Regulating transitions from school to work: an institutional ethnography of activation work in action

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.

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