ABSTRACT
Employment and social policies may be understood as a set of techniques devised for the governance of a society (Donzelot, 1994). The notion of governance has two different meanings in this context. First, the policies in question play an important role in efforts to create employment, to curb unemployment, to determine the quality of jobs, and to provide support to the needy. Second, these policies play a key role in the struggle over how these phenomena are to be named and judged. Inherent to employment programmes are ethical theories concerning the objects of policy intervention. They transmit shared ideas about what is meant by work, employment, and unemployment, about what is socially just or unfair, and about the type of actions that are required to achieve the desired objectives and the respective order of responsibilities.
