ABSTRACT
In ‘active’ welfare states, problems of unemployment are increasingly dealt with at the individual level by targeting the self-understanding and aspirations of the unemployed. This chapter draws on ethnographic observations of social interactions between coaches and youths at a youth activation centre in a former industrial community in Sweden. The ‘industrial mentality’ among youths, or the elevation of manual labour over education, had been depicted as a problem. The chapter explores attempts made at transforming this industrial mentality within two activation projects at the youth activation centre. It shows that the first project tended to reproduce rather than transform subjectivities, and the second tended to foster disabled subjectivities by both drawing on and reproducing contemporary biomedical discourses. In this way, the chapter highlights the complexities involved in efforts to intervene in individuals’ self-understanding and shows that practices of governmental self-formation do not work linearly top-down, and may produce unexpected outcomes.
