Introduction

Social policy almost by definition has to deal with the complex relations between general policies and the political process on the one hand, and individual people and their everyday lives on the other. We define problems and policies as social if they affect large groups of people. Social policies therefore are developed on a general, political level. They ‘speak’ in general terms (participation, employment, integration), ‘address’ large groups of people (the excluded, unemployed, migrants) and ‘deal’ with the redistribution of collective resources (money, the institutions of the welfare state). At the same time, social policy is aimed at individual people and their everyday lives, aspirations, competences, possibilities and impossibilities. It is national or local governments that draw up and deliver social policies. In the end, however, the goals of social policy can only be realised in and through the everyday actions of the individual people they address. Social policy, for example, can create conditions to prevent social isolation and to stimulate participation. In the end, success or failure is ‘made’ by the thoughts, decisions and actions of individuals. The relations between general policies and individual people, almost by definition too, have strong normative aspects. Social policies are not only about how things are, but also about how they should be and thus what people should do.

What goes for social policy in general, goes for activation policies in particular. The primary task for the institutions of the welfare state is to get people who are on benefits back into the labour market as soon as possible. These activation policies are not only based on more or less objective economic and financial considerations. They are also firmly based on normative ideas about ‘work ethics’, ‘social responsibility’, and so on. Thus activation policies require more from unemployed people than the fulfilment of bureaucratic duties. Social policies should give individual people the opportunity to work; individual people are supposed to take this opportunity. The success or failure of activation policies, in the end, depends upon and has to depend upon the people who are to be activated.

In recent years the tendency has been towards the individualisation of social policies, and of activation policies in particular. Those policies are giving increasing emphasis to the specificities of the everyday lives of individuals. This tendency, however, is neither clear nor unifocal. In most European countries it is an expression of various discourses.