Making sacrifices: how ungenerous gifts constitute jobseekers as scapegoats

ABSTRACT

Although they are the recipients of welfare we argue that the unemployed are pathologized and scapegoated by the ungenerous nature of this gift. The suffering of the unemployed is explored here as emerging not from the lack of economic, psychological, and social goods, but from how gift-relations are imbued with power-relations, particularly as generated in activation policies currently spreading through the OECD. Inspired by theoretical consideration of Mauss, Girard, and others, we aspire to offer an imaginative rethinking of unemployment, moving beyond the simple notion that it is just a lack of work, to positioning unemployment as a foundational axis of punishment which is constitutive for modern society. In this way, the unemployed exist as imaginary scapegoats for political legitimization and as surplus labour which allows capitalism to function. Illustrative empirical data are drawn from interviews and media reportage in Ireland, where the switch to activation policies was made swiftly and dramatically since 2012.

KEYWORDS:

• gift
• sacrifice
• scapegoating
• unemployment
• welfare

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Tom Boland lectures in Sociology at Waterford Institute of Technology. His core interests are in social theory, historical sociology, and the sociology of critique. Recent articles have appeared in Culture, Theory & Critique, Textual Practice, Irish Journal of Sociology, International Political Anthropology, Irish Political Studies, Beascna, Anthropological Theory, The History of the Human Sciences, and Work Employment and Society. His monograph Critique as a Modern Social Phenomenon was published in 2013 by Mellen Press. With Ray Griffin he is the editor of The Sociology of Unemployment, Manchester University Press, 2015.

Ray Griffin is Lecturer in Strategic Management at Waterford Institute of Technology School of Business. Ray’s research interests include strategy and structure in multi-national corporations, but are increasingly moving towards studies of modern forms of work and organization with projects on organizational resilience in crisis, fun workplaces, banks as hypermodern organizations, and unemployment as just another type of work, all underway.

Notes

1. Marx’s description of the ‘lumpenproletariat’ might be read as a commitment to economic conceptions of utility and worth, and partaking in the general ‘scapegoating’ of the unemployed, or, alternatively, his work can be seen as a diagnosis of how feudal human beings are ripped from gift-relations and rendered as homo sacer by ‘market forces’.

2. All media citations below are drawn from (Author and Colleagues 2015); our study of print-media reportage of unemployment spanned the years 2008–2014 in Ireland, from the height to the easing of the economic crisis.

3. ‘For the tax-payer: To ensure that each person in receipt of job-seeker payment fulfils their personal responsibility to engage fully with the employment and training supports provided by the State, as a pre-condition for receipt of their welfare payments’ (Department of Social Protection 2012, 9). While the language is neutral or pragmatic here, the logic nonetheless expresses collective sacrificial violence against the individual jobseeker.