EMPOWERMENT AND UNDERCLASS MANAGEMENT AS TWO ACTIVATION MODES. AN ATTEMPT TO STRUCTURE EUROPEAN ACTIVATION POLICIES, SERVICES AND FRONTLINE PRACTICES

Abstract

Since the beginning of the modern era, the social policy of European countries has merged the trends of assistance and control. The concept of active social policy (ASP), developed in Europe at the turn of 20th, is another attempt to link the idea of assistance and mobilization of the unemployed and economically inactive. It consists in programme-based linking of activation methodology with the use of conditional support instruments (characterising the mobilisation and control order) with the assumptions of social inclusion (referring to social solidarity and empowerment of beneficiaries coming from the assistance order). The paper presents various ways of implementing this concept at the social practice level. Differences are visible at three levels of the concept's implementation: the formatting of legal and institutional support tools, the application of activation service management techniques s and the practice of frontline work with the customers the customers; moreover, legitimisation processes, consisting in attributing specific social meanings and functions to activation, proceed in different ways. It might be stated that activation services "overgrow with" different organisational cultures. The analysis of these cultures reveals that despite the care taken in the programming phase of activation policies to combine coherently the support and mobilisation items, in the implementation phase one or another historically established approaches to the people socially marginalised and excluded usually prevails. Bearing this in mind, the paper presents the original proposal for a bipolar typology of activation policies, services and frontline work practices, distinguishing two activation modes: (1) the empowerment mode, corresponding to the assistance order, and (2) the underclass management mode, corresponding to the mobilisation-control order. These are two fundamentally different and at the same time internally coherent Max Weber’s ideal types, i.e. multidimensional analytical tools covering all activation levels and aspects. They provide a continuum on which activation policies of individual countries (macro level of activation approach), specific models of organisation and management of activation services (mezzo level) and specific frontline work practices (micro level) can be positioned according to the criterion of proximity/distance from either model extreme.