Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I trace how bureaucrats at a government office for supported employment in the Helsinki region in Finland mix caring and punitive bureaucratic registers, thereby conditioning persons with disabilities into labouring subjects through the mediation of socially accepted behaviour.

Paper long abstract:

Finnish social institutions, often seen as the epitome of the welfare state model in the Global North, are morphing historically distinct institutional designs and technologies due to escalating neoliberal imperatives. How do bureaucrats in these institutional contexts both reproduce and challenge government-imposed requirements that combine a traditionally “caring” rhetoric on the one hand and a traditionally “punitive” rhetoric on the other? In this paper, I offer an ethnographic analysis of the interaction between work coaches and disability service clients at a government office for supported employment in the Helsinki region in Finland. I trace how this interaction conditions persons with disabilities to become particular kinds of labouring subjects through the mediation and reproduction of socially accepted capacities and abilities. The attribution of a successful labouring subjectivity is contingent on the varied understandings of both what the interaction between the coach and the client should encompass and what constitutes orderly behaviour that merits care and disorderly behaviour that deserves punitive action. Through strategic and creative linguistic practice, the work coaches mix registers and genres in overlapping ways to resolve tensions that emerge within the situation, thereby rendering the interaction inherently ambivalent. The ambivalent efforts of the work coaches embed affective and emotional labour into a punitive bureaucratic apparatus, thus making the will to care and the will to punish often simultaneously emergent and mutually constitutive, rather than distinct and mutually exclusive. Together, then, interactants untangle bureaucratic double-binds that the client must navigate in order to gain access to the labour market.