Research project SO/10/035 (Research action SO)
Local implementation of formulas for the activation of employment policies: impact of context as well as local agents and institutional mechanisms on the socio-professional paths of poorly qualified young people
Research objectives
The research project, which has an economic section and a sociological part, focuses on formulas for the activation of employment policies and the welfare state.
The first part, which is essentially sociological, aims at understanding the interactions between policies on insertion, their implementation through the actual efforts of local insertion/training officers and their impact on the plans, methods of engagement and insertion paths of young people themselves.
Part two, which is more economic, aims to outline the importance of the "local" socio-economic context in terms of the insertion of young people and measures the degree to which this local context can differ in the French-speaking Community Wallonia-Brussels. In both cases, one of the project’s components involves drawing useful lessons for the definition and implementation of youth insertion/training policies.
Sociological section of the research
This research fits within a theoretical framing that closely resembles ethnomethodology and involves the development of a pragmatic, "molecular" analysis of insertion officers and an assessment of the impact the actual work of these officers has on the methods of engagement of young people as they seek employment or training. Thereby this research is distancing itself from the conventional "input/process/output" analysis model, which takes a causalist viewpoint in order to analyse policies and systems by focusing on the impact of assorted variables (e.g. regulatory and organisational) on result variables such as access to employment and the professional insertion paths of the young target audience.
Therefore, the aim of this section is to analyse the work and situated action of insertion officers in two sub-regions within the French-speaking Community-Brussels. The officers involved are inscribed within the mechanisms of the "Road to Insertion" ("Parcours d’insertion" in French). This policy symbolises the philosophy of activating employment policies and is the subject of intensive promotion at the European, federal as well as regional levels.
The work performed by insertion officers, even more than the insertion of youth trainees, is the central issue. Understanding local implementation of the "Road to Insertion" means taking a very close look at the work of insertion officers in situ within a framework of situated actions. Furthermore, this analysis will allow certain difficulties to be understood that occur when building and co-ordinating the "Road to Insertion" and when implementing insertion efforts with young people.
In accordance with various empirical and feasibility criteria, we have chosen two contrasting sub-regions where we shall be carrying out our fieldwork: Liège and Arlon. Some methodological principles borrowed from ethnomethodology will guide this work. One example is tracking, which makes it possible to see what the subject sees and reassemble the network starting from the points at which the subject connects with it. The aim of the fieldwork is to compile a total of around twenty interviews with insertion officers and around twenty interviews with youth trainees, with both sets of interviews repeated, as well as numerous direct observations of interactions between youth trainees and insertion officers in an employment situation.
Economic part of the research
The economic part of the research aims to outline the importance of the "local" socio-economic context in which young people and the officers responsible for the application of insertion/training policies operate. This involves measuring the effects of the socio-economic context confronting young people in particular.
The reference to the socio-economic context in this type of analysis is nothing new in itself. What is new, undoubtedly, is the idea of ascertaining the socio-economic context and what it is that makes it eminently local. Of course, the reference to "local" itself carries the assumption that there is a strong variation strategically between the "places" in which young people find themselves, chiefly with regard to "resource" volumes and the extent of the "opportunities" effectively being offered to them.
This local emphasis in our reflection echoes the development of economic analysis and socio-economic reality itself. As far as theory is concerned, a growing number of contributions is tending to "broaden" the notion of "resources" useful for a person’s development to include components that have no direct monetary expression, such as human capital (Becker, 1964), social capital (Bénabou, 1994), relational network density (Montgomery, 1991), degree of security, trust between neighbours, etc.. As a correlation, these contributions as well as others (Piketty, 1994) suggest the existence of mechanisms (selective pairing, polarisation) that tend to produce a markedly uneven distribution pattern for these resources in accordance with the multiple, actual "places" in which young people function: economic basin, sub-region, urban conurbation, neighbourhood, company, school, and even the family (Kremer, 1994).
These theoretical works are echoed by more empirical projects highlighting:
(i) intensification of certain intra-national (or infra-regional) inequalities at a time when there are a number of cases of convergence covering wider areas, such as whole nations (Overmand & Puga, 2000), and
(ii) intensification of differences in fortune (income) between "equal" individuals in terms of age, school qualifications and sector of professional activity (Gibbons & Katz, 1992; Cohen, 1997).
The methodology in this section includes:
(i) preparation of a conceptual framework,
(ii) empirical assessment of the degree of intensity of differentiation between these local contexts in the French-speaking Community comprising Wallonia and Brussels, with a special effort channelled into producing synthetic indexes of disparity, dissimilarity and polarisation, and
(iii) identification of the challenges linked to local differentiations for insertion/training policies.
Mises en oeuvre locales des formules d'activation des politiques d'emploi : rapport final
Orianne, Jean-François - Maroy, Christian - Moulaert, Thibauld ... et al Gent : Academia Press, 2004 (PB6017)
Mises en oeuvre locale des formules d'activation des politiques d'emploi: L'Etat social actif en action : résumé
Bruxelles : Politique scientifique fédérale, 2003 (SP1247)
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Lokale implementatie van de activeringsmaatregelen van het werkgelegenheidsbeleid: De actieve sociale staat in actie : samanvatting
Brussel : Federaal Wetenschapsbeleid, 2003 (SP1248)
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Local Implementation of Employment Policy Activation Formulas: L'Etat social actif in Action : summary
Brussels : Science Policy Office, 2003 (SP1249)
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