Title of the research project
The Change from active labour market policy towards activation policies in Germany

It is common practice for politicians as well as for social scientists to describe the present policy change in labour market policy as a change from active labour market policy towards activation policies (or in German “aktivierende Arbeitsmarktpolitik”, activating labour market policy). These terms have their origins in the political debate. To use these terms for analytic uses is problematic because they served also for justifying the policy and they are laden with normative assumptions and conceptual indeterminacies. However the postulated aim of politicians to replace the active labour market policy by activation policies is a first indication for a major overhaul in this policy field.
The starting point of this project is the supposition that the construction of labour market policies are guided by interpretations, or to put in a term of Foucault by governmentalities, of how manpower is co-ordinated, organised and used in the production process. That the policies are guided by such interpretations is likely because the aim of the integration measures is to bring the unemployed in paid labour (or, alternatively, to hold the employed in paid labour).
In order to analyse the interpretations of the organisation of manpower two ideal types have been built. This has been done on the basis of the literature on that subject in sociology of labour and in economics.(Williamson, Wachter et al. 1975; Offe 1984; Voß and Pongratz 1998)
The first idealtype is called employee (Arbeitnehmer). Here labour is treated as a commodity. However the labour contract has special features which differentiates the contract between an employer and an employee from other contracts. The employee is the seller of the manpower but at the same time he is not separable from it. Also it is not possible to define exactly in advance what the employee has to do. As a consequence the employer has the problem to get the maximum amount of manpower in exchange for his payment. A hierarchical organisation and control are central means for the employer but they are not sufficient. The employer depends on the willingness of the employees to work hard and to not act opportunistically. This leads to the erection of a status relationship between the contracting parties.(Streeck 1990) The payment, working time etc. are not determined solely by individual negotiations between the employee and the employer but by collective arrangements. Trade Unions are recognised by the employer and the employees are permanently integrated into their firm. Also an internal differentiation by status of the labour force is likely to arise, because some jobs are better to control by the employers than others and different groups of workers have also different means of pressing for a secure and well-paid job.(Offe and Hinrichs 1984)
The second idealtype is called entreployee (Arbeitskraftunternehmer).(Voß and Pongratz 1998) The entreployee is not selling his labour but the products of his labour. He is self-employed and he is organising the production of these products himself. The entreployee don’t has to be disciplined by a boss. He is himself responsible for producing in the stipulated time and as a consequence has to discipline himself. To put it another way, the entreployee is exploiting himself and commercialising his manpower. He has to develop his manpower in order to fit the requirements for his product-strategy. He is also responsible for the marketing of his products and needs for that commercial qualifications in addition to the technical qualifications for the production of the good.

Idealtypes are not likely to appear in the “real” world in their pure form. The relevance of these idealtypes and the appearance of mixtures of them has to be empirically tested. For the management literature there is already empirical evidence that there is now a dominating interpretation of the worker as one with traits of an “entrepreneur of himself”.(Bröckling 2002)
The empirical field in this project is the labour market policy or more exactly the debates in the political realm about labour market policy. The central question of this project is: Do the two idealtypical interpretations of the organisation of manpower appear in the political debates and how important are they for the construction of the labour market policy? The hypotheses is that the conception of the so called active labour market policy has been influenced by the then dominating interpretation of the worker as an employee which has been replaced by an interpretation of the worker as an entreployee. This change in the dominating interpretations of the worker in the process of production contributed to the construction of the so called activation policies.
In this project the labour market policy in Germany is analysed starting from 1969 with the passing of the “Arbeitsförderungsgesetz” which counts as the central legal framework for the adoption of the so called active labour market policy and ending in 2003 with major reforms in labour market policy under the red-green government. While discussing the whole period the reforms in the 90s and the beginning of this century are analysed more intensely. The material which is in the process of being analysed is foremost the documentation of the parliamentary debates around the major reform projects, policy statements by the chancellor and the Minister of Labour and reports of commissions.