The Promise and Deception of Participation in Welfare Services for Unemployed Young People

Abstract

This study examined the role of welfare services in the participative citizenship of young people under 30 years of age outside the labour market. Thematic content analysis of the government’s white papers regarding participation policies, as well as participatory action research projects in two Finnish towns, were used to identify factors that enable or hinder participation for this group of service users. The paradigm of participation was critically examined with reference to the theoretical framework of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s “dialectic of Enlightenment”, which proposes the parallel existence of the promise and the deception of Enlightenment. The results indicated that user participation holds the potential to promote democratization, consolidation, and qualitative improvements in services, especially by valuing experience-based knowledge and enabling the growing political citizenship of young people. However, the promises of the paradigm of participation can turn toward deception when applied as a managerialistic workfare instrument to control young people’s behaviour and can even deepen marginalization by focusing only on their absence from workforce participation. The ambivalent role of social sciences and social work as agencies of Enlightenment in developing participation technologies is also discussed.

‘The will to not be empowered (according to your rules)’: Resistance in Finnish participatory social policy

“…Närhi and Kokkonen (2014) have shown how the participatory ethos merges democratic and consumerist rationales, which creates contradictory participant-roles for the service users (also Meriluoto, 2018). Furthermore, based on recent research indicating how many participatory initiatives have failed in their promise to amplify the service users’ voice in the service system (Matthies et al, 2018; Meriluoto, 2017), Finnish researchers have also come to interpret welfare users’ participation as a tool of government, aimed primarily at producing more self-sustained citizens and building legitimation for decisions already made (Matthies, 2017; Meriluoto, 2016). Leemann and Hämäläinen (2016) even propose that a particularity of Finnish participatory schemes is their strong emphasis on the experiential aspect of participation.…”