Compassionate responsibilisation in a neoliberal paternalistic homelessness system: ‘They’re not just numbers to me, I do actually care’

Abstract

Frontline workers in welfare systems are often understood as an ‘uncaring’ group, with their affective labour co-opted and reframed in terms of systemic efficiency. Yet they also operate at the frontlines of neoliberal paternalism, their work structured by encounters with extreme hardship, required to address this through ‘pedagogical interventions’ aimed at instilling a competitive, individualistic ‘self-care’ mindset in applicants. Approaching care as a universal need, an embodied practice, and a location of resistance to capitalism, I explore how actors at the frontlines of welfare governance mobilise care in their daily encounters with welfare subjects. Reporting upon 54 extended interviews with frontline workers within the post-2015 Welsh homelessness system, I argue that care is central to the operation of the neoliberal paternalistic welfare system, providing a motivation for workers to engender compliance with neoliberal paternalistic methods of governance. I illustrate this with the example of the Housing (Wales) Act 2014, drawing upon three findings. First, workers operate from a core caring sensibility, caring despite structural constraints. Second, responsibilisation is conceptualised as a strategy which, through its focus on individual empowerment, becomes one of care. Third, however, the focus of these interventions was performative, giving workers strategies to help clients fit into the system and thus increase the legibility of their deservedness. Thus responsibilisation, a technology associated with state abandonment of welfare subjects, was used by workers as a strategy to enable meaningful care in the context of the intense constraints of their role.