This paper moves from a reading of processes that are transforming public services in ways that amount to a dismantling of the welfare state in the UK. In order to interrogate these processes, the paper focuses on 'youth' and 'youth services'. Framed by an analysis of the aggressive disinvestment of 'austerity', we take up Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the assemblage as a tool to map and understand the apparently disparate factors or components that come together to produce a 'youth service assemblage' and its disassembly and reassembly. As we do this we demonstrate the usefulness of assemblage as way of encountering the productivity of relations across components and avoiding an account that over-states the force or scope of 'policy'. The paper concludes that by analysing in terms of assemblage, new challenges for thinking about politics emerge, in particular the limits of thinking in terms of a resistant political subject and the need to engage ambiguity.

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, policy-making in post-industrial nations has been widely characterised in terms of austerity. Yet this provides an insufficient basis for an understanding of social policy-making at this time. I argue for a 'late neoliberal' phase distinguished by a change in the regime governing the emergence of public service formations. I work from the example of UK policy discourse to demonstrate how in late neoliberalism austerity, social investment and localism operate in conjunction. Beyond fiscal constraint, this conjunction serves to move social policy on from 'quasi-marketisation' to reflect more closely the logic and forms of finance capital. The effects of this change can be seen in the reconstitution of 'value' in public services, how capital is distributed, and in the subjectivating force of policy. Ultimately late neoliberalism serves to sustain and reproduce familiar relations of domination.

Revising rationality: the use of 'Nudge' approaches in neoliberal education policyThis article argues that the concept of rationality is undergoing significant revision in UK education policy making, influenced by developments in several academic fields. This article focuses on the take up of behavioural economics in policy as one aspect of this revision of the concept of rationality, discussing how this has happened and its implications. Framed by a wider debate regarding the significance of a 'crisis' in neoliberal approaches to social change, behavioural economics suggests that a reliance on rational choice is insufficient and individuals need to be 'nudged' to make good choices. This revision and its impact on the subject of policy, the policy maker and policy technologies are examined, and the discussion is supported by two illustrations from school choice and youth service policy texts from the 2000s. The potential use of 'nudge' theory in education is also considered with respect to the Conservative-Liberal Democrat government's use of behavioural economics. In conclusion, we argue that the use of these ideas in policy, alongside others, marks a revision of the neoliberal idea of a rational chooser as the aim of policy making, of which education policy sociology should take account.

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Public services operate increasingly through financialising policy technologies in which governments and other funders ‘invest’ in programmes and interventions that can measure and monetise their social impact. This article investigates this shift towards social investment, focusing on the UK government’s flagship youth programme the National Citizen Service and UK government Treasury guidance, particularly the ‘Green Book’ (HM Treasury, 2018). We argue that policy on social value operates in conjunction with new approaches to impact measurement creating a ‘social investment machine’. The machine operates through innovations in policy alongside ‘evaluation entrepreneurship’ at a programme level to reposition young people as the subjects of investment with imagined futures as economically productive citizens, while their data becomes the currency of investment. This shift towards financialisation in policy also promotes ‘high volume’ services, which in contrast to universal welfare services obscure the structural inequalities that shape young people’s lives.