It’s About Time: Employability, Unemployment, and the Swedis Public Administration (working title)

My PhD thesis’ topic lies at the nexus of the fields of public administration and labour market policy, drawing inspiration from the field of conceptual history—in particular from the conceptual historian Reinhart Koselleck’s philosophy of temporality. Drawing upon Koselleck’s work on temporality tand placing my reading of this specific concept of his within a Luhmannian communication perspective, I aim at extrapolating how the Swedish Public Administration observes unemployment. Taking a historical perspective, I intend then to address how the Swedish Public Administration’s contemporary way of observing unemployment could be construed as a (re-)temporalisation of the concept of employability and opens out into the present—a present, which, as I see it, stresses the openness of a future to be perpetually borne by (unemployed) individuals’ self-realisation in time. To do so, I elaborate Kari Palonen’s reading on Koselleck’s work of temporality, which focuses upon the processes of de-spatialisation, de-naturalisation, de-traditionalisation, but also construe Reinhart Koselleck’s concepts of asymmetry and generalisation as host of such (re-)temporalisation.