TY - JOUR
AU - Helman,, Sara
AB - Abstract This article shows how two different subjectivities promoted by neoliberal discourses—that of the entrepreneur and that of the docile workers—are interwoven in the discourse of coaches leading employment readiness workshops conducted in a workfare program in Israel. Three main discursive strategies, “between entrepreneurialism and docility,” “rehearsing employability: the labor market as a second family,” and “happiness and positive psychology,” interwove appeals to simultaneously identify as docile workers and enterprising selves. The findings presented in this article underscore how class (and gender) are re-scripted as individual barriers by exhorting welfare-reliant women to become an entrepreneurial job seeker. Introduction The enterprising self is the privileged form of subjectivity under neoliberal governmentality (Rose 1996a). The attributes of the enterprising self are autonomy, agility, flexibility, and proactivity, among others. This is a subject who turns her own life into an enterprise, i.e., seeks to maximize her human capital (Brockling 2016; Foucault, Davidson, and Burchell 2008, 226; Rose 1996a). Dean (2002, 40) observes, however, that not all individuals have the capacity for autonomy. There are those, mainly the long-term unemployed and subsistence allowance beneficiaries, who are unable to act in their own best interest. Consequently, for them a prior step to attaining autonomy is their cultural training as docile, i.e., independent, industrious, punctual, responsible, motivated workers. The docile subject is expected to be flexible and self-reliant and to individually bear risks (Darmon and Perez 2011; Dean 1995, 2002; Whitworth 2016). Ethnographic studies of job search and employment readiness workshops in the United States and Canada corroborate these interpretations. Programs that cater to middle-class job seekers train them to brand themselves and become entrepreneurial job seekers (Brockling 2005, 2016; Sharone 2007; Urciuoli 2008; Wee and Brooks 2012), whereas workfare programs demand docility, submissiveness, and compliance (see, e.g., Korteweg 2003; Purser and Hennigan 2017; Van Oort 2015). Less is known, however, about how the attributes of the enterprising self and those of the docile worker are interwoven in employment readiness workshops that target welfare-reliant women. In this article, based on nine months of participant observation, I analyze the discourse of coaches who led the employment readiness workshops at a workfare program in Israel. I ask how they called upon welfare-reliant women to identify with the enterprising self while simultaneously emphasizing the transition from dependence on social benefits to independence and self-responsibility. The simultaneous appeal to self-sufficiency and personal responsibility, on the one hand, and to autonomy, agility, and proactive behavior, on the other, is based on two main premises regarding the subject to be governed: first, that the program participants lack the responsibility and motivation to be competitive in a world where the economic conditions are constantly changing (Amable 2011, 15); and second, that “since all possess the desire and opportunity to engage in the enterprise of maximizing [their] human capital” (Fenwick 2002, 707), it is possible to instill in them capacities for agency that will turn them into entrepreneurs (Jensen and Pfau-Effinger 2005). The article proceeds by elaborating the theoretical argument and points to the proliferation of the discourse of the enterprising self in programs that target populations other than the middle and upper middle classes. Next, it examines the context in which the program was implemented. The main section shows how the discourses of the enterprising self and those of the docile worker are hybridized in the coaches’ discourse. I conclude by highlighting the ways in which workfare, like other neoliberal projects, redefines social relations, turns class and gender constraints into personal attributes, and commodifies personality. Welfare-to-Work Programs and the Enterprising Self Welfare-to-work programs can be defined as emergency spaces in which individuals are exposed to active citizenship and either invited to identify themselves as new subjects of government or coerced into doing so. Active citizenship can be conceptualized as a shift from status to contract. Status is embodied in social citizenship where social benefits are rights that individuals enjoy by virtue of their belonging to a political community (Esping-Andersen 2013; Marshall and Bottomore 1992). De-commodification underpins social citizenship and protects citizens from the vagaries of the labor market. In contrast, active citizenship is underpinned by a quid pro quo approach, i.e., rights are attached to the fulfillment of obligations, and each member of society must participate in the labor market in order to protect herself from a variety of social risks formerly covered by the welfare state. Active citizenship embodies a call to the individual to become responsible for her own life and wellbeing, and this call is presented as an obligation, not an option. Moreover, categories formerly exempted from participation in the labor market (e.g., lone mothers) undergo commodification (Handler 2004; Jensen and Pfau-Effinger 2005, 4). The subject of active citizenship is characterized by cognitive and motivational qualities such as autonomy, responsibility, initiative, and consumerism (Miller and Rose 2008), some of the attributes of the enterprising subject. Welfare-to-work programs deploy technologies of agency and coercion. The latter are expressed in the new paternalism and include intensive surveillance by case managers or advisers and enforcement of obligations and punitive measures for those who fail to fulfill their obligations. All of these are geared to induce individuals to exercise responsibility and independence (Soss, Fording, and Schram 2011, 27). Technologies of agency aim to transform the status of the unemployed in order to make them active citizens capable of managing their own risks (Dean 1995, 576). These technologies are part of the neoliberal governmentality project. Following Larner (2000, 13) I conceptualize neoliberal governmentality or “market governance” as “a series of strategies of rule that encourage people to see themselves as individualized and active subjects responsible for enhancing their own well being.” Welfare-to-work programs are therefore an integral part of “active society,” because they re-specify the citizen as an active agent that is “both able and obliged to exercise autonomous choices” (Larner, 2000, 13). These autonomous choices include the “individualized bearing of risk and responsibility to transform one’s circumstances,” but without the resources and benefits of the social security system (Whitworth 2016, 420). Studies that examine the enhancement of welfare-reliant women’s agency focus on job readiness workshops and the discursive strategies deployed by coaches and counselors. Korteweg’s (2003) seminal work focuses on the discursive strategies counselors use to call upon welfare-reliant lone mothers in the United States to identify as male citizen workers. Fuller et al. (2008) interrogated how lone mothers in Ontario, Canada interpret and negotiate the meaning of active citizenship through the mobilization of volunteer work while resisting a narrow conception of active citizenship as waged labor only. A study by Pulkingham et al. (2010), also conducted in Ontario, examined how lone mothers resist the attempts of front-line workers to place them in precarious jobs and direct them to the low-wage labor market. Purser and Hennigan (2017) researched a faith-based work readiness program that targeted men. They underscore how the program produced docile, submissive, employable subjects through biblical teachings, or what they term religious neoliberalism. Finally, Gazso (2009), in her study of workfare programs in three Canadian provinces, shows how social policy discourse is underpinned by a gender-neutral citizen worker model that constructs lone mothers and fathers as “responsible risk takers.” These studies center on the different ways in which case managers and coaches in the United States and Canada attempt to “conduct the conduct” of welfare-reliant women (and men, in some cases), that is, to shape their conduct, aspirations, desires, and capacities and enlist them as adult male or gender-neutral workers in order to integrate them into the labor market or enhance their employability. This body of research indicates that welfare-reliant individuals are interpellated in welfare-to-work programs as docile workers, i.e., submissive semi-skilled and unskilled workers endowed with a work ethic, responsibility, neatness, and punctuality, who are ready to accept the instability and temporariness of the low-wage labor market (Korteweg 2003, 458–59; Van Oort 2015, 87–88). Moreover, the “docile worker” is one who accepts or at least quietly tolerates the imperatives within the moral code to participate in the labor market in whatever form they are presented and in whatever role they are mandated to perform (Whitworth 2016, 419). The findings on welfare-to-work programs stand in sharp contrast to those of studies that address the entrepreneurial self, which focus on middle-class workers, middle- and upper-class women, and unemployed professionals (male and female) (Fenwick 2002; Gill and Ganesh 2007; Sharone 2007; Urciuoli 2008). Despite the fact that the enterprising self is based on the experiences of middle- and upper-class men (see, e.g., Brockling 2005; Gill and Ganesh 2007), affluent middle-class women are called upon to identify as entrepreneurs: to reveal agency, activeness, and personal initiative (Brockling 2005; Joseph 2013, 246–47). The enterprising self is calculating and oriented toward gaining a competitive edge in order to succeed in the contemporary labor market. Entrepreneurialism denotes action and imagination, a restless personality, and the capacity to anticipate and embrace technological or social changes (Brockling 2016; Walkerdine 2003), that is, what Gillies (2011) terms the agile self. He claims that agility can be linked to the neoliberal concept of the person as enterprise, as she/he can respond quickly and efficiently to any change in an unpredictable and volatile labor market, rather than adapting to it. Whitworth (2016, 419) adds that “proactive agility rather than passive docility becomes a key characteristic of the entrepreneurial self.” By means of these traits, the individual will make an enterprise of her life, seek to maximize her own human capital, project a future for herself, and shape herself in order to become what she wishes to be (Rose 1996b, 160). The long-term unemployed in general and lone mothers in particular are called upon to become responsible risk takers in a context of the privatization and individualization of risks. According to Joseph (2013) and Whitworth (2016), personal responsibility and independence are defined against welfare dependency and a lack of future oriented self-discipline. As opposed to responsible risk takers, entrepreneurial workers simultaneously manage and avoid risks, but more importantly their stance toward the uncertainties of the labor market is proactive rather than defensive and they enjoy the resources and opportunities that allow them to move forward and optimize themselves in the labor market (Gillies 2011; Whitworth 2016). Moreover, while independence and income earning are implied in entrepreneurialism, the latter denotes agency, activeness, leadership, and personal initiative (Joseph 2013, 246–47). However, as Brockling (2016, 20) puts it, the perception of the entrepreneurial self as “not something that exists, but something that ought to be brought into existence,” enables the proliferation of discourses and practices that center on the promotion of the entrepreneurial self and the implementation of programs for youth at risk (Kelly 2006) and the long-term unemployed in the UK and Germany (Brockling 2016; MacLeavy 2008), poor single mothers on welfare (Kingfisher 2002), and poor and middle-class women in developing countries (Altan-Olcay 2015; Dolan and Johnston-Louis 2016). These groups are imagined in terms of lacking the self-responsibility and motivation to succeed in the changing economy, and therefore programs that aim to transform the cultural resources of the women who participate in them are devised. The micro-enterprise is the ideal form for programs aimed at promoting poor women’s entrepreneurial subjectivity. In these programs—aimed at women in developing countries—women are enticed to define their work in terms of individual responsibility, effort, and market capacity (Altan-Olcay 2014). Women are conceived as new agents of development “with cultural propensities to invest wisely and look after their families and their communities” (Rankin 2001, 20). Dolan and Johnston-Louis (2016, 76), for example, show in their ethnography of Avon’s door-to-door sellers in South Africa how poor women are detached “from the torpid world of dependency […] and remade as entrepreneurs through practices that seek to banish idleness in any form.” In her study of development programs in Turkey aimed at enhancing entrepreneurship among women, gender equality, and poverty reduction, Altan-Olcay (2015) analyzes how women are called upon to identify with the enterprising self. She emphasizes the ways in which these programs decontextualize the image of the enterprising woman and make success contingent upon individual agency and women’s willingness to improve themselves. The micro-enterprise is not, however, the only path to the transformation of poor women into entrepreneurs. Other authors observe that under neoliberalism, individuals are conceived as “entreployees”—salaried workers who constantly maximize their own human capital, commercialize it, and willingly accept the importance of the employer’s interests as an integral part of life (Pongratz and Voss 2003, 243). The conception of the salaried worker as an entreployee blurs the distinction between the entrepreneur and the wage worker. Attributes of the entrepreneur, such as leadership, innovation, risk-taking, and rational planning are transferred—under conditions of flexible labor markets and privatization—to the salaried worker. Instead of the wage relation in which where the employer “rents” workers in exchange for a salary and certain amount of security, the very concept of the entreployee signifies a partnership between the employer and the worker in which both share responsibility and risk (Gershon 2011; McNay 2009). In this article, I focus on the discursive strategies of coaches in employment readiness workshops that took place in an Israeli welfare-to-work program, and ask the following questions: How are welfare-reliant women, who largely lack educational qualifications and are under-trained and destined to work in positions at the lower end of the labor market, called upon to identify with the enterprising self? How are they enticed to engage in the continuous business of optimizing their own human capital and turning their lives into enterprises in a program premised on rapid reintegration into the labor market? How are the discourses of the enterprising self interwoven with those of the docile worker, which emphasize submissiveness and responsibility? And, last, how are structural issues of class and gender inequality translated into individual choices and risks? Wisconsin Works in Israel During the 1990s, the Income Support social program (Havtachat Hachnasa) in Israel expanded both quantitatively and qualitatively (Gal and Achdut 2007). Its expansion was attributed to the liberalization of Israel’s political economy, the flexibilization of the labor market, and large waves of immigration from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia (Swirski, Frankel, and Swirski 2001). Rising expenditures and increases in the number of income support beneficiaries became focusing events and provided a window of opportunity in which to initiate a transformation of the Income Support program through the importation of Wisconsin Works (Peck and Theodore 2001) from the United States and its translation and implementation in Israel (Maron and Helman 2017). The program, dubbed “From Welfare to Secure Employment,” was popularly known as the Wisconsin Program. It represented a departure from the social rights of women as mothers in general (Berkovitch 1997) and as lone mothers in particular (Helman 2011). Programmatic changes were introduced so that: (i) mothers of children aged two and older were required to join the labor market or participate in the program as a condition for continuing to receive social assistance benefits (until 2003 lone mothers had been exempted from work until their youngest child reached age seven); (ii) social assistance cash and in-kind benefits were retrenched through a series of governmental decisions; and (iii) the salary ceiling and income disregard were lowered (Herbst 2009). The “From Welfare to Secure Employment Program” was launched as an experiment in four areas of Israel, which I will refer to as Coastal City, Green City, Golden City, and Divinity City, in August 2005. The program was implemented by private providers that were rewarded on the basis of closed files (the reduction of the number of social assistance claimants), and not for quality placements. Working-age social assistance beneficiaries and new benefit claimants in these areas were required to participate. The program was based on the principle of “work first,” that is, returning the unemployed as rapidly as possible to the labor market in order to “help them to regain work habits and allow their employment suitability to be tested” (Tamir 2001). The program required the participants to take part in the centers’ activities for a total of thirty to forty weekly hours or return to paid full- or part-time work immediately. Unemployed spouses of social assistance beneficiaries were also compelled to participate in the program. Beneficiaries of income supplements were also required to take part in the program’s activities in addition to their jobs and were asked to try to expand their part-time jobs and replace them with full-time employment. Case managers were granted vast discretionary authority, including the ability to sanction participants in the program for behaviors that could be interpreted as non-compliance. The benefits of non-compliant beneficiaries could be denied for two consecutive months and not gradually as they were in the Wisconsin Works program. Moreover, despite the fact that the program was supposed to tailor individual labor market-insertion plans, a one-size-fits-all approach was applied to a heterogeneous population. The program was implemented for five years, until May 2010, when the temporary provision of law expired due to the opposition of members of the Labor, Welfare, and Health Committee of the Knesset to extending the program in its existing form. Nonetheless, it is possible to see its continuation in various initiatives, such as Momentum in Employment or Tevet (http://www.tevet4u.org.il/), a myriad of programs run by NGOs (http://en.katef.org.il/; www.be-atzmi.org.il), and, since 2016, in the renewal of the program under the name Circles of Employment, under the supervision of the Israel Employment Service. These programs focus on the personal traits of unemployed persons or job-seekers with the goal of teaching them to be independent and become entrepreneurs of themselves. Method This article is based on nine months (August 2009–May 2010) of participant observation at three one-stop centers responsible for the operation of the welfare-to-work program. Throughout this period, student-researchers and I participated in daily program activities, observed meetings between participants and their case managers and employment counselors, attended employment readiness workshops, and conducted in-depth interviews with case managers and participants. At first, the participants mistrusted us, suspecting that we were taking notes to report them to the case workers. At one of the observations at the job club in Green City, as soon as the counselor left the room, the women began to chat. Suddenly, one woman expressed her discomfort, and remarked that I might pass on my notes to the case managers. She said, “Please do not write that we are chatting (instead of looking for jobs). This is serious, we could be sanctioned.” As time elapsed and trust was built, we became part of the landscape and some of the participants would address us and complain about the program with remarks such as: “Please write that this program is a nightmare; it is like a prison.” The one-stop centers were located in renovated buildings, which contrasted sharply with the run-down welfare and public employment service offices (for a similar observation, see, e.g., Hays 2003; Schram et al. 2010). The buildings’ interiors resembled the luxurious headquarters of high-tech companies. Hanging in the lobbies were thank-you letters, success stories, and bright signs with sentences such as: “Only those who struggle to go far know how far they can go”; “Ask yourself if what you are doing today will bring you to the place where you want to be tomorrow”; and “In order to move a mountain, we must move the smallest stone.” In two of the centers, the employment-readiness workshops that are the subject of this article were conducted in a separate wing or floor of the main building, while in the third they were held on a nearby college campus. The different workshops were titled, for example, “Data Systems,” “Planning and Logistics,” “Marketing,” and “Positive Thinking.” These were short-term workshops, and participants were referred to them immediately upon entry into the program, before they were allocated jobs. Participants for whom a position was not found or who were laid off and returned to claim social assistance benefits were required to participate in the workshops again in partial fulfillment of their obligations to the program and in order to continue to receive benefits. The courses were adapted to the audience, but were like similar workshops such as “Developing a Personal-business Image in the Modern World” (http://etgar.org.il/gmul/courses) that train employed and unemployed individuals how to brand themselves in the labor market and are based on various self-help books. These courses were standardized and short-term, and no professional training was offered to the participants. Professional training subsidies were available only to those who persevered in their jobs for over a year, and the training was allowed to take place only during their spare time. The employment readiness workshops were led by one or two coaches (most of them women, with the exception of one man) at each one-stop center. In Green City, the coach was a soft-spoken, motherly woman, a former participant in the program. The coaches at the other centers had academic qualifications (in human resources, organizational sociology, education, and so on). Like most of the employees of the one-stop centers, they were hired on temporary contracts, yet, with the exception of the coach in Green City, none was a former social assistance beneficiary. The job readiness workshops were conducted in a slightly more relaxed atmosphere than the interactions between case managers and participants, although participants were constantly under the watchful gaze of the case managers. Coaches allowed participants to “let off steam” and express their dissatisfaction with their forced participation in the program, its rigid discipline, and the threat of sanctions. In most cases, the coaches employed positive psychology and the happiness discourse (Binkley 2011; Cruikshank 1993; Kingfisher 2013) to transform the participants’ dissatisfaction into problems that could be easily solved through a positive attitude. The workshops were heterogeneous in terms of the participants’ backgrounds. Long-term unemployed Jewish Israeli-born men and women, immigrants from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia, and Palestinian citizens of Israel (both men and women) took part. Despite the participants’ heterogeneity, the dominant approach was “one size fits all.” Women constituted 63 percent of the program’s participants in August 2005 and 67.8 percent in January 2006 (Achdut, Heilbrown, and Schmeltzer 2006). Given that the program originated in the United States and was being implemented in Israel, we expected that the subject of the working mother (Korteweg 2003) would be among those that dominated the coaches’ discourse. As I will demonstrate throughout the analysis, motherhood and caring obligations were addressed when coaches referred to them as “pity parties thrown” by the participants as an excuse not to take responsibility and be independent, or as a private affair that should not interfere with the performance of work duties. Motherhood and domestic chores were addressed neither as an asset that could be mobilized to demonstrate organizational and management skills (Korteweg 2003) nor as an identity that could grant access to social benefits (Helman 2011). Domestic chores (specifically cooking) were mobilized for their market value. Since Israeli lone and married mothers have never been expected to be full-time mothers, but rather to subordinate paid work to motherhood, it may be assumed that coaches took for granted that motherhood was not a hindrance to paid work (Helman 2011). Moreover, the coaches’ discourse promoted “employment for all” (Orloff 2004), and not an approach that reconciled paid work with care labor. This research follows the emerging trend of governmentality-inspired ethnographies. These studies criticize the tendency of certain governmentality studies to consider governmentality too coherent. They also find fault in the exclusive focus of these governmentality studies on policy documents rather than on the messy actualities of neoliberal programs. My long-term presence in the classrooms allowed me to observe the words and actions of the street-level agents of neoliberal governmentality, rather than focusing on manuals, self-help books, official policy documents, or interviews with policy makers. Following scholars such as Brady (2014), Fridman (2014), and Larner (2000), I focused precisely on the messy actualities of neoliberalism, or the ways in which discourses aimed at constituting different subjectivities were hybridized in the discourse of the coaches as street-level agents of neoliberalism (Hagelund 2016; McDonald and Marston 2008; Turgeon, Taylor, and Niehaus 2014). Upon completing the field work, I iteratively read the field notes and I was able to identify three discursive strategies, “the new labor market”; “rehearsing employability: the labor market as a second family”; and “happiness and positive psychology,” which I present in the following sections. Within each discursive strategy, the coaches alternated between the discourse of the enterprising self and that of the docile worker. Special attention was given to the ways in which the coaches’ discourse presented the flexible labor market and its virtues, how social relations and identities were produced in the representation of social practices (such as the kind of workers employers are looking for; employers’ attitudes toward employees; and the proper approach to job interviews and salary negotiations), and the appeals to identify with the enterprising self, along with calls to accept any job they are offered as a stepping stone out of unemployment and reliance on social benefits. In other words, while coaches called upon the participants to identify with the entrepreneurial self, the context—a welfare-to-work program that directed participants to the lower end of the labor market—shaped the ways in which the discourse of the enterprising self was articulated, with an emphasis on personal responsibility, docility, and the acceptance of any job the participants might be offered. This study has some limitations. First, I do not inquire into whether the participants identified with the subject positions they were enticed to take. I focus mainly on how the participants are constructed in the coaches’ discourse, the goals to which they are directed, and the means through which they are induced to simultaneously become entrepreneurial and docile workers. The second limitation of this research is that it is based on a one-country case study. Given the limited availability of ethnographic studies that center on the promotion of the enterprising self in workfare programs and the analytical implications of disregarding contextual factors rather than engaging in comparative analysis, this study presents an in-depth examination of the Israeli case. Research on programs for the long-term unemployed indicates a cross-national convergence around workfare in a context of fiscal discipline (Lodemel and Moreira 2014) and growing inequality. Future research may inquire into the ways in which the promotion of the enterprising self is mobilized in these programs to individualize inequality, de-politicize class conflicts, and turn class and gender constraints into individual choices and lifestyles. Welcome to the Flexible Labor Market: Between Entrepreneurialism and Docility In August 2009, a lesson on the characteristics of the new labor market was held in one of the program’s one-stop centers. In it, Debbie, the coach, an energetic young organizational sociologist, explained that career patterns have changed. From 1948 to 1989, it was acceptable to work in one place until retirement age, but, she noted: “Since 1989, people have changed jobs more frequently and there are more careers. Everything has become more dynamic, more flexible.” She elaborated, noting that the change in career patterns is the result of globalization and Israel’s integration into the global market. The issue of globalization was linked directly with the subject of the workshop, that is, preparation for the world of work. In this context, Debbie highlighted the occupational advantages that globalization provides to Israelis: Following globalization, all sorts of companies are investing here and opening … workplaces, for example Google and HP. If Israel had not entered the GATT agreement in 1989 [sic], none of these places would exist. There have been many developments in Israel because of globalization—it is good for the country today. It is acceptable, advisable … to go to work not in the public sector, but rather in the private one, where there is temporariness, competitiveness, and innovation. (Debbie, Golden City) The link between temporariness, competitiveness, and innovation is not accidental. Temporariness is presented as a source of innovation, since frequent transitions between jobs motivate employees to become agile selves (Gillies 2011). The connection between temporariness, competitiveness, and innovation gives glamorous meaning to the flexible job market and to occupational insecurity. What are the skills required to be able to integrate into this new world of flexible work, a world brought to Israel by globalization, according to the coach? What do you think employers are looking for? … Creativity, diligence, initiative, responsibility, intelligence, the ability to keep to a timetable, neatness, work ethic, tolerance. Additional traits: learning ability, initiative, the ability to acquire knowledge and skills, and the ability to teach others. All of these upgrade the worker and the workplace. The world is very advanced. It is upgrading itself like cell phone models, every year, all the time. So if you don’t adjust to the changing market and upgrade yourself, you won’t find a place! Take initiative … take more responsibility, get things done, streamline processes, and so on. The skills required: self-management ability, high-level learning abilities, and teamwork skills. (Debbie, Golden City) Note that in her appeal, the coach interwove the attributes of the docile worker with those of the entrepreneur. She called upon the participants to adopt the attributes of the enterprising self, namely risk-taking behavior, creativity, initiative, knowledge acquisition, and life-long learning and, on the other hand, the skills required of the docile worker, namely work discipline and ethics, neatness, responsibility, and the capacity to adapt to the vagaries of the labor market. The coach actually demanded that the participants make the transition from homo welfarist to homo economicus and become entrepreneurs of themselves through the accumulation, investment, and maximization of their human capital (Foucault, Davidson, and Burchell 2008, 224–29). The above quote describes a worker who is alert to the market’s fluctuations and demands, an up-to-date worker who can keep up with changes so she will not become a “cell phone of the previous generation.” According to the coach, the entrepreneurial worker is agile and flexible, alert, and attentive to the signals of the labor market and the employer. Carnoy, Castells, and Benner (1997) and Feher (2009) compare the enterprising self to a stock portfolio of human capital composed of all the qualities that can add value to the self, that is, that can contribute to its successful marketing. Thus, the stance toward this package of qualities is always speculative, with an attempt being made to gamble on the attributes that will yield the highest return on the market. That is, initiative, innovation, and creativity are imperative for survival in the contemporary labor market and yield the highest return in it (Gillies 2011). On the other hand, the same coach called upon the participants to accept any job offer, even those jobs that do not necessarily involve innovation and creativity: “You should give NIS 22 [minimum wage at the time] an hour a chance, not stay stuck in place. Make a move, take advantage of the opportunity. Being employed makes it possible to find self-satisfaction, a sense of contribution, action, utility, and relevance.” Unemployment was portrayed as a meaningless way of life, and the unemployed were depicted as not contributing to society or to themselves. Contribution, utility, and action were also presented as resources that can move the organization forward, increasing its ability to survive in a competitive environment (Costea, Crump, and Amiridis 2008). Yet recruiting and harnessing the individual to serve the needs of the world of work does not mean that the firm is tolerant of that individual’s problems. According to the coach: There is also larger change, changing your place of residence, becoming parents—situations where an employee needs to adapt to change while continuing to provide the same output. Employers dislike it when a worker is busy with her personal problems … brings her dirty laundry to the workplace. Employers want the ability to work and function well in times of prosperity and hardship. (Debbie, Golden City) Hence, a trustworthy employee is one who adapts to the demands and needs of the organization or a “docile worker” who accepts or at least quietly tolerates the imperative to participate in the labor market in whatever form it is presented in whatever role she is mandated to perform. Her flexibility is expressed in her capacity to pay the price for change herself, without disturbing the performance of the firm. These features are presented as universal, although they originate in the experience of middle- and upper-class men (Wee and Brooks 2012). They are presented as part of the ethical regime under which the participants are required to act if they want to succeed in the new world of work. Life cycle changes, such as the transition to motherhood, become the employee’s personal problem. It should be noted that motherhood was presented as a personal barrier to successful contribution to the organization, as “dirty laundry,” and not as part of an identity that could be reconciled with successful performance in the organization. However, since the participants lack the cultural resources to succeed as enterprising workers, the program’s mission is to guide them throughout the process of turning themselves into enterprises, even if they are currently unemployed (du-Gay 1996, 156). Rehearsing Employability: The Labor Market as a Second Family Policy makers in Israel and elsewhere conceive of welfare-to-work program participants as faced with a host of barriers that prevent them from integrating into the labor market. Houser et al. (2015, 144) maintain that “barrier discourse collapses the distinction between internal characteristics and external conditions, rendering both as traits of individuals who are expected to change their behaviors and become self-sufficient.” Barriers may range from what have been conceptualized as “deficits in human capital,” such as a lack of professional skills and experience, low education levels, low Hebrew language proficiency levels, having young children and babies, or mental and physical health problems (King et al. 2001). Since structural and external conditions are perceived as individual impediments to work, the workshops’ main task was to remove them. One of the first barriers that had to be removed was inadequate time management due to care obligations. Alon, a charismatic and highly appreciated coach at the Coastal City one-stop center and the holder of a BA in human resources, spoke about time management and interwove it conceptually with personal responsibility. While addressing one of the participants who raised the issue of her care obligations, Alon turned these into what he called “limitations” (barriers). He did not deny that the participants in the program had care obligations, but implied that investing oneself only in care labor was a sign of irresponsibility and lack of self-discipline: Most of the responsibility lies with me and with all of you, and if I want to get out of unemployment, I have to manage my time despite my limitations, and not let my limitations manage me. You also said before [turning to one of the participants], “I have plenty to do at home.” This is true. Work at home, especially when there are children, never ends—more laundry, more cooking. But when I manage my time correctly, I learn what to do and when to do it. That is what we need to do. (Alon, Coastal City) The link between responsibility and proper time management makes it possible to turn unemployment into an individual problem that can be overcome if individuals do not give in to their limitations and “throw pity parties for themselves” (for a similar expression see, e.g., Broughton 2003). As they said in one of the one-stop centers: “You are a mother and there is no father in the family? It just means that you have to invest more effort to support your family! I don’t believe in those pity parties!” (Green City One-Stop Center). The subordination of motherhood and care obligations to paid work and the construction of the latter as a caring obligation constitute a sharp departure from past policies in Israel, which subordinated paid work to motherhood (Helman 2011). In addition, making room for paid work is not a matter of choice, but is formulated as a moral imperative according to which participants must act. Time management as a form of self-management of human capital is therefore the first step toward taking responsibility. Once they have taken responsibility and want to escape unemployment, the participants will be able to rehearse employability and practice for job interviews. In one of the workshops, for example, Dikla, a former participant in the program and a self-made coach, emphasized body language and communication skills: You should tailor your body language to the nature of the interviewer … sit and act like him. During an interview, we are being examined, but we are also examining the employer and deciding whether we would want to work for him. … [I]t is important to sit at a reasonable distance from the table, be relaxed, not hold objects … and turn off your cell phone. Most of the work of the interview falls on the first impression, so don’t show signs of nervousness. … if your legs shake during an interview, this indicates nervousness and restlessness, and can be prevented by crossing your legs. … We must present traits that have significance for success in the specific job. If we are asked to indicate our negative qualities, we should not do so in a way that prevents us from being hired. A job interview is … our first impression, so until they get to know us better, we should to try to emphasize our strengths. (Dikla, Green City) Boland (2016) claims that job-seeking advice texts and self-help manuals call upon the unemployed to perform “tailored roles” for different audiences and present a positive image. Similarly, participants in Israel were explicitly instructed to reveal their strengths, but also to avoid at any price talking about their personal issues and disclosing their weaknesses. Note that the job seeker was placed in a symmetrical position vis-à-vis the potential employer, conveying the impression that she had the leeway to refuse job offers. In most of the workshops we observed, impression management through body language and communication skills were presented as paramount. The emphasis on impression management and communication skills is not limited to workfare programs. In a study conducted on a workshop for unemployed professionals in California, Sharone (2007) found that job-seeking was constructed as a profession based on personal motivation, time management, dedication to the job search, updating the resume to fit each new interview, and unending self-monitoring of the job-seekers’ communication skills. Korteweg’s (2003) study highlights how coaches conveyed the impression that workplaces were in desperate need of employees. What emerges from both studies is that coaches place all of their emphasis on the creation of a good impression, underplaying the difficulties involved in being called in for a job interview and the large number of applicants for each job. We observed a similar dynamic in the job readiness workshops at the one-stop centers in Israel. The coaches spoke as if everything was contingent upon successful impression management, and taught the participants to negotiate their salaries as though they had a myriad of employment options and employers were competing to hire them: “In the negotiations it is in the interest of both parties to win, and no one should feel that she has lost” (Dikla, Green City). Moreover, the coaches added that when negotiating a salary increase, one should always ask for more than what one expects to get. However, they frequently contradicted themselves. On the one hand, in their pep talks they put employers and employees on equal ground, while, on the other, they spoke of the need to compromise: “If it’s necessary to lower the salary, as long as it does not go below the minimum wage, it’s all right. You have to do everything you can to make a living” (Dikla, Green City). Such oscillation between the enterprising and docile selves was also manifested in the discourse that represented the labor market. In one lesson, the coach exalted employers’ attitudes toward their workers and hinted that employers seek satisfied and happy workers, and no longer wish to exploit cheap labor: Today, we recognize that money is not the only thing that interests people, but other things as well. Today, we realize that we need employees. Without them, businesses are not worth anything, even the biggest businesses. (Alon, Coastal City) The workplace was represented as based on daily cooperation between employees across hierarchy lines. Alon likened the family to a firm based on daily cooperation and the contribution of each member of the organization to a common purpose, or the sharing of risks between employers and employees: Even the family is a team. We all work for a specific goal. Maybe everyone has a slightly different role and slightly different responsibilities, but we all have the same goal, and it’s the same work. Every role on the team is important, from the CEO to the cleaner. Because if the cleaner doesn’t come one day, everything will be filthy, and we won’t be able to work properly. (Alon, Coastal City) The invisible cleaner becomes visible in the coach’s discourse, while her contribution to teamwork and the smooth functioning of the firm is emphasized. The reference to the cleaner is not accidental, as cleaning was prominent among the jobs advertised in the job centers. Moreover, since every role on the team is important, from the CEO to the cleaner, there are no employers and employees and “exploitation is swept aside by a tide of win-win situations and synergetic effects” (Brockling 2016, 166). The coaches sought to bestow upon the participants the virtues of the “entreployee,” a salaried worker who constantly maximizes her own human capital, commercializes it, and willingly accepts the importance of the employer’s interests as an integral part of life (Pongratz and Voss 2003, 243). Think Positively and Broaden Your Horizons: Positive Thinking and Happiness Coaches and case workers were confident that a change in the participants’ mindset would lead them to overcome their personal limitations (or barriers) and nurture a new and more self-confident interpretation of themselves. Dikla, the self-made coach, presented the possibility that dreams can come true when she screened the film The Pursuit of Happiness (2006), in which Will Smith plays a Black American single father who sets himself the goal of attaining an internship as a stockbroker. Despite the many difficulties he encounters along the way, he manages to be accepted as an intern at a prestigious stockbroking’ firm. At the end of the film, the firm hires him. In the final scene, as the father and son overlook the San Francisco Bay, we learn that the character later opened his own company, then sold it and became a millionaire. The coach summarized the moral of the film: “The man had a vision. As soon as he knew where he wanted to go, the path became clear, and it didn’t matter what obstacles stood in his way. If you have willpower, you succeed, and it doesn’t matter what happens along the way” (Dikla, Green City). In the excerpts quoted above, it is not difficult to identify the main premises of positive psychology. The coaches induced the participants to work on their emotional states, and at the same time, called upon them to become entrepreneurs of themselves. Turning positive thinking and happiness into a project of self-government is based on the belief that people are unhappy because they cannot transcend their own routines and their inability to act on their own. Concomitantly, happiness and positive emotions are manifestations of agency and responsibility. Thus, “enterprise and responsibility for oneself are both the means and the content of happiness” (Binkley 2011, 385). Alon highlighted the advantages of using the imagination properly to overcome barriers, in this case the domestic division of labor and the subjugation of women to their husbands: Our thoughts create reality. If you think positively, things will be good. In addition, people must bring to light new images to replace the old ones. In this way, they open themselves to new ideas. Look at what four women from Dimona (a city in southern Israel), housewives who were also excellent cooks, did. They asked, “Why not to make a little money from it?” They started out selling what they cooked to neighbors and friends. Then they expanded and now they have a catering company. But their husbands were a barrier, because they wanted them to be at home and cook for them. So these women announced that from now on their husbands would do the cleaning and cooking, because the women were going to work. A person who wants to recreate herself, if she sees things a little differently, comes up with an idea of something to do. (Alon, Coastal City) Adopting a post-feminist discourse that claims that “women can have it all, if they only try,” the coach presented the gender division of labor and the subjection of women to their spouses as personal barriers that can be overcome by a proactive stance. He invited the participants to examine their daily circumstances from a different perspective, and to transform them through personal agency and the assumption of responsibility for themselves. Cooking as a domestic chore is represented as non-productive labor, but the moment it is transferred to the realm of the market, it acquires market value. The example of a micro-enterprise notwithstanding, the program did not encourage women to start small businesses, but mainly to join the low wage labor market. At this point, the call to women to cultivate and produce within themselves entrepreneurial subjectivity as a condition for freeing themselves from dependence on social benefits meets with the call to think positively, be happy, and dream as an enterprise. These two calls are intertwined, since to the ability to dream, fantasize, and try new and different things are all attributes of the enterprising self. Conclusions: Welfare-to-Work Programs, the Enterprising Self, and Class and Gender as Personal Barriers In this article, I have addressed the work-readiness workshops conducted as part of a workfare program in Israel. A governmentality-inspired ethnography enabled me to focus on the micro-politics of neoliberalism and ascertain how the enterprising and the docile selves were interwoven in the coaches’ discourses. In these workshops, the coaches invited women both to become independent and responsible risk takers and to turn themselves into proactive and agile individuals by means of initiative, creativity, and constant branding and improvement of their human capital. Moreover, the labor market was represented as gender-neutral and offering ample opportunities to motivated and creative individuals endowed with a positive outlook toward their life circumstances. The question I would like to raise here is why the imperative for the workshop participants to become entrepreneurs of themselves was so prominent in the coaches’ discourse and how this phenomenon can be related to the changing configurations of the welfare state in Israel and elsewhere. The central differentiation in “welfare to work” and other neoliberal projects is between active and inactive citizens or between those who carry the burden and help themselves while contributing to society and those who “prefer” to remain passive and excluded (Crespo Suarez and Serrano Pascual, 2007). In the discourse of the coaches, class and gender were rescripted as individual barriers and not as a problem related to the unequal distribution of resources. Turning welfare-reliant women into entrepreneurs of themselves through a variety of techniques such as coaching, motivational talks, and simulations holds the promise that precarious jobs and low wages are not insurmountable obstacles to social mobility, and that self-responsibility, assertiveness, and creativeness can extricate these women from poverty and marginality. By calling upon welfare-reliant women to become entrepreneurs of themselves, the coaches trained them to act under conditions of job insecurity and absolved the state of responsibility for creating sustainable employment and occupational welfare. Moreover, turning a welfare-reliant woman into an entrepreneur of herself grants legitimacy to the neoliberal rule of insecurity, which transfers the burden of workers’ welfare from employers to employees and rewards employers (Frade and Darmon 2005; Kalleberg 2009). Another lesson to be learned from this study lies in the neoliberal project’s underlying premises, which redefine social relations. Neoliberal projects seek to dismantle collective subjectivities, such as the working class, and to transform social citizenship into active citizenship. Active citizenship expands the definition of homo economicus (who is not only oriented toward interest and profit making, but comprises human capital, and seeks to maximize it in all areas of life) to embrace the notion that he himself is a firm (Brown 2015, 33–36). When the market is set as a model for all social relations, and integration into society and the overcoming of social exclusion are contingent only upon waged labor, the enterprising self becomes the privileged form of subjectivity. Social relations are therefore defined along differences in individual qualities, individual capacities for self-management, self-responsibility, creativity, and imagination as assets that improve the individual’s capacity to compete in the market (Brown 2015, 33–36; Feher 2009; Makinen 2014). Thus, personality becomes commodified and the individual’s worth is measured by the expansion of her entrepreneurial capacities (Makinen 2014). Unconstrained by class, gender, and location, individuals are imagined in neoliberal discourses as free to pursue their freedom. Technologies such as coaching, positive psychology, and the very discourse of the enterprising self individualize the contradictions between capital and labor, and unemployment becomes a problem of the individual. In light of growing inequality in Israel and elsewhere, more research is needed to inquire into the ways in which class and gender inequality are represented in a variety of local and transnational projects. Note Sara Helman is a political sociologist at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology—Ben Gurion University of the Negev. Her areas of specialization are the sociology of citizenship, the reconfiguration of the welfare state under neoliberalism, and gendered subjectivities. Her last articles were published in Social Politics, Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Social Policy and Administration, and in book collections. 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TI - Turning Welfare-Reliant Women into Entrepreneurs: Employment Readiness Workshops and the Constitution of the Entrepreneurial Self in Israel
JO - Social Politics
DO - 10.1093/sp/jxy020
DA - 2019-03-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/turning-welfare-reliant-women-into-entrepreneurs-employment-readiness-44oCu4oapy
SP - 116
VL - 26
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -