ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the ethnographic study in the field of active labour market policies is to examine how such policies operate on an everyday basis and to what extent such strategies of mobilization are functional with regard to their declared goals. The profound transformations took place throughout Western welfare states. The caring or the providing state has been superseded by the activating or enabling state. While the former aimed at providing its citizens with a comprehensive safety net for social risks and at the same time at reducing social inequality. Unemployment carries the potential for exclusion, social downward mobility and marginalization in nearly all spheres of life. The instrument of activating unemployment policies is a variety of educational and training schemes. The chapter describes that activating strategies lead to a displacement of responsibility from the welfare state to the unemployed at the expense of those, who for whatever reasons cannot persist in the endless trials of an idealized labour market.
