Towards the active society

Since the late 1980s, a spectre has been haunting Europe and beyond, the spectre of what may be called the ‘active turn’. It transforms welfare states and labour market regulation gradually, but radically. Regardless of previous paths, be they Bismarckian, social democratic, residual or post-communist, welfare states, as well as their clients, are becoming increasingly ‘activated’. Policies representing such transformation have been given many labels, from ‘active social policies’ (Bonoli, 2013), ‘active labour market policies’ (Daguerre, 2007; Bonoli, 2010) and ‘activating labour market policies’ (Dingeldey, 2009), to ‘workfare’ (Jessop, 1993; Lødemel and Trickey, 2001; Peck, 2001), ‘welfareto-work’ (Dean, 2007) and ‘activation’ (Barbier, 2002; Barbier and Ludwig-Mayerhofer, 2004; Serrano Pascual, 2007; van Berkel et al, 2012).

Although the many labels expose a certain ambiguity in these transformations, what characterises all of them is a will to construct policies that somehow underpin a more ‘active society’, where ‘active’ usually entails paid work or activities such as jobseeking and training whose ultimate goal is paid work. The term derives from the late 1980s vision of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) vision of what kind of social policy it would take to bring its member states out of the economic downturn (Gass, 1988; OECD, 1989; see also Dean, 1995; Walters, 1997).