Looking presentable, feeling optimistic, performing potentiality: How recipients of social assistance in the Netherlands are ‘activated’ for the post-Fordist labour market

The gradual retreat of many governments from guaranteeing secure labour relations and social security, and the attendant normalisation of precarious working and living conditions, goes hand in hand with a promise that ‘the good life’ can be attained through paid work. Welfare-to-work programmes are at the centre of this, as they problematise social assistance and seek to ‘improve’ recipients and their positions in society by obliging them to find precarious employment in the post-Fordist labour market. This dissertation examines how this is done within the daily practices of ‘labour market (re)integration’ in social assistance offices in the Netherlands. It asks how the focus on future employment takes shape in these practices, what exactly is required of recipients who are deemed ‘work-ready’ in return for the right to social assistance benefits, and what the observed practices tell us more generally about the politics of social security. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, I reveal the work that goes into obtaining and retaining the right to social assistance and the pedagogical techniques that case managers use to entice, persuade and coerce recipients to find precarious paid work. ‘Work-readiness’ (being continuously and completely ready for and able to adapt to potential future employment) is accomplished by problematising the need for social assistance, by mobilising ‘the right’ aesthetics and affects, and by glorifying paid work. It is by looking presentable, feeling optimistic and performing potentiality that social assistance recipients are deemed able and willing to find paid work and to become potentially valuable members of society