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Manufacturing Responsibility: The Governmentality of Behavioural Power in Social Policies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 November 2017

Rik Peeters
Rik Peeters*
Affiliation:
Department of Public Administration, Centre for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE), Mexico City E-mail: rik.peeters@cide.edu
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Abstract

Responsibilisation is commonly associated with a neoliberal transfer of responsibilities from state to social actors. However, it also covers the construction of responsibility where it does not exist yet – where citizens need socialisation to manufacture responsibility so they become economically and socially active, healthy, and productive subjects. This article aims to bring more conceptual clarity in these practices. Based on an analysis of literature on contemporary welfare state policies, three different techniques are discerned: reciprocal governance in welfare state services; training and treatment of vulnerable citizens through support and structure; and choice engineering by working upon the unconscious and psychological triggers underlying decision making. These techniques of behavioural power seek responsibilisation by working upon people's understanding of responsibility as a moral imperative and upon the rational or psychological mechanisms that constitute the choices they make and the attitudes they have.

Keywords

Responsibilisationgovernmentalitybehavioural powersocial investment statemindpolitics
Type
Articles
Information
Social Policy and Society , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , January 2019 , pp. 51 - 65
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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