Abstract
The focus of this article is a recent round of workfare reform in Finland. Departing from many existing analyses of workfare, it focuses on issues of governance. Drawing on policy documents and interviews with key policy actors, it shows how this reform and attempts at implementation took place along the lines of a specific form of managerial governance, namely strategic governance, involving the enrolment of strategic management into policy making. The article details how this mode of policy making enabled an intensification and depoliticization of workfare policies via the replacement of political concerns with economic imperatives and in so doing contributed to the broader process of economization of the state. While the latter is often located as central to the project of neoliberalism, the practices through which it is instantiated often remain hazy. This article therefore contributes knowledge on how the process of the economization of the political operates in practice.
Highlights
The focus of this article is workfare policy in Finland, especially the previous government’s (2015–2019) efforts to open out public employment services to private actors
Management practices have been disseminated into policy making and ‘non-political’ actors such as management gurus, university professors and consultants have penetrated the political sphere to the extent that they have been referred to as ‘shadow government’ (Kantola and Seeck, 2011; Ylönen and Kuusela, 2019)
In this article we have analyaed a recent round of workfare reform in Finland and how this reform and attempts at implementation took place along the lines of strategic governance, involving the enrolment of strategic management into policy making
Summary
Keywords Economization, managerial governance, policy making, strategic governance, workfare reform The focus of this article is workfare policy in Finland, especially the previous government’s (2015–2019) efforts to open out public employment services to private actors.
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