Bielefeld, : Bielefeld University Press, 2021

9783839457061

3839457068

1 online resource (312 p.)

BiUP General

331.34137

Youth

Welfare State

Transitions

Human Service Organizations

Institutional Ethnography

Activation

Sociology of Conventions

Work

Education

Educational Research

Sociology of Education

Social Pedagogy

History of Education

Bielefeld University Press

Inglese

Includes bibliographical references (pages 277-307).

Frontmatter    1 Contents    5 1. Introduction    9 2.1 How Institutions Structure the Youth Phase    17 2.2. Situating the Swiss Transition Regime    27 2.3. The Politics of VET in Switzerland and the Emergence of Transition Measures    39 2.4. Excursus: Collectivist Skill Formation Systems and the Right to Education    53 2.5. From the Emergence of a Problem Towards the Construction of a Policy    67 Einleitung    75 3.1. The Life-Course as an Institutional Program and a Subjective

Construction    80 3.2. The Organizational Regulation of Biographies    93 4.1. Street-level Bureaucrats, Institutionalized Organizations and People Processing Organizations    113 5.1. A Focus on Activation Practices    153 6.1. A Short Introduction to Motivational Semesters    177 6.2. Conflicts Between Orders of Worth and situated Compromises in Human Service Work: The Case of Sanctions    191 6.3. Gate-keeping and the Negotiation of Employability: The Intermediary Function of Motivational Semesters    208 6.4. Constructing the Client that Can Create Himself: Technologies of Agency and the Production of a Will    225 6.5. "Making Up" Viable Future Selves Through Evaluation - Working with the Portfolio-Tool    239 6.6. Guided Self-Exploration as a "Narrative Machinery" that Produces Intelligible Subjects    251 7.1. Organizations as the "Missing Link" for the Mediation Between Systemic Requirements and Subjectivity    255 7.2. The institutional Production of Subjectivity: Biographisation - Valuation - Optimisation - Autonomisation    260 8. Bibliography    277 9. Annex    309

How are activation programs for the young unemployed implemented? How do street-level bureaucrats deal with competing rationalities and demands for action? Transition policies increasingly aim at promoting self-regulation and constructing employable subjects. Stephan Dahmen explores the practical regulation of biographical transitions in activation programs for the young unemployed by focusing on the interactive accomplishment of activation work. The study reveals how the critical tensions of activation policies are continually re-interpreted and adapted to local contingencies and describes the various organisational technologies used for creating employable subjects.