Tim Edkins

Performing governance for the public

How are the public produced as observers of the unemployed? My paper investigates how New Labour has changed the way individuals are currently imagined to be helped back into work, and how unemployment is managed in Britain at present. I argue that they have done this by redesigning how individuals claim financial support from the state for unemployment. This now involves training that is ostensibly designed to speed up an individual’s reentry into work, but which also functions – regardless of when or whether they enter employment – to audit an individual’s narratives of work and its role within their life. I argue that going through processes such as mentoring requires that individuals convincingly perform a life narrative bound to work, for their mentor on a regular basis, in order to maintain financial support. I am interested in how this performance functions as a means of auditing that can be narrated to, and easily understood by, the public. I use Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s collaborative research, which draws together performance studies and critical management studies, to examine how requests like these – to give, and be ready at any moment to give, an account of oneself – function as part of a broader model of governance.