hermeneutics6 (see e.g. Oevermann 1979). The "*sequential analysis* of each individual contribution to an interaction, step by step, without clarifying in advance the internal or external context of the utterance" (Reichertz 2004: 291, emphasis in original quote) has been used as a tool for systematically blending out contextual knowledge and a priori knowledge and for gaining access to the "taken for granted" meanings and assumptions of the interviewees that make interaction possible. After the indepth analysis of a few selected interview passages, I equipped them with a code. After this step, thematically similar interview passages from different interviews where compared and the codes were refined to identify systematize cross-cutting topics. During this process, first theoretical memos have been written which developed hypotheses and interpretation patterns to be followed up in further analysis and to be compared with similar and different cases. In this process of "constant comparison" (Charmaz 2006), elements of the document analysis (either if the direct reference to them was made to them or when referring to specific legal categories, organizational processes, and bureaucratic rules were implicit) where included in the subsumption of codes into larger categories. This thematical comparison of different interviews and topics tried to give dimensions to the earlier identified topics and aimed at "condensing" the data to fewer central categories. At this point, initial memos were re-written and recast to fit better to the data. Nevertheless, until now, I refrained from a theoretical abstraction of the data in order to give more density to the concepts and to scrutinize the categories and concepts by constantly comparing them to different segments of the interview7 . It

6 Kleemann et. al (2014) propose a "standard module" of interpretation where basic steps of conversation analysis, objective hermeneutics and narrative analysis are blended into common steps of data analysis. They identify the systematic variation of meanings and contexts as a central step that is applied in each of these methods (albeit with slight differences). Indeed, as C.A. focusses on turn-taking and the ongoing maintenance of intersubjective understanding, a focus on the publicly displayed meaning (thus, focusing on the transcribed text instead of recurring to "external" explanations (e.g. intrapsychic processes, the "identity of a speaker etc) a word-by word sequential analysis is advised. In a specific way, this is also acknowledged by Grounded Theory. For instance, Charmaz describes the process of "word by word-analysis as a process that "forces you to attend to images and meanings. You may attend to the structure and flow of words, and how both affect the sense you make of them, as well as their specific content" (Charmaz 2006: 5). While GTM thus displays a certain sensitivity for the ongoing construction of meaning, it is "category-based" (v.s. case-based) and proceeds very early to splitting up the text into codes and categories. Particularly the "everyday work stories" (Maynard-Moody/Musheno 2003) of the interviewees where displayed in "narrative" form, so that an early "splitting up" through coding and categorisation was not seen as a viable strategy.

7 In this first open-coding process, I followed Glaser´s suggestion to orient oneself to basic social processes. Glaser suggest to ask oneself the following questions: " 'What is this data a study of?', 'What category does this incident indicate?', What is actually happening in the

is only after a certain saturation of the system of codes and categories that I began to detach my analysis from the wording of the interviewees and to describe similarities and differences by reference to theoretical knowledge. It is only at this point that a reference to the ethnographic field notes and the documentary analysis has been established. This served to perform a recursive comparison of how professionals dealt with the sometimes-contradictory goal orientations and institutional contradictions that were previously identified in the organizational make-up of the measure. For the analysis of documents, I followed the same basic process than the interview passages but adapted them through including the suggestions of Atkinson and Hammersley8 (1995: 142) the propositions of Wolff9 (2004) and the detailed analytic questions of Charmaz10 (2006: 39-40). The further process was guided by a continuous succession of inductive and deductive steps, through the data analysis and coding, new hypotheses and theoretical memos where established (inductive), which then led to collecting new data on the basis of these hypotheses (deductive). Codes and categories where continuously validated and further-developed through constant comparison (initially, through comparing data with data, later through

data?', 'What is the main concern being faced by the participants?', and 'What accounts for the continual resolving of this concern?'" (Glaser, 1998: 140).

8 Atkinson and Hammersley propose Questions to ask about documents that allow to develop queues for analysis:"How are documents written? How are they read?Who writes them?Who reads them? For what purposes? On what occasions? With what outcomes? What is recorded? What is omitted? What is taken for granted? What does the writer seen to take for granted about the reader(s)? What do readers need to know in order to make sense of them?" (Hammersley/Atkinson 1995: 142-143)

9 Wollf (2004), based on an ethnomethodological analytic strategy proposes some practical strategies of bestrangement and analytic focusses, for instance the description of the display of information, formal characteristics of the document, the semantic content, the (graphical) display of information and their effects), and so on.

10 Charmaz (2006: 39-40) provides a wide range of analytic questions, of which only those retained for the analysis are displayed here: "How was the text produced? By whom? What is the ostensible purpose of the text? Might the text serve other unstated or assumed purposes? Which ones? How does the text represent what its author(s) assumed to exist? Which meanings are embedded within it? How do those meanings reflect a particular social, historical, and perhaps organizational context? What is the structure of the text? How does its structure shape what is said? Which categories can you discern in its structure? What can you glean from these categories? Do the categories change in sequential texts over time? How so? Which contextual meanings does the text imply? How does its content construct images of reality? Which realities does the text claim to represent? How does it represent them? What, if any, unintended information and meanings might you see in the text? Which rules govern the construction of the text? How can you discern them in the narrative? How do these rules reflect both tacit assumptions and explicit meanings? How might they be related to other data on the same topic? Who benefits from the text? Why? (Charmaz 2006: 39-40)

comparing codes and categories and establishing links between them), then and integrated into larger concepts.The recourse to theoretical concepts mainly happened on the Level of Memos, I tried – wherever possible – to construct analytic codes and categories solely from data. Once several codes could be linked to a theoretical Memo (and hence – to a sensitizing concept, an initial idea or a clear-cut theory) I went back into the data to eventually re-code interview passages and bits of data according to this new theoretical lens. This process can most easily be described by an example: An extensive narrative of one respondent on the difficulties to balance the demands of the funding office and own professional and ethical standards in the interactive practice was coded with the in-vivo code "wearing different hats". In the first step, the same interview was re-read for further passages that contained descriptions of conflicting demands and their experience. Then, passages of a second interview that contained similar descriptions where coded. Here, the balancing of different institutional demands and injunctions was described as a matter of incompatible goals that required a form of "information management" (in-vivo code) in a complex mosaic of accountability. These two codes were integrated into the concept of "conflicts between different institutional demands". In a theoretical Memo attached to both codes, I tried to describe the different regimes of accountability, the strategies the frontline agents employed to deal with them and tried to describe them in theoretical terms. In this process, I found the concept of "articulation work" and of "invisible work" to designate "Work" that is required to keep things going on that is not represented in rationalised models of Work. The Memo then also contained prompts on what to look for in other interviews: Did the interviewees have different strategies to deal with conflicting demands? Where some of them not describing the same topic as a relevant issue? In What situations would such an "articulation work" be particularly urgent? What are the structural features (constellations of interests, powerful stakeholders, etc.) behind these conflicts? Through this process, I ended up with a longer theoretical Memo, that – reworked after each new coding session – contained a complex description of frontline work and that was grounded in the data.

## **6. Results**

## **6.1. A Short Introduction to Motivational Semesters**

The "semesters de motivation" are financed by the local office for labor market policy and figure under the spendings for active labor-market measures. Historically, the implementation of the "Motivational Semesters" goes back to the period of the early nineties, in which the federal government stood under pressure to provide a temporary solution for young people who could not find an apprenticeship (Heinimann 2006 Froidevaux/Weber 2003, see chapter 2.3). At first, implemented as an experimental measure during the 1990s, the legal framework for the "Motivational Semester", was implemented during the revision of the unemployment law revision in the Year 1996, while the explicit name of the measure only figures in the legal texts since the 2003 revision. It is important to note that the implementation of the SeMo's happened in a time when Switzerland "discovered" activation and in which many structural, administrative and legal reforms have been implemented. (see chapter 2.3.) Since their first implementation, the number of Motivational Semester has augmented from 3 to nearly 80 on an overall swiss-level, constituting thus a central "transition measure". Despite the relative autonomy of the cantonal authorities to define the quantity and quality of active labor-market policies and despite the heterogeneous implementation amongst cantons, we can assume that the governance relations are similar around Switzerland. Conceptually, (and despite the high variability of different funding constellations and organisations), the SeMo's can be described as a mix between "work-training" in the first labor-market or in workshops located in the institutions, a rather minor part of schooling (maximum two days a week), assistance in writing applications and an intensive personalized and individualized "follow-up" through regular counseling. The SeMo aims at a "profound assessment" of the situation of each participant in order to establish a professional "insertion strategy" that has to be followed by the participant and which is controlled in weekly follow-up counseling sessions with a personal counselor. The participants of the Motivation Semesters are subject to the legal requirements of reciprocity as fixed in the unemployment insurance law (LACI § 97b). they thus officially must comply with the obligation of writing a certain number of applications per month, while other legal regulations of the unemployment insurance for adult beneficiaries do not apply to the same degree. The SeMo's are funded through "subvention contracts" with the local PES, according to which they are paid for a specific number of participant-places. Throughout the year, the occupancy rate has to amount to 92 % in order to maintain the same amount of funding. In addition, the providers of the Motivational Semester, mostly not-for-profit organizations and third sector associations have to fulfil minimal requirements in order to benefit from the subventions. These minimum requirements include, among others, the strict application of the regulations as they figure in the Swiss unemployment insurance law (This includes, for example, the prescribed number of applications to be written by the participants per month as well as the application of relatively strict sanctioning regime).

The governance relations of the Motivational Semester can be described within a complex "triangle" between the service provider (usually a private/ third sector organization), the service purchaser (the cantonal office for logistics of active labor-market policies, directly attached to cantonal employment office) and the beneficiary, who is subject to the eligibility conditions, rules and administrative requirements of the unemployment insurance. This "triangle" comes with a complex arrangement of different duties, formalized and non-formalized accountability relations and power-relations. As participants become beneficiaries of the unemployment insurance when enrolling in the measure, a specific set of preconditions, requirements and behavioral imperatives applies to them. These specifications mainly refer to the "CIVIC" order of worth – they define the conditions according to which each and every worker, as an "equal citizen" (subjects of the civic OoW) can aspire to draw on collective solidarity for securing individual welfare. A such, laws emitted by the state act as an expression of a collective, civic will. The higher common principle of the "CIVIC" world are rules and regulations, that apply irrespective to the person's state of worth in other domains, for instance, their state of greatness in the MARKET OoW (income, employability) or their seniority (DOMESTIC). In the civic OoW, the citizen as a member of a collective symbolizes the state of greatness, accordingly, the individual must renounce to his immediate interests and subsume his aspirations to the collective will. This is enshrined in a document that summarizes the "conditions of participation" (Document 1) defining that participants have, in accordance with the law on unemployment insurance, to "be apt for placement" (thus able and ready to work and be entitled to unemployment-benefits) to take up work (§ 14). Public employment services are in fact allowed to command a medical assessment in cases a doubt on the ability for placement persists. Furthermore, as highlights in the same document, participants have to pursue "personal efforts in order to find an apprenticeship" (Document 1). The legislator elaborates that the insured person must do everything necessary to abrogate or avoid unemployment that one can reasonably demand from him/her (§ 17).

To reduce "damage" the insured person must immediately take up work (§ 16) Insofar the proposed job corresponds to specific criteria of "reasonable work" (§16a-i). The law on unemployment insurance gives furthermore specifications on the Motivational Semesters as an active labor market measure. These are legally open for "insured persons that search for an apprenticeship after the compulsory education insofar they do not yet dispose of a vocational degree and did not finish their school with a gymnasia degree" (§ 64 LACI). The legislator thus highlights a specific group of persons without access to a first vocational degree and deprived of other options (a gymnasia degree gives access to universities and universities of applied sciences) as a, a field of public action in which the state must intervene to some extent. The "circular letter on active labor market policies" (SECO 2009) additionally states that "participants in Motivational Semesters can be liberated from the job search activities during the measure at the profit of the search for an apprenticeship" (SECO 2009). As fixed in the contract notice (document 3.) that specifies the contractual relations between third sector organizations (provider) and the logistics office (purchaser), the tight regulations of the LACI apply to the same extent to the young participants. The only difference is that youngsters are exempted from compulsory job search activities during their first weeks (in the phase in which young participants are required perform a personal skill assessment). At the same time, youngsters are obliged to perform one internship per month (document 3). Nevertheless, as fixed in the "catalogue of sanctions" (Document 4), aiming at establishing a common framework that fix the rules of participation in the Motivational Semesters, the "refusal of a suitable job1 " figures under the heading "serious misconduct" just along other sanctionable behavior *("putting others in danger, violence, theft and racketeering"*) and potentially engenders a suspension of unemployment benefits for 31 days. In fact, young persons can be sanctioned for not taking up an apprenticeship that, for whatever reason, does not correspond to their expectations. As described above, the Motivational Semesters being implemented within the framework of the unemployment insurance, their official goal is the "improvement of the aptitude to take up a job in order to enable a fast and sustainable labor-market integration" (§59 line. 2 LACI). The Motivational Semesters are implemented by third sector organizations mandated by the logistics office of the cantonal employment service. The primary and official goal can be described as increasing the employability of the beneficiaries – more specifically through bringing back the job-searchers into employment through qualification measures which lead to a "realist professional project" (Document 3). As such, third sector organizations are subcontracted by the "logistics office" of the cantonal employment service that "buys" for each year a

1 The "catalogue of sanctions" a document that is designed for the internal use thus takes up the original phrasing of the corresponding article in unemployment insurance law, see chapter 6.2.1.

number of participants/places. Counselors of the regional public employment services attribute these measures to participants and "delegate" a part of the follow up of the job-seeker to the Motivational Semester. Nevertheless, the PES-counsellors are informed each month on the progress of the measure, the specific progress of the job seekers they follow and on specific infringements of the participant. The subcontracted third sector organizations are submitted to a wide range of regulations that are fixed in the "contract notice" (document 3), which constitutes the contractual basis for subventions and gives regulatory prescriptions on the design of the program. The relation between the logistics office of the cantonal employment service and the third sector organization is a classic "purchaser-provider" relation that is characterized – in the vocabulary of the economy of conventions – by the "MARKET" OoW: The purchaser defines the (minimal) product specificities, defines the goals and specificities of the product and the financial contribution (price) that he is willing to pay. The latter is also articulated in the quality standards which defines the clients as "the financing authority that has commissioned an integration service" (AOMAS: 2010). While this arrangement does not correspond to a true market situation, the collaborators of the logistics office highlight that the minimal requirements of the subvention contract allow for considerable creativity in the specific design of the measure. It is convenient to talk about a "controlled" market as, despite considerable freedom to design the measure, each organization must be certified by specific quality norms that are provided by an association of organizations providing labor-market integration measures. These norms act as a kind of regulatory standard defining processes and providing standardized, uniform criteria most likely correspond to the INDUSTRIAL order of Worth. Third sector organizations are thus – in the restricted frame of minimal requirements – meant to create innovative programs while acting within a tightly regulated competition for creative programs. As the logistic office orders each year a limited number of places per year with each of the six third sector organizations providing Motivational Semesters on the territory of the canton of Vaud, one can suppose that it will adapt the number of commissioned places based on the preferences of those PES-counsellors that attribute these measures to participants. As the inflow of participants is only regulated by the PES-counsellors, Motivational Semesters are dependent on them for "filling" their measure. The "official" goals of the Motivational Semester, as seen by the logistic office consists in *"prompting the participants to enter an apprenticeship through carrying out an individual assessment of their personal, family and professional/school situation", "determining a professional project that accounts for their personal interests"* and through *"verifying the adequacy between this project and their effective competencies through a confrontation to the realities of the world of work"* (document 3). The latter is to be performed by *the "personal counselor of the young person"* (document 3) who has the task of organizing the individual followup of the young person through an individual career portfolio that regroups all

kinds of activities, assessments, and documentation. These individual encounters between personal counselors and participants are supposed to make up for ten percent of the time passed at the program, thus four hours per week. There is thus a considerable amount of time devoted to individual one-on-one encounters and individualized counseling.

When looking closer at the different documents one can identify potentially contradictory and conflictual goals that derive from the complex institutional environment. For instance, a contradictory combination of "client-centeredness" and "compulsion" (Lindsay/Mailand 2005: 195), that results from the focus on professionalized individual counseling on the one side and the strict activation regime of the unemployment insurance. Furthermore, SeMo's are supposed to perform an ongoing monitoring of the "work-readiness" of participants, and of their "employability" according to the "MARKET" OoW, which implies a whole battery of assessment tools and a direct contact with the world of work (through a simulated working environment in internal workshops and through internships in firms). In addition, Motivational Semesters perform a delegated monitoring function for the Public Employment Service and the supervision of the behavioral requirements of the unemployment insurance ("CIVIC" order of worth). The monitoring of the deservingness for aid, for instance, the regular and timely attendance of the participant, but also the imposition of sanctions in case of non-compliance. This task calls for a bureaucratic "people processing" technologies in which participants are evaluated regarding standardized, person-independent monitoring tools. The construction of a "personal integration project" (document 3) that considers the "personal, familial and professional situation" (ibid.), and that accounts for the "personal preferences" of youngsters in turn, implies a personalized, individual approach a "people changing technology", in which the interpersonal relations between the counselor and the client are key.

Just by looking at these few "static" structural features, one can establish that Motivational Semesters operate within a situation of institutional pluralism: the SeMo is "subject to multiple regulatory regimes (and) embedded within multiple normative orders" (Kraatz/Block: 2008: 243). It operates in an institutional field that is made up of a variety of different professional, administrative interest groups, legal definitions of need, merit and mandate, other organizations in their field and relevant stakeholders. As shown in chapter 4, neo-institutionalist approaches focus on how potentially contradictory legitimation needs that result from the organisational environment are tamed by changes in the formal organizational structure. As the process of bringing young people into work is hardly technologiseable, it is delegated to professionals. In chapter 4.1.5 I have proposed to utilize the concept of "institutional logics" (Thornton/Ocasio 2008, 2012) to adequately describe the pluralist make-up of organizations. In this perspective, the SeMo as an organization in the field of employment promotion is shaped by competing for institutional logics

of the market, the logic of the democratic state, and a professional logic of individualized care. SeMo's both operate on a Market (qua their exchange relations with the apprenticeship-market) and in the sphere of the "democratic state" (as a public policy, they operate according to a logic of welfare citizenship where bureaucratic eligibility rules and the imperative of equal treatment before the law become ubiquitous). According to the institutional logics perspective, these logics can exist side by side and provoke potentially conflicting, countervailing or stabilizing tensions. A described in chapter 4.1.5 the concept of institutional logics remains on the level of supra-organizational logics. To provide the conceptual tools that allow analyzing how actors manage the rivalry of coexisting and competing for institutional logics in their day-to-day work activities I proposed in – chapter 4.1.6 – to utilize the descriptive vocabulary of the sociology of conventions.

In contrast to the rather static perspective of neo-institutionalism (focusing on the homogeneity of institutional fields and adaptation of formal organisational structure), and the focus on meso-level institutional logics of the institutional logic perspective, the sociology of conventions "emphasizes a notion of coordination being more open to uncertainty and the dynamics of coordination and accounting for the plurality of modes of coordination" (Thévenot 2001: 406). For Thévenot, organizations are a specific socio-material arrangement specifically designed to deal with a pluralist environment. They are "compromising devices" (Thévenot 2001: 410) for uncertain situations that result from the simultaneous existence of different nationalities within the same organization. Accordingly, the focus is shifted from formal structures and meso-level institutional logic to concrete, practical situations of uncertainty, so called "critical moments" (Boltanski 2006). This implies that in the sociology of conventions, organizations are not seen in strict correspondence to each order of worth (e.g. civic worth to the state-administration, domestic worth to the family or industrial worth to the firm), rather, "all organizations have to cope with critical tensions between different orders of worth" (Thévenot 2001: 411). These critical tensions thus also manifest themselves on the level of everyday institutional life and the concrete practice at the frontline-level. In the following chapters, I will therefore focus on the ways frontline agents operate within a complex institutional world, and how they balance different contradictory injunctions to "get along" in institutional everyday life. This includes a thorough analysis of institutional classifications and the judgment on persons. The "people processing" and "people changing" activities in human service organizations require complex, often morally infused judgments over persons. Situations of institutional classification, insofar they imply a judgment of the quality of persons and things are typical "critical situations" (Boltanski 2006). For the concrete implementation of the policy at hand, actors are required to perform ubiquitous judgments on persons, infused with insecurity and a plurality of possible interpretative schemes: "Is a person "apt for placement?" "Should a "fragile" person be sent to an internship at the risk of "burning" an employer?" "How should repeated lateness be dealt with?". These processes of evaluation and classification that are so central for people processing activities are far from trivial. In these diverse insecure action situations, actors must actively build a conception between the resources made available through general, publicly available orders of justification and the respective situation at hand. Classification practices are indeed not simple operations of observing and naming differences. To classify means to contribute to the definition of an unclear situation, as it implies a judgment on the information that is deemed (institutionally) relevant in that specific situation. As such, the practice of classifying is itself a contribution to compromising and coordinating a complex situation characterized by a plurality of different rationalities.

## 6.1.1. Motivational Semesters as Complex Devices of Coordination

The Motivational Semesters constitute a complex conventional arrangement. This first empirical part describes the conventional arrangement of one Motivational Semester, analyses the resulting conflicts and shows how professionals and their clients manage to overcome controversies and find a fragile balance between the different forms of judgment and evaluation. This first part uses the OoW framework to reveal "the different competing or conflicting rationalities in organizations" (Jagd 2011: 355) of one organization and to describe how they manifest themselves within both formal structure and everyday activities of actors. These different competing rationalities are as described above, also carried through different actor constellations within the institutional environment of the organizations. As such,

"When one pays attention to the moment where a policy is put into practice, it becomes evident that, beyond the application of a rule, there is a confrontation between different forms of judgment expressed by the different actors implicated in the policy" (Thévenot/Boltanski 2001: 216)

Albeit these actor constellations refer to a clear material environment, the interest of this chapter is to show how these constellations affect the concrete justification work of the organization and how these different conflicting demands clash on the frontline level. A first, very simple way to gather the different orders of worth is the recourse to the exchange relations the Motivational Semester maintains with different organizations of their environment, describe the different OoW resulting from this arrangement and to describe resulting conflicts and how the Motivational Semester works as a "compromising device" (Thévenot 2001: 401) between the different orders of worth. It is important to distinguish between the different levels, actors, social arenas and conventional requirements which lead to these conflicts. To remain true to the OoW-framework, it is important to define the objects that are made relevant within each order of work and to which actors refer to when performing a test. Therefore, attention will be given to different forms and regulations that play a central role in each order of worth, as "compromising" between different OoW is an active work located at the concrete level of "situations", the second part will focus on the "art of composition" (Thévenot 2009) between different regimes. Organizational actors have to deal with different abstract, ambiguous and sometimes even contradictory policy goals that result from the complex institutional environment of the different actors implicated in that policy.

## 6.1.2. Contradictory Logics and their Practical Compromises

Tensions between different action logics can be traced back to the phase of institutionalization of the Motivational Semesters in the early nineties when first third sector organizations began to implement such services after the creation of the possibility to be funded by unemployment insurance. As the head of one of the Motivational Semesters describes, the early phase of institutionalization of the Motivational Semesters, ambiguities between the different actors involved in the policy emerged:

"It is true that in, let´s say, the economic logic it is […] young persons finish their obligatory schooling, and we will try to evaluate, for 6 months If they are "placeable" with the terms of placeability of unemployment insurance, and then, it is very simple – we will release them in the wilderness! And since the beginning, here, we made the claim that in the end, we are dealing with a specific profile of clients, these are not some random unemployed. What can we do to lead them to the world of work? Except, if we apply such an educational datum, we are suddenly in a, we are obliged to use a constellation of professionals. Our staff cannot act like the public servants of the employment service, that put a "stamp" on persons that are non-placeable, there is suddenly an undisclosed vocation, to conduct these youngsters to the world of work. And it is this "grey sphere" that I found interesting, that lead me to work here" (I. 1.: 23-41)

The interviewee clearly identifies the mandate attributed by the employment agency as people processing activity aiming at "*evaluating*" the market readiness of participants and refers to the notion of "*placeability*", a notion referring to the legal specifications in unemployment insurance. She rejects the "economic" logic and the demands of the employment service according to which the organization only fulfills a "sorting function" of participants according to their labor market viability. She denounces the potential "stigmatising" and damaging effects of the sorting logic ("*putting a stamp on persons*") and opposes It to a notion of "*accompaniment*" and personal guidance that is "*educational*" In character and requires "*professionals*" rather than "bureaucrats" (public servants of the unemployment office). The latter have, as the quote implicitly suggests, no problem with putting a stamp on somebody and execute their legal mandate without questions. The accompaniment requires professionals, that can respond to the *"specific profile of clients"* that constitute young unemployed that just left school. These clients are opposed to *"random*" unemployed, which, – implicitly – do not require or not deserve the specific accompaniment. The characterization of young unemployed as a client group with a specific profile refers to an implicit corpus of knowledge used for client categorization and can be read as a kind of a professional "jurisdictional claim" (Abbott 1988) that also serves as a form of cultural capital to reclaim control over the workplace vis-a-vis the legislator. As young persons have a "*specific profile*" they ought not to be treated like regular unemployed, but require special, professional treatment. The logic of people processing according to employability criteria – suggesting bureaucratic processing that stands in contrast to a "people changing" logic (accompaniment) requiring a professionalized organization able to deal with the specificities of each client and the insecurity of the organizational technologies that derive from the variability of client specificities. The notion of "undisclosed vocation", is an important datum, as It refers on the one side, to a "vocation" In the sense of a "calling" to which the organization is especially drawn to and for which it is suited. The notion "undisclosed" refers to the fact that this organizational vocation is ambiguous. It cannot or should not be disclosed, it remains implicit. The importance of the claim to provide an individual and professionalized "counseling" and accompaniment to the young persons for the organizational identity of the analysed Motivational Semester is also highlighted in the further interview and suggests that there are conflicting and contradictory demands between the people processing logic of unemployment insurance and the "undisclosed vocation" of accompanying young persons to the world of work. As the head manager, who is working for the organization since its beginning, says, "We have been one of the first motivational semesters that introduced professional social workers within the system, to guide youngsters within this sphere. This was quite subversive at that time, something that was hard to apprehend by the employment service" (I.1.:54-56).

The process of formal implementation of the Motivational Semester thus seems to be a source of historical dispute between the financing institution and the implementing organization over the scope and goal of the concrete measure. These seem to revolve around the question of the appropriateness of individualized counseling and the lack of assertiveness of the providing organization to implement the "sorting function" of the Motivational Semesters and the strict compliance with regulations and application of rules. Nevertheless, the story told is a story of at least partly successful institutionalization of the logic of individualized counseling within a rather strict regime of bureaucratic processing and compulsion. The need to perform a "strict coupling" with the rules and regulations of the unemployment services, and the resulting overview of a limited purview of organizational activities seen to be a source of constant negotiation and disagreement.

"We had the employment service, relentlessly watching, perhaps justifiably, but always watching and saying, "take care, you are outside of your mission statement, this exceeds your mandate, you are doing a recreation center". And the picture they had of individual counseling was "you are knitting with the youngsters, but when do the sanctions come? When do you eject from the system? When do you start the – quotation marks – sorting center?" (I.2: 115-122).

The interviewee describes the insecurities that existed during the institutionalization phase of the motivational semester during the early nineties. The use of "pedagogical" modes of operation like counseling as a central ingredient was obviously seen as being at odds with the legal makeup of an active labor-market measure initially designed for adult job seekers. The third sector organization that institutionalized the measure found itself exposed to critiques by the funding institution – from the background of a jurisdiction that clearly defined the task of ALMP's as enhancing the employability of unemployed job-seekers and that restricted access to those clients that are "apt for placement". The implicit suspicion issued by the cantonal employment office is that the Motivational Semester would not adequately implement the relatively strict regulations in terms of sanctions and access criteria as fixed in the legal framework. In fact, as the head officer of the Motivational Semester describes, the creation of the Motivational Semester also introduced new professions into the former purely "administrative" treatment of the unemployed youngsters. Social educators, social workers, psychologists entered a field that was formerly populated by persons either affiliated to public administration or to the crafts (the staff of the workshops). In addition, the third sector organization on whose initiative the Motivational Semester was created was traditionally involved in the operation of youth welfare services and open youth work activities. The objection of the funding institution must be contextualized: After all, a new "player" in the field of ALMP´s, the surfacing of new professions that would eventually bring own jurisdictional claims, an own descriptive repertoire is due to their tendency to de-couple their work from direct administrative supervision harder to control. The former would unduly orient their operations to pedagogical work rather than the enforcement of the logic of unemployment insurance, which allegedly operates according purely conditionally programmed applications of law to cases. Surely, the objections of the funding institutions are a sign of a lack of an initial lack of legitimacy of the new arrangement – and bear witness of tension between the goals of then unemployment insurance and the institutionalization of "people-changing" work within the Motivational Semesters. The intrusion of these new professions in the field of unemployment insurance is paralleled by a larger transformation of the knowledge categories with which the issue of unemployment is apprehended socially, and in which new "people changing technologies", emerged. As such, "counseling", as a main ingredient of the SeMo emerged in a historical phase in which traditional modes of the organization of the education-occupation link where put in question, and in which new social demands are institutionalized and displaced from organizational dispositives towards the subject. This process is intricately linked to the emergence of new professions referred to knowledge forms and practices from sociology and psychology that are intricately linked to leading individuals to a form of desirable self-regulation (Rose 1999). We do thus witness, with the historical emergence of the Motivational Semester, a specific form of institutionalized "treatment" of unemployment, which does not restrict to "administrative" management of the unemployed but installs new forms of governing (young) unemployed. Nevertheless, the initial reluctance of the funding institution bears witness of an arrangement still to consolidate, to conceal. The suspicion that the "pedagogical" treatment of the unemployed would undermine the strict regulatory goals of a "sorting center" in which persons are processed according to criteria of employability can be counted as one of the central foundational tensions of the Motivational Semesters that still structures the everyday work in the SeMo. As the head officer describes, this conflict strongly structures the relation of the organization to its environment, and as such the organizational justification work that is required to maintain such a precarious arrangement:

"Over all those years, that was a very specific task of my position. On the one side, I supervise and coached welfare professionals´ that focus on building relationships and focus on individual counseling, and on the other side I perpetually I had to prove that we are still following our mandate and that It is more efficient and also has a higher quality to accompany the youngsters, to take into account his resources, his relationships with his family, the social constellation" (I1: 240-254).

We see that the Motivational Semesters actively endorsed and promoted the "individualized" treatment" of unemployment. It is a central institutional entrepreneur for the promotion of a view on unemployment that does not restrict its mandate to the administrative treatment, but that comes with a specific form of communication ("building relationships", take into account his resources, his relationships") that are extremely unselective, (everything can be thematized) and that is potentially characterized by a deprivatization of the subject, in which private troubles become public issues. It is clear that such a perspective is at odds with the more selective administrative treatment in which the person is only addressed with reference to abstract legal regulations and categories. Nevertheless, as the quote suggests, the Motivational Semesters seem to perform a "hybridization" of the administrative" and the "person-centred" rationality at least insofar the position of the head officer describes her task of bridging the legitimation requests from the organizational environment on the one side and her task to "coach" and "supervise" the internal activities. These contradictory logics that result from the organizational environment of the Motivational Semester are not "resolved" in a specific compromise that remains stable all-over organizational areas, whose potential for conflict would be resolved in some kind of "ritualized" compliance with the external norms but remains active within the everyday activities of workers and professionals of the Motivational Semesters. As such, the professionals working with participants on an everyday basis are aware of the tensions that result from the different stakeholders involved in the policy and are aware of the contradictory demands that result from them.

"We cannot just take them as a number and tell them, do this, do that. That` s not possible, we must be able to work with the participant based upon what he has, what he likes or does not like. Because finding him an apprenticeship that he doesn´t attend anymore after two weeks, that doesn´t make sense. Ok, It Is true that our mandate is… yes to "forget" the young person, but that´s simply not possible. Because we wouldn´t be able to do good work, we wouldn´t be able to maintain a good image in front of the employers, and the young persons, the same, we could find an interim solution, but for two months and then it fails…" (I.3.: 398- 408).

This counselor talking about his everyday work with young program participants rejects the one-size-fits-all logic of unemployment insurance. A key issue in this quote was how participants are to be evaluated and what information counts as relevant to the everyday interaction of the Motivational Semesters. If counselors would follow the mandate of the unemployment insurance, so the argument goes, they would have to treat young participants as "numbers". In fact, the people processing logic of the unemployment Insurance is evaluating the young person in the "CIVIC" regime – did the young person, as an "abstract citizen" with specific rights and responsibilities, respond to his legal duties? The application of the CIVIC OoW thus comes with a specific "cognitive format" (Nachi 2008, Diaz-Bone 2009) and specific objects (forms to be forwarded to the unemployment agency, a sheet in which the number of applications must be documented), that defines how the situation is to be treated. The evaluation of conformity with the unemployment insurance laws, the assessment of the number of postulations and internships, do in effect result in "*treating young unemployment as a number*". As the counselor puts it, this format has limitations ("*simply not possible*"), as this would result in prescribing specific actions and tasks, without considering "*what the young person likes or does not like"*. The hesitation to not prescribe specific lines of action to clients seem to result from a "respect" of individual volition and preferences of the client, which – if we follow the interviewees line of thinking – cannot be discarded easily. Nevertheless, the interviewee does not legitimize the rejection of such a direct paternalist stance by referring to the value of individual autonomy or a professional code of ethics

that would forbid to simply discount the client values, but he refers to a notion of good and "effective" work. As such, the interviewee differentiates between the goal orientation of "fast" integration into the labor market", and a "sustainable", "durable" integration into the labor market, that does not "fail" after two months. To reach the latter, so the interviewee suggests, it seems necessary to "*work with the beneficiary*" and to consider his desires.

In addition, this quote introduces another key stakeholder in the institutional environment of the Motivational Semester: The "employers", towards which a "good image" must be maintained. Motivational Semesters are dependent on firms that offer apprenticeships to accommodate their population outflow, and an important part of their activities consists of placing young persons into internships with different firms and matching them with potential employers. As such in the eyes of the interviewee, it is highly important to *"maintain a good image"* in front of employers. It is seen as an important task not to *"burn"* an employer through *"selling"* them a young person that finally drops out. In order to maintain stable exchange relations with employers, frontline workers have to carefully pre-select young people they are sending to internships, test the *"stability"* of his motivations and his ability to comply with the *"codes"* od the world of work. This requires as stated in the quote below, to go beyond the mission of strictly working on "employability" issues of the mandate, a people changing technology in which an individual's motivation, his identity, and his personal characteristics are worked on.

"… there we are a little bit outside of our framework. Because our mission, our mandate is really to work on the professional (to work on employability) But we are aware that somewhere, we are always a little bit in between of the two, because we are aware that if we don´t work on personal issues, (sighing) we can integrate a young person into a job, we can call the employer and say "You really have to take him, he is really good", but he will hang onto it for three weeks, and then it will blow up. That is not really a good option" (I. 6.:556-560).

The counselors of the Motivational Semesters thus have to deal with a whole range of different conflicting demands that can be described as a complex conventional framework. On the one side, the administrative logic of the unemployment insurance law, which is based on a "civic" OoW, in which the youngster is assessed according to the eligibility criteria and the criteria´s of work readiness that result from their duties in the sphere of a contractual citizenship: as a beneficiary of the unemployment insurance, specific requirements have to be met, independently of the individual situation of the person. The logic of the unemployment insurance is characterized by the idea that youngsters can comply with the with work requirements and specific behavioral imperatives and that participants can calculate the cost and benefits of non-compliance with the rules (for the SeMo: being at time, performing several job search activities per month, performing one internship per

month). As such, the task of welfare professionals is to enforce regulations and standards and refer to the legal officers (the public employment service) in case of infringement. This logic, for which an administrative people-processing logic would be appropriate, conflicts with both the (professional) organizational identities of the staff and other conventional requirements that are carried through another stakeholder in the institutional environment of the Motivational Semester: the employers. As Motivational Semesters maintain important exchange relations with employers, the simple monitoring of job-search activities and the "fast" placement of youngsters is not an option, as the Motivational Semesters are required to maintain a "good Image" in front of employers. As such, Motivational Semesters do pre-screen and pre-select the youngsters that are deemed to be "ready" for placement according to the classification patterns of employers. This finds entrance into the formal structure of the SeMo through standardized competency tests (IN-DUSTRIAL), a profound assessment of the behavior in workshops, specific assessment forms employers must fill out after a participant has performed an internship (INDUSTRIAL), the behavioral "codes" of the world of work (wearing the adequate clothes, being kind and submissive, but not too much, etc.) (DOMESTIC), but also the adequacy of the aspired apprenticeship with the participants school grade (MARKET). The Motivational Semester has the role of a market intermediary (see chapter 6.3), which screens participants and performs matching with the job placements for firms. We will see in the next section that the "categorization" of participants fully fits within these categories. Contradictorily, these tensions result in the need to perform people changing activities – counselors must consider the "individuality" of the participants and "what they like" to maintain a "credibility" towards employers.

One could say that due to the heterogeneity of the participants, this results in a kind of translation of specific behavioral requirements into interaction requirements and the transmission of specific dispositional patterns that are required to enter the world of work. On the one side, the CIVIC logic of the unemployment law presupposes autonomous persons, that can calculate cost and benefits of non-compliance and that, in general, do not dispose of any vulnerabilities or attachments that impede them from complying to strict behavioral requirements. As we will see this is not true for many young participants. These tensions are also reported in the following quote.

"For instance, young persons are supposed to do one internship per month. That is what the employment agency is asking from us. And in reality, that is not possible. Because firstly, we will have to put in place a "professional project" and this can already take one to two months, depending on the person. Then there are time periods, like July, August or January, where it is simply impossible to land an internship because firms are on holiday. And then, with some youngsters, it is not

possible instantly, they need more time because they are not yet ready. And we are aware that we are not on target, at this level, but sometimes, we are not forcing young people who are refusing to enter an apprenticeship, we are not going to force them to do one internship per month. We know – we are outside the framework, and we do not have the right to tell the employment agency" (I1.: 624-641).

This interviewee highlights that the requirements from the employment agency are restricted to "purely professional" questions and describes the tensions that arise from the rather strict legal requirements (make one internship per month), seasonal fluctuations in the economy, and the "non-readiness" of some of the young persons. The latter result on the one side, from the fact to construct a "professional integration project" with the young person, and on the other side, the nonspecified fact that young persons are not yet "ready". The counselor describes that it is a common policy in the organization to subjugate the strict demands attached to the Unemployment Insurance and to exercise a kind of discretion regarding the strict implementation of legal demands and the exercise of sanctions. As the Interviewee describes, this partly happens through negotiation with the public employment service agents that are responsible for the participant, and partly on the basis of a *"grey sphere/zone"* (I.5.: 365) In which the administrative follow up is "decoupled" from the people changing activities. The frontline work seems to consist of a large part in a consolidation between the different logics of action and the different "orders of worth" that clash on the frontline level.

## **6.2. Conflicts Between Orders of Worth and situated Compromises in Human Service Work: The Case of Sanctions**

Motivational Semesters are – as described above – part of the active labor market policy of the Swiss cantons and as such submitted to a regime of institutional rules and prescriptions. The cantonal office for labor market measures functions as a contracting authority and links the financing of the measure to specific conditions to be met and prescribes specific accountabilities. An important dimension of these accountability claims which directly links the concrete Motivational Semester to the administrative system of swiss labor-market policy are the legal prescriptions that are made to the participants of the Motivational Semester. As most of the participants are beneficiaries of the unemployment insurance, the rules and legal requirements of the unemployment insurance apply to them and are monitored by the organizational actors of the Motivational Semester. The rules of the unemployment insurance state for instance, that the job seeker is required to "be apt for placement" (thus able, ready and entitled) to take up work (§ 14 LACI). Public employment services are in fact allowed to command a medical assessment in cases a doubt on the ability for placement persists. Furthermore, as highlights in the same legal framework, "the insured person has to do everything necessary to abrogate or avoid unemployment that one can reasonably demand from" (§17.). To reduce "damage" the insured person must Immediately take up work (§16) Insofar it corresponds to specific criteria of "reasonable work" (art 16a-i), and the insured person can face benefit cuts if the person "does not show enough effort in searching for reasonable work" (§30). For the Motivational Semesters, these requirements are translated into a "catalog of sanctions", which specifies these rules for the specific group of young apprenticeship seekers and for the practice of the Motivational Semesters. The catalog of sanctions is a central element of the bureaucratic rules and legal prescriptions of the Motivational Semester: Firstly, as these rules apply for all Motivational Semesters funded by the public employment service, the document that contains these rules is a central artifact that links the frontline-level work of organizational actors with the extralocal social order. As Dorothy Smith puts it, such documents link the work at the front-line level with the hierarchical organization of the organization and at the same time defines "the concepts and categories providing the terms in which what is done at that level become accountable are governed by the law and, presumably, also by the administrative rules of the department" (Smith 2005: 186). Due to its validity for all Motivational Semesters in the canton and its replicability in a whole range of different settings within the analyzed measure and beyond it is part of the "ruling relations" (Smith 2005) that govern the extra-situative conditions for action for the frontline agents. Due to the replicability of the document it is able to contribute "to the standardizing of work activities of all kinds across time and translocally" (Smith 2005: 155). Secondly, the document constitutes a vital part of the institutional script that shapes practice. As we will see below, the catalog of sanctions comes in the form of a guideline and contains concrete rules for action. Using the actor-network theory, one could say that this guideline has specific "inscriptions2 " which means that the document embodies specific "patterns of use" (Akrich/Latour 1992: 259) that is inscribed by the designer of the guideline and that reflects his/her interests.

## 6.2.1. The Institutional Script of the Sanctioning Procedure

While the guideline does not determine how organizational actors implement and interpret the rules it contains, the guidelines are part of the institutional structure that gives sense to and legitimize specific practices or actions of frontline

2 The term "inscription" has been coined by actor-network theory and can serve as a sensitizing concept to analyse how different actors achieve to make figure their interests into material artefacts, for instance, a institutional document or form. According to Callon "an inscription is the result of one´s interest in material form" (Callon 1991: 143).

agents. The "catalog of sanctions" as a procedure manual is an institutional script that "streamlines, organizes includes and excludes information by instructing staff […] to attend to certain themes and categories of information" (Berrick et al.: 2018: 41). The concept of institutional script focusses both the encoding of the script in institutional principles as well as it´s concrete organizational enactment. Institutional scripts constitute "observable, recurrent activities and patterns of interaction characteristic of a particular setting" (Barley/Tolbert 1997: 98). Hasenfeld argues that these scripts highlight both "how organizations select and establish rules that guide their work and how these rules become enacted in everyday activities" Hasenfeld 2010 in Berrick, 2018: 44).

The form "table of faults and sanctions" employed in all Motivational Semesters in Western Switzerland describes the disciplinary measures the frontline workers are deemed to implement in case young participants do not comply with the conditions of participation in the SeMo. The form distinguishes between "light," middle" and "heavy" faults, each coupled to different penalties. As a "light" fault, for instance, figures a late arrival, a work task that has not been realized within the demanded time, or the non-respect of a directive. In case these faults are committed, the Motivational Semester is bound to inform the local employment agency, and these faults can subsequently lead to a suspension of benefits. In case of repeated faults, an examination of the "aptitude for placement" (job readiness) is mandatory, which can lead to the administrative exclusion of a youngster from the scheme. The documents' most remarkable feature is that it provides a measurement standard, that makes situated doings and sayings authoritatively identifiable and "institutionally actionable" (Smith 2005: 186). It renders recognizable a whole range of doings and sayings through translating them into "the generalized forms in which they become recognizable and accountable across the local settings of institutional work" (ibid.). In doing so, it establishes a principle of equivalence for judging different sometimes incommensurable situations, makes invisible specific information and potentially invalidates and overrides individual experience (for instance, the subjective reasons for action that lie behind a specific behavior). The form does, as an example, not differentiate explicitly between situations of "coming late" due to a bus accident or due to oversleeping. When a situation is treated within the categories of the form, complexity is reduced, and a situation is made a manageable case. Imagine for instance the light fault "non-respect of an instruction": No information about the subjective meaningfulness of the instruction, the interaction history of the participants, the concrete tasks involved leading to the "non-respect of an instruction", etc. are given in this classificatory term. In the procedure of classifying the concrete situation according to the organizational logic of "non-respect of an instruction", "peoples experience (is subordinated) to the institutional. In that transformation, "local actualities become institutionally actionable" (Smith 2005: 187). Hence the frames, concepts, and categories (and the technologies) that

#### *Figure 2: Table of faults and sanctions*

structure the selection and assembly of the actual as institutionally actionable are central in subordinating individual subjectivities to institutionally generated realities. (Smith 2005: 187). James C. Scott has coined the term "legibility" to designate the process of rationalizing and simplifying the subtilties of an often-complex reality that is involved in making things "legible" (Scott 1999). By legibility, Scott means efforts of the modern State to make things visible and "governable". In order to make local behavior "legible", it must be detached from the concrete situation in which it took place, translated within the institutionally relevant framework and made "institutionally actionable" (Smith 2005: 186). As stated in the last box of the document, repeated faults make an examination of the "aptitude for placement" (a medical assessment of the ability to work) mandatory that can lead to the administrative exclusion of a youngster from the scheme. The system of sanctions thus potentially leads to an exclusion of those who for different reasons, are not able to comply with a 40 hours working-day rhythm or come too late repeatedly. The document also contains some rules for action that are contained in each column ("consequences"). These have the character of conditional, if-then plans, and they describe the concrete actions to take when a certain "fault" is detected. For instance, for light faults, a letter to the parents and to the personal advisor at the public employment office, for "heavy faults", a telefax to the legal respondent. Latour (1987) has used the term 'action at a distance' to indicate how decisions documented in one context and setting can carry implications for action in future settings. In this case, the document contains concrete instructions for future organizational activity, for instance, triggering benefit cuts. The document "catalog of sanctions" becomes – following ANT, an "active agent(s) in networks of action" (Prior, 2008: 822). Linked to the identification of potential "misconduct" are a whole network of human agents (the legal respondent, the PES-officer, the parents of the young person) and non-human agents (the form for fax, the apparatus that is used for the "aptitude to placement" test, a.s.o.). But how are these scripts enacted and implemented? What happens when they are facing a blurry and multifaceted context of action in which these rules must be practically balanced with other rationalities?

## 6.2.2. From Rules to their Implements: The Local Interpretation of Sanctioning Rules

The rules embedded within the sanction procedure document are of administrative nature, they embody accountabilities of the Motivational Semester towards the funding institution and they point towards bureaucratic procedures in the Weberian sense, insofar they are deemed to be implemented independently of the person and on a one-size-fits-all basis. Nevertheless, the situated application of rules requires an interpretative effort by the frontline agents. Rule implementation requires rule interpretation, simply because rules necessarily leave a margin of interpretation. This is even the case for the strict conditionally programmed (Luhmann 2012: 317) "if-then" programs as the one depicted in the "catalog of sanctions". The use of a rule requires that the interaction partners agree on the contextual framework of the rule (the "if "-component), that is the definition of the situation requires a specification if the situation at hand is one in which the rule applies. While rules (and the artifacts that "carry" these rules) may naturally have an impact on how situations are interpreted, they do not predetermine locally situated behavior. Their implementation is dependent on local interpretation. This has most prominently been described in Anselm Strauss concept of "negotiated order" according to which "no organizational relationships without accompanying negotiation" (Strauss 1978: 5ff). An organization does not exist independently of the actions of their members; organizational members are continually "negotiating" the pre-existing results of the process of the organization. In this process, codified organizational rules do not simply constitute a coercive structure (like in the Weberian notion of Bureaucracy), but they also constitute action resources: A nurse can use a codified rule for the treatment of patients to rebuke a co-worker, but also to display herself as particularly competent nurse in case of a justified infringement of the rules for a specific case.

The concept of the convention described in detail in chapter 4 comes with a similar conception of situated practice that highlights the role of the locally situated coordination. As shown in chapter 4, conventions are not to be simply understood as rules. Conventions are agreements on opportune behavior respectively the adequate judgment of situations that are situatively interpreted by actors with "critical capacities" (Boltanski 1999). For convention theory, different conventions can be overlapping in a single situation. Due to the existence of a "plurality of mutually incompatible modes of justification" (ibid.: 359), disagreements about either the violation of one mode of justification (for instance deviations from the administrative process of sanctioning as referencing the "civic" regime of justification) or about the mode of justification to apply at all (for instance whether an act constitutes a "faulty behavior" at all). These disagreements only become visible in the daily occurrence of disputes for criteria of justification.

Convention theory starts from the idea that institutions are genuinely incomplete. This results in the necessity of a situated interpretation by competent actors. Bearing similarities with Straus's concept of "negotiated order", a high relevance is put on the performative activities of the actors and their symbolically mediated construction of social order. Other than the concept of negotiated order, the sociology of conventions highlights that coordination is not restricted to the level of minimalist coordination between agents. The common basis for coordination, the so-called conventions are "enshrined in books, institutions, legal provisions and representatives, and […] are constantly recapitulated, transmitted and reactivated in disputes about legitimacy and in the construction of justified agreements" (Dodier 1995: 153). In situations that require coordination, people "fabricate" (ibid.) mediations between this generalized repertoire of shared worlds and particular situations. But, in contrast to what we have seen in the ethnomethodological perspective, "judgments may in this context claim a validity that is not simply ad hoc, provided they respect the requirements defined by one of the models of justice" (Dodier 1995: 154). As such the sociology of conventions operates with a "methodological situationism" (Diaz-Bone 2017: 85) in which on the one side, the equipment of the situation with different objects, forms of practice and institutional rules and on the other side, the interpretative capacities of actors are analyzed. As Favreau and Lazega state

"convention refers to many more aspects of social and economic life than rules, although the latter are included in the former. Conventions are often agreements about how one should coordinate with others but grounded on interpretation as much as on calculation. But to the extent that they are rules, they do not determine behavior mechanically because they have to be interpreted and applied. They are sometimes resources, sometimes constraints, depending on the situation and on where the individual is in the structure. This is why actors have to have an idea of the social collective associated with the correct functioning of these rules, in which they want to coordinate with others" (Favereau/Lazega 2002: 23).

For the sociology of conventions, institutional-administrative rules (for instance, guidelines as the "catalog of sanctions", fixed organizational rules or specific templates for judgment) are part of the conventional equipment of the situation of action. These act as supports for coordination but must be activated by the actors in order to become relevant in situations. Or as Dodier puts it: "whether these rules are drafted for reasons to do with cost management or administrative or legal concerns, or to provide a scientific foundation for the activity – the existence of these rules does not tell us how they are used in concrete situations" (Dodier 1998: 56).

It comes as no surprise that despite the clear-cut conditionally programmed rules of the catalog of sanctions, frontline workers display certain creativity in the application of these rules. The pure possibility to do so results from the fact that the concrete application of sanctioning criteria happens in the sphere of client interaction – as there is no direct purview of the administrative level, the translation of rules into practice is only loosely coupled to the organizational criteria. The existence of this discretionary levy leaves space for a practice of sanctioning that is not based on a simple application of sanctioning rules, but that leaves space for a multiplicity of other modes of judgment then the administrative one. In the interviews, the agents explicitly reclaim a discretionary space in the application of sanctions and justify with reference to internal organisational requirements, with reference to information about the capacities and the social situation of the young clients (knowledge usually made invisible in the administrative rules) or by reference to professional identities and ideas about what constitutes "good professional work". In this process, the frontline agents seem to have a quite profound explicit knowledge about the different, competing institutional logics, about what their enrolment in an organization with different, sometimes conflicting expectations from different stakeholders. The tensions between these different logics seem to be a constant concern during everyday work and require constant re-balancing during ongoing situations. The structural conflicts resulting from the incompatibility of the application of administrative categories and rules and other conventions of evaluation are to be treated on the level of frontline interaction. There is, as I will show below, a "rivalry" of coexisting and competing institutional logics in the dayto-day work activities that are engaged, rejected and sometimes transformed by the welfare professionals. This is illustrated by the following quote:

"I have the impression that the Motivational Semesters follow up youngsters that can be in difficulties and who need some time and the employment service follows up unemployed that need to correspond to a specific profile. In my opinion, we cannot say everything, always, to avoid working against the young person that we look after. Sometimes, we are also their advocate" (I.7.: 81-87).

In this quote, the interviewee clearly distinguishes between two different membership categories that he attributes to the Motivational Semesters on the one side and the unemployment service on the other. The identification of a difference between the Motivational Semester and the unemployment insurance is already a significant one, as it implies that the Motivational Semesters have a proper objective that exists beyond the "official" goals that the funding agency (the public employment service) assigns to it. As the Motivational Semesters are strongly coupled to the cantonal active-labor-market policy, it would have made perfect sense if the interviewee would have described a strict continuity between the work of the Motivational Semesters and the goals of the public employment agency. As this is not the case, this sequence of the interview points to the fact that the Motivational Semesters dispose of an informal institutional reality with its own relevancies, categorizations, and institutional scripts. The interviewee justifies the differentiation of both institutional sites with reference to specific person categories. On the one side youngsters "th*at can be in difficulties and who need some time"* and on the other*"unemployed that need to correspond to a specific profile"*. The use of the word "youngsters" (the use of the word client, participant, or beneficiary would have made perfect sense, nevertheless the interviewee "chooses" the word "youngster") categorizes the attendants of the SeMo in terms of life-phase vocabulary, the notion of "youngsters" refers to the membership of the attendees to a specific life-course category. Taken at face value, the persons at the SeMo qualify mainly through the fact that they are young, that they are eventually "in difficulties" and that they "need some time". In this utterance, the reasons for young people being at the SeMo is displayed as one

of "maturation": once the youngsters with problems have more time, their "difficulties" disperse. Opposed to this implicit problem description of the persons that take part in the SeMo lies the category of a person as seen by the public employment agency: *"Unemployed who have to correspond to a specific profile"* primarily refers to an administrative status (unemployed) that – as opposed to the category "youngster" – refers to a single domain of human life (the absence gainful employment), that imperatively, without indulgence (*"need to"*) correspond to a "*specific profile"*. The membership requirements of the unemployment insurance are described as a non-negotiable requirement of fit between an unemployed person and the specific administrative profile that corresponds to that category. From the background knowledge gained through the analysis of the "table of faults and sanctions", We know that at the very least, this specific "profile" might refer to the notion of "aptitude for placement" (job readiness). And indeed, by looking only at that document, one may gain the impression that the motivation semesters' sole task is to monitor compliance with criteria that emerge directly from the unemployment insurance.

The interviewee does not further explicate potential problems, shortcomings or conflicts that derive from the opposition of the different person-categories of the Motivational Semester and the employment service. Nevertheless, he formulates how he is practically dealing with the existence of two different logics that have each a specific view on the persons at hand. The declaration "*we cannot say everything, at all times, to avoid working against the young person that we look after. Sometimes, we are also their advocate*" suggests strategic information management towards the employment service legitimized by a professional logic of advocacy and a practical ideology of the best interest of the client. The pre-existing rule is negotiated and compromised with a logic of professional action. Further interviews show that the frontline agents acknowledge that *"the constraints of an economic logic and the necessary social work do not marry well"* and that it conflicts with the *"motivation work*" and the *"work on behaviors, the educational work"* that is described as a taken for granted, informal mandate of the work of the counselors. One of the reasons, as just shown for frontline agents actively reclaiming deviance from the institutional rule is the incompatibility between a "people processing" logic (processing, sorting and evaluating clients according to the criteria of aptitude for placement) and a "people changing" logic (work on behaviors and motivation). Nevertheless, the idea that the practical negotiation of sanctioning rules is due to the fact that different stakeholders inside (the frontline agents) and outside (the funding agency) each come with different interests may be a bit too straightforward. Much more, it is a fullyfledged institutional contradiction that lies at the heart of the "creative" use of the sanctioning rules: Motivational Semesters are asked to enforce administrative rules and regulations according to an administrative category of "unemployment" to persons that come with specific characteristics potentially standing in conflict with these administrative standards:

"I think that if we would apply the sanctioning criteria as demanded from the employment agency, we would need to expulse half of the participants – A young person who comes here and who is not employable, there is probably some work to do so he becomes employable, that is also our mission" (I. 3.: 526-532).

This quote suggests that many of the participants of the Motivational Semester are not – at the point of entry, able to comply with the strict sanctioning criteria of the unemployment insurance. The reference to the notion of "employability" is a direct reference to the eligibility criteria of the Unemployment Insurance, to which – so the interviewee argues – over 50% of the youngsters do not correspond. The interviewee distances himself from administrative processing logic and defines that it is also the mission of the Motivational Semester to "work" on the employability of the young persons. The discretionary exercise of sanctions presents itself as highly functional for the people changing activities, and displays an "educational" logic, in which the temporary suspension of administrative rules opens the possibility to initiate an individualized treatment of the participant and to slowly transpose the demands of the world of work into the subjective relevancies of the participant. "Working" on the employability of the young person constitutes a central shift from the descriptive vocabulary of the employment insurance. "being employable" is resignified from a characteristic of persons that people dispose of (or not) into a category that can be "worked on", that can be treated. The problem of "non-employability" is re-classified into a pedagogical problem, into an organisationally manageable problem.

"Sure, as soon as we follow up a young person, and we start to set goals on work behavior to somebody that didn´t work for a whole year, he will need some time to synchronize first. we evidently will not sanction him for coming 4 minutes too late, or for missing out on an objective. So, this is always this "grey zone", on which we want to have a hold on" (I.5.: 345-365.)

While the preceding quote is an indicator for the discretionary application of sanctions, it also points to a specific incompatibility between the conception of the "welfare beneficiary" of the unemployment insurance and the classification according to the internal organizational logic of the Motivational Semester. To be transformed as a subject of the organization in question, to be transformed into a "manageable case", The requirements of the unemployment insurance must be re-signified signified into "employability troubles" (Orianne 2005: 175) that can be treated on the individual level. The sanctioning criteria of the unemployment insurance operate with a "juridical-legal" conception of young persons as rationally choosing economic actors, which would rationally choose welfare over work, thus having to be given the "right" incentives. Welfare policies presuppose the "autonomous" and self-sufficient individuals they are trying to restore. The very idea of sanctioning

builds on the premise that "welfare recipients who face the threat of sanctions are capable of complying with the work requirements" that "the failure to comply signifies a lack of motivation", as well as that the beneficiaries "are aware of the rules and can rationally calculate the costs and benefits of complying" (Hasenfeld et. al. 2004: 304). For instance, the inability to develop a professional project and to do the legally prescribed number of internships and Job search-activities precludes that young persons have the necessary autonomy to do so. This has consequences for the people processing in the SeMo. Besides the obvious fallacies of the juridicallegal subject as the guiding principle of the sanctioning rules, we see that frontline agents – when it comes to describing the characteristics of the participants – amount to a whole normative register of appropriate action that accounts for what it means to be "employable". On the one side, there are clear youth-specific, "developmental" criteria, (the *"lack of maturity" of some youngsters,* on the other side, they describe violations of specific normative forms that refer to the site of the training firm, for instance not *"knowing the codes of the word of work", "problems of regularity"*, the *"lack of motivation".* These characteristics refer to a range of specific individual traits that clearly exceed the juridical-legal subject definition of unemployment insurance. The fact that many of them "*do not know how to sell themselves In front of employers",* have *"a totally wrong image of a specific profession*", *"sabotage themselves due to their low self-esteem"* or *"do not even know what they want",* refers to personal characteristics that are not enshrined in the juridical-legal conception of the subject as it is represented in the legal codes of the unemployment insurance, but that are central organizational categorizations that make unemployment a "treatable" issue (by the means at the disposition in the organization). Last but not least, the inability to perform the required number of internships because of *"non-readiness*" and the need to work on the *"individual integration project",* or *"the image she wants to show from herself "* shows that there is a "gap" between the construction of the person in unemployment insurance and the "real" life-situation of the participants in the SeMo.

The conception of the welfare subject in the unemployment insurance presumes an instrumental-rational individual, in which both job-preferences and aspirations derive from individuality herself and who is "independently capable of action and driven by her internal motivations" (Ehrenberg 1999: 311). This is – as the manifold informal client categories show, obviously not the case. Much more, the abstract liberal political subject, – before its status as an "autonomous being" – needs to find a hold in relationships of recognition and supportive relationships in the close, familiar sphere. The "morally responsible self " that is presupposed in the liberal conception of the person is dependent on "relations of intersubjective recognition" (Anderson/Honneth 2005: 127) as a constitutive precondition for the ability to pursue own life-projects. The "capacity to act", or a sense of "biographical agency" – so generously presumed in the notion of the "individualized integration project" is

only possible from the Background of "a view of oneself as the legitimate source of reasons for acting" (Anderson/Honneth 2005: 146). It seems as, sometimes, the policy documents presume the individual they are trying to restore. Because of this gap, counselors in the Motivational Semester seem to pursue a careful construction and reconstruction of "agentic" individuals, or of "clients that can create themselves" (Andersen 2007). The interactive transformation of a disciplinary practice of sanctioning, in which an external demand (*"the codes of the world of work")* Is displaced into the interiority of persons *("he has to make this injunction his own"*) requires the welfare professionals to act in a *"grey sphere"* in which the sanction criteria are temporally suspended in order to enter into an interactive negotiation of the goals that an individual could reasonably subject himself to. The "suspension" of sanction opens up a space in which the sanctions no longer involve a coercive practice but aim at fostering practices of self-formation.

## 6.2.3. The Grey Sphere of Acting "Below the Conventions"

As the following quote shows, the compromising of these different logics of action and evaluation is a continual task that must be situatively negotiated by the frontline agents. This can be described as a skillful "art of composition" (Thévenot 2009: 808) of different conventions. On the one side, the strict enforcement of the "one-size fits all", conditional sanctioning rules would amount to an administrative treatment of persons, a treatment that would consequentially invalidate the possibility to account for the personal attachments and vulnerabilities of the singular person and restrict the possibility for a trustful work-alliance between client and professional. On the other side, a pure orientation on the "regime of proximity" would invalidate the character of the Motivational Semester as a public policy and inevitably lead to conflict with the formal requirements of the organization.

If a youngster is late all the time, I mean 20-30 minutes, we are legally obliged to sanction him, within three days, we can fire him, but that's not our objective – we will have to account for this problem and set him goals to work with the young person so he makes this injunction his own and he realizes that these are the codes without which one cannot make it in the world of work" (I.4:694-699).

This quote shows that organizational practice often happens "below the conventions" (Breviglieri et al. 2007: 129) insofar the temporary suspension of conventionbased horizons of evaluation takes place in a discretionary grey sphere implying a deliberate flouting of legal prescriptions and their formal evaluation criteria. This temporary suspension of the legal horizons of judgment enable a form "situated judgment" (Boltanski/Thévenot 2000: 208) in which the young person is not noticed as an abstract citizen in the civic order of worth, but as a concrete subject, which disposes of a restricted equipment of action resources and which – at least potentially – is equipped with a volition to voluntarily comply to the abovementioned requirements. In terms of the economy of conventions this constitutes a form of situated compromise between the industrial order of worth (young persons should satisfy the criteria of the labor market, for instance regarding the expectation of being on time), the civic order of worth (receiving unemployment benefits is tied to conditions that are valid for all, independent of their personal circumstances) and a regime of familiar engagement that means, the way in which a person is engaged with the world in order to serve *"*the good of personal and local convenience and feeling at ease, and its personal access to reality as usual and used surroundings" (Thévenot 2008: 20).

This specific pedagogical pragmatic regime characterized through proximity, closeness, and interdependence (Thévenot 2011), aims at introducing the young person to the "tests" of the labor market in a gentle and cautious way while considering his life-world and biographic embeddings. In some situations, in which young participants came too late to the Motivational Semester, the frontline agents made dependent the application of the administrative sanctioning criteria on the capacity of the young persons to justify it and apologize for it. In the vocabulary of the sociology of conventions, the situation of "coming too late" can be described as a "critical moment" (Boltanski/Thévenot 1999), as a situation of a "test" (Dansou/Langley 2012) in which the local ongoings have to be aligned with the conventional equipment of the situation, and where a conflict between the civic order of worth (enshrined in the institutional rules of sanctioning) and the pragmatic regime of engagement unfolds3 . In the everyday practices of the Motivational Semesters also justifications that refer to the proximity of the person ("I overslept") are seen as valid, especially as they allow the frontline agents to thematize private life conduct (for instance playing computer games all night long) as a public problem. This would not be

3 The conventional equipment of the situation of sanctioning can be deciphered as follows: *"Coming to late",* insofar it relates to the necessary "codes" of the world of work and constitutes a central evaluation criteria of employers, refers to the "INDUSTRIAL" OoW. Not being on time conflicts with the temporal organization of the daily work of a firm, with the plans and the organizational procedures and workflows. The *"legal obligation to sanction" (table of faults and sanctions)* refers to the cognitive format of the "CIVIC" OoW, in which the person is evaluated in terms of a "abstract citizen", irrespective of personal characteristics. Abstracting from the particularities of a individual, the CIVIC OoW abstracts from the particularities of the person, and sees the person as an abstract holder of rights and responsibilities, that stands in a contractual relation with the state. Legal standards are to be applied regardless of personal background and individual motives. The focus of an application of juridical standards to cases is a deliberate fading out of perspectives that would suggest other standards of evaluation. The case in question (for instance the breaching of a sanctioning rule) is apprehended from a distance, it is only from the background of a standardized application of legal norms, only this stance allows to establish a legal objectivity and to avoid arbitrary decisions that would not withstand claims for equal treatment.

possible with strict enforcement of the administrative regime of sanctions. Nevertheless, this constitutes a fragile compromise, a *"montage pratique"* (Breviglieri 2003: 142), that must be negotiated over and over again: On the one side, the frontline worker does deliberately breach an administrative instruction, the practice mentioned above thus has to happen in a semi-public space, where derivations from the rule are not sanctioned. On the other side, the frontline worker is constantly at risk of getting "to close" to the young person. (Because becoming an intimate or close friend with the attended person would be a breach of "professional distance"). But he must "asymmetrically consider the required familiar accommodation to surroundings which supports the primordial ease and self-confidence of the person and usually infringes for this purpose some of the regulations or even contractual engagements" (Thévenot 2008: 19). This is what Thévenot has described as the most delicate, trying and skillful aspect of the work of social workers, as it implies "to integrate these different engagements while preventing the tyranny of one of them and the oppression on another" (Thévenot 2008: 20). This tension between two different orders of worth, between the "civic" and the "familial" requires compromise, a precarious, temporary compromise that often has to be re-negotiated and re-enacted at the frontline level. The quote in question suggests one way to temporarily appease the tension resulting from these two conflicting orders of worth: The interviewee considers the young person as a subject with diverse attachments and specific vulnerabilities, a specific, limited equipment of resources – thus as a "concrete" individual and considers the limited ability to comply to the legal obligations. He decides in favor of a temporal suspension of the conventional requirements, to act "below the conventions" (Stavo-Debauge et.al. 2006) and to operate in the discretionary grey sphere between conventional pressures, organizational demands for accountability and the need for a situational compromise. The discretion in the application of sanctions can go quite far, as the following example shows:

"We have situations where young persons smoke a lot – accordingly, they get up in the morning and are not able to work. So, we say "ok, how are you managing your drug consumption? What are we doing with this? And how will you go into the labor market like this? Because now, you cannot". Simply to come to such a conclusion, together with the young person, so that he becomes aware of this. Because sometimes he simply is not aware, that this is not possible. And we are not here to be moralizing or to say, "this behaviour is good, that behaviour is bad". It is much more about fixing objectives, step by step" (I.7.: 399-410).

This quote shows that the suspension of sanctions has the function to "individualize" specific behaviors that open the possibility to "get closer" to the young people and to delicately confront them to the demands of the world of work. Unlike in the civic regime, the person's individuality is considered in a nearly excessive manner, it is intrusively "deprivatized" (Gubrium/Hollstein 1995). The "private" sphere (specific forms of life-conduct, incompatible with the world of work) is "confessed", it is brought to the fore and becomes a "quasi-public" issue. The fact that such issues enter in the communicative space that is established in the weekly encounters between the youngsters and their personal counselors is highly ambiguous. After all, the official "mandate" of the Motivational Semesters are purely professional issues, within this official mandate, within the "pure" relationship between a public servant and a citizen, the mentioning of such behavior would constitute a breach of communicative rules and be perceived as highly irritating. Insofar it would impact on the work behavior of young people, doing drugs would constitute a rule violation that leads to direct exclusion of the program, as mentioned in the sanctioning code. While the consumption of drugs would be a reason for the expulsion of the scheme, the abrogation of the legal framework and the deliberate non-application makes this behavior "negotiable" in face-to-face interaction. The weekly counseling sessions become a space in which the individual can express himself, without any consequences, in which moral judgment is suspended, and in which introspection and self-reflexive evaluation are accommodated for. This mode of practice parallels the Christian confession, which – according to Foucault – spreading and multiplying outside the ecclesiastical institution and extended towards a ubiquitous mode of exercise of power, constitutes a "institutional incitement to speak" (Foucault, 1978: 18, 67 f.) that puts the person in a specific relation to oneself and urges him to relate to the codes of the world of work.

"There is one young girl I follow up on, she just started one and a half months ago. During her first interview, we talked a lot about her family situation, which is quite complicated. And I felt that she was a bit reluctant to come, it was not too much her thing she has been pushed by her parents to come here and so the first week, she did not come at all. And I called her several times, we exchanged a few emails and then on Thursday, she tells me that she will come but she did not come.  Because I felt that she would need some time, and finally she tells me that she will not come on Friday. But she managed to tell me "It is because I do not want to start in the middle of the week, and I am a bit scared to come to the SeMo can I come on Monday?" And that´s when she finally came and, from that moment on she comes here on time every morning. I was able to build a relationship, a personal link to that person that made it possible for her to come here, but officially I would absolutely have to sanction her! Because that is a week of unauthorized absence. I negotiated with her counselor from the Employment Service. It was necessary to create a basis if I would have sanctioned I would have broken all the relational work that I had done" (I.4: 821-834).

The temporary suspension of the legal sanctioning regime opens a space for "relational work" a proximal space that can accommodate the specific vulnerabilities of the young woman. The relationship characterized by the counselor is a relationship that is diffuse, that considers the person that is non-judgmental which allows for the young person to be heard, and where her vulnerability comes to the fore extensively. The deliberative suspension of the judgement in the CIVIC order of worth ("is the behavior of the young person conforming to her duties as a citizenworker?") gives space for a more or less symmetrical relationship allowing for the voicing of concerns, of basic desires, intentions that are not submitted to instant evaluation and where non-fulfillment of these intentions is not judged upon. This so-called "relationship work" allows the young women to identify and formulate her wish to participate in the Motivational Semester as a promise made personally. The sensibility for the specific biographical situation of the young person made possible through the softening and flexibilization of the rather strict requirements of participation in the world of work opens space where the person can articulate her own desires within a larger system of ends and purposes. While the sanctioning criteria displayed in the official documents come as descriptively neutral and objective topics and matters, they inescapably do not merely request objective information, but information about individuals embedded in personal histories of need and care. For the frontline agent applying these criteria, putting them into practice and being confronted with the question if one should "fill in" the sanctioning form and start the sanctioning procedure for an individual participant is far from trivial. The simplicity and one-size-fits-all the bureaucratic sanctioning rules are implying a "descriptive tyranny" (Gubrium 1989), as through standardizing, they "beg the ongoingly constructive and meaningful flow of everyday life, to gloss over the way its members' experience its objects and events" (Gubrium 1989: 212). No place is left in the description of sanctioning rules for the reluctance of the participant to come to a new, unknown environment that the motivation semester constitutes, and no reflection is made of the hesitations and doubts that the person incorporates.

This is also exemplified by the fact that despite a relatively strict conditional programming of sanctions and a relatively unambiguous definition of the mandate of the personal counsellors as "matching" persons to jobs and as the pre-selection of applicants for apprenticeships, all of them highlight the requirement that the relationship to their clients that is based on mutual trust: "*I mean if I do not manage to create a confidential relationship, I will not be able to work, or will do rather bad work, so I really like to talk about more personal and varied things"* (I.9:283-282). If a personal counselor has the impression to put the trust given by the young person at risk through a sanction, he can count on the head officer to take the role of the *"bad cop"*. As such, the personal counselor can continue to maintain a relationship characterized by trust and position himself as an intermediary and try to "individualize", to "translate" the demands into goals that the young person eventually can make his own to prevent another sanction. He acts as a kind of "buffer" between the legal demands

and the young person: *"you understand, it is the management who decides. You surpassed the limits, you have to try harder in order that it does not happen again"* (I.2.: 557-558).

The temporary suspension of specific legal compliance constraints, especially in the case cited above, is highly functional, even required for performing the "task" of the Motivational Semesters: The interviewee highlights its role as an intermediary between the demands of the world of work, the legal demands and the young person with his specific dispositions, the peculiarities of his life-world and individual attachments. It is not the *"goal to fire him"*, to act as a simple disciplining tool for the world of work. Much more, the work is only seen as successful insofar the young person interiorizes the demands of the world of work, *"make this injunction* (to be on time in the morning, S.D.*) his own",* and realize (by himself, not by compulsion) that he cannot do without. The outline provided by the interviewee reminds a kind of maieutic of subjectivity, in which the person is proposed a specific symbolic order in which his actions (for instance getting up in the morning on time) can be recognized from the background of a specific evaluative framework trough which he can recognize himself in a specific way. *"Making this injunction one´s own"* as the quote goes, refers to a form of self-governance, that is not yet achieved, but that, with the help of the counselor, can be achieved through a kind of relational work, in which the person is accompanied and receives help to exert this transformation on himself. This mechanism comes close to a form of subjectivation in the Foucauldian sense an highlights both the constraining and productive effects of power: The *"world of work"* constitutes a specific system of rules and values that certainly exerts some disciplining power, but that in addition "applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorizes the individual […], imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him. It is a form of power which makes individuals subjects" (Foucault 1988: 781). It is a proposal to the young person to subject himself to the systems of codes and values of the world of work, which in turn equips him with a model "for setting up and developing relationships with the self, for self-reflection, self-knowledge, self-examination for the decipherment of the self by oneself, for the transformations that one seeks to accomplish with oneself as an object" (Foucault 1985: 29).

The quote exemplarily shows that the focus on legal compliance by the unemployment service hides that at the end of the line of frontline implementation, it is not only about young citizens having to comply with legal demands as beneficiaries of public policy, but it is about the negotiation of subjectivities. Instead of "disciplining" the young person, the counselor prefers to "*set goals*" to the young person, that he might eventually make his own and aims at fostering "understanding" and "comprehension" for the injunctions of the world of work. The normative horizon of this practice is an individual who has "interiorized" the demands of the world of work, who exercises control over himself, who expresses himself a willingness to comply with specific requirements of the world of work, without external pressure, all by himself. As Dean puts it, the aim of this arrangement is the "promotion of desirable self-regulation" (Dean 2007), in which the subject subjugates himself under the demands of the world of work and achieves a new state of "worthiness", in which he starts to assess all by himself, his own behavior in the light of the codes and values of the world of work. The suspension of the legal sanctioning criteria can go quite far and opens up a space of interactive negation of the conventional demands of the labor market that does not stop at behavioral requirements such as "coming too late", but that can involve specific forms of life-conduct of young people and potentially involves the person as a whole.

## **6.3. Gate-keeping and the Negotiation of Employability: The Intermediary Function of Motivational Semesters**

The SeMo's are "intermediaries of the labor-market" (Eymard-Duvernay 2006). This means that they stand in between the labor-market (with its specific selection mechanisms, it's patterns of standardization, it's entry requirements for specific apprenticeships), the young persons, and the state, or more particularly, the funding institution in form of the cantonal employment service. From a microeconomic perspective, the Motivational Semesters work through increasing the market efficiency between supply (of the labor force) and demand-side (the labor-market). They reduce, through pre-selecting and preparing the young persons to the labormarket, the insecurity of recruitment decision of the employers. As described in chapter three, they are a kind of gate-keeper that is "in charge of to assess persons according to criteria which decide on exit and entry from status passages" (Heinz 1992: 11). As described in the previous section, gate-keeping activities are performed in relation to the institutional environment of the Motivational Semesters, they "act on behalf of their institutions and legitimize decisions by reference to organizational reality – that is, to regulations, professional standards, application queues and so on" (Heinz 1992: 11), and have to "take into consideration the interests and interpretations of different actors" (Struck 2001: 30). As such they can take the role of "quasi-neutral" third parties, that balance different interests and standards of appropriateness. The provision of internships within the SeMo analyzed in the previous section gives a good example. To maintain a "good image" in front of employers, and not to jeopardize one´s "neutrality" towards the employers, counselors are keen to send only those youngsters to apprenticeships that are "employmentready". In their decisions (for instance, to "send" a young person to an internship in a specific sector), counselors of transition measures must both incorporate the expectations of potential employers as potential gate-keeping criteria (in order to maintain exchange relations with their organizational environment), ensure consistent application of legal standards) and consider – at least to a minimal extent

– the biographical plans and preferences of the youngsters. But gate-keeping activities also happen on a more basic level of the Motivational Semester. These different considerations that enter into the frontline agent's gate-keeping activities can amount to pure acceptance or rejecting of participants "as members of institutionalized collectivities" (Heinz 1992: 10-11) in this case – the "world of work".

## 6.3.1. Exclusion Through Sorting Out

What are then the membership criteria according to which young persons are preselected, and which lead to the "acceptance" or "rejection" as members of the institutionalized collectivity of the world of work? What are the tools, instruments, and according to which cognitive categories are youngsters are evaluated? While on the one side, the Motivational Semesters can help to overcome those gate-keeping processes that prevent especially lower educated youth to get invited for a job interview, they act as gate-keepers themselves, and to a certain extent reproduce the exclusion mechanisms of the apprenticeship-market. This is reflected in the membership criteria of the organization: Participation in the Motivational Semester is – as we have seen in the previous chapter – dependent on the criteria of "being apt for placement" (which means – having no bodily impairments or other characteristics that would impede labor-market participation). Youngsters not corresponding to these criteria would be legally a case for invalidity insurance. As we will see below, the categorization system employed by the Motivational Semester can lead to the exclusion of specific youngsters, particularly of those that are categorized as not being compatible with the demands of the unemployment insurance. The sanctioning criteria provide an institutional resource for the exclusion of specific clients.

Seen from the overall design of the Swiss transition system, the "administrative exclusion" from the scheme has different functions. Firstly, a gate-keeping function for the different, highly fragmented social insurance systems that deal with youngsters. Access to offers from the office for youth protection (providing measures for young persons under the age of 18 who have specific emotional and/or psychic impairments) requires that a young person is categorized as "non-apt for placement" before offering their services. The Motivational Semesters, through testing the work-readiness of youngsters and more importantly through administratively excluding youngsters, thus performs a sorting according to "work readiness" criteria. The latter is exemplified by the following quote, in which an interviewee describes the practice of the youth protection unit to send youngsters to the SeMo in order to "screen" their labor-market readiness:

"At some point, they were sending us youngsters that manifestly where suffering, that really had other issues than finding an apprenticeship. They came here, with the official demand of the unemployment agency, that means, not more than one time coming to late, 2-3 minutes means a sanction – that's very strict as a demand, and we had to molest them without them even having a professional project, so that they had the "stamp" of non-placeability, in order to be entitled to access other measures on the basis of the youth protection service…" (I. 1. 111-116.)

Secondly, through categorizing and sifting youngsters according to the behavioral requirements of the labor market, the Motivational Semesters perform a sort of screening of applicants for potential employers. In selecting applicants from the pool of participants of the Motivational Semesters, the insecurity of the suitability of participants for a specific position during recruitment decisions is reduced. This might constitute a central mechanism for the Motivational Semesters to process their client towards successful labor-market integration, but this happens at the price of exclusion of some.

"Finally, I mean, there comes a moment where… the counselor, often together with the agent from the public employment service think that a sanction makes sense. Sometimes, it is good for us, because we see that we are outside of our mandate. This means, if there is a youngster who is obviously at the wrong place, we start a count-down, and say "ok listen, we are sorry" one, two, three – ejection. We do not have that many of those, but the sanctioning criteria can come in handy, sometimes" (I.12.:1281-1230).

The sanctioning rules provide an institutional legitimation for the sifting out of specific youngsters. From the point of view of the organization, this is seen as useful, as it constitutes a potential lever for "rationing services" (Lipsky 1982: 82) and for the limitation of access and demand. In situations in which the Motivational Semesters have a high demand (which is usually after the end of a school year, when many school leavers are still looking for an apprenticeship) the existence of exclusion criteria allows the caseworkers to regulate the population inflow or to perform some sort of creaming. This stems from the specific subvention agreement the Motivational Semesters have with the employment agency. Motivational Semesters are commissioned to provide a specific number of places per year and are required to maintain a mean yearly filling rate of 92%. If a Motivational Semester falls short of reaching this threshold, the places commissioned the year after will possibly be reduced. Due to natural fluctuations in the population inflow, Motivational Semesters are thus overfilling their measure, while in other periods, they are working at an occupancy rate far below 92%. Some interviewees suggest that in such periods, sanctioning criteria are employed much more strictly:

"Sometimes, in fact regularly, we say – when we feel that there is a large group to manage – the norm is that after four faults, there is a sanction, ok. We can also

apply it quite strictly. What I mean at some point we start to say, we also regulate the population flow" (I. 1.: 127-129).

The latter quote suggests that there the discretionary application of sanctions provide at least a potential possibility of "creaming", thus focusing the organizational resources on those who are most promising in terms of labor-market integration: confronted with more clients than can readily be accommodated, the Motivational Semesters often choose those who seem most likely to succeed in terms of success criteria. The latter is enabled by the considerable discretion professional dispose of the application of sanctions as this happens under relative withdrawal of supervision by the employment service: "*we are not controlled in the very concrete operations. Nobody will look at the attendance list and ask: there have been three absences, why did not you sanction him".* This discretion also leaves ample space in reporting sanctionable behavior to the regional employment office, may it be in order to "keep" participants not corresponding by the strict eligibility criteria, or for the regulation of the population flow in periods of high attendance. Much more the specific financing mode of the Motivational Semester constitutes an incitement for using the tool of sanctions for regulating the population inflow or for eventually "keeping" participants that do not comply with the criteria of "work-readiness".

"We have a high "occupancy rate", (draws quotation marks with his fingers) in September and then in April we are nearly empty, because we place the young persons and because they find jobs. so, the more effective we are, the more we are penalized because we do not make our participant-days at the end of the year…" (I.8.:267-269).

More particularly, the recent introduction of a case-management system for youngsters (five regional transition counters that register all school leavers "without a solution" of the region – see chapter 2.4.5.) toughens the situation. Just like the legislator intended, youngsters are monitored during the running school year and those that did not find an apprenticeship are directed to different transition measures instantly. The legislator's intention to "inhibit the insidious raising of the age of transition to apprenticeship" (Nahtstelle 2010: 27) leads to the fact that the mean age of participants in the Motivational Semester has plummeted.

"since the introduction of the case-management, those that arrive here are 15 years old… before its introduction, most were 17, 18 years old, but we could even do better work with those being 20, 21. They have a different maturity level, it (the motivational semester) is simply more appropriate for this age group. The younger ones come directly from school, and a big issue is that they are not at all able to project themselves in the future. And that's a real problem, with whom we have to deal with. […] And there we are eventually a bit more disciplinary, we

ask them a bit more… we make more use of the sanctions of the employment service because we want to give them sense and tell them "Watch out, in this system, you have not really understood everything, there are specific codes to follow". No problem, we can take care of that, but it is a pity, because they have a right to come here, and it is simply just a bit too early – if they would have come a year later, we would have been much more effective" (I2.:456-472).

The latter quote shows that structurally, the Motivational Semester serves as a "systemic buffer" between school and the labor-market, operating as a rather crude selection procedure according to labor-market criteria. Interestingly, these quotes show that "employability" or "work readiness" is merely a fixed and objective characteristic of persons, but that it is a contingent characteristic that largely depends on the local demand-supply relationship of apprenticeships. Employability, and it´s functionally equivalent organizational category ("being apt for placement") constitutes a relational category: in moments of the year in which many young persons enter the Motivational Semester, the criteria of "placement readiness" are enforced very strictly, in moments where there are few participants attending a Motivational Semester, the application of these rules is handled much more flexible.

## 6.3.2. Flexibilising Job Aspirations

In their roles as intermediaries of the labor market (Eymard-Duvernay 2006), frontline workers certainly proceed to a "sorting out" of young people according to the evaluative criteria of the labor market. At the same time, they might act as "translators" of these demands for some youngsters, to facilitate a possibility to be selected by potential employers. As we have seen in the previous quote, the Motivational Semesters have a limited scope for action for doing so. The characteristics of clients that enter into focus are not random. Motivational Semesters have neither an impact on the demand side (the number of available apprenticeships) nor an impact on the selection mechanisms of employers. As pure supply-side policies, the SeMo's only have an impact on some characteristics of the young persons, primarily their job-search behavior, their self-presentation, and the individual lifeconduct and job aspirations. This is well reflected in the interview transcripts analyzed so far. The frontline agents in the Motivational Semester do not restrict the "readiness" for an apprenticeship to allegedly "objective" evaluative criteria that as would suggest a purely economic understanding of the apprenticeship market. It is not only school grades that count, but it is an understanding and incorporation of the "codes" of the world of work, the existence of an "elongated" temporal horizon, the ability to project oneself in the future, etc. This requires a whole work of secondary socialization which is a central field of action of the Motivational Semester. These criteria are part of the organizational classification system of the Motivational Semester. Human service organizations need to classify individuals according to their organizational schemes to "treat" them. The individual client is transformed into a subject of that organization and it is transformed into a "manageable case". In this process of organizational classification, an ambivalent apprenticeship market situation, or more precisely, a structural "mismatch" between demand and supply, but also age-specific characteristics (e.g. a lack of "maturity") are signified into individualized "employability troubles" that can then be treated through people changing work. These organizational classifications do not only guide people processing, but they constitute "institutional identities" (Gubrium/Hollstein 1998) that act as discursive environments for the self-interpretation of clients. As Hasenfeld describes, "people-processing organizations employ classification-disposition systems that reflect, in part, organizational adaptations to the constraints of their exchange relations with various market units receiving the processed clients" (Hasenfeld 1972: 256). Employers are one of the central exchange units of the Motivational Semesters. As such, those personal psychological characteristics that are changed partly reflect the criteria that employers use for the legitimating their recruitment decisions. Furthermore, the Motivational Semesters have clearly limited mandate, partly reflected in the institutional make-up of the Swiss transition system. For instance, while "having a low educational degree" clearly is a characteristic that becomes relevant for recruitment process, Motivational Semesters do not dispose of a mandate to prepare youngsters for a higher school degree4 . Activities related to the enhancement of school-related competencies are legally restricted to 10% of the time per week. Motivational semesters thus do neither have a grasp on the structural imbalances of the apprenticeship market and – due to their intervention being limited in time and scope – nor on those characteristics of persons relevant to the recruitment process that are harder to change. The Motivational Semesters, therefore, limit their intervention to changing those characteristics of persons that are easily treatable and that can be tackled on the level of the Person. To do so, the problems to be treated first have to be established: Barriers to the integration into work have to be resignified into classification schemes that can be processed by the organization of the SeMo and for which specific organizational technologies exist. These classification schemes furthermore "reflect and represent broader moral conceptions sanctioned by the state, by the professions and by other authoritative bodies that give rise to these organizations and legitimate their practices" (Hasenfeld 2009: 98). The "problems" described are not only functional for the people processing and people changing activities of the organization, but they have to resonate within the organizational environment of the organization.

4 In contrast, the German BVJ (Berufsvorbreitungsjahr/preparation year for work) grants – at least principally – the possibility to obtain a school degree.

*"Inadequate job aspirations"* constitute a central client categorization applied in the SeMo. As the education-occupation link is regulated by the demand-supply relationship on the apprenticeship market, the propensity to get selected for a Job Is partly based on a "realistic" self-assessment on one´s own "market worth". If employers can select from a wide range of applicants, they rather chose those from general secondary schools than those from intermediate or upper secondary schools. Apprenticeships can, in fact, have very different pre-requirements in school competencies. Furthermore, as described in chapter two, on an overall level, there seems to be a structural mismatch between the job aspirations of youngsters and available apprenticeship places: In specific apprenticeship sectors (traditionally the building sector, sales and manufacturing industries) apprenticeship places remain unoccupied, with some youngsters remaining without an apprenticeship place. It is clear that the Motivational Semester does not have a direct impact on the demand-supply relationship on the apprenticeship market. In turn, job aspirations of youngsters seem a first focal point of the people changing technologies of the Motivational Semesters:

"Some youngsters come with desires that are not, that are hardly realizable, hardly realizable mainly because of their school level. We have many of them and it is truly the first part of our work to say…. let me give you an example: A young person enters the office, we ask them "what do you want to do? What motivates you in your life"? etcetera. and sometimes they say, "commercial apprenticeship" while she barely has the level of an upper secondary school degree" (I.6.: 230-236).

In this case, the inadequacy of the "desires" of the youngsters with the realities of the labor-market is depicted as a lack of knowledge of oneself, as an inadequate assessment of one´s own capacities. While the Job choice itself is largely conceived as a biographical self-project that is rooted in the "inner motivations" (*"what do you want to do? What motivates you in your life?")* of a person, the realization of this self-project requires that the job aspirations are in line with the requirements of specific apprenticeships and situation on the apprenticeship-market. The category of "inadequate Job aspirations" seems to become a particularly urgent problem in cases in which young people show a lack of flexibility in their job aspirations and where they are merely willing to adapt their "desires" to institutionally feasible pathways. As such, many of the counselors reported cases where a young person's where not willing to adapt their Job aspirations to the realities of the market.