Social Security is not framed in terms of de-commodifying labour but instead increases both public spending and dependency on the welfare state. This re-entrenches neoliberalist agenda.

The organizing logic of social security systems is currently marked by a tension. On the one hand, unlike the ‘classical’ arrangements of high-income post-war welfare states, social security policy is no longer framed primarily in terms of decommodifying labour and collectivizing the risks associated with capitalism (Esping-Andersen, Citation1990). Instead, it is predominantly seen through its potential to create unsustainable public spending and high levels of public debt, or its unintended impact on welfare dependency (Hills, Citation2014). This discursive shift toward welfare state retrenchment is manifest in reforms which have reduced government spending, recommodified labour, and privatized risks by reconfiguring the conditions of entitlements and the structure of financial support (Hills, Citation2011; Pierson, Citation1994; Timmins, Citation2017). On the other hand, however, implementing welfare state retrenchment has been far from easy (Hacker, Citation2004). Indeed, in many ways the basic contours of the social policy landscape remain relatively unchanged. This is particularly true if we look at overall public expenditure on social policies for most high-income countries, even those considered to be more liberal (or more commodified), such as the United Kingdom. This is because cuts are difficult to implement, as harms are typically concentrated on vulnerable groups, whereas the benefits politicians accrue by implementing such cuts are diffuse (Pierson, Citation1994). In this paper, we analyse the design and implementation of Universal Credit(UC) in the United Kingdom to illustrate how this tension–between the resist-ance to privatizing risks and the costs associated with welfare dependency–gets instantiated. UC has been described as ‘one of the boldest and most radical reforms since Beveridge’ because it streamlines the system of existing benefits, bringing together six different forms of social security into a single form of welfare (Timmins,2017 ). This streamlining was intended to ‘activate’ citizens(moving them into employment) by making it easier to move between out-of-work and in-work benefits (Hills,2014 ). But UC does not merely institutionalize a mantra of ‘active citizenship’(Reeves & Loopstra,2017 ). On the contrary, we show the uneven, chaotic and at times outright disastrous effects of the roll-out of this most recent wave of welfare reforms. As people become unable to meet its requirements, they fall foul of the system of conditionality and sanctions, which is ultimately pushing many away from the labour market, while at the sametime communities that have already been harshly hit by a decade of austerity are further destabilized by the individualizing effects of a new digital welfare state. Drawing upon a mixed-methods analysis that brings together existing quan-titative research with original qualitative fieldwork, we argue that the efforts of politicians and policymakers to place ‘active citizenship’ more squarely at the Insa Koch and Aaron Reeves: From social security to state-sanctioned insecurity449heart of welfare states has fostered the kinds of insecurities commonly associ-ated with commodifying labour, all while leaving the state’s involvement inthe lives of those affected largely intact. Unable to simply reduce welfare spending or recommodify labour entirely, policymakers have engaged in a process Thelen (2003) calls ‘conversion’, whereby the purposes of a policy or an institution are remade. In the context of UC, this means existing systems of social security are being reconstituted with the consequence that the machin-ery of the state is now assuming an ever more central role in creating uncer-tainty. Welfare conversion is not merely ‘privatising risks’, however, by exposing citizens to the insecurities associated with the market. Rather, we argue that these reforms are turning the state itself into the creator of certain risks by converting (whether intentionally or not) social security into a form of state-sanctioned social insecurity. This happens as particular state interven-tions–including those relating to work-related conditionality, sanctions, and the digitalization of the welfare state–have disproportionately affected someof the most vulnerable members of the population and further weakened the capacities for collective resistance in communities that have been most severely affected by welfare reforms.Our analysis contributes to wider debates on the ‘state of the welfare state’(Koch & James,2020) by bringing perspectives from within the anthropology of the ‘everyday state’(Alexander,2000; Fuller & Bénéï,2001;Koch,2018;Spencer,1997;Thelenet al., 2014) to bear on social policy debates. Thus, although our focus is on a particular policy, we are not primarily interested inthe policy itself. Rather, we go beyond traditional social policy perspectives byseeking to understand the social reality these policies create (Dubois,2009). Meth-odologically, this leads us to start with how UC manifests itself in the lived experi-ence of people subject to UC in order to identify its wider implications for relations between citizens, the state and the market (Patrick,2017 ). Our second, more conceptual contribution is to theorize UC as a form of policy conversionwhich arises from the historical tension between policies which seek to (de)com-modify labour. Doing so allows us to develop an argument about a qualitative shift in welfare state making, one which both draws on older logics of commodification but which is also distinct in the way it intensifies these logics by turning the state itself into a dispenser of heightened risk. It is precisely this production of risks through the mechanism of the state, rather than the market as commonly assumed (Harvey,2007), that we refer to as ‘state-sanctioned insecurity’–a process which may well be representative of broader welfare developments in the years to come, and which raises the need for urgent political change. Competing logics in the welfare state: Between de-commodifying labour and enacting welfare retrenchment While most countries share a commitment to ensuring a basic standard of living for citizens, societies’ understanding of what constitutes ‘bare life’450Economy and Society changes over time (Agamben,1998). This is true in the United Kingdom and many other high-income countries, where certain economic and social forces have reconfigured the assumptions people hold about their government’s role in ensuring a basic standard of living. For example, one key dimension around which welfare states have been formed is the degree to which labour is de-commodified or not, that is, the degree to which households can maintain a socially acceptable standard of living independently of engaging in the labour market (Esping-Andersen,1990). In the United Kingdom specifically, the post-war welfare system which placed limits on the de-commodification of labour was premised on what T.H. Marshall (1950) called ‘social rights’–a belief in extending certain basic entitlements to all citizens, with benefits rooted in work. The United Kingdom, then, implemented a partial de-com-modification of labour through ensuring some groups (such as the elderly and to some extent children) would not need to rely on wage labour for their live-lihood (Timmins,2017). And yet, de-commodification was not extended to everyone. There have always been conditions attached to most forms of social security (Hills,2014). Those who failed to engage productively with the market have been subject to stigmatization (McArthur & Reeves,2019)which helped legitimise the harsher forms of welfare conditionality appliedto those lacking ‘respectability’(Tyler,2020), including with respect to some of the most valued social goods, such as council housing (Koch,2018).But it was only during the 1980s that the political impulse towards welfare retrenchment and the stigmatization of those who continued to rely uponbenefits became far more prominent (Clarke & Newman,2012). Governmentscame to emphasize unsustainable levels of public spending and the belief thatwelfare regimes fostered a culture of dependency (Hills,2014; Somers &Block,2005). Whereas the logic of‘social rights’had assumed the statewould collectivize the risks associated with ill health, unemployment and oldage, the new logic of social security was one of‘privatising risks’through re-commodifying labour by exposing it to market forces more completely. Thispresumed a more residualised form of risk sharing, whereby individualsrather than collectives bear their costs. The interface between state andmarket was the central battleground on which policy conflicts were waged,with market-oriented approaches becoming ideologically dominant. Further,with the global financial crisis in 2008/2009, reducing government debts wasmade the key policy goal in many European countries (Clarke & Newman,2012). Welfare recipients became the scapegoats, as they were seen to be the ones pushing up government spending, creating unsustainable levels ofpublic debt through their unwillingness to work and threatening economic recovery. By stigmatizing those on social security, the Conservative-led coalition government elected in 2010 sought to legitimise policies intended toreduce government deficits by cutting public spending through policies likethe bedroom tax and the benefit cap (Koch,2018) and through withdrawing funding from local communities (so-called‘austerity localism’) (Lowndes &Pratchett,2012).Insa Koch and Aaron Reeves: From social security to state-sanctioned insecurity451Yet, the financial crisis on top of decades of neoliberal reform did not simplydo away with welfare states’commitment to collectivize risks associated with thefree market. It did not suddenly alter the political calculus that had made re-com-modification of labour difficult in the post-war decades, nor did it remove thepowerful constituencies who were likely to fight retrenchment. Thus, whilethe ideational shift towards welfare retrenchment–increasingly prominentsince the late 1970s–has led to real differences in how social policies are orga-nized, there is also a surprising degree of stability in social welfare programmes,such as universal healthcare services, pensions and working-age benefits (OECD,2019 ;Pierson,1994 ). Indeed, this shift was only successful in allowing the ser-vices provided and the protection offered to become devalued in real termsover time. Instead, welfare states have typically come to tackle the ensuing ten-sions through a mantra of ‘active citizenship’(Reeves & Loopstra,2017 ), which refers to the obligations on which entitlement to social security is predicated, and the forms of welfare conditionality that come with it. As a policy mantra, this hasbeen central to social security provision at least since the 1990s, as people aretypically only entitled to social security if they are active in a specific kind ofway and failure to do so results in financial penalties (Timmins,2017 ). But, aswe will see below,‘active citizenship’has experienced a period of resurgencesince the financial crisis where policies, including UC, have more explicitelylinked welfare entitlement to different forms of conditionality.In short, even just a cursory glance at the history of post-war social securitypolicies reveals a central tension at the heart of the welfare state, in the UnitedKingdom and beyond: between an ever-greater drive to commodify labour, onthe one hand, and governments’inability to completely remove the state fromproviding‘bare life’(Agamben,1998 ), on the other. While in the‘classical’period of post-war British social democracy, this tension tended to be resolvedin favour of the latter, more recently, political impetus has pursued an ideologicalagenda in line with the former. Yet, even today, a commitment to offering aminimum level of social security protection continues to exist, resulting in ten-sions that are instantiated in the mantra of‘active citizenship’. This, in turn,raises the question of how governments reconcile these tensions. We now turnto one way in which governments have attempted to do so through a processof adaptation that Thelen (2003 ) refers to as‘conversion’, and illustrate thiswith reference to the case of UC. We will argue that despite important continu-ities in existing social security provisions, it is in redirecting policies towards newaims that policies like UC have impacted the lived experiences of citizens, thusalso transforming relations between citizens, the market and the state in far moreradical ways than anticipated by politicians and welfare reformers.