Suchergebnisse

Bespreking: Christien Brinkgreve (2012) Het verlangen naar gezag: Over vrijheid, gelijkheid en verlies van houvast.

'De onbeholpen samenleving' is het resultaat van een gedegen onderzoek door een hoogleraar en een onderzoeker naar de ontevredenheid van Nederlanders over de samenleving en het functioneren van die samenleving. Zij kijken naar de gevolgen van delegitimering, globalisering en individualisering, maar vooral naar het participeren van de burger. De knowhow die een burger zou moeten bezitten om volop mee te kunnen doen, te kunnen inspreken in onze maatschappij, maar ook het vermogen om te kunnen leven met conflicten. Daarmee zoekt het boek de oorzaken duidelijk in kleinere sociale verbanden, niet i

This article focuses on experiences of welfare recipients summoned to do volunteer work. Proponents of 'workfare volunteerism' argue that it leads to empowerment and employability while critics dismiss it as disempowering, stigmatising, and disciplining. Our longitudinal qualitative inquiry into experiences of sixty-six 'workfare volunteers' in the Netherlands shows how experiences of disempowerment or empowerment are dependent on caseworker approaches as well as on time. Disempowerment can turn into empowerment when an individual's past is considered, but can revert to disempowerment if changing needs go unrecognised. These findings have broader implications for debates on activating policies. They point to the need for diachronic approaches, which reflect the changing experiences of target groups over time and adaption of policies and caseworker approaches that respond to their clients' changing needs and self-understanding.

In urban neighbourhoods, there is an enduring problem with inequality in participation. Middle-aged, higher educated, white men are often overrepresented. Research indicates that front-line workers can play an important role to reach and activate underrepresented groups, but there is little evidence on how they manage (or fail) to do so. In this article, we focus on front-line workers' strategies to combat inequality in citizens' initiatives in the deprived neighbourhoods of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. To analyse these strategies, we construct the ACLR-framework. We find that front-line workers manage to activate a more diverse group of citizens by paying special attention to those who are not already active, by supporting citizens in developing and exercising civic skills, by connecting them with others, and by making sure that citizens experience the system as responsive. However, this professional support is often not recognised because of what we call the civic support paradox: the better that front-line workers do their work, the more invisible it is, and the more difficult it is to pinpoint the factors that make it effective.

The provision of services in the contractual welfare state is conditional. If one wants to receive a service, one has to comply with the demands of the provider. If one fails to do so, the organisation threatens to terminate its services, and indeed often does so. There are, however, people who breach their contracts time after time, falling back into the same dire situation that prompted them to ask for help in the first place. Social workers must then visit these people to help them re-enter the contract. This article draws on an in-depth analysis of such 'behind the front door' policies, focussing on single mothers on welfare. It argues that for many single mothers on welfare, social security fails to provide emotional and relational security, which undermines their ability to fulfil the terms of the contract. So long as the welfare state is based on the idea of (material) social security, 'behind the front door' workers remain urgently needed.

This article reviews how activation policies frame citizens as individual welfare agents. The analysis focuses on the framing of feeling rules employed by governments that encourage active citizenship, in this instance in the Netherlands and England. In England, encouraging voluntarism is central to the Big Society agenda; in the Netherlands, it is at the heart of the 2007 Social Support Act and more recent ideas on citizenship. Governments cannot compel their citizens to volunteer their time; they can, however, try to seduce people by playing on their emotions. Based on an analysis of thirty-nine policy documents and political speeches, we find that English politicians employ 'empowerment talk' calculated to trigger positive feelings about being active citizens, while Dutch politicians employ 'responsibility talk' conveying negative feelings about failure to participate more actively in society. Responsibility talk runs the risk that citizens respond with counter-responsibility claims, whereas empowerment talk can fail to incite sufficient enthousiasm among citizens.