Policies aimed at upskilling, motivating and/or disciplining the unemployed have remained a cornerstone of most OECD countries’ employment policies since the 1990s. Central to these policies is the idea of activation – i.e. the premise that benefit entitlement is conditional on one’s participation in some kind of activity. This article seek to understand how this idea of activation has proven so enduring by analyzing the international development of Activation Policies since 1990 through the lens offered by the concept of ideational robustness. It is analyzed how the robustness of the idea of activation has been continuously challenged through critiques raised against the effects, the legitimacy and the relevance of activation policies. Yet, in each of these moments of contest, proponents of the idea of activation succeeded in keeping the idea relevant as a point of reference for policymaking. They did so by rebalancing disciplinary and enabling approaches to activation, adding a new scope of application for activation policies, and rearticulating the underlying assumption about client agency. The analysis further reveals how these robustness mechanisms succeeded in appropriating the critiques due to their inscription within the technical and seemingly de-political language concerning effect evaluations, implementation deficits, and new forms of governance. Policymakers were thereby able to downplay normative questions of the legitimacy, fairness, and justice of activation policies. The idea of activation has thus taken on a status as an objective to be implemented as effective and efficiently as possible rather than as an idea to be discussed or challenged. However, while the idea of activation remains robust, the same cannot be said of the governance and implementation structures of activation policies. Our study suggest that the near-constant reforms of these governance arrangements and implementation structures during the last 30 years are partly a consequence of critique being skewed from the idea of activation to these structures and arrangements. The robustness of the idea of activation has thus, rather paradoxically, come about by reducing the robustness of specific activation policies and governance arrangements.

中文翻译：

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激活方针：遍体鳞伤但仍屹立不倒

自 20 世纪 90 年代以来，旨在提高技能、激励和/或约束失业者的政策一直是大多数经合组织国家就业政策的基石。这些政策的核心是激活的理念——即福利权利以个人参与某种活动为条件的前提。本文通过理念稳健性概念提供的视角，分析 1990 年以来激活政策的国际发展，试图了解这种激活理念如何经久不衰。通过对激活政策的效果、合法性和相关性的批评，分析了激活理念的稳健性如何不断受到挑战。然而，在每一个竞争时刻，激活理念的支持者都成功地保持了这一理念作为政策制定参考点的相关性。他们通过重新平衡纪律和启用激活方法、为激活政策添加新的应用范围以及重新阐明有关客户代理的基本假设来做到这一点。分析进一步揭示了这些稳健性机制如何成功地利用了有关效果评估、实施缺陷和新治理形式的技术和看似非政治语言的批评。因此，政策制定者能够淡化激活政策的合法性、公平性和正义性的规范性问题。因此，激活的想法已经成为一个需要尽可能有效和高效地实施的目标，而不是一个需要讨论或挑战的想法。然而，虽然激活的想法仍然很强大，但激活政策的治理和实施结构却并非如此。我们的研究表明，过去 30 年来对这些治理安排和实施结构的近乎持续的改革，部分是由于对这些结构和安排的激活理念的批评偏向的结果。因此，相当矛盾的是，激活理念的稳健性是通过降低特定激活政策和治理安排的稳健性来实现的。