ABSTRACT
Introduction Responsibility is one of the concepts that has been intensively used and analysed in social sciences during the last three decades. In this chapter, our interest is primarily in responsibility literature that discusses responsibilities in regard to the changing roles of citizens, clients and providers in Western welfare societies. This interest brings us to the formulation of the concept that describes the claimed direction of this change, namely responsibilisation. Since the 1990s, this formulation has gradually become more and more common. As Brown and Baker (2012: 18) note, the concept of responsibilisation “is appearing with increasing frequency in accounts of management, social policy, health and welfare”. The concept has also entered The Sage Dictionary of Policing, where O’Malley (2009: 277-279) defines it in the following way:
“Responsibilization” is a term developed in the governmentality literature to refer to the process whereby subjects are rendered individually responsible for a task which previously would have been the duty of another – usually a state agency – or would not have been recognized as a responsibility at all. The process is strongly associated with neoliberal political discourses, where it takes on the implication that the subject being responsibilized has avoided this duty or the responsibility has been taken away from them in the welfare state era and managed by an expert or government agency.
