Job guarantees are a form of managerial governance used to fold social and economic policies into one body under capitalism.

The focus of this article is workfare policy in Finland, especially the previous government’s (2015–2019) efforts to open out public employment services to private actors. We show how attempts to implement this reform took place along the lines of strategic governance, a specific form of managerial governance. In recent decades, management practices have been disseminated into policy making and ‘non-political’ actors such as management gurus, university professors and consultants have penetrated the political sphere to the extent that they have been referred to as ‘shadow government’ (Kantola and Seeck, 2011; Ylönen and Kuusela, 2019). These tendencies occur within a broader context of dynamic change within policy making across the globe, namely, the shift from government to governance. This shift refers to a passage from traditional top-down bureaucracy to governance through networks and markets as well as to a greater reliance on non-elected actors in the design, implementation and evaluation of policy (Flinders and Wood, 2014; Sørensen and Torfing, 2017). Within this ecology, managerial governance is a specific form of governance that relies on business management practices and perceives governance as a pragmatic tool for effective problem-solving. It transforms and translates political into economic concerns as it relies on the idea of using economic effectiveness to determine political strategies and objectives (Knafo, 2019). To date, rather than on issues of governance, research on workfare has tended to focus on how the take-up of workfare policies has been at the heart of the political economy of post-Fordism and the reform of welfare states, including of Nordic welfare states such as Finland’s (Adkins and Ylöstalo, 2018; Adkins et al., 2019; Jessop, 1993; Kananen, 2014; Peck, 2001). The workfare principle that whole populations should either be in work or actively seeking work has fundamentally reconfigured the redistributive logic of welfare states. It has transformed the welfarist social right of access to state protection and support in times of unemployment into a set of obligations and compulsions: rather than redistributing resources among populations, workfare regimes focus on moving people into paid work (Jessop, 2002; Kananen, 2014; Peck, 2001). In so doing, workfare regimes and workfare polices cast unemployed populations in particular terms. Rather than as in need of protection from the state, the unemployed became responsible for their own fates and for the provision of their own needs. As this suggests, existing research has established how workfare policies have not only transformed the redistributive logic of the welfare state but also recast the problem of unemployment into an issue of individual enterprise (e.g. Adkins, 2018; Triantafillou, 2011). There is also a rich literature on the effects of formal large-scale policy and administrative changes on the day-to-day operations of workfare (e.g. Bredgaard and Larsen, 2007; van Berkel, 2014). There is, however, far less research about how shifts in governance have facilitated or intensified contested policies such as workfare (although see Elomäki, 2019). Via a focus on policy making and especially on workfare reform in what we term here strategic management mode, in this article we show how the latter treats unemployment as a technical question for which there are different kinds of practical solutions. We show, in other words, how this mode of reform depoliticizes workfare policies. We also elaborate how workfare reform in strategic management mode obscures how workfare policies problematize the behaviour not only of the unemployed but also that of public servants engaged in the provision of services to unemployed populations. What interests us about strategic governance is that while it is presented as a neutral form of policy making that is not tied to any specific policy agenda, it has, nonetheless, enabled an intensification of workfare policies. As well as contributing to the literature on workfare by highlighting how such measures are facilitated and intensified by the policy making environment, this article also contributes to the literature on neoliberalism and the state. Specifically, by showing how strategic policy making enables a depoliticization of workfare policies via the replacement of political concerns with economic imperatives, this article contributes empirical knowledge on the process of the economization of the political. Broadly stated, this process concerns the folding of the economy into state politics via the dissemination of economic values, practices and metrics into policy making (Caliskan and Callon, 2009). While the economization of the political is very often understood as central to the neoliberalization of the state (Brown, 2015), details of its empirical manifestations are, nonetheless, often sketchy. In providing such detail, this article therefore contributes knowledge on how this process operates in practice. To make these interventions this article draws on research carried out in Finland which has long been classified as a Nordic welfare state. In his now embedded and enduring typology of post-Second World War welfare states, Esping-Andersen (1990) described the Nordic welfare state as characterized by the provision of universal basic services and a redistributive social security benefits system financed by progressive taxation. In Finland, however, as in other Nordic states, this model has been undergoing a process of significant transformation. From the 1990s onwards, and via a set of major and wide-ranging reforms, many of the key and organizing Nordic welfare state principles were transformed. The principle of universalism was, for example, replaced with competition (Kananen, 2014; Kantola and Kananen, 2013). While existing research has mapped and drawn attention to specific aspects of these reforms, in this article we emphasize their managerial dimensions. In doing so, we locate Finland as a participant in the global trend of ‘new managerialist governance’ (Sørensen and Torfing, 2017) and in the surge of programmes and policies seeking to promote more ‘effective’ public management (Triantafillou, 2017). We stress how such managerial governance operates as a device of the economization of the political. We focus on two recent and interconnected reforms to this end. The first is an OECD-inspired ‘strategic governance reform’ of the government’s political steering process. The reform aims to make government decision-making processes more strategic by narrowing down policy objectives and aligning them explicitly with fiscal objectives. The second is a reform of employment services, aimed at increasing the role of private employment services in the provision of employment services. What interests us about this reform is not only that it is one that takes place along the lines of strategic governance, but also that it heralds the introduction of a specific form of workfare policies in Finland: the unemployed are activated to work via the incorporation of market mechanisms into public employment services. The opening out of public employment services to private actors has previously drawn scholarly attention especially for pioneer countries such as Australia and the Netherlands (Bredgaard and Larsen, 2007; van Berkel, 2014). Our analysis of the Finnish case allows us to reflect on how policy ideas and reform ‘travel’ as well as on context-specific attempts at implementation (see Helman and Maron, 2019). The article is structured as follows. In the next two sections we provide a discussion on data and methods as well as further conceptual background on ongoing welfare state reform in Finland. We then focus on the process of the enrolment of managerial governance into policy making. First, we analyse this process in regard to the reform of the government’s steering process and second, in relation to the reform of employment services. In the concluding section we discuss how managerial governance serves as a device of the economization of the state.