Creating the Client Who Can Create Himself and His Own Fate – the Tragedy of the Citizens’ Contract

Niels Åkerstrøm Andersen

doi:10.18778/1733-8077.3.2.07

Authors

Niels Åkerstrøm Andersen Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/1733-8077.3.2.07

Keywords:

Active citizenship, Contractualism, Luhmann, Koselleck, Semantics, Governmentality

Abstract

This article is about the emergence of new forms of active citizenry, empowerment, and self-help that meet in the so-called citizens’ contract. Based on Danish social policy, the article shows how the articulation of the citizen as ‘fellow citizen’ has led to the current contractualization of the relationship between the administration and the individual citizen. Citizens’ contracts are employed not only to commit clients to a specific behavior, but first and foremost to commit them to a particular inner dialogue about obligation and freedom. Economic assistance becomes dependent on this dialogue and they thus become contracts both between the administration and the citizens and between the citizens and their own selves. The article moves beyond the Foucault-inspired categorization by identifying the tragic consequences of these self-contracts.

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Author Biography

Niels Åkerstrøm Andersen, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

Niels Åkerstrøm Andersen (PhD) is a Professor at Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy at The Copenhagen Business School. There, he is also research manager of the Public and Political Management Group consisting of 20 researchers. He has worked with discourse analysis and systems theory for quite many years. His focus has been diagnoses of present within the empirical field of public administration in a very broad sense. He has published 9 books and more than 30 articles. In 2003 he published Discursive analytical strategies. Understanding Foucault, Koselleck, Laclau, Luhmann at Policy Press.

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