Unemployed citizen or ‘at risk’ client?

Classification systems and employment services in Denmark and Australia

an article by Dorte Caswell (Danish Institute of Local Governmental Studies), Greg Marston (University of Queensland) and Jørgen Elm Larsen (University of Copenhagen) published in Critical Social Policy Volume 30 Issue 3 (August 2010)

Abstract
The paper explores recent developments in Australian and Danish unemployment policies with a special focus on the technologies used to classify and categorise unemployed people on government benefits. Using governmentality as our theoretical framework, we consider the implications of reducing complex social problems to statistical scores and differentiated categories – forms of knowledge that diminish the capacity to think about unemployment as a collective problem requiring collective solutions. What we argue is that classification systems, which are part and parcel of welfare state administration, are becoming more technocratic in the way in which they divide the population into different categories of risk.

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