Introduction
The concept of ‘responsibilisation’ has become a familiar way to understand transformations in contemporary social policies (Rose, Reference Rose1996a). The idea that citizens should take a bigger role in reducing welfare state dependency, improving standards of public health, and creating safer neighbourhoods has also become a staple of governmental discourse in countries such as the Netherlands (Peeters, Reference Peeters2013a, Reference Peeters2013b), Canada, the US, Sweden, Italy (Verhoeven and Tonkens, Reference Verhoeven and Tonkens2013), and the UK (Perri 6 et al., Reference Perri Six and Leyland2010). However, responsibilisation threatens to become a catch-all phrase, incorporating a neo-liberal ideal of a larger individual responsibility for self-care and for free choice in the marketplace of welfare services, as well as a communitarian/republican ideal of a larger responsibility for the social through participation in communities, volunteer works, (local) government, or schools (Hurenkamp et al., Reference Hurenkamp, Tonkens and Duyvendak2012). This article aims to bring some conceptual clarity by distinguishing responsibilisation of people who are, in principle, willing and able to play their role as responsible citizens, and of people who, either because of unwillingness or inability, fail to spontaneously show responsibility with regard to their self-care (Gradin Franzén, Reference Gradin Franzén2014).
Responsibilisation is often associated with ‘governing at a distance’ (Rose and Miller, Reference Rose and Miller1992). However, when we focus on government efforts to ‘manufacture civility’ (Peeters, Reference Peeters2014) rather than simply transfer tasks, literature shows a large variety of techniques that intervene in a more up close and personal way. Social marketing of healthy lifestyles, rearranging the choice architecture in canteens and supermarkets, rehabilitation programmes for juvenile offenders, outreach support to individuals in need of care, or mandatory activation strategies in welfare state policies all indicate that efforts to make people act ‘responsible’ involve a wide variety of techniques that emphasise governing up close and personal, psychological triggers, socialisation, and mandatory participation (e.g. Goddard, Reference Goddard2012; Cantillon and Van Lancker, Reference Cantillon and van Lancker2013; Phoenix and Kelly, Reference Phoenix and Kelly2013). This analysis is preceded by a theoretical framework based on Foucault's notions of ‘governmentality’ (Foucault, Reference Foucault2007) and ‘biopolitics’ (Foucault, Reference Foucault2008), and by an analysis of the responsibilisation discourse. I conclude with outlining the concept of ‘behavioural power’ to gain a fuller understanding of the way ‘the conduct of free individuals is shaped in the direction of civility’ (Rose, Reference Rose1999: 73).
Late-modern governmentality
An analysis of techniques of government is, in Foucauldian terms, an analysis of governmentality (Foucault, Reference Foucault2007). We can understand responsibilisation as part of an advanced liberal governmentality, which seeks to work ‘upon the ways in which individuals regulate their own behavior to ensure this is consonant with the interests of the state’ (Pierson, Reference Pierson2004: 75).Footnote 1 The objective is to make individuals conduct and evaluate themselves into alignment with political objectives (Rose, Reference Rose1996b: 155). To this end, governmental techniques work on both the level of the individual and the level of the population. ‘Anatomic’ techniques focus on individuals and the individual body, as exemplified by the disciplinary power exerted over people in schools, prisons, hospitals, and factories. ‘Biological’ techniques treat humans as part of a population. Interventions take place on the level of the entire population, where humans are subject to regulations and policies that aim to mould them into productive elements of an economical order and manageable elements of a public order (comprising such topics as public health, crime, and welfareFootnote 2). Through the two tiers of anatomo-politics and bio-politics, governments aim ‘to shape conduct by working through our desires, aspirations, interests and beliefs’ (Dean, Reference Dean1999: 11) to be healthy, successful, and safe.
Governmentality in liberal states emphasises voluntary obedience over coercion. Liberal governments are concerned with ‘getting people to act’ (ibid.: 119) in specific, productive ways, for instance by promoting an educated labour market and by providing social insurances against poverty (e.g. Ewald, Reference Ewald, Burchell, Gordon and Miller1991). Moreover, individuals must also come to recognise themselves as free and responsible individuals that shape their own lives through conscious choices about their future and their potential (Rose, Reference Rose1999: 68). Liberal techniques are not limited to economic policies, but can be applied to any domain in which governments seek to use freedom as an instrument of political power. Instead of discipline, liberal governments pursue techniques of ‘security’ that allow ‘freedom of circulation’ (Foucault, Reference Foucault2007: 49) and stress prevention over correction. Instead of state control, they pursue mechanisms of self-regulation that make people act ‘responsibly’ of their own accord. Techniques to control and manipulate behaviour are built into people's daily lives to mould their conduct, such as surveillance in the public domain, designing policies that ensure high levels of economic productivity (education, infrastructure, health care, etc.), and the implication of non-state experts and other actors (psychologists, planners, social workers, entrepreneurs) to manage social life.
The idea of ‘individual responsibility’ is at the core of liberal government: ‘[. . .] a unitary, responsible self-agent must be supposed to exist because it is intellectually, juridically, and morally necessary’ (Douglas, 2005: 220). In its various conceptions, individual responsibility has been used as the prime mechanism for demarcating the role of government. In a liberal governmentality, the responsibility of the individual and the responsibility of the state are tightly linked. Changes in conceptions of individual responsibility legitimise changes in governmentality. Ewald's (Reference Ewald, Baker and Simon2002) historical analysis on shifting interpretations about individual responsibility provides a useful framework to understand how each interpretation is accompanied by a specific governmental intervention repertoire,Footnote 3 as described below.
Responsibility paradigm
Closely related to the emerging nineteenth century night-watchman state is the notion that ‘one person cannot transfer to another the burden of what happens to him’ (Ewald, Reference Ewald, Baker and Simon2002: 274). In accordance with this paradigm, the state refrained from intervening in society to correct inequality, illness, or poverty. It did, however, lay the foundations of a criminal justice apparatus which had its philosophical basis in the assumption of individual responsibility and the attribution of individual guilt.
Solidarity paradigm
The twentieth century welfare state was justified by defining the limits of which risks could reasonably be seen as beyond the control or responsibility of an individual. Poverty and illness were now seen as consequences of externalities, such as economic production processes and epidemic diseases, which were to be compensated through collective insurance and social security (Ewald, Reference Ewald, Baker and Simon2002: 280).
Preventative paradigm
Late-modern risks, whether in the form of technological and environmental risks or in the form of social risks (such as welfare diseases), cannot be contained through the mechanisms of the welfare state (Beck, Reference Beck1986). At the end of the twentieth century, a new paradigm emerges in which ‘[t]he problem is no longer so much to multiply the responsibility for risk and to organize the solvency of those who are liable through insurance, but rather to prevent certain risks from being taken’ (Ewald, Reference Ewald, Baker and Simon2002: 296). The establishment of a link between individual behaviour and collective problems triggers an interpretation of responsibility in which responsible behaviour is something that can and should be trained and manufactured. Individual responsibility is not assumed to be naturally present in all people – as is the case in the responsibility paradigm – nor is it assumed to be completely out of reach.
The preventative paradigm is the governmental response to more recent social changes. The sour fruits of progress (cf. Beck, Reference Beck1986; Giddens, Reference Giddens2009) have sparked the emergence of welfare diseases, new forms of insecurity, concerns about the financial viability of the welfare state, and climate change – to name just a few. In contrast to most of modernity, we are now facing a conflict with the systems we have created ourselves to improve our standard of living (Palsson et al., 2013: 8). Giddens (Reference Giddens1991) associates late-modernity with the end of the age of emancipation and the beginning of the age of lifestyle: instead of a struggle for universal protection by the welfare state, reflection on proper behaviour takes centre stage. Human choices are perceived as inherently problematic and the classic tools of government – institution building, legislation, communication – fail to intervene on this level of social life. In a quest for new forms of social control, governments are increasingly tapping into people's potential for self-government and behavioural change.
Developments in public health policy provide an interesting case in point. A recent study of Dutch public health policy reconstructs the governmental response to the rise of welfare diseases in terms of the dominant policy techniques (Peeters and Schuilenburg, Reference Peeters and Schuilenburg2016). During the 1970s and 1980s, unhealthy habits such as smoking and drinking were mainly tackled through rational persuasion (i.e. objective information campaigns so citizens could make rational choices). The 1990s saw the rise of more regulatory mechanisms, such as taxation and age limits, which were designed as a supportive measure next to informing the public. Since the turn of the century, however, government abandoned the idea that a healthy lifestyle was purely a matter of rational choice. Instead, it focused on the psychological mechanisms of individual choice and used techniques such as ‘nudging’ (Thaler and Sunstein, Reference Thaler and Sunstein2009) to alter behaviour.
Responsibilisation as a transfer from state to society
Within the preventative paradigm, the notion of ‘responsibilisation’ has become a powerful indictor of contemporary governmental efforts to reframe responsibility and include citizens in the governing of late-modern social risks (Rose, Reference Rose1996a: 331). In its original neoliberal conception, responsibilisation is the process of transferring responsibility from one actor to another, usually from state agencies to individual social actors (Wakefield and Fleming, Reference Wakefield and Fleming2009: 276). This definition of responsibilisation rests on two specific assumptions, which are described below.
Linking personal and social responsibility
In the context of late-modern problems, social actors are to be included in the pursuit of public value and the mitigation of risks (Juhila et al., Reference Juhila, Raitakari and Hall2017: 6). They are expected to self-regulate former state-controlled tasks (privatisation) or they are mobilised for the realisation of policy goals (e.g. Miller and Rose, Reference Miller and Rose1990; Donzelot, Reference Donzelot, Burchell, Gordon and Miller1991; O'Malley, Reference O'Malley, Barry, Osborne and Rose1996). In the context of social policy, citizens and social actors – parents, consumers, planners, investors, managers, educators, etc. – are implicated as partners ‘in a game of collective self-management and modulated social adjustment’ (Walters, Reference Walters2004: 35). Schools monitor their pupils for purposes of wellbeing and crime prevention (e.g. Garland, Reference Garland1996), food producers adapt pre-made meals to fight obesity (e.g. Peeters, Reference Peeters2013a), and private security companies complement public efforts (e.g. O‘Connor et al., 2008). Government no longer acts through grand plans, bureaucracies or institution-building, but 1) organises the conditions (regulations, standards, inspections) within which social actors can assume responsibility; 2) works together with social organisations and experts through contracts, covenants and public-private assemblages; and 3) stimulates citizens to use their capacity to ‘judge themselves and act upon themselves to make themselves better than they are’ (Rose, Reference Rose2001: 18).
Assuming the potential of self-governance
Bearing the responsibility for reducing risks – such as illness, criminal behaviour, addiction, and unemployment – is thought of as an individual matter. For instance, welfare state reforms shift the logic of individual entitlement to ‘no rights without responsibilities’ (Giddens, Reference Giddens1998) – such as a commitment to life-long learning, and a willingness to relocate or re-train to find work (Kemshall, Reference Kemshall2002). In public health, individuals are expected to internalise healthy lifestyle choices (Rose, Reference Rose2001: 6). And delinquents in rehabilitation programmes are expected to engage in introspection and take full responsibility for their lives and their actions (Garland, Reference Garland1997; Phoenix and Kelly, Reference Phoenix and Kelly2013). This characteristic of responsibilisation has been referred to as ‘the death of the social’ (Rose, Reference Rose1996a; O'Malley, Reference O'Malley1999), implying that social risks are less explained through social circumstances and managed through welfare, and more perceived as a matter of individual responsibility: ‘Disadvantage and exclusion are re-framed as matters of choice and not of structural processes’ (Kemshall, Reference Kemshall2002: 43). Responsibilisation implies ‘expecting and assuming the reflexive moral capacities of various social actors’ (Shamir, Reference Shamir2008: 7; cf. Rose, Reference Rose2000: 334). The responsible citizen is a ‘homo prudens’ (Adams, Reference Adams1995): ‘not to engage in risk avoidance constitutes a failure to take care of the self’ (Hunt, Reference Hunt, Ericson and Doyle2003: 182). Responsibilisation is the process by which individuals are made to recognise that social risks, such as unemployment, illness, and poverty, are their own responsibility and a matter of ‘self-care’ (Lemke, Reference Lemke2001).
Responsibilisation as the construction of civility
However, not all people will spontaneously express the desired self-governance. In the literature on responsibilisation, it is understood that a different repertoire of techniques must be deployed for these cases. Rose (Reference Rose, Rose, Barry and Osborne1996c: 60) has referred to this as ‘ethical reconstruction’, which involves training, counselling, community action, and empowerment, or punishment for those deemed unwilling or incapable of taking responsibility. However, early theorists of responsibilisation have not elaborated much on this topic. Only more recently have scholars begun to identify and analyse the specific techniques that governments deploy to actively construct responsible attitudes. Moving beyond a strictly neo-liberal interpretation of responsibilisation, we have seen the emergence of a more interventionist governmentality.
For instance, efforts to rehabilitate criminal offenders and support people with personal problems are pursued through techniques that carefully try to manufacture responsibility (e.g. Goddard, Reference Goddard2012; Peeters, Reference Peeters2013a; Phoenix and Kelly, Reference Phoenix and Kelly2013). Furthermore, the recent emergence of psychological-behavioural techniques such as nudging is based on the premise that people do not act rationally but are driven by psychological processes that can be manipulated through choice architecture (Thaler and Sunstein, Reference Thaler and Sunstein2009). And new welfare state policies introduce incentives for people to behave more responsibly: in exchange for access to welfare support, social security, or social housing, citizens are required to comply with certain conditions such as arranging social support, mandatory re-education, or house rules (e.g. Cantillon and Van Lancker, Reference Cantillon and van Lancker2013).
Responsibilisation is, therefore, not necessarily a simple transfer of tasks from state to social actors. It can also imply the construction of responsibility where it does not exist yet. This builds upon the idea that there are two sides to responsibilisation (Van Houdt and Schinkel, Reference Houdt and Schinkel2014). One the one hand, it assumes ‘a pre-existing autonomous citizen, a citizen already properly socialized, only to be mobilized and called into active service’ (ibid.: 61). On the other hand, there are citizens that require socialisation and the mobilisation of the state ‘to act-very-close in the homes, minds and bodies of people’ (ibid.). This second form of responsibilisation can be defined as manufacturing attitudes and manipulating choices to make citizens assume responsibility for self-care in accordance with governmental objectives.
Even though there is already a considerable amount of empirical studies on governmental efforts to construct responsibility, there is a lack of theory-building. By grouping both forms of responsibilisation together, our understanding of their fundamental differences is clouded. Responsibilisation as ‘the construction of civility’ is underdeveloped in terms of conceptualising the variety of techniques that governments use. In the following, I present the analysis of a literature review of contemporary welfare state policies that can be linked to this latter form of responsibilisation.Footnote 4 The results are divided into three types of techniques to get a clearer understanding of how responsibility is manufactured in domains of health, welfare, and security.
A. Reciprocal governance
A first type of techniques is situated in the context of the development of the classic welfare state into a ‘social investment state’ (e.g. Giddens, Reference Giddens1998; Taylor-Gooby, Reference Taylor-Gooby2008; Morel et al., Reference Morel, Palier and Palme2012; Pintelon et al., Reference Pintelon, Cantillon, van den Bosch and Whelan2013), which shifts attention from providing protection against externalities, such as poverty, to the way citizens use the opportunities the welfare state gives them. Through work incentives, life-long learning, training, and early childhood protection, governments try to activate citizens socially and improve their employability instead of merely providing a social safety net. Passive benefits such as cash transfers are cut back in favour of social investments that improve citizens’ opportunities rather than compensate them for harm (Brettschneider, Reference Brettschneider2008: 20).Footnote 5 The social investment state's discourse emphasises responsibility, active citizenship, participation, and self-efficacy – notions that make clear what kind of behaviour is expected from citizens. The state backs up this objective by making welfare state entitlements conditional on the behaviour of recipients. This ‘quid pro quo’ logic (Cantillon and Van Lancker, Reference Cantillon and van Lancker2012) implies a form of reciprocity in exchange for access to social services: mandatory job applications in exchange for social security, commitment to behavioural change in exchange for family support, strict house rules in exchange for social housing, and financial responsibility in exchange for debt relief (e.g. Peeters, Reference Peeters2014). The key element of this technique is the introduction of both positive and negative incentives in welfare schemes to elicit different choices or different behavioural patterns.
An example of a ‘socially useful reciprocity’ (Corra, Reference Corra, Bosselaar and Vonk2013: 63; my translation) is volunteer work or community service, through which recipients of social security can prove themselves capable of taking responsibility and learn how to be a good citizen (Warburton and Smith, Reference Warburton and Smith2003). Failure to meet government-set conditions can lead to a partial or complete cut in benefits. Recent social assistance reforms in England and the Netherlands are imprinted with this logic. They are imbued with the notion that social support is, above all, the personal responsibility of citizens. This includes the responsibility of disabled and elderly people to arrange the necessary support they need from friends, family, and neighbours. Only if that proves insufficient, government and professional support enter the picture (Verhoeven and Tonkens, Reference Verhoeven and Tonkens2013). Across the OECD-countries, this contractual form of reciprocity is used in a variety of areas (Goodin, Reference Goodin2002): as a mandatory condition for access to professional support for problematic debts, substance abuse, domestic violence or parenting, people are required to alter the behavioural patterns that got them into trouble in the first place (Tonkens and Verplanke, Reference Tonkens and Verplanke2013). If people fall back into their old habits, support may be terminated.
B. Training and treatment
A second type of techniques targets people who usually do not ask for care of welfare support, but are – according to professional assessment – in need of support to alter self-destructive behaviour, to rehabilitate after a prison sentence, to increase employability, or to become a functional family. The core element of this technique is the training of people with the assumed potential of responsibility. Interventions are usually up close and personal and organised at ‘the margins of the welfare state’ (Juhila et al., Reference Juhila, Raitakari and Hall2017).
In social security policy, welfare recipients are targeted for welfare-to-work and work-for-the-dole programmes which have become common in such diverse countries as the US (Korteweg, Reference Korteweg, Marston and McDonald2006), Australia (Bessant, Reference Bessant2000), and the Netherlands (Kampen et al., Reference Kampen, Elshout and Tonkens2013). This includes interventions towards groups such as (partially) disabled, single parents, long-term unemployed, low-skilled workers, and adolescents. This can take the form of ‘job clubs’ in which people receive assessments and training for job applications (Korteweg, Reference Korteweg, Marston and McDonald2006) or the form of personal assistance programmes for people to acquire basic skills or deal with their personal and emotional issues (McDonald and Marston, Reference McDonald and Marston2005). There are special programmes for people with a longer distance to the labour market, such as long-term unemployed or people with disabling personal problems (alcoholism, for instance), designed to render a person ‘job ready’ (ibid.). The discretionary space of case management is used to ‘shape the dispositions, attributes and aspirations of unemployed people’ (Marston et al., Reference Marston, Larsen and McDonald2005: 142). Case managers use a variety of strategies to work upon their clients’ attitudes, including motivation, moral instruction (counselling, punctuality, etc.), and coercion (penalisation, surveillance, mandatory appointments, etc.).
Examples in security policiesFootnote 6 include treatment in detention for juvenile delinquents and repeat offenders, early detection of risk adolescents (e.g. Keymolen and Broeders, Reference Keymolen and Broeders2013), intensive probation programmes (e.g. Kemshall, Reference Kemshall2002), and outreach family support programmes (e.g. Welsh and Farrington, Reference Welsh and Farrington2006). As fieldwork in rehabilitation practices points out, efforts often revolve around a tension between the objective to make people self-governing and responsible on the one hand, and the acknowledgement that they require discipline and obedience on the other hand (Gradin Franzén, Reference Gradin Franzén2014). Furthermore, assuming responsibility for one's life is far from a purely rational decision. Even for people without personality disorders (which constitute a large part of the prison population), how they view their own responsibility for what happens to them is a psychological process (Maruna, Reference Maruna2004) that requires active manipulation by professionals (Fox, Reference Fox1999).
Whereas crime prevention focuses on risk citizens, welfare focuses on at-risk citizens – even though this distinction is often blurred in practice. People who pose a threat for their own health or wellbeing are not merely left to take responsibility for themselves, but are approached through outreach interventions. Of particular interest for government are families, since they are the locus of childhood risks from a preventative perspective and of childhood opportunities from a social investment perspective (Parton, Reference Parton2006). ‘Whole family’ approaches focus on good parenting and aim to identify and help children growing up in a dysfunctional family (Morris and Featherstone, Reference Morris and Featherstone2010) – be it a socially excluded family (unemployment, low income, poor housing, family breakdown, bad health) or anti-social family (criminal or otherwise socially burdensome) (Murray and Barnes, Reference Murray and Barnes2010). Other examples of interventions are rehab support for addicts, protection for victims of domestic violence, and weight loss support for obese children (Peeters, Reference Peeters2013a). Through an ‘assertive and persistent’ attitude, professionals try to get people to accept support and be there during the entire process towards more self-care (Batty and Flint, Reference Batty and Flint2012: 346).
C. Choice engineering
A third type of technique aims to influence people's behaviour by working upon the psychological mechanisms underlying the choices they make. Its most prominent application is in the field of public health, which has responded to the rise in welfare diseases by emphasising endogenous health threats – those caused by lifestyle choices – over the exogenous threats that triggered the late nineteenth century public hygiene movement and twentieth century health care systems (e.g. Petersen, Reference Petersen, Petersen and Bunton1997; Wilkinson and Marmot, Reference Wilkinson and Marmot2003; Pomerleau and McKee, Reference Pomerleau and McKee2005; Keller, Reference Keller2008; Mackenbach and Van der Maas, Reference Mackenbach and van der Maas2008). This has made the responsibility of people for their own health a focal point of policymaking. However, it also urged governments to influence the way people make their ‘free’ choices. Manipulating choice architecture, social marketing of healthy lifestyles, and social shaming of smokers are among the techniques that favour psychological and emotional mechanisms over rational or instructive ones. It marks a break with the previously held policy assumption of man as a ‘rational actor’ and an acknowledgement of the fact that most of our daily behaviour is based on instinctive and emotional rather than deliberative and logical thinking (Kahneman, Reference Kahneman2011). Crawshaw (Reference Crawshaw2013) speaks of a ‘behavioural turn’ in public health methodologies, and Peeters and Schuilenburg (Reference Peeters and Schuilenburg2016) speak of the birth of ‘mindpolitics’.
The concept of ‘nudging’ provides a theoretical touchstone for policymakers (Thaler and Sunstein, Reference Thaler and Sunstein2009). Nudging is intervening in the physical and socio-cultural ‘choice architecture’ in which people make their daily decisions regarding exercising, drinking, smoking, and eating. The assumption is that humans behave less like a rational ‘homo economicus’ and more in accordance with group pressure, impulses, desires, and emotions (cf. Thaler, Reference Thaler2000; Grüne-Yanoff and Hansson, Reference Grüne-Yanoff and Hansson2009). The way society is structured – fast food on every street corner, motorised transportation, an economy of non-physical labour, etc. – makes it difficult to live a healthy life. Therefore, government sees it as its responsibility to ‘make the healthy choice the easy choice’ (Peeters and Schuilenburg, Reference Peeters and Schuilenburg2016). A typical ‘nudge’ is placing healthy products at eye-level of supermarket shelves or at the beginning of the aisle in office canteens, or reducing plate sizes in self-serve restaurants (Kallbekken and Sælen, Reference Kallbekken and Sælen2013). Among governmental nudge-like interventions are ‘social marketing’ of a healthy lifestyle (i.e. promoting healthy choices as easy, fun, and cool), design the living environment to separate smokers from non-smokers, reduce availability of tobacco and alcohol, and de-normalise smoking through normative health campaigns. Governments also cooperate with social partners to reduce portion sizes of microwave meals and offer healthier products in vending machines.
Failure of self-care requires compensation – not by imposing external control, but by using psychological manipulation to alter people's choices. Nudging is a form of governing at a distance and of promoting the ‘entrepreneurial self’ (Crawshaw, Reference Crawshaw2012), albeit with a twist. What sets choice engineering apart from the previously discussed techniques of behavioural power is that it is assumed to be impossible to construct individual responsibility. Instead, eliciting responsible behaviour requires permanent behavioural manipulation. Nudging targets the unconsciousness, whereas other techniques focus on making people more conscious of the decisions they make. Not the assumption of the rational actor, but that of a fundamentally irrational one lies at the foundation of choice engineering.
Conclusion: behavioural power
Responsibilisation can refer to the transfer of responsibilities from state agents to social actors. As such, it has become a standard element in critical analyses of neoliberalism's privatisation and welfare state retreat discourse. However, responsibilisation can also refer to a very distinct set of interventions. Where social actors do not take up their newly assigned task, complementary government interventions are necessary. This is especially the case when government appeals to the individual responsibility of citizens to take part in mitigating late-modern society's social problems, which range from welfare diseases to climate change and from public security to unnecessary welfare state expenditures. This second form of responsibilisation – the construction of civility – has been less clearly conceptualised than the transfer of state tasks to social actors. The aim of this article was to provide more conceptual clarity of the various techniques that make up the construction of civility through a literature review of contemporary welfare state policies.
In the previous pages, we have identified choice engineering, training and treatment, and reciprocal governance as the main techniques to make people lead a healthy life, to participate in society and economy, and to express self-care by working upon their willpower and willingness. These three techniques differ in the sense that they are targeted at three different interpretations of people's potential for responsible behaviour. Reciprocal governance focuses on control: it introduces ‘quid pro quo’ incentives and disincentives in welfare state schemes so rational actors will ‘voluntarily’ choose for compliance with government conditions for (continued) access to public services. Training and treatment stress the importance of care: providing support and structure for individuals and families as they are guided towards full and independent participation in society and economy. Finally, choice engineering opts for psychological interventions as it builds upon the premise that people are (in certain aspects) more driven by unconscious psychological triggers than rational choice.
What binds these three techniques together is their normative and interventionist outlook on ‘responsibility’. As a conceptual marker, I propose the term behavioural power to refer to governmental techniques that seek to realise behavioural change by working upon people's understanding of responsibility as a moral imperative and upon the rational or psychological mechanisms that constitute the choices they make and the attitudes they have, as described below.
Responsibility as a moral imperative
Individual responsibility is not understood as holding people accountable for their actions (as is the case under the aforementioned responsibility paradigm that underscores classic criminal justice) (cf. Hart, Reference Hart1968), but as a call to an active ex ante assessment of the possible consequences of our actions. This is responsibility as a virtue, which ‘emphasises acting in the present and preventing undesirable situations and events’ (Bovens, Reference Bovens1990: 35; translation RP). Under a preventative paradigm of government, individual responsibility is linked to social responsibility: people are made to understand that their individual actions and choices are not isolated from social problems, but intrinsically interconnected with them. Interventions are not meant to correct behaviour, but to make sure people do not err in the first place. Neither are they meant to expand rights and opportunities (as under the solidarity paradigm), but to influence the way people use their rights and opportunities in socially and economically useful ways.
Mindpolitics to manufacture responsibility
The mechanisms through which we – either consciously or unconsciously – make our choices are the object of intervention to manufacture responsible behaviour. In governmental terms, these are not mechanisms of juridical power (such as criminal law or social rights) or of disciplinary power, which seeks to deprive individuals of their freedom to choose (Foucault, Reference Foucault and Bouchard1976, Reference Foucault2004). Instead, we can understand them as extension of ‘biopolitics’, or the management of social relations, such as the government of children, souls, communities, families, and the sick (Foucault, Reference Foucault, Dreyfus and Rabinow1983: 221). Techniques of behavioural power focus on how we make decisions. They can, therefore, be seen as ‘mindpolitics’ (Peeters and Schuilenburg, Reference Peeters and Schuilenburg2016) – the advanced liberal version of biopolitics that stresses the opportunity of choice, but links it to economic and social objectives such as productivity and welfare state expenditures. Behavioural manipulation is not imposed by an external force such as imprisonment, regulation or surveillance, but is elicited through people's ‘internal’ triggers for behaviour. Techniques of behavioural power – reciprocity, unsolicited care, nudging – function as ‘pedagogies of government’ (Pykett, Reference Pykett2012).
An analysis on the level of techniques of government – one that transcends the boundaries of different policy domains – can lead to a fuller understanding of patterns in contemporary government. The concept of behavioural power adds a deeper understanding of responsibilisation and looks at the efforts to manufacture responsibility that go beyond a mere transfer of tasks. Responsibilisation is often associated with ‘governing at a distance’ (Rose and Miller, Reference Rose and Miller1992), but our analysis suggests this is only half the story. While it may hold truth when it comes to citizens that are already ‘properly socialized’ (Van Houdt and Schinkel, Reference Houdt and Schinkel2014: 61), it is an unsatisfactory term to describe the governmental approach towards citizens who have yet to be subjected to socialisation. The moral coalescence of welfare state dependency, poor health, and anti-social behaviour with moral failure is not an argument for rolling back the state, but for new forms of intervention.
The flipside of the neoliberal ‘governing from a distance’ is the piercing gaze of the engineers of human choice, attitude, and self-care. These engineers can be found on both the level of policymaking as on street-level. In this article, I have mainly looked at responsibilisation from a policy-analytical perspective, but the impact policies have on street-level workers and citizen-state encounters seems considerable (e.g. Liebenberg et al., Reference Liebenberg, Ungar and Ikeda2015). In the neoliberal conception of responsibilisation, social actors are assumed to take over government responsibilities. The forces of the free market – guided by regulation – take care of the rest. Responsibilisation as behavioural power, however, requires the cooperation of social actors and street-level workers. In many ways, their adoption of this strategy follows the same logic as the responsibilisation of citizens: either they voluntarily make it their own, or they are incentivised to do so through government intervention. A common tactic is the use of performance contracts for social workers, which stipulate targets and commitments in exchange for government funding. Furthermore, we see various new forms of professionalism at the local level, such as outreaching social work, social support consultants, and enforcement of conditional cash transfers (Peeters, Reference Peeters2013a; Juhila et al., Reference Juhila, Raitakari and Hall2017). The emergence of this new repertoire is more than an implementation issue – it reflects the move of the traditional welfare state into a more preventative paradigm, where new risks and new vulnerabilities are tackled through a new constellation of policies and practices. Here too, a new ‘welfare mix’ is being constructed (Ascoli and Ranci, Reference Ascoli and Ranci2002) – not of the governance of privatised welfare, but of manufacturing responsibility.
