The Death of Unemployment and the Birth of Job-Seeking in Welfare Policy: Governing a Liminal Experience

The category of ‘unemployment’ is gradually being replaced with ‘job-seeking’, in contemporary welfare policy – driven by ‘liberal’ or neo-liberal politics. Here we attempt to go beyond the ‘deprivation theory’ of unemployment, emphasising how the experience of ‘unemployment’ or ‘jobseeking’ is shaping the way it is governed – drawing on the Foucault inspired governmentality approach. Firstly, we examine the apparatus of supervision, interventions and sanctions introduced in Ireland under Pathways to Work. Secondly, we analyse a set of interviews with job seekers in 2014, specifically focusing on interactions with the social welfare office, internships, sanctions and job-seeking activities. Building on these empirical investigations we suggest that unemployment/job-seeking can be understood as an artificially produced liminality, characterised by uncertainty, self-questioning, tedious time to be filled and frantic seeking to escape to a job, and, in many cases, repeated failure.