Artiklen tager teoretisk afsæt i den franske, pragmatiske sociologi og demonstrerer, hvordan denne kan benyttes til at skitsere en pluralitet af forskellige moralske positioner i danske offentlige debatter om aktivering af arbejdsløse. Et bredt uddrag af den offentlige debat om såkaldt nytteaktivering analyseres, og på baggrund heraf skitseres fire forskellige forståelser af den legitime sociale orden, som aktører trækker på i den pågældende debat. Det drejer sig om henholdsvis en industriel, en markedsorienteret, en projektorienteret og en orden orienteret mod medborgerskab. Artiklen demonstrerer, hvordan aktører, der trækker på forskellige moralske principper, gør positive moralske domme over nytteaktivering som praksis. Hermed udfordrer artiklen en af feltets hidtidige antagelser, nemlig at de forskellige positioner i aktiveringsdebatter fungerer som gensidigt begrænsende.
ENGELSK ABSTRACT:
Mathias Herup Nielsen: Activation of the Unemployed Seen Through the Lens of Pragmatic Sociology
This paper demonstrates how French pragmatic sociology can be applied to grasp a plurality of orders of worth that come into play when actors engage in disputes about activation policy programs targeting unemployed people. Drawing on an archive consisting of around 300 articles from a Danish public dispute about a specific activation policy program, the article describes four different sets of principles of justice that actors rely on in the actual dispute. These four sets of principles are described as the industrial polity, the market polity, the projective polity and the civic polity. The article shows how a pragmatic sociological approach can serve as an alternative to monistic approaches, stressing that a plurality of orders of worth are present in contemporary workfare debates. In addition, the article concludes that actors, relying on very different orders of worth, all seem to justify the specific activation policy program.
Keywords: pragmatic sociology, Luc Boltanski, justification, activation, unemployment.
