Different routes, common directions? Activation policies for young people in Denmark and the UK

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Lindsay, Colin and Mailand, Mikkel (2004) Different routes, common directions? Activation policies for young people in Denmark and the UK. International Journal of Social Welfare, 13 (3). pp. 195-207. (https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2397.00069-i1)

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Abstract

This article analyses and compares the development of activation policies for young people in Denmark and the UK from the mid-1990s. Despite their diverse welfare traditions and important differences in the organisation and delivery of benefits and services for the unemployed, both countries have recently introduced large-scale compulsory activation programmes for young people. These programmes share a number of common features, especially a combination of strong compulsion and an apparently contradictory emphasis on client-centred training and support for participants. The suggested transition from the ‘Keynesian welfare state’ to the ‘Schumpeterian workfare regime’ is used as a framework to discuss the two countries’ recent moves towards activation. It is argued that while this framework is useful in explaining the general shift towards active labour-market policies in Europe, it alone cannot account for the particular convergence of the Danish and British policies in the specific area of youth activation. Rather, a number of specific political factors explaining the development of policies in the mid-1990s are suggested. The article concludes that concerns about mass youth unemployment, the influence of the ‘dependency culture’ debate in various forms, cross-national policy diffusion and, crucially, the progressive re-engineering of compulsory activation by strong centre-left governments have all contributed to the emergence of policies that mix compulsion and a commitment to the centrality of work with a ‘client-centred approach’ that seeks to balance more effective job seeking with human resource development. However, attempts to combine the apparently contradictory concepts of ‘client-centredness’ and compulsion are likely to prove politically fragile, and both countries risk lurching towards an increasingly workfarist approach.

ORCID iDs

Lindsay, Colin ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2493-6797 and Mailand, Mikkel;
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)