Abstract

The paradigm of activation has been structured differently in the European states, but they have in common that the responsibility for unemployment has been individualised. In the German public employment service (PES) it also led to an expansion of the groups of people who are to be activated, e.g. focusing on less market-compatible or hard-to-place jobseekers. Against this background, social work with homeless people is created as part of workfare programmes. Their aim is to stabilise the person and to promote employability only in a long-term perspective. The project aimes to analyse different latent structures of meaning of how social workers, job placement staff and homeless people perceive social activation programmes. It uses a secondary analysis of data that was collected in two different projects: Semi-structured interviews with social workers and placement staff of the PES are conducted in the project Social Activation in Germany and semi-structured interviews with homeless people are conducted in the project Homelessness in the Nuremberg metropolitan region .