No abstract

Ambivalence about rights is well known: rights may both challenge existing injustices while simultaneously re-enforcing sovereign regulatory control over citizens. In this article, we focus on the paradox that potentially radical and transformative claims to rights are made at a site – civil society – that under liberal governmentality has increasingly become a site of government. By exploring the unionization of undocumented migrant domestic workers (MDWs) in the Netherlands, we aim to show how rights claims are shaped and controlled by civil society. Using the analytical category of (in)visibility, the case study discloses the dualistic role of the union. On the one hand, the union operated as a site of resistance supporting undocumented MDWs to make their rights claims. On the other hand, it operated as a site of government of the same undocumented MDWs by selectively promoting work-related rights claims and excluding more radical claims for the right to come and go.

Abstract. Using methods that are developed in Discourse Historical

Most scholars engaged in ideational analysis agree that the availability of new ideas may cause existing welfare state policies and institutions to alter. This article considers the extent to which the open functional approach and constructivist approaches are able to explain the role of ideas in policy and institutional change. Notwithstanding their contribution to the study of the role of ideas in policy and institutional change, these approaches suffer from some shortcomings as they fail to view ideas as non-stable entities. In order to address these shortcomings, an alternative poststructuralist discourse theoretical explanatory model is presented. Applying this model to the case of the rise and fall of Dutch life course policy, the article shows how a discourse theoretical view of ideas as floating signifiers contributes to the study of the role of ideas in welfare state change.

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