ABSTRACT
Arising on the terrain of the crisis of the welfare state, the Social Investment (SI) perspective indicates a strong and explicit link between social protection and economic growth. One cornerstone consists of active labour market programmes that give priority to the objective of social inclusion through participation in work, unlike traditional passive policies, which provide compensation for non-participation in work (Borghi and van Berkel, 2007). Equally important are the interventions held to be crucial for the development of human capital: measures for childhood, education, training and lifelong learning. In SI the same logic of incentivization and mobilization of individuals
resounds as permeates the practices and rhetoric of governance. As already mentioned, the processual declination is a basic aspect of public action, and just as ambiguous. The chapter begins by focusing on the ambiguity of the SI perspective and
of activation, reporting the critical debate that has developed on these themes. I shall then tackle this ambiguity by developing a question: what sort of agency comes into play in activation and social investment? Therefore, I will concentrate on models of agency guiding public actions, linking them with current dynamics of individualization. The comparison between freedom of choice/punitive responsibilization and interdependence/capabilities is the line of investigation in the final part.
