States of Imposture: Scroungerphobia and the Choreography of Suspicion

Kaufman, James

Abstract

Recent decades have witnessed the emergence of an international agenda to reorganize welfare states and their social security provisions around the ‘activation’ of benefit recipients, often in the form of ‘welfare-to-work’ programmes. In the United Kingdom this agenda has been pursued through an emphasis on ‘behavioural conditionality’, whereby entitlement to benefits is made conditional upon the ‘active job-seeking’ or ‘work preparation’ efforts of claimants, whose conduct becomes the object of ongoing monitoring. Controversially, failure to meet these conditions results in punitive and potentially lengthy benefit sanctions – the withdrawal of benefit payments. In the context of pervasive political and media narratives about ‘benefit scroungers’, questions about entitlement frequently become freighted with concerns about fraud and imposture and, for claimants, with an urgent need to appear genuine and deserving.

Citation

Kaufman, J. (2021). States of Imposture: Scroungerphobia and the Choreography of Suspicion. In The Imposter as Social Theory :Thinking with Gatecrashers, Cheats and Charlatans (171-190). Bristol University Press. https://doi.org/10.51952/9781529213102.ch008

• Publication Date: May 26, 2021
• Deposit Date: Sep 26, 2023
• Publisher: Bristol University Press
• Pages: 171-190
• Book Title: The Imposter as Social Theory :Thinking with Gatecrashers, Cheats and Charlatans
• Chapter Number: 8
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.51952/9781529213102.ch008