Regulating Transitions from School to Work: An Institutional Ethnography of Activation Work in Action

How are activation programs for the young unemployed implemented? How do street-level bureaucrats deal with competing rationalities and demands for action? Transition policies increasingly aim at promoting self-regulation and constructing employable subjects. Stephan Dahmen explores the practical regulation of biographical transitions in activation programs for the young unemployed by focusing on the interactive accomplishment of activation work. The study reveals how the critical tensions of activation policies are continually re-interpreted and adapted to local contingencies and describes the various organisational technologies used for creating employable subjects.

Stephan Dahmen, born in 1982, is a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Educational Science at Universität Bielefeld, Germany. His current research covers organizational ethnography in human service organizations and education, social inequalities in education and work, the transformations of contemporary youth and childhood and qualitative research methods.