In this chapter, I present materials that show how different types of welfare conditionalities have been experienced by those who took part in this study. In this respect, I intend to look at the processes of formal welfare conditionality, although I do attempt to nuance this in my analysis as I have done elsewhere (Whelan, 2020a). In Chapter 5, I introduce empirical materials that evidence something less formal, something less tangible than welfare conditionality or at least more implicit than explicit. There I introduce how welfare recipients attempt to maintain compliance and engage in impression management practices. I flag this here on the basis that both sets of phenomena are very intimately related. However, it makes sense to first introduce the formal and explicit ways in which separate aspects of the same sets of experiences are acquitted before moving on to evidence how even that which appears simple on the surface is, in fact, psychosocially complex. Before moving on to present the empirical materials that make up the bulk of this chapter, however, I first briefly discuss the concept and practice of welfare conditionality.

I have argued elsewhere that conditionality has arguably always been part of formalised welfare regimes dating at least as far back as the poor laws and the condition of less eligibility (Whelan, 2020a). Others have also acknowledged the historical embeddedness of the conditional nature of welfare receipt, though it may once have been called ‘poor relief ‘ (Powell, 1992, 2017; Watts and Fitzpatrick, 2018). In this book, it is experiences of the modern processes of welfare conditionality that we are concerned with, and it is generally accepted that there has been a more pronounced turn towards welfare conditionality in the latter part of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries. Indeed, welfare conditionality is an area that has attracted and continues to attract international research interest (see Soss et al, 2011; Collins and Murphy, 2016; Dywer, 2016; Millar and Crosse, 2018; Watts and Fitzpatrick, 2018; Hansen, 2019; McCashin, 2019; Redman, 2019, 2021; Gaffney and Millar, 2020; Murphy, 2020; Whelan 2020a; Boland and Griffin, 2021; Dukelow, 2021; Finn, 2021; McGann, 2021; McGann and Murphy, 2021; Redman and Fletcher, 2021 for just some examples).