Resumen de Activation policies and social inclusion in Denmark and Portugal

Pedro Hespanha, Iver Hornemann Moller

• In recent years labour market policies have shifted from a philosophy of material compensation for the loss of a job to a philosophy of promoting new opportunities for employment through activation programmes for unemployed workers or social assistance recipients. The discourse of activation is compelling and it contains very positive arguments for the materialisation of basic social rights, or even of new social rights such as the right to work and to social insertion. Its practice, nonetheless, raises serious problems given its permeability to ethical, financial and bureaucratic distortions. In this article the inclusionary impact of activation programmes for the unemployed is analysed in two quite different social and political contexts: Denmark and Portugal.