A reading sample from Social Work in the Changing Welfare. State A Policy Analysis of Active Labour Market Policies for Disadvantaged Youth in Austria by Alban Knecht, chapter 6 “Impact of socio-political change on social work and on young people”.
6 Impact of socio-political change on social work and on young people
“This chapter” addresses the impact of socio-political change on social work in the field of employment support for disadvantaged young people and on the young people themselves. While chapter 6.1 discusses changes in the context of social investment labour market policies, chapter 6.2 addresses the impact of right-wing populist policies. Chapter 6.3 goes into depth on the analysis of the effects on young people and chapter 6.4 focuses on the (lack of) opportunities for participation in the area of employment support for young people.
6.1 Changing social pedagogy of transition through social investment labour market policy
The introduction of the training guarantee in 2007 brought about a steady expansion of employment support for disadvantaged young people. This led to a large number of career-promoting offers and, statistically speaking, to a “good ‘supply situation’ for young people” (Knecht 2014: 228) and has been a factor for the comparatively low number of unemployed young people, early school leavers and NEETs. The expansion of Supra-Company Training (SCT) as well as the expansion of production schools or the Ausbildungsfit programme and Youth Coaching led to a relative increase in the importance of employment measures in the context of youth policy interventions. Compared to open youth work – i.e. youth work in youth centres and youth clubs and outreach youth work in public spaces – and compared to school social work, the area of employment promotion grew disproportionately (ibid.; cf. also Tab. 3, col. 1). Although services such as Youth Coaching claim to offer comprehensive personal help, they always deal with personal problems in the context of labour market support and its objectives (see also Sanduvac, 2014; cf. also Tab. 3, col. 1) (s. a. Sanduvac 2018). In view of the social work and socio-educational orientation of the measures presented, it became apparent that the boundaries between youth work and employment promotion were increasingly blurred by newly developed concepts and that the two areas were becoming more closely interlinked (Knecht 2014). The pressure on open youth work – which was increasingly confronted with youth unemployment and the uncertainty of the transition from school to employment (Krisch 2011: 507) – to cover labour market-related topics such as writing letters of application increased.[65] Social pedagogical (leisure) offers were quasi activated in order to lead the young people to the training and labour market. For open youth work, which sees itself as biased in favour of the side of young people and works on the development and empowerment of young people, this new role presents irritation (ebd; Oehme/Beran/Krisch 2007).[66] Here one could speak of a colonisation of youth work. However, there were also positive reports of an improved exchange between open youth work and institutions of labour market promotion, through which the views and understanding of open youth work could be communicated to the labour administration (Knecht 2014: 227).
For the young people, access to the measures represents an educational resource that is, in a sense, linked to a “quid pro quo”, a counter transaction. Young people are promised integration into society through success in the labour markets – provided they adopt certain behaviours and orientations (including fulfilling training duty) that are understood as rational, mature and adult (Atzmüller/Knecht 2017a). In this context, compulsory training/education includes activating and punitive components. The contexts of coercion have intensified (s. a. Kähler/Zobrist 2013; Gehrmann/Müller 2010) with the new training duty having little impact on pupils in secondary schools, but affecting disadvantaged young people in particular (“dualization”) (see also Sting/Knecht 2022). The invocations (Althusser 1977) and measures do not follow the principle of the entrepreneurial self (Bröckling 2007), which presupposes self-optimisation and self-disciplining and to which graduates of higher schools are more likely to be exposed (ibid; Knecht/Atzmüller 2017: 247). For disadvantaged youth the interventions rather correspond to an activating logic of demanding and promoting and thus represent a form of activation policy.
Using the example of Youth Coaching, which is officially considered a voluntary offer (SMS 2021) but within the framework of compulsory training for young people who cannot be in training for various reasons, it can be shown how voluntary guidance services can also become part of an activation and punishment system. The guideline that counselling should be voluntary, open-ended and silent (Schubert/Rohr/Zwicker-Pelzer 2019: 15, 209f.) is no longer fulfilled. However, the punitive mechanisms do not take place for the most part in the concrete cooperation between professionals and young people, but are outsourced. For example, the compulsory training is administered by separate regional “Training up to 18 Coordination Centres”. When these offices have identified young people who are not in training or care, they commission the organisations that carry out Youth Coaching to make contact and provide care. However, the penalties imposed in the case of suspected lack of the will to cooperate are mediated via the coordination offices and the administration. This at least relieves the relationship of the youth coaches to their clients and gives them the chance to try to establish the paradox of an apparent freedom of action within a coercive context. Nevertheless, these counselling sessions always take place under the Damocles sword of punishment. Therefore, the increasingly activating, punitive and controlling character of welfare state interventions (as well as the discriminatory discourses that form the basis of their introduction) can hinder trusting, appreciative cooperation. Maier (2013) uses a German study to show the great importance of at least partial voluntariness for young people who have often had difficult experiences with the coercive school system (see also Knecht 2014: 224f.).
In the final analysis, it is irrelevant for the situation of young people which problem descriptions played a central role in the arguments for the introduction of compulsory training/education – mental problems, lack of skilled workers or long-term securing of the offer of help. For them, the resource-allocating offers are linked to various obligations and a threat of punishment. Instead of viewing adolescence in terms of the ‘adolescent moratorium’ as a phase of experimentation, self-expression and protest, it is constructed as a transitional phase in which the development of marketable skills and smooth integration into the work world are paramount, undermining the understanding of this phase of life as one of latency, experimentation and nonconformity (see Sting/ Knecht 2022; Knecht/Atzmüller 2019). The orientation of socio-educational and social work activities towards future employability and human capital formation through a shift towards activation policies and vocational training resulted in state and para-state institutions having a broad grasp on children and young people and their subjectivity (Atzmüller/Décieux/Knecht 2019). In addition to young people, this already affects children in crèches and kindergartens (see ibid.).
In this context, the vocational training measures were designed in such a way that they were officially intended to train job-related skills, especially manual skills, following, however a “secret curriculum” (Hoff/Lappe/Lempert 1982: 530) whith the aim is of enduring certain frustrations without giving up the apprenticeship (see e.g. quotation from the SocIEtY project in Knecht/Atzmüller 2017: 247). Ultimately, it is (also) about learning to cope with the demands of flexibilised and precarious labour markets in a subordinate position.
From the point of view of resource orientation and theory, it becomes clear that in the context of the transformation from a providing to a socially investing and activating welfare state, the notion of the resource-allocating state must be supplemented by an analysis of the preconditions attached to the utilisation of benefits and services, i.e. conditionalisation. Welfare state services become a “business” of very unequal partners, because in the relationship between state and citizen, it is the state that sets the conditions. “Agreements” and “contracts” that are becoming more and more common, especially in the field of labour market integration, deceive conceptually about the power imbalance of these relationships, as they do not correspond at all to a usual client relationship.
References
[65] For Austria: Knecht 2014; Knecht/Atzmüller 2017: S. 243; for Europe: European Commission 2015.
[66] However, it is also the professionals who are in contact with the young people who express dissenting voices and question, for example, the sense of increasing commitment and activation – but also of transition management in general: “That is also a bit of my criticism […] of this transition management. That people no longer ask what young people actually want: ‘Do they want that? Do they want this kind of training?’ Isn’t it also a sign that […] the number of those who drop out of the apprenticeship in the first year is totally high. … It’s neither fun nor do you get recognition. […] And therefore one could […] heretically say that this transition management tries very hard to get young people to strive for apprenticeships and to say: ‘Yes, I’m striving for this apprenticeship myself’. But whether that is what appeals to young people, one can doubt.” (Interview of the SocIEtY Project, quoted in Knecht 2016: 854)
***
Would you like to continue reading?
Order “Social Work in the Changing Welfare State” in our shop or download as open access
Social Work in the Changing Welfare State.
A Policy Analysis of Active Labour Market Policies for Disadvantaged Youth in Austria
by Alban Knecht
About “Social Work in the Changing Welfare State”
How can employment policies support young people entering the labour market? Alban Knecht analyses the changes in political discourses and social-political measures with regards to employment promotion for disadvantaged young people in Austria. Against the background of his resource theory, he discusses measures such as inter-company apprenticeships, youth guarantee, and compulsory training and illustrates the impact that the social investment paradigm as well as the capability-orientated, neoliberal, and right-wing populist approaches may have on the practical work of professionals and on the young people concerned.
