By looking into the public debates surrounding four major activation reforms, the four preceding chapters have exposed the ideas, politics and policies at stake in the ‘active turn’. This chapter and the following one discuss key patterns that cut across the four cases and argue for their relevance beyond the selected cases and countries. This chapter discusses the content of the moral economy of activation, while Chapter 9 points to the key dynamics. The first section of the current chapter addresses content by discussing the role of the seven cities of unemployment in the four reforms. The following section compares findings relating to the theories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ activation presented earlier in Chapter 1. The main argument is that non-coercive activation approaches posited by the social investment literature are contradicted by the internal morality of investment as well as by the way it is used to justify and make compromises in practice. The final section discusses whether and how neoliberalism differs from or taps into the moral economy of activation. I argue that although moral activation has clear neoliberal traits, labelling it simply as ‘neoliberal’ loses sight both of important variations in neoliberal thought within the activation debate and what the term ‘neoliberal’ can credibly encapsulate.

Each country has its own particular history of governing unemployment, embodying different test situations and compromises; even within clusters of welfare regimes, divergence is substantial. The great variety of instruments in the four reforms (individual contracts, interviews, monetary sanctions, jobseeking, control, training, education, subsidies to employers, job offers, job-rotation schemes, work-for-benefit schemes, benefit level and entitlement period adjustment, entitlement criteria adjustment, categorisation tools, mobility requirements, protected work, social work and income taxation) exemplifies the point. Furthermore, each reform has its own particularity that is not necessarily illustrative of the relevant country's long-term transformation. The four cases illustrate that context, or existing historical and institutional paths, does not simply predetermine the direction of policy change. However, the changes matter because existing policies and institutions constitute the reality that is put to the test and adjusted accordingly, and to which new instruments are added.