Researching governmentalities through ethnography: the case of Australian welfare reforms and programs for single parents

Abstract

In this article I argue that the spaces of freedom and constraint that personalized planning programs targeted at Australian single parents open up and close down are distinctly different when viewed from a top-down perspective of governmental rationalities as compared to a bottom-up perspective, or what Foucault referred to as the 'witches' brew' of actual practices. Around 90% of single parents with dependent children in Australia are single mothers, and around 80% of these single mothers receive single rate Parenting Payment. Changes to this payment (and its precursor, Sole Parent Pension) over the last 25 years have recognized this gendered composition by focusing on issues of mothering and the intensive activities of care that continue to be carried out most commonly by mothers. While the existing literature argues that the 2005 Welfare to Work package sharply broke with this practice by not focusing on gender and the unique features of mothers' life courses, I find that these considerations have remained a key part of the 'witches' brew' of actual practices. Given this finding, a key argument is that studies of governmentalities which combine sociologies of actual practices together with studies of official governmental rationalities can make important critical contributions to understanding the heterogeneous logics and practices through which welfare reform policies occur.

“Activated, but Stuck”: Applying a Critical Occupational Lens to Examine the Negotiation of Long-Term Unemployment in Contemporary Socio-Political Contexts

“…The implications of this stuckness encompassed experiencing a life "on hold", pervasive uncertainty, unwanted dependency, feelings of isolation and depression, struggles to maintain a positive self and social identity, and fears regarding the future. As such, the findings add to the emerging body of work using a "bottom up" or "street level" approach to expose the limits of neoliberal governance [18,25,45]. In particular, this study exposes the limits of contemporary approaches to defining and managing long-term unemployment which focus on activation in one occupational domain-in this instance, activities framed as essential for managing and remediating the situation of joblessness.…”

“…Even if such approaches may foster taking up the subjectivity of an "activated" job seeker, they fail to address, and often obscure, the diversity of socio-politically shaped barriers that have emerged in this and previous studies, including discrimination tied to characteristics such as age, criminal history, or being an injured worker; the dissolution of standard employment relationships and the rise of precarious forms of work; inadequate public transportation systems; and limited housing options for those with restricted incomes [15,25,31,37]. Taking age as one example, there is a substantial body of evidence pointing to ageism as a factor contributing to long-term unemployment and age-based discrimination in hiring, training and retention practices cannot be overcome through individual activation [54][55][56].…”

“…Indeed, while not explicitly informed by a critical occupational perspective, research examining long-term unemployment for single parents underscores the need to explore occupations outside formal labor force activities. For example, Brady's [25] ethnographic work has highlighted the importance of examining how service providers actively negotiate governmental guidelines and enact discretion to help clients fit activity expectations and paid work within mothering practices and identities. Gazso and McDaniel's comparative study concluded that "both Canadian and American lone mothers' experiences of neo-liberal support policies can, in a largely counter-intuitive matter, expose them to greater rather than less economic insecurity and inequality" [16] (p. 369).…”

Governing customers? Integrating customer focus and compliance in the urban governance context

“…However, I do not consider these to be generic processes that operate in the same way everywhere. Rather, as I discuss in more detail below, I hold that these processes develop and play out in contingent ways in different contexts as they intertwine with existing ways of thinking, acting and exercising power that always already exist there (Brady, 2011(Brady, , 2016Li, 2007b). Therefore, I will turn in the next section to how governmentality scholars have conceptualised the domains of compliance/regulation and urban governance respectively (as these constitute the core empirical focus of this thesis) as well as how advanced liberalism and consumerist thinking have affected them.…”

“…For, unlike archival methods, which focus exclusively on texts, ethnographic methods such as interviews and participant observation allow the researcher to examine how the discourses and rationalities embodied in texts are mobilised within and intersect with the complex situations and relations in which governing actually takes place (Brady, 2016;Li, 2007a;McKee, 2009;Smith, 2005). Furthermore, ethnography provides a sensitivity to how governing is shaped, not only by broad governmental discourses/rationalities, but also by features of the social, political and institutional contexts in which it is enacted (Brady, 2011(Brady, , 2014(Brady, , 2016McKee, 2009). It is precisely the situatedness of ethnography that makes this possible, for it exposes the researcher to 'the specificity of a certain place', 'the weight of its problems' and 'the density and polyvalence of the experiences that one finds in it' (Collier, 2011: 33).…”