Over several decades Liberal-National Governments have encouraged Australian Public Service (APS) employers to uphold managerial prerogative by offering individual employment arrangements to employees. During the period of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Morrison Liberal-National Government’s Workplace Bargaining Policy reinforced this agenda. In place of collective bargaining, APS agency heads were encouraged to determine pay rises and new employment conditions for employees using Section 24 of the Public Service Act (PS Act) 1999. Workplace determinations did not need to be negotiated with public sector unions and some 85,500 employees across 57 APS agencies, or approximately 63% of the APS workforce, had accepted pay increases via workplace determinations by 31 December 2020. The widespread adoption of workplace determinations in the APS poses significant challenges for public sector unions and for the future of APS collective bargaining.

In liberal welfare systems, social security policy has been increasingly shifting towards conditionality and individualisation (Knotz, 2019). It is within this context that failure to meet the set conditions becomes personal rather than systemic. This has been enabled by policy discourses that construct poverty and unemployment as the result of personal failure and poor social behaviour. While this area of study over emphasises ‘the constraints imposed by discourse’ (Bacchi, 2000: 55), alternative discourses are often developed. This paper draws on ethnographic research investigating the development of self-reliant groups (SRGs) in Scotland. SRGs are small groups of women supporting each other in creating opportunities for personal development. We find that the process of involvement and sharing of experiences between women at the forefront of welfare reform led to the development of a counter public sphere. Yet, the experience doesn’t move fully towards actions for transformative social change.

Active labour market policy (ALMP) reforms have fundamentally changed welfare states over the last decades. Their objectives are quite diverse: workfare reforms have increased conditionality and sanctioning of benefits, while enabling reforms have extended education and training opportunities for the unemployed. Little is known about the political discourse on ALMP reforms. We investigate how the individual unemployed person is portrayed in ALMP reforms via a comparative coding analysis of parliamentary debates on labour market reforms that took place in Germany in 2003 (workfare) and in 2016 (enabling). Our results indicate that compared to enabling reforms the individual unemployed is less important in the framing of workfare reforms but more often blamed. Party characteristics matter: parties on the left more often point to the deservingness of the unemployed. However, when the social democratic party in government introduced a workfare reform they used blaming of unemployed persons as a framing strategy.

Employees of the public employment services (PES) are street-level bureaucrats who shape activation policy on the ground. This paper examines how PES staff use enhanced discretion in an innovation project carried out by the German Federal Employment Agency. Applying a bottom-up perspective, we reconstruct PES employees’ logic of action and the dilemmas they face in improving counselling and placement services. According to our findings, placement staff use enhanced discretion to promote more individualised support and an adequate matching of jobseekers and employers. The use of discretion is framed by organisational norms and reward mechanisms and by the current labour market situation. Our analyses are based on qualitative interviews and group discussions with placement staff.

L’objet du travail est de montrer l’intérêt d’une application à la psychiatrie du concept de normativité, développé initialement dans le cadre général de la médecine par G. Canguilhem. Méthodologiquement, c’est une recherche de philosophie appliquée. La médecine recourt à diverses disciplines pour produire des déterminations à sa pratique, – d’où la terminologie plurielle et équivoque de « sciences médicales ». Il n’est donc pas illégitime, à certaines conditions, de produire une recherche philosophique sur la médecine. À partir d’une lecture de Canguilhem, nous avons tâché d’expliciter le concept de normativité en ce qui concerne la maladie dans sa dimension organique. Ce concept détermine la nature de la différence axiologique entre le normal et le pathologique. En introduisant les notions de valeur et de finalité, il se montre fécond à orienter la pratique clinique médicale, par-delà les objectivations scientifiques et technologiques. Nous avons proposé d’appliquer ce concept à la notion de maladie mentale. Les résultats de cette application montrent que la maladie mentale relève d’une même logique que celle de la maladie organique, ce qui permet de garantir la place de la psychiatrie dans le champ de la médecine. Néanmoins, cette logique n’opère pas dans le même contexte. À partir d’une même normativité, organisme et psychisme apparaîssent comme les deux modes d’individualisation de l’être humain : d’abord dans l’environnement naturel (champ de lois) par le caractère générique d’espèce, ensuite, dans un monde social et culturel (champ de normes) par le caractère particulier de la personnalité. De cette double détermination impliquant les rapports, répulsifs ou propulsifs, de l’individu normatif au milieu, il découle une définition plurivoque mais synthétique de la maladie et de la santé. La spécificité de la psychiatrie peut être alors précisée. Dans cette perspective, se dégage un programme de philosophie appliquée à la psychiatrie, à la médecine et à leurs rapports.

This article interprets Paul's self-reflections in Phil 1 in light of the most current discourse about the ‘(introspective) self’ in antiquity: it is argued that Paul – in his last letter writing during his final imprisonment (in Rome?) – offers insights into his ‘inner self’ by construing the reflective mode of introspection. Similar to how ancient philosophers – such as Seneca in his letters – develop introspection when dealing/coping with the expectatio mortis, Paul too, in Phil 1–3, has to respond to his expectation of his pending death. While Phil 1.21–6 – which is to be read in the frame of chapters 1–3 – reflects Paul's situation highly individually and autobiographically, ancient philosophical introspective speaking modes in general tend to remain generic. In its ‘autobiographical consolidation’ Phil 1.21–6 is also to be seen in a ‘contrastive analogy’ to Rom 7.

European welfare states used to be based on the principle of the family. Since the 1990s, however, ‘individual responsibility’ has been promoted, which fundamentally alters the traditional welfare-institutional framing of the family and the corresponding construction of the social citizen. One policy field that has been heavily influenced by this development is old-age security. The literature assumes a convergence towards institutional individualisation. We show this however to be incorrect. We empirically analyse and classify welfare-institutional change in old-age security with regard to individualisation. An innovative methodological approach for institutional analysis allows a nuanced identification of the welfare-institutional trends towards individualisation of the social citizen above pension age both within and between welfare states. We conclude that there has been no general and no partial convergence towards individualisation. Instead, on average, family elements in old-age security have either increased or persisted. Also, our analysis suggests that welfare-institutional change with regard to family is far from being a linear process and in part even displays contradictions.

In social policy debates and research over recent years, ‘risk’, ‘social inclusion’ and ‘the life course’ have become influential topics. In this themed section we will revisit these concepts and analyse how they have influenced policy debates and research in Australia and elsewhere. The contributions were developed as part of a research collaboration that brings together expertise from social policy, gender studies, risk sociology, social work, youth studies and research on ageing and old age. This introduction outlines the concepts and dimensions we found helpful for analysing social policy practice and research and the key arguments of the contributions.

‘Risk’, ‘social inclusion’ and the ‘life course’ have become key notions in social policy after the Golden Age of welfare capitalism. This article reviews some of the key debates and developments in Australian social policy and research that underpin the contributions to this themed section. From ‘new social risks’ to ‘the great risk shift’ and the broader debates about the ‘risk society’ and ‘governmentality’, it reviews debates about social inclusion and the individualisation of risk, the risk shift in service delivery and the understanding and researching of the new life course. It concludes with suggestions for more community based research to inform social policy.

This paper considers developments in long-term care that are increasingly focused around the individual. Recent decades have seen massive changes in the way that care is understood and provided. Yet in Australia, as in Europe, North America and Asia, we are still a long way from a stable state of agreed services and provisions. Emphasising the social theory behind the shift, it is argued that understanding the individualisation of care cannot be reduced to a simple dichotomy of good or bad. Individualised care promises much, but the concept is applied to a wide range of phenomena, often in ways that conceal rather than reveal the character of the transactions involved. For individualisation to become meaningful it must be developed as a condition of recognition that is equally applicable to those who provide and those who depend on care. It is also important to distinguish individualised care finance arrangements from real attainments in the practice of providing care. These distinctions are necessary if we are to distinguish its use as an ideological justification for welfare cutbacks and the restructuring of care provisions as markets from the liberating potential that the approach can present when care practices are more truly based around the recognition of the individuals concerned: those who receive and depend on assistance as well as those who provide it.

The end of the ‘Golden Age’ of welfare capitalism in the 1970s was the prelude to a period of greater individualisation within societies and was accompanied by an increase in the importance of consumption as a way of organising social relations. During the same period there was also an expansion in the discourses aimed at enhancing the government of the autonomous self. One such discourse operates around what has been termed the ‘will to health’: it suggests that health has become a required goal for individual behaviour and has become synonymous with health itself. The generational groups whose lifecourses were most exposed to these changes are now approaching later life. We explore the extent to which social transformations related to risk, consumption and individualisation are reflected in the construction of later-life identities around health and ageing. We examine how the growth in health-related ‘technologies of the self’ have fostered a distinction between natural and normal ageing, wherein the former is associated with coming to terms with physical decline and the latter associated with maintaining norms of self-care aimed at delaying such decline. Finally, we consider anti-ageing medicine as a developing arena for the construction of later-life identities and discuss the implications of the social changes for researching later life.

A l'heure de l'économie du savoir et de la connaissance, l'éducation est devenue un enjeu majeur et l'enseignant a acquis une place centrale dans le processus de production d'éducation. Dans ces conditions, sont recherchés les moyens d'augmenter la performance des enseignants afin d'améliorer les résultats scolaires des élèves. La mise en place de structures incitatives (notamment la rémunération à la performance) est souvent suggérée mais les études démontrant l'efficacité des incitations restent mitigées.

Cet article propose une revue de la littérature théorique et empirique sur la façon dont les incitations affectent le comportement des enseignants. Les arguments pour et contre la mise en incitation des enseignants sont étu-diés. En particulier, nous examinons i) les difficultés à contrôler et à évaluer la performance des enseignants, ii) la question du travail en équipe dans un contexte d'individualisation de la performance et iii) le problème du multitâches lorsque les incitations portent sur seulement quelques tâches.

This paper is concerned with intercultural relationships within the trigenerational family. As part of our study of sociostructural changes affecting the family, we have looked at these relationships from a basis of the concepts: generation gap and seriality between generations. The information reported in this paper was obtained from twenty inter-generational triads (ten female, six male, four mixed) who were given a series of highly structured and open ended questions by trained interviewers. The results showed significant differences in the definitions of culture given by the three generations. The most important result in analysing ‘taste cultures’ and cultural activities within trigenerational families is that within the trigenerational family there are varying relationship structures and that these are perceived differently by the different generations. This is attributed to an overall process of individualisation in society. The findings indicate that similar taste cultures and shared activities in grandparent-grandchild generations are not common and that consecutive generations resemble each other more in tastes and activities. In general, the position of the old in relation to the youngest generation can be described as remote. Grandparents are not important in the cultural life of young adult grandchildren and vice versa. On the basis of our findings, it would appear that the family is declining as a factor in the sociocultural integration of the elderly.