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DOI: 10.1177/1368431011412348

2011 14: 321European Journal of Social TheoryVando Borghi

and paradoxical turns in European welfare capitalismOne-way Europe? Institutional guidelines, emerging regimes of justification,

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One-way Europe?Institutional guidelines,emerging regimes of

justification, andparadoxical turns inEuropean welfarecapitalism

Vando Borghi

University of Bologna, Italy

Abstract

The article inquires into some of the most relevant current transformations of the ideaof the social in contemporary European welfare capitalism. Some crucial institutionalideas employability and activation of EU welfare capitalism and their connectionswith the new spirit of capitalism network capitalism are discussed. In particular,the way these ideas contribute to enacting institutional regimes of justification,framing in this a new idea of the social, is explored. The features of the latter will bedeepened with particular concern for two constitutive elements of European societal

self-representation individualization (as a social ideal and project) and publicness (as afundamental characteristic of the institutional programme) and regarding emergingparadoxes characterizing their current development. Arguments will be advanced inorder to show that the currently dominant institutional regime of justification does nothave a univocal, one-way fate of development, and both ties and opportunities are recon-figured. The idea of the social, even if reframed according to the social and institutionallogics the article explores, is a terrain of (cultural, political, social and institutional) con-flict. In this, possible counter-factual interpretations of the emerging institutional devicesand practices, already at work on the social stage, can be further developed andstrengthened.

Corresponding author:

Vando Borghi, Department of Sociology, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

Email: [email protected]

European Journal of Social Theory14(3) 321341

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Keywords

activation, individualization, network capitalism, publicness, regimes of justification

The main topic of the article is the metamorphoses the idea of the socialis undergoing in

contemporary European welfare capitalism. Particular attention is dedicated to the trans-

formation involving one of the historical pillars of the idea of the social in European (and

Western) welfare capitalism, i.e., the project of individualization. In this, pragmatic

sociologys approach to a plurality of regimes of justification constitutes a crucial frame-

work, as particularly helpful for analysing the social logics of these metamorphoses. At

the same time, in order to grasp these processes in a deep sense, we need to look (also) at

a more specific level of these broader changes, that is, the institutional regimes of justi-

fication, which does not completely overlap with the terrain on which pragmatic sociol-

ogy has been developed.The article is divided into four parts. In the first part, I shortly revisit the institutional

context in which activation andemployability, as governmentality devices, emerged.

Subsequently, the interpretive perspective I adopt is introduced: institutional changes are

discussed as symptoms of deeper transformations, concerning the normative dimension

of EU welfare capitalism and, more particularly, one of its most relevant pillars, the proj-

ect of individualization. In the third part, I try to clarify these deeper transformations in

terms of a paradoxical development of the process of individualization. Finally, some of

the consequences of a metamorphosis of the idea of the social, related to the paradoxical

development of the individualizationprocess, are pointed out. In this, a discussion of theconcept ofpublicness, of its transformations in currently predominant regimes of justi-

fication, but also of possibly counterfactual regimes of justification in which interesting

institutional innovations can be/are experimented, is developed.

In this way, the most explicit statements regarding these changes for instance, the

reframing of work and unemployment according to the epistemic scheme of employabil-

ity in the device of the Open Method of Coordination can indeed be analysed as

mechanisms of sensemaking, contributing to enact the social on which institutions are

going to intervene, rather than as a set of formal, juridical rules. As Serrano Pascual and

Crespo Suarez (2007: 37980) suggest, It is less a question of regulating by recourse to alegal framework than of setting a defining cognitive framework in accordance with

which the measures to be adopted will then be devised. Activation and the guidelines

of employability can be properly studied as devices of governmentality (Dean, 1999;

Foucault, 1991): they work as instruments (Lascoumes and Le Gales, 2009) addressing

human behaviour in itself and shaping human conduct. A circular relationship exists

between these devices and the paradoxical torsion of one of the pillars of the Western

idea of the social, that is, the process of individualization (Honneth, 2004). The former

being, at the same time, a result and a facilitating factor of the latter. In other words, acti-

vation and employability as devices of governmentality are manifest signs as well as

their discursive corollary in terms of human capital and flexibility discourses of a more

profound transformation of the meaning of the modern project of individualization (Gar-

sten and Jacobsson, 2004; Serrano Pascual and Crespo Suarez, 2007; Strath, 2000;

Wagner, 2000), as well as of the idea of the social in the European context.

322 European Journal of Social Theory 14(3)



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Devices of EU governmentality: employability and activation1

A few words will have to be spent in order to point out the meaning of the two pillars of

EU welfare capitalism: employability and activation. These two institutional guidelines

are strictly linked the one to the other and both mark not only linguistic, but also verysubstantial transformations as far as the idea of the social is concerned. On the one side,

employability abandoning the explicit reference to work as a socially organized con-

dition,2 resulting from a social process involving different actors emphasizes individ-

ual responsibility with regard to the personal position in the labour market; activation, on

the other side, has to do with a set of different practices that individuals, institutionally

sustained, have to (actively) pursue so that they canthemselvesbetter their employabil-

ity, identifying the latter as the best way to overcome difficulties and reducing social

risks (poverty, exclusion, dependency, etc.).

First, it was the OECD that in the 1990s began to propose the image of the active soci-ety as a new social picture in which a facilitated access to formal work for a larger set of

persons (particularly disadvantaged groups and women) became the most effective instru-

ment for combating a large part of the social problems addressed by traditional social pol-

icies. In its wake, the European Union, already since the Luxembourg meeting (1997),

explicitly adopted employability as the most qualifying objective of its reform design

towards active welfare states (Dingeldey, 2007: 4). In this framework, income support,

and social services in general, are always to be combined with measures aimed at improv-

ing individual employability, usually conceived through the vocabulary of human

resources and human capital (Dean et al., 2005, in particular: 45; Daly, 2007).Very schematically, activation can be identified through a set of measures aimed at

formalizing a specific link (more or less strict, depending on the different interpretations

we find of this principle) between social protection and labour market participation.3

According to that principle, social policies are deeply restructured (Barbier, 2002:

308): a systematic preference is given to the engagement of welfare recipients on the

labour market (independent of the quality of the job and of its real effect in terms of

empowerment), according to the slogan work-first; the eligibility for welfare measures

is conditioned and subjected to (different degrees of) sanction (Gray, 2002).

The concept of employability is crucial as well, not only to the strategy of reformingEuropean labour market policy, but more in general to the effort of modernizing national

systems of welfare. It has clear links with a profound change in the meaning of indivi-

dualization that I will discuss later: its shift from the protection of labour to the promo-

tion of work (irrespective of any consideration about its quality and social effect; Salais,

2003; Van Berkel et al., 2002), is inscribed in a more comprehensive rebalancing of

individual and collective responsibility that asks employees to make themselves the

entrepreneurs of their becoming (Zimmerman, 2006: 468).

Even if we are now stressing a critical perspective,4 it must be said that strong argu-

ments can be developed for justifying these guidelines. In an extreme synthesis, active

participation of (social and labour) policy recipients in the designing and implementation

of personalized projects and practices in order to face their difficulties, can be motivated

in many legitimate ways: individualizing measures and policies, permitting welfare reci-

pients to avoid only passive roles, enabling a participative construction of policy

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projects, strengthening the effectiveness of the measures by mobilizing (also) recipients

resources, and so on. In fact, as we will also see below, the range of interpretation of

these guidelines (in the scientific and public debate, but also in the way national welfare

systems applied them) is rather large5

and the lines of tension raising from the differentinterpretations are multiple.

The normative bases of welfare capitalism and the

process of individualization

The centrality of the normative dimension (and its relationship with rationality) for the

understanding of social phenomena has always been stressed by the pragmatist analysis

of regimes of justification (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005; Boltanski and Thevenot,

2006; Borghi, et al., 2008; Borghi and Vitale, 2007; Thevenot, 2007). More in particular,

activation and employability can be fruitfully approached keeping in mind the character-

istics of the most recent developments of network capitalism, as far as its normative

framework is concerned: the political-moral order of the cite par projets(Boltanski and

Chiapello, 2005).

The normative dimensions indeed play a crucial role, framing the different regimes of

social action in which actors are engaged and providing them with a socially legitimized

vocabulary to make sense of their own experience (social norms of fairness; beliefs about

appropriate ways of doing, organizing, exchanging; models of evaluation). In other

words, social action cannot be explained as a mere effect of self-interest or as a totally

forced form of behaviour: observing situated actions, where situations are always inneed of interpretation, we need to analyse the registers of justification and evaluation,

which are mobilized in the situation but transcend it (Wagner, 1999: 344; see also

Thevenot, 2007). As Boltanski and Chiapellos analysis of the new spirit of capitalism

(2005) pointed out, the reproduction of the capitalist regimes of action needs motiva-

tional resources that are not merely reducible to the capitalist practices in themselves.

Social actors actively interpret and make sense of situated contexts of action through

orders of justification, whose relative stability goes beyond the specific situation itself.

According to this perspective, the normative bond between individualization and the

capitalist economy has to be mentioned. In a very schematic way, we can summarize themodern conception of the relationship between individuals and society as a double pro-

cess of de-traditionalization (Heelas et al., 1996). On the one side, this departure from

tradition has been related to the passage from a holistic societal representation based

on the idea of a hierarchical conception of the social order in which the relationship

between man and man is emphasized mainly, to an individualistic and egalitarian socie-

tal representation, which mainly insists on the relationship between man and things

(Dumont, 1977). On the other side, this de-traditionalization is a result of a long histor-

ical process of construction of the concrete social bases of the individual citizen: the

anthropological passage from the holistic to the individualist conception of the socialworld requested, indeed, that the building of social property (social protection, educa-

tion, health, etc.) on which the realization of the project of the individuals active partic-

ipation in society is concretely based, extended to the entire society and not only to those

persons privileged by their inherited individual property (Castel, 2002; Castel and




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Haroche, 2001). The project of the modern individual actor, the homo aequalis, no

longer submitted to the yoke of personal links and subordinated to social totality, has

been emerging as a project of emancipation to be pursued through the inscription of

individuals in collective systems of regulation mainly entered via participation in thelabour market6 that promoted and enlarged individual autonomy.

Reframing the idea of the social: the paradoxical

torsion of the individualization project

A fruitful way for inquiring into the social transformation underlying the activation and

employability devices consists in looking at the paradoxical contradictions our society

produces along the main normative axes of the welfare capitalist regimes of action.

A paradox is a specific form of contradiction, according to which the concrete social

pursuit of an (original) intention paradoxically diminishes the effective probability of

its realization: a contradiction is paradoxical when, precisely through the attempt to

realize such an intention, the probability of realizing it is decreased (Hartmann and

Honneth, 2006: 47).

The normative dimension I am focussing on is the project of individualization, in

which the devices of activation and employability claim to be rooted. As is well known,

individualization has many different meanings (Valkenburg, 2007). One of its meanings

is almost hegemonic in current interpretations of the active welfare states: it has to do

with a general shift of social responsibilities from the public to the private sphere (the

realm of individuals and their families) (Clarke 2004). As far as employability is con-cerned, in this framework and in line with the growing emphasis on individual respon-

sibility we can observe a transition from a definition of unemployment as a structural

effect of socioeconomic cycles and organization, to a definition of that condition as the

result of personal deficiencies of employability (Bonvin and Favarque 2003). In this

way, most of the responsibility of facing unemployment lies with the individual himself.

This also implies a fundamental metamorphosis, clearly reflected in activation policies,

of the concept of citizenship, according to which citizenship as a status (associated with

rights, safety nets and benefits, beyond duties and responsibilities) is transformed into

citizenship as a contract (the access to rights is conditional upon active participationin the labour market) (Handler 2003; Vitale 2005; White 2000).7

It is exactly in this context that, more in general, the concept of individualization

one of the normative pillars of modernity and of welfare capitalist regimes can

currently be seen as a terrain of (normative) tension, a space in which a paradoxical

contradiction (in the sense mentioned above) can be observed. While being more and

more explicitly emphasized in the realms of welfare (against the emphasis on the collec-

tive nature of that social property) and the labour market, individualization undergoes a

strong torsion of its (original) meaning: this is the process in which (according to

Honneth, 2004), a project of qualitative self-emancipation (the original meaning ofindividualization)has been twisted into a systemic prerequisite.

So, the point I wish to stress is the following. Individualization remains one of the key

features of the current welfare capitalist regime of action; but whereas in its origins it was

part of an emancipatory project of qualitative individual self-realization, it has now

Borghi 325



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turned into a systemicprerequisite of individual performance, pushing people to search

for biographical solutions to structural problems (Beck, 1992) and producing rising

levels of mental and psycho-social suffering (with concrete, clinically observable,

effects; Dejours, 1998; Ehrenberg, 1999).8

With the institutional transformations Western capitalism has undergone in the past twenty

years, the ideal of a self-realization pursued throughout the course of a life has developed

into an ideology and productive force of an economic system that is being deregulated: the

expectations individuals had formed before they began to interpret their own lives as being

an experimental process of self-discovery now recoil on them as demands issuing from

without, so that they are explicitly or implicitly urged to keep their options regarding their

own decisions and goals open at all times. (Honneth, 2004: 474)

If what I am saying is true, activation devices have to be observed as parts of a bigger

picture. One of the most recurrent arguments in favour of active welfare states is, indeed,

that activation is the way to effectively respond to the rising requests to individualize

services and policies. In other words, individualization is invoked as one of the most

relevant historical pressures underlying the activation turn in social and labour market

services and welfare policies in general. This activation turn has to be interpreted and

analysed as part of a broader transformation process, affecting the individualization

project. Whereas the latter is not new in itself, what is really new is a structural conver-

gence of both public and private agencies and organizations in realizing a common aim:

to produce an individuality herself independently capable of action and driven by herinternal motivations (Ehrenberg, 1999: 31112). In this new social and governmental

landscape, the transformation I am emphasizing the paradoxical torsion of the indivi-

dualization principle is particularly evident when we look at the most relevant changes

affecting capitalist regimes of action: what has been called network capitalism.

The most important criterion for describing this new capitalism . . . is the readiness to self-

responsibly bring ones own abilities and emotional resources to bear in the services of indi-

vidualized projects. In this way, the worker becomes an entreployee or himself an entre-

preneur; no longer induced to participate in capitalist practices by external compulsion orincentives, he is in a sense self-motivated. (Hartmann and Honneth, 2006: 45)

So, we can say that the individualization process takes on a new social meaning, coherent

with the development of a new spirit of capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005) and

with its anthropology of flexibility (Sennett, 1998; Strath, 2000; Wagner, 2000) and of

employability (Garsten and Jacobsson, 2004) .

What is more, it has to be noted that this change goes far beyond more recent cultural

political (neoliberal) trends and is an element of the general restructuring of social

relationships specifically marking the governing of advanced liberal democracies(Foucault, 2004). According to Rose (2006: 15960),

the ethicala priori of the active citizenship in an active society, this respecification of the

ethics of the personhood, is perhaps the most fundamental, and most generalizable,




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characteristic of these new rationalities of government . . . , which underpins mentalities of

government from all parts of the political spectrum, and which justifies the designation of

all these new attempts to re-invent government as advanced liberal.

All these changes have strong consequences, as I already mentioned, in terms of govern-

mentality. The changed nature of the social from a univocal collective body inscribed

in national borders and its singular embodiment, the citizen, to the rising emphasis on the

responsible individual and on self-governing communities produced, among other

effects, the need ofnew regulatory technologies and norms, more centred on networks

and competitiveness than on hierarchy and procedural control. The emergence of New

Public Management techniques and of other instruments aiming at introducing

market-oriented modes of social propertys governance, for instance, can be properly

understood in the light of these changes. In this regard, I will try to point out in the fol-

lowing some major consequences I see concerning the publicness of what was abovedescribed as social property.

Social property and its publicness: the metamorphosis of a

relationship

Before going in more detail into the relationship between social property and public-

ness, some attention should be paid to the meaning of these concepts. Social property

(Castel, 2002) has been the specific terrain of action of an institutional program (Dubet,

2003), according to which the object of realizing an autonomous individual has alwaysbeen constitutively pursued through his socialization. The transformation of many rele-

vant aspects the project of individualization, as we have seen; the nature of socializa-

tion, where the social itself is a historical product undergoing deep changes; social

property, which is experiencing a profound restructuring of its symbolic and material sta-

tus implies a consequent metamorphosis of the institutional programme itself. In other

words, the changes we have been observing in the last decades such as the blurring

boundaries between state and market and the development of a welfare mix, the prolif-

eration of quangos in public administration, the (horizontal and vertical) multiplication

of actors involved in the governance of welfare systems, together with the changes summarized above of the object itself (individualization), produced a profound rede-

sign (according to some observers, even the dismantlement) of that institutional pro-

gramme. Of course, these changes are not exclusively produced by the principles of

activation and employability: they are the result of many and different pressures. Nev-

ertheless, these policy devices are closely linked to them, as they are some of the prin-

cipal devices through which institutional, organizational and social shifts have been

introduced. In this light, the following object of discussion will be one of these shifts,

that is, the effects these pressures have on publicness.

Whereas the classical liberal vision of the public dimension usually identified it withthe states organizational space, the changes described here make such a straightforward

substantive definition of publicness impossible. I here assume that publicness depends

much more on the properties characterizing the actions of a plurality of (public and pri-

vate) agencies and on the qualities and the aims of their relationships than on thea priori

Borghi 327



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supposed nature of the agencies in themselves (Bifulco and de Leonardis, 2005). This

perspective, in which publicness has to do with the process of treating a distinct matter

as public rather than with the nature of the actors involved, is rooted in a specific

conception of the public sphere, of the public good and of public social services. Thepublic sphere has, indeed, to be considered not only as a set of mechanisms linking soci-

ety to the political system, based on specific institutions (connected with law enforce-

ment, public opinion formation, public administration, etc.), but also as a general

socialhorizon of experience through which matters relevant for all members of society

take form and are integrated (Fraser, 1990; Krause, 2005; Negt and Kluge, 1993). The

public sphere has a structural power, being the site where the capacities of individuals

to participate in public life are produced and where the production of the publics horizon

of experience or the limits of the possible are produced (Davis, 2005: 137). In this

perspective, there is a strong relationship between the public sphere and the identifica-

tion of the public good. Far from being a specialists or experts matter, the public good

cannot be described as the mere aggregation of the private interests of many individuals.

Instead, it has to be conceived of as a social and culturalprojectof the public sphere,

produced in and through a public process and not ascertainable independently of it

(Calhoun, 1998: 32). In this perspective, the public sphere is not as it is often conceived

only a space in which information plays a relevant role and in which decisions are

taken. It is also an arena of reflexive modification of the people who enter it, of their

ideas, and of its own modes of discourse, in which our debate on the public good what

is good for us is always, as well, a discourse about our identity: who we want to be

(Calhoun, 1998: 33). In this frame, public institutions (e.g., providers of social services)have a specific, pivotal role, as they should consciously recognize9 themselves as a

formative context (Unger, 1987) and assume this nature of a formative context as an

explicit terrain of action: intervening in the social realm with the awareness that social

services are relationships that reproduce relationships, and identifying the specificity of

public institutions with the space where questions of technical efficacy (what works)

can be integrated with value questions and with the role among others of sometimes

taking on impossible tasks (Hoggett, 2006: 1314).

Schematically, we can say that publicness may arise when four properties are fulfilled

(Bifulco and De Leonardis, 2005; De Leonardis, 2006, 2008), properties already par-tially explored by the pragmatist approach to regimes of justification and to their public

nature (Boltanski and Thevenot, 2006). Being public has to do with the quality of

visibility, with a claim ofuniversalistic validity as a constitutive element of publicness,

with recognizing commons (what is in-common), and with a crucial role of regulative

(vertical) devices resulting in efforts ofinstitutional building.

Different regimes of justification in new welfare capitalism

Keeping what was discussed about social property and publicness in mind, it is nowpossible to sketch some alternative regimes of justification that can innervate the rela-

tionship between social property and publicness, including its possible features and

developments. In other words, the following scheme can be considered as a way of

summarizing the bigger picture (regimes of justification and modes of governmentality)




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of which also specific devices of activation such as employability are part. It is rather

evident that currently a specific interpretation (individualization as individual, private

responsibility; publicness as a more and more weakening dimension) of these (and other)

instruments of governmentality is dominant, according to a vision associated with theparadoxical turn of the individualization project. But other interpretations are working

on the social stage, and the current situation is not an unavoidable fate or a monolithic

social reality. Alternative scenarios are always possible, and in some ways already oper-

ating in the social scene.

This is equally true for the development of the individualization project as such. The

new regime of the self does not have an intrinsically inscribed, one-sided, and univocal

fate. The project of individualization can be conceived itself as a terrain of conflict and

its possible future configuration is closely linked to an always open history of political,

social and cultural controversies and conflicts. The current regime of the self represents a

new stage in the historical process of individualization, in which old issues and conflict-

ing perspectives are reformulated and the relationship actorsociety is reconfigured into

a new social horizon: both ties and opportunities are reconfigured, and the results are not

fixed. So, it could be fruitful trying to reflect about possible alternative perspectives with

the help of an analytical framework (Table 1) regarding the regimes of justification

currently available or recurrent in European welfare capitalism, with particular attention

to the normative dimensions which ground institutional logics and practices.

This typology is derived from a distinction of three ideal-typical conventions of the

state, which focuses on the ways the state interprets the common good in responding

to both social and economic actors: (1) the technocratic external state (common goodas collective interests pursued mainly through expert solutions imposed on passive cit-

izens); (2) the absent state (the common good is the result of pursuing selfish individual

goals in a context of minimal collective regulation); and (3) the facilitative situated

state, in which the common good is interpreted as a situation in which actors have

autonomy to develop whatever world they find compatible with their frameworks of

action (Salais and Storper, 1997: 212). At the same time, the scheme has empirical bases

in the different (in terms of time and space) organizational logics that have been and are

dominant in the public action.

Evidently, Boltanski and Thevenots work about regimes of justification has been acrucial for inspiration in terms of an understanding of social processes ranging from

governmentality devices such as activation and employability to the coordination of

social actions. Of course, the inspiration is not an exegetical one: the focus here is not

on the coordination of individual courses of action and the repertoires of normative

frames, but on the institutional level. In this regard, the analysis ofinstitutional regimes

of justificationcan be considered a pragmatist approach to the orders of worth at work

in the symbolic artefacts (Douglas, 1986) and formative contexts (Unger, 1987) which

make up institutions.

Column 1 clearly refers to the cognitive and practical framework of the welfare state,as a set of devices centred on a powerful national state, and which has been undergoing

deep and complex processes of transformation, with different dimensions (related to the

oil shock in the 1970s, a growing financial crisis of the state, experiences of mass

unemployment; but also growing social complexity, the increasing differentiation and

Borghi 329



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Table 1. Institutional regimes of justification in EU welfare capitalism

Institutional regimes of justification

1 Traditionalbureaucratic regimeof justification

2 Managerial post-bureaucratic regimeof justification

3 Participative regimeof justification

Premises Top-down definedneeds

Individual preferences Thick needs and politicsof needsinterpretation

Objectives Conformist reproduc-tion of social divi-sion of labour

Enhancing human capitaland employability;work-first approach towelfare to work

Promoting capabilities;life-first approach towork to welfare

Role of the state External absent; incentive givingstate

Capability state; ethicallife promoting state

Role of privateactors (compa-nies or non-profit serviceproviders)

Residual Sources of legitimatedinstitutional logics

Autonomous links(among others) of anetwork

Form ofresponsibility ofPublicAdministration(PA)

Direct Indirect By process

Organizationalregulation

Hierarchy; army-likeregulation; based onappropriateness (ascompliance withrules)

New Public Management;based on pro-market,non market organisa-tional delivery andefficiency

Participative anddeliberative formsof governance

PA /relationshipwith citizen

Dual (PA-citizen);coerciveness anddelegation

Triangular (PA, servicesprovider, citizen);marketization ofcitizenship

Network and promotingborder-lands

Idea of the social Resulting fromadministrativecategories

The sum of individuals(and of theirpreferences)

Shaping /resulting fromthe exercise ofindividual capabilities

Public Statist Spaces and devices forpromoting the owner-ship society (instead ofsocial property)

Spaces and modes ofproducing the personalinterest to participateto the collective ela-boration of socialproblems

(continued)




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restructuring of life cycles and relationships among educationworksocial life, etc.;

combined with the emergence of critique, such as of bureaucratic excesses, paternalism,

etc.). This resulted in what has been summarized by means of the formula of theenabling (welfare) state (with which an emphasis on the key concepts of activation and

employability is associated). Columns (2) and (3) can be conceived as different interpre-

tations, as different grammars of institutional justification stemming from that turn, of

course with relevant differences in terms of strength and social spread, the second col-

umn being the currently hegemonic and the third column a minority grammar. Whereas

the empirical representation of the second column is rooted in the managerial approaches

inspired by NPM, as well as in EU communications and programmes insisting on con-

cepts such as flexicurity, employability, and human capital (Serranno and Crespo

Suarez, 2007), column (3) does not correspond to an already existing, coherent institu-tional architecture and methodology; but different examples indicate that the concepts of

recipients participation in the realization of policy measures, citizens voice in introdu-

cing institutional innovations and in empowering their capacity to aspire can be con-

cretely pursued and experimented (in urban regeneration projects, in innovating public

administration, in managing public institutions and in experiences in the varying fields

of social policy (see Appadurai, 2004; Bifulco and Vitale, 2006; Bobbio, 2000; Fung,

2003; Sclavi et al. 2002; Vitale, 2010). Of course, Boltanski and Chiapello have

brilliantly shown the difficulty of any form of critique in times in which network capit-

alism has been successfully absorbing the main motives of the most pertinent forms ofcritique (see also Boltanski, 2009). But this does not mean that we have to renounce the

chance to organize the pessimism (as, Didi-Huberman, 2009, reminds us, Walter

Benjamin wrote in times certainly not better than our ones) and to look forpossible

worldsthat can feed our critique (Borghi, 2010).

Table 1 (continued)

Institutional regimes of justification

1 Traditionalbureaucratic regimeof justification

2 Managerial post-bureaucratic regimeof justification

3 Participative regimeof justification

Individualization Standardized cate-gories; citizens assubjects and voters

Citizen as client andcustomer; individuali-zation as a systemicpre-requisite and as ameans

Citizens as validatedpartners (beyond pro-fessionals, experts,bureaucrats, etc.);individualization as aself-reflexive (endless)process

Participation From passive to problem-solving participation From problem-solving toproblem-settingparticipation

Source: Based on our elaboration of different sources:Baines (2004); Bifulco and Vitale (2006); Bonvin and Farvaque (2003); Bonvin and Thelen (2003); Clarke (2004);Dean et al. (2005); Denhardt and Denhardt, (2000); Farvaque and Raveaud (2004); Fraser (1990, 1997);Freedland (2001); Giaque (2003); Honneth (1995); Salais and Storper (1997).

Borghi 331



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Of course, the motives stemming from columns (2) and (3) are often combined and

confused in social and institutional daily life. This ambiguity is not only present at the

level of social and institutional practices, but also in the scientific debate: the capability

approach, for instance, can, on the one hand, be interpreted as a perspective fully coher-ent with column (3), stressing the idea of capability for voice (Bonvin and Thelen,

2003), while on the other, it entails a much more orthodox vision, indeed a distraction

from and weakening element of the set of principles and concepts represented in the third

column (Dean, 2009). The aim of the scheme is indeed to build a sort of vocabulary of

grammars currently deployed in institutional practices.

In the three types of institutional regimes of justification schematically designed, the

participativeone clearly represents a largely counterfactual perspective. Here the role of

the state (centrally and locally) consists of promoting processes through which institu-

tions mediate rather than prescribe, and in which jobseekers whether individually

or by means of collective forums formulate, argue for and realize their life plans (Dean

et al., 2005: 11), in building the conditions for pursuing what Honneth (1995) has called

the ethical life and in realizing a politics of needs interpretation (Fraser, 1997) that

fully feeds a rich and lively public sphere. The welfare subject may achieve autonomy

through a collective politics of capability and in which the welfare subjects capacity for

voice is central for the determination of provision of resources and interpretation of

outcomes (Fraser, 2005: 11) Here the cultural dimension plays a crucial role, interpreted

as capacity to aspire (Appadurai, 2004), that is the capacity of (also) the most excluded

individuals to exercise voice, to debate, contest, and oppose vital directions for

collective social life as they wish and to reframe ones own range of possibilities foraction, escaping the fate that his/her social condition seems to condemn him/her to, and

without accepting externally imposed moral or political orders. The organisational

regulation (Giaque, 2003) of public administration and services, in this perspective,

is characterized by a problem-setting and problem-solving participative approach, based

on the introduction of deliberative arenas and practices (Barnes et al. 2003; Bonvin and

Thelen 2003; Fisher 2003), and on an involvement of private companies conceived as

oneactor among others in a network through which the common good is concretely pur-

sued by the capability state.10 According to this perspective, centred on a pattern of

shared administration (Bifulco and Vitale, 2006), PAs responsibility is about the coor-dination of the whole process through which citizens are sustained in their capacity for

voice and in the realization of their capabilities.

Thetraditional bureaucratic regime coincides with Storper and Salais technocratic

state, in which problems and issues are treated with a minimal involvement of citizens,

and in which private companies and organizations have a residual role. Finally, the man-

agerialregime, largely influenced by the New Public Management philosophy, is mainly

inspired by the absent and incentive giving state or what Bifulco and Vitale (2006) have

called a company administration pattern. Here, corporations strongly influence social

policy and have a direct form of influence (Farnsworth, 2004: 6), thereby sustaining theirinterests and ends through individual and collective lobbying; institutional participation

in committees and in services providers management; sponsorship and funding of

political and cultural entities and welfare institutions; direct social provision of different

welfare benefits for corporate employees and other citizens. They can have an indirect




14/22

influence as well, imposing themselves as a socially legitimated source of institutional

logics: a typical example of mimetic isomorphism, according to which, in a context of

growing uncertainties generated by different societal transformation processes, an insti-

tutional and organizational imitation dynamic is encouraged in which the adoption ofexternal, socially successful and culturally and politically hegemonic, models, often con-

stitutes a practically viable and economically advantageous path (DiMaggio and Powell,

1991).

So, the main differences concerning the topics of my discussion here individualiza-

tion, publicness between the second and the third columns in our scheme are not based

on the publicprivate divide in itself as I stated, publicness should be conceived as a

property of the process, rather than of the actors but on the different institutional

regimes of justification and respective modes of governmentality enacted. In fact, differ-

ent institutional regimes of justification mean different institutional key ideas (Beland,

2005; Eder, 1997) and different institutional conceptions as formative contexts (Unger,

1997) in which the concrete institutional performances are shaped.11 In a company-like

ruled public administration (Bifulco and Vitale, 2006), the concept of individualization

is almost completely conflated with the economistic and reductive idea of human capital,

that is, it is treated as a means to increase employability and individual competitiveness

(Bonvin and Farvaque, 2003; Dean et al., 2005); moreover, NPM-like approaches show

little inclination to develop participative citizenship beyond its reductive consumerist

interpretation (promoting citizens power ofexit, and discouraging their power ofvoice;

Vigoda-Gadot and Cohen, 2004). On the contrary, in the third approach, public institu-

tions do take into account (and are responsible for) the whole process in which, throughfully participative and deliberative practices involving public and private entities, indi-

vidualization is pursued as a (virtually endless) project, driven by a life-first and capa-

bility approach to welfare and activation.

Another distinction between the regimes of justification, affecting some of the

properties of publicness I introduced first and foremost visibility and universalism con-

cerns the relationship between Public Administration and citizenship. The managerialist

regime emphasizes contractualization, both at the level of reconfiguring purchaser

provider relationships in the process of producing and delivering social services, and

of redefining relationships between servicesconsumers, i.e., between institutions andcitizens. Justified by the intentions to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of services

and to empower citizens by giving them a right to choose, it can very often diminish the

visibility of the process (e.g., due to the increasing role of private organizations in the

production of welfare provisions, or to the dilution of the responsibility for the quality

of services along the purchaserproviderconsumer chain; Crouch, 2004; Farnsworth,

2004; Freedland, 2001). Due to the triangular setting of the relationship between citizens,

public institutions and intermediate public-server provider (IPSP) that particular

approach adopts, the responsibility of public administration in effectively building an

institutional setting of citizenship is weak and indirect:

By rendering the relationship between the citizen (as customer of the IPSP) and the govern-

ment (which operates through the IPSP) an indirect and incidental one, these remodelling

exercises downgrade the citizens voice in government, both by denying the directedness

Borghi 333



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of that voice and by commercializing the subject-matter of the discussion between citizen

and government. (Freedland, 2001: 91)

In this regard, the regime sketched in the third column insists on an idea of public insti-tutions, in which the latter do not limit themselves to taking the individual capacity to

express choices as data, but also have precise responsibilities in the building of that

capacity that is the capacity to aspire (Farnsworth, 2004) and in qualifying and

enlarging it.

More in general, the introduction of the devices discussed above activation,

employability is often linked to the crisis of the old, allegedly paternalist, welfare

system. This crisis is interpreted as (also) a crisis of its organizational paradigm,

based on a top-down, engineering and mechanical planning rationality. The emer-

gent regime of justification is asking for innovative organizational approaches,

inspired by the network systems mode of relationship (the term governance is often

a way of ideologically taking for granted these changes): a more interactive relation-

ship among different actors and different levels involved in the production, delivery

and use of welfare and administrative services. In other words, new organizational

practices and devices tend to be less centred on respecting formal procedures and

more on realizing specified objectives. This implies a shift of paradigm or, more

realistically, a combination of paradigms which opens a new range of possible

concrete scenarios, which may range from democratic experimentalism (Sabel,

2001), participative and deliberative approaches insisting on the importance of

intensifying the capability for voice of welfare recipients and of citizens in general,to a stronger capitalist synchronization (Sheuerman, 2004), insisting on a manage-

rialist, elitist, post-democratic12 conception of the relationship between institutions

and citizens and of the idea of the social, and moving far away from the project

of the inclusive individualization of the social property towards the exclusive indi-

vidualization of the ownership society (Harrington, 2007) and of a privatist con-

ception of the public sphere (de Leonardis, 1997).

ConclusionThe article has been focussing on the metamorphoses of the idea of the social in the

European context, mainly through the analysis of the activation turn in the social

policies area and its relationship with some main processes characterizing the new

spirit of the capitalism. In particular, two aspects have been emphasized: (1) the trans-

formation of the qualitative project of individualization, undergoing a paradoxical

torsion which turns its meaning upside down; and (2) the growing shifting and weaken-

ing of the meaning of publicness that, in the frame of network capitalism, is increasingly

substituted by devices and models of social regulation based on a direct (that is, beyond

any institutional mediation), horizontal interaction among individuals (according to thenetwork mode of coordination), at great risk of asymmetrical and de-politicized

disequilibrium.

The pragmatic sociology approach results are particularly helpful, both in order to

grasp the regimes of justification which are working in such a context, andfor realizing




16/22

this analysis without considering the figure of the observer (in this case, the sociologist),

the unique source of a critical posture about the social world. One of the most relevant

elements of the pragmatic sociological approach lies indeed in its passage from the

posture of a critical sociology to that one of a sociology of the critical capabilities. Thearticle is an attempt to apply this analytic perspective to a specific level of the regimes of

justification, the institutional level, in which an over-individual social logic is working.

The analysis showed the degree of penetration that the network capitalism expressed at

that level, as well as the critical and counterfactual enacting potentialities that level is

anyway presenting.

Notes

1. This part of the article, developing some of the points already introduced in Borghi and van

Berkel (2007a; 2007b), is based on a long-term collaboration with Rik van Berkel (Borghi and

van Berkel 2007a; 2007b; 2007c, and also van Berkel and Valkenburg, 2007): without the con-

tinuous exchanges with him it simply would not have been possible for me to elaborate the

ideas presented in the following pages; of course, the responsibility for what is written here

is completely mine.

2. More precisely, we should always consider formal and paid work as only one part of the

comprehensive and gendered total social organization of labour (Glucksmann, 1995, 2005).

3. One of the features of the regime of action emerging in the new spirit of welfare capitalism is

that all social rights tend to be reinterpreted in that direction: from issues of social justice to

means for labour market policies; Lewis (2006) noted the same process in the EU context:

work/family policies have moved from being a part of equal opportunities policies to being

a part of the European Employment Strategy.

4. Due to what seems to be, in my view, the prevalent trend in the institutionalization of

these guidelines.

5. The literature about the movement towards active welfare states is now enormous; as pos-

sible starting points one could take Barbier and Ludwig-Mayerhofer (2004); van Berkel and

Hornemann Mooller (2002) and van Berkel and Valkenburg (2007). We presented a clear

example of the different social and institutional effects of the same guidelines, comparing the

Italian and the Dutch cases (Borghi and van Berkel, 2007c).6. Here we encounter the ambiguous nature of this project as far as its gendered nature is con-

cerned: this distinct project of emancipation, indeed, has clear limits due to the historically

predominant male participation in the formal labour market, leaving all the social work needed

for reproducing the social bases of that labour market in the dark.

7. A rather ambiguous contract, it should be added, as it involves partners that are far from equal

(in terms of competencies, information, abilities, etc.) (Geldof 1999: 19).

8. Even if it is always risky trying to associate social phenomena directly with individual con-

crete cases, it was difficult for me to avoid doing so, sometime ago, when reading of the cases

of frequent suicides at the French plant of Renault in Gouyancourt (four suicides between2006 and 2007) or the frequent cases of cocaine addiction among blue-collar workers (as a

recent media inquiry showed in Italy: see the newspaper Il Manifesto, 2008, 14, 16, 23 and

27 May). Anyway, about the social and individual pathologies caused by recent transformations

of work there is significant convergence, despite variegating theoretical and methodological

Borghi 335



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approaches, between many scholars; see, for instance, Castel (1995); Delanty (2008); Hartmann

and Honneth (2006); Sennett (1998).

9. The conditional mode here stresses that such a recognition is an eventual result of a social

process, as I mentioned, rather than an intrinsic attribute of the involved actors.10. Dean (2009) has convincingly pointed out some relevant limits inside the capability

approach, as it neglects the constitutive nature of human interdependency, it ignores the

problematic nature of the public realm and does not consider the exploitative nature of (work

conditions under) capitalism; but in my view, whereas his critique can be rightly addressed to

the more liberal or mainstream version of Sens perspective, the clarification of a more

radical interpretation is an important step in developing a more promising interpretation of

the capability approach itself.

11. Even if these constitute only part of institutional life, and the street-level bureaucracy (Lipsky,

1980) and its active role in the implementation of policy designs also always play a crucial

role.

12. The post-democratic paradigm is based on a combination of different sources: elitist political

theories; reductionist (atomistic, economicist) social approaches; everyday political prag-

matics inspired by the famous slogan Society doesnt exist, etc. (Crouch, 2004; Mastropaolo,

2001).

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empirical research.European Journal of Social Theory 9(4): 46784.

About the author

Vando Borghiis Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Bologna. He

teaches Sociology of development and Labour Policies at the Faculty of Political Sciences. His

current research interests are the regimes of justification in the network capitalism and the




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informational basis of policies, mainly explored in the fields of the transformations of labour, the

labour movements, the relationship between labour and welfare, the institutional public action. On

these topics he has publishedLe grammatiche sociali della mobilita [Social grammars of mobility]

(with M. La Rosa and F. Chicchi, Eds., Milano, 2008) and edited (with T. Vitale) an Italian intro-

duction to the sociology of conventions: Le convenzioni del lavoro, il lavoro delle convenzioni

[The conventions of labour, the labour of conventions], monographic issue of Sociologia del

lavoro, 104, 2006. He has published articles in Public Administration,Social Policy and Society,

International Journal of SociologyandSocial Policyand other Italian journals. Address: Univer-

sity of Bologna, Italy. [email: [email protected]]

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Documents

Transcript of European Journal of Social Theory 2011 Borghi 321 41