Turning Welfare-Reliant Women into Entrepreneurs: Employment Readiness Workshops and the Constitution of the Entrepreneurial Self in Israel

Abstract

This article shows how two different subjectivities promoted by neoliberal discourses—that of the entrepreneur and that of the docile workers—are interwoven in the discourse of coaches leading employment readiness workshops conducted in a workfare program in Israel. Three main discursive strategies, “between entrepreneurialism and docility,” “rehearsing employability: the labor market as a second family,” and “happiness and positive psychology,” interwove appeals to simultaneously identify as docile workers and enterprising selves. The findings presented in this article underscore how class (and gender) are re-scripted as individual barriers by exhorting welfare-reliant women to become an entrepreneurial job seeker.