and personalised support.

PurposeThis paper addresses the labour market impacts of Covid-19, the necessity of active labour policy reform in response to this pandemic unemployment crisis and what trajectory this reform is likely to take as countries shift attention from emergency income supports to stimulating employment recovery.Design/methodology/approachThe study draws on Ireland’s experience, as an illustrative case. This is motivated by the scale of Covid-related unemployment in Ireland, which is partly a function of strict lockdown measures but also the policy choices made in relation to the architecture of income supports. Also, Ireland was one of the countries most impacted by the Great Recession leading it to introduce sweeping reforms of its active labour policy architecture.FindingsThe analysis shows that the Covid unemployment crisis has far exceeded that of the last financial and banking crisis in Ireland. Moreover, Covid has also exposed the fragility of Ireland's recovery from the Great Recession and the fault-lines of poor public services, which intensify precarity in the context of low-paid employment growth precipitated by workfare policies implemented since 2010. While these policies had some short-term success in reducing the numbers on the Live Register, many cohorts were left behind by the reforms and these employment gains have now been almost entirely eroded.Originality/valueThe lessons from Ireland's experience of post-crisis activation reform speak to the challenges countries now face in adapting their welfare systems to facilitate a post-Covid recovery, and the risks of returning to “workfare” as usual.

This article looks at the process of education-to-work transitions in female-dominated welfare professions within the Slovenian post-crisis context marked by a workfarist agenda. It departs from a scholarship that conceptualises precarity as a transitional vulnerability and disaffiliation exacerbated by workfarist policies to explore the contemporary experience of those trying to achieve professional integration under a volatile workfarist regime. The findings reveal a mismatch between established regulations for early career recruitment and professional licensing and actual chances in the labour market to meet these requirements through available workfarist non-standard, entry-level jobs/schemes designed for particular status and/or socio-demographic groups. It gives new evidence that European workfare regimes exacerbate precarity and a novel understanding of state-manufactured precarisation as an intersectional process of marginalisation and discrimination that not only hinders integration into welfare professions, but also downloads the costs of social reproduction on the next generation, causes precarious ageing and widens intersectional differences.

We estimate the effect of a large rural workfare program in India on private employment and wages by comparing trends in districts that received the program earlier relative to those that received it later. Our results suggest that public sector hiring crowded out private sector work and increased private sector wages. We compute the implied welfare gains of the program by consumption quintile. Our calculations show that the welfare gains to the poor from the equilibrium increase in private sector wages are large in absolute terms and large relative to the gains received solely by program participants.

The Hungarian post-communist welfare state was created under the neoliberal influence of international organisations while retaining lots of elements of solidarity. The growing social tensions in the mid-2000s due to a second economic crisis in the new millennium led first the left then the right wing governments to shift the post-communist welfare state into a punitive type of workfare system. The article concludes that the political populism of the mid-2000s leading to an undemocratic governance by the 2010s better explains this paradigm shift than – as many authors argue - the neoliberal influence frame.