Making up the market: Job-seeker courses and the ordinary ethics of social investment in Norway

Abstract

The social investment paradigm enjoys broad, if tacit, support in contemporary Norway. At the same time, assessment of its effects remains superficial, focusing largely on the economic costs and consequences of particular policies. In keeping with the theme of this special issue, this article proposes a more expansive view of social investment as a normative order – an order animated by assumptions and claims about the relationship between human capital, economic growth, and individual and social welfare. To study social investment in actions is to seek out the sites where people grapple with these assumptions and claims in their daily lives. In this article, I focus on one such site – the job-seeker course – to examine how it promotes a distinctive understanding of the job market that undergirds an ethics of action and individual responsibility. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Oslo, including 6 months in job-seeker courses, I show how course instructors use three tropes (hiddenness, becoming visible, and national cultural specificity) to imagine – or ‘make up’ – a knowable, navigable, and seemingly natural market. I conclude by reflecting on how social investment fosters an everyday moral education congruent with social democracy in the age of the post-industrial, knowledge-based economy.