In market economies access to gainful employment is the pivotal precondition for economic and social integration. Therefore, our study focuses the social organization of integration into and exclusion from the labor market. In line with a process-oriented theoretical model of exclusion as starting “in the centre” of society we compared organizations of the economic and the welfare system. Empirically our project is a multi-sited ethnography consisting of case studies in three businesses (multinational company, retail group, bank) and three work integration programs for the unemployed (workshop for unskilled people, training firm for office workers, youth program). The ethnographic research pertaining to organizational practices is embedded in a discourse analytic framework. Namely, it relates to governmentality studies and the debate on the “new spirit of capitalism” positing the emergence of a normative model termed “the entrepreneurial self”. This entrepreneurial self rationalizes his or her life according to market imperatives in order to ensure his or her “employability”. Our study addresses the missing link between such discourse analytic diagnoses and the level of practice and sheds light on the practical accomplishment of exclusion by analyzing it as a form of work.
In the economic field we explored the techniques of handling so-called “low performers”. Performance is a key concept in respect to employability. Although the three companies studied differ in their interpretations of performance, they share a few basic assumptions. Performance is regarded as an objective and measurable fact combining effort and output with behavior. Actually the evaluation of someone’s performance is the result of institutionalized negotiations between employees and supervisors. Because performance rarely ever is an unequivocal fact the employee appraisal is an important occasion for selling one’s achievements. Hence interactive skills in self-marketing become an additional demand crucial for one’s status in the world of work. A negative performance evaluation does not automatically lead to (quick) dismissal. HR- and line managers, social workers, medical services etc. use a variety of cooling-out techniques, which fall into three categories. Changing the person (e.g. training, coaching, disciplinary action) aims at improving an employee’s capacity or willingness to perform adequately. Changing the context (e.g. transfer to another job, team building) aims at a better alignment of an individual and his/her social environment. Changing the status (e.g. degradation, early retirement, dismissal) denotes different ways of partial or complete exclusion. Thus, integration and exclusion cannot be reduced to the opposition of dismissal versus keeping an employee in the company. While individual lay-offs for performance reasons only seem to be rare, the reference to performance serves to legitimize and individualize structural changes such as reduction of jobs or heightened qualification levels and the concomitant loss of unskilled jobs.
Work integration programs operate within the framework of unemployment laws and insurance. The Swiss unemployment policies follow the principle of activation, which in turn is based on the cultural model of the context-free competent economic actor with the sole problem of being out of work. In reality unemployment is often accompanied by a host of personal and social problems and a lack of resources. Hence integration programs are caught in a dilemma between the competitive logic of the market and the care logic of social support. They offer a simulation of the labor market instead of “real” work experience; thus, participation does not attest to participants’ employability. Moreover, the programs do not offer vocational training, but restrict themselves to teaching self-marketing techniques for the job search. In this way the model of the entrepreneurial self is also applied to the unemployed. This may be adequate for those with a sound basis of professional credentials, but falls short of the needs of socially vulnerable groups without the necessary cultural and social capital. Because of the model of the competent economic actor integration programs must not offer social work or other forms of social support. Yet, this denial of social problems obstructs the integration work of the programs and may in some cases actually accelerate trajectories of exclusion. Again, modeling unemployed people as entrepreneurial economic actors individualizes structural problems of the labor market and stigmatizes those, who cannot find a job as “not employable”. Still, integration programs do have some positive effects. They offer a time structure, contacts with other people sharing the problem of unemployment, some social recognition and professional assistance with the job search.
