‘Chatting Shit’ in the Jobcentre: Navigating Workfare Policy at the Street-Level
研究英国年轻失业男性如何在就业中心通过“扯淡”等策略，暗中抵制工作福利政策的强制要求，优先满足自身需求，揭示这些行为本质上是阶级不平等下的生存策略。
Since the mid-1980s, out-of-work benefit receipt in the UK has been increasingly governed by a ‘workfarist’ mesh of conditionality and activation policies. A wealth of research has found that conditionality and activation policies trigger a range of harmful outcomes for benefit claimants. However, this research largely ignores how claimants may struggle against these policies to eschew harmful outcomes. Drawing on longitudinal interviews with 15 young men, this article demonstrates how claimants can subvert policy implementation to prioritise their own needs and interests. It is concluded that claimant struggles against policy implementation most accurately reflect survival strategies and are predominantly rooted in the ‘material nexus’ of class-based inequalities in capitalist societies.