Social assistance in Austria: Regulating the poor as in-between

Not only the concept of social inclusion is widely recognized as an important basis today for making social policy, but it also provides a platform for the policing of the poor. Thinking uncritically about social inclusion prevents us from seeing how it operates to re-inscribe subordination even as we help the poor overcome their marginalization. With an awareness of the paradox of inclusion, it is possible to examine how welfare policy today operates to discipline the poor as people who must accept their plight at the bottom of the socioeconomic order. While formal policy may not make this paradox apparent, the disciplinary effects of an inclusionary social assistance policy are starkly visible when we examine its implementation, where we can see how the excluded become included in ways that perpetuate their subordination. Social assistance recipients obtain a benefit, but the way they are treated does not correspond with full social rights, which is reminiscent of Georg Simmel's discussion of the poor. As exemplified by research at one local social assistance office in Austria, welfare recipients are ultimately neither included nor excluded. Welfare, as administered today, upholds the system of social stratification by perpetuating an ‘in-between’ status for the claimants of social assistance benefits at the frontline.