This article uses a constructivist approach to scrutinize embedded actions of situated agents of governance to explore the governing of activation services in Israel. It probes beliefs, discourses, and practices of meso-level regulation administrators and street-level workers to analyze the emergence of a new stringent and disciplinary activation mode. Ultimately, this activation mode reconfigured the “social contract” between the state and its unemployed citizens via intensive intimacies: a conflicted microspace governed with little discretion and imbued with a reformative vision of state–society relations. The article demonstrates how situated agents’ meaning-making is essential to examining shifting governance forms and their political ramifications.
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