Dahmen, Stephan: Regulating Transitions from School to Work. An Institutional Ethnography of Activation Work in Action. 2021
Inhalt
- Contents
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Youth, Education and the Welfare State
- 2.1 How Institutions Structure the Youth Phase
- 2.1.1. Regimes of Youth Transitions
- 2.1.2. Welfare State Typologies, Educational Systems, and Transitions from School to Work
- 2.1.3. The Comparative Political Economy of Skill Formation
- 2.2. Situating the Swiss Transition Regime
- 2.3. The Politics of VET in Switzerland and the Emergenceof Transition Measures
- 2.3.1. The Apprenticeship-Crisis and the Rise of Youth Unemployment in the Early Nineties
- 2.3.2. Reforms in the Unemployment Insurance for Young People
- 2.3.3. The new VET-Act and the Popular Initiative on the Rightto Vocational Training
- 2.4. Excursus: Collectivist Skill Formation Systems and the Right to Education
- 2.4.1. The Emergence of Transition Management and the Birth of Transition Policies
- 2.4.2. Individual Counseling and the Early Identification of Risk-Groups
- 2.4.3. Standardizing the “Matching” Process
- 2.4.4. Transition Measures and the Promotion of a “Fast” Transition from School to Work
- 2.4.5. Interinstitutional Collaboration and the Rise of Educationfare
- 2.5. From the Emergence of a Problem Towards the Construction of a Policy
- 3. Life-Course, Biography and Social Policy
- 3.1. The Life-Course as an Institutional Program and a Subjective Construction
- 3.1.1. Life‐course, Biography and Institutionalized Individualism
- 3.1.2. From Positions and Sequences to Identities over Time
- 3.1.3. Rationalization, Normalization and Social Control of the Life-Course: temporal Patterns and the “Autonomous” Individual
- 3.1.4. The Paradoxes of Individualization and the Politics of the Individual
- 3.2. The Organizational Regulation of Biographies
- 3.2.1. Human Service Organizations as Life-Course “Gate-Keepers”
- 3.2.2. People Processing and People Changing Institutions
- 3.2.3. Human Service Organizations as Discursive Environments for Self-Construction
- 3.2.4. Human Service Organizations as Subjectivation Devices
- 3.2.5. Towards an Analysis of Subjectivation Processes in Human Service Organizations
- 4. Analyzing Activation in Action
- 4.1. Street‐level Bureaucrats, Institutionalized Organizations and People Processing Organizations
- 4.1.1. Overcoming the Implementation-Control-Discretion-Narrative
- 4.1.2. From Street‐level Bureaucrats to Human Service Organizations
- 4.1.3. Human Service Organizations and their Institutionalized Environments
- 4.1.4. (De-)coupling and Organizational Fields
- 4.1.5. From Organizational Fields to Contradictory Institutional Logics
- 4.1.6. From Institutional Logics to Competing Orders of Worth:The Sociology of Conventions
- 4.1.7. Organizations as Devices for Complex Coordination: Conflicts and Compromises in Human Service Organizations
- 4.1.8. Human Service Work in the Light of the Sociology of Conventions
- 4.1.9. Conclusion: Applying Convention Theory for the Analysis of Human Service Work
- 5. Methodology, Research Design and Data Collection
- 6. Results
- 6.1. A Short Introduction to Motivational Semesters
- 6.1.1. Motivational Semesters as Complex Devices of Coordination
- 6.1.2. Contradictory Logics and their Practical Compromises
- 6.2. Conflicts Between Orders of Worth and situated Compromises in Human Service Work: The Case of Sanctions
- 6.2.1. The Institutional Script of the Sanctioning Procedure
- 6.2.2. From Rules to their Implements:The Local Interpretation of Sanctioning Rules
- 6.2.3. The Grey Sphere of Acting “Below the Conventions”
- 6.3. Gate‐keeping and the Negotiation of Employability: The Intermediary Function of Motivational Semesters
- 6.3.1. Exclusion Through Sorting Out
- 6.3.2. Flexibilising Job Aspirations
- 6.3.3. Dealing with Disappointed Expectations and the (Re-)Construction of Viable Job Aspirations
- 6.3.4. “Selling” Young Persons to Employers: A Process of Valuation and Mediation
- 6.4. Constructing the Client that Can Create Himself:Technologies of Agency and the Production of a Will
- 6.4.1. Constructing Viable Job Choices Through Guided Self-Exploration
- 6.4.2. Negotiating the Integration Contract
- 6.4.3. Private Problems Becoming Public Issues
- 6.4.4. Modulating Distance to Accommodate for the Pitfalls of the Contract
- 6.4.5. Subjectivation Practices: Valuation and the Preparation to the Conventional Demands of the Labor-Market
- 6.5. “Making Up” Viable Future Selves Through Evaluation –Working with the Portfolio-Tool
- 6.5.1. Elements of the Portfolio
- 6.5.2. Linking the administrative‐temporal order of the Motivational Semester with practices of Self-Exploration
- 6.5.3. Individual Self-Exploration and the Invocation of Individuality
- 6.5.4. Self-Assessments as Tools for Self-Discovery
- 6.5.5. Panoptical Evaluation and Self-Improvement
- 6.5.6. Biographical Self-Scrutiny and the Continual Limitation of the Space of Possibilities
- 6.5.7. Linking the Biographical to the Structural: Learning to Describe Oneself in the Evaluative Vocabulary of the Labor-Market
- 6.6. Guided Self-Exploration as a “Narrative Machinery” that Produces Intelligible Subjects
- 7. General Conclusion and Discussion of Main Results
- 7.1. Organizations as the “Missing Link” for the Mediation Between Systemic Requirements and Subjectivity
- 7.2. The institutional Production of Subjectivity:Biographisation – Valuation – Optimisation – Autonomisation
- 7.2.1. Biographisation
- 7.2.2. (E-)valuation and Mediation
- 7.2.3. Optimisation
- 7.2.4. Discretion and Invisible Work as a Precarious Precondition for Successful Coordination
- 7.2.5. Risks and Limits of Institutionalised Individualism: “Autonomy Gaps” in Welfare Polices
- 7.2.6. Subjectivation Practices Between Subjection and Enablement
- 8. Bibliography
- 9. Annex